How Wonder-ing Leads to Wandering

SGGK, Fitt I

Hiya, Readers!

So, that bonus post on Apple’s new iPad commercial picked up a number of new readers—if that’s you, welcome to Salvage! Lest anyone have whiplash from the transition from a post about an Apple commercial to a post about the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, let me explain what’s up here.

The argument I’m making at the moment is that the romance, a literary genre that began in the medieval period, has profoundly influenced the way modern people have imagined, advertised, argued about, and expressed desires related to technology. And this is part of a larger argument that literature has historically functioned as a design space for the technological future. For years I’ve been particularly concerned with human attempts to re-create the nonhuman species with whom we share our world, attempts now marketed as “biorobots,” or “dogbots,” or just “drones” described using animal terms. You can read the story of how I got onto this subject in “The Night the Lightbulb Went On,” and readers seem particularly interested in my post “How Ford Has Rendered the Animal Body,” the first in a series on the ways car commercials animalized machines and prepared people to be awed by twenty-first-century biorobots.

Rewinding all the way to SGGK, one of the first romances written in English, helps us see the romance’s signature traits so we can (a) recognize the ways romances become more complex over time as they evolve into science fiction, fantasy, and other imaginative genres, from which (b) they influence modernity’s technological imagination. For now, sit with this: Gawain is a knight from King Arthur’s court, and Luke Skywalker is “a Jedi Knight.” That’s a very basic association; but the two are linked by more than George Lucas’s coincidental reuse of the word “knight.” And if you read Salvage, the connections will become clearer. For those of you who’ve been reading along, thanks! Also, I hope this intro is a good refresher on what’s going on here.

Peace,


Aaron

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The Burghley Nef, photo courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England

All the quibbling over language and translation last post matters because, as the Gawain-poet has it, Britain is a place of wonders or marvels. In Tolkien’s terms from “On Fairy-stories,” it’s a place where the veil between our world and “Faerie” is thin.¹ The first dozen times I read SGGK (I wrote about it for my master’s thesis) I didn’t see it. And then, thanks to Daston and Park, I started seeing wonder and wonders everywhere. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but their distinction between “wonders of nature” and “wonders of art” matters here.² Arthur’s court, Camelot, is encrusted in wonders of art; and Arthur’s thirst for wonders, or perhaps just his soul-dead habit of collecting them, gets Gawain into trouble. We might say that Arthur’s wonder-ing eventually necessitates Gawain’s wandering.

For starters, Arthur and his people are wonders themselves. We are told that at Arthur’s court “the [Christmas] feast was unfailing full fifteen days”—nevermind the usual twelve, apparently. The Gawain-poet continues, “With all the bliss of this world they abode together,/ the knights most renowned after the name of Christ,”—so that’s where John Lennon got it!—“and the ladies most lovely that ever life enjoyed,/ and he, king most courteous, who that court possessed.”³ But these people are not just joyous and lovely, they are deadly: “For all that folk so fair did in their first estate abide,/ Under heaven the first in fame,/ their king most high in pride;/ it would now be hard to name/ a troop in war so tried.”⁴ We might say that, from a certain perspective, Arthur and his rout are terrors, perilous beings like Tolkien’s Elves, at least in the sense that they are beautiful and deadly in battle. But we have no sense they make lovely things, though they love to have lovely things anyway.

Look at all the wonders Arthur has. The Gawain-poet begins the tale with, “a marvel among men I mean to recall… one of the wildest adventures of the wonders of Arthur.”⁵ Arthur had so many wonders it was a defining feature of his court. The words “wonder” and “marvel” appear over and over in fitt I: wonders were such a defining feature of Arthur’s court that the Gawain-poet has made them a major motif of his poem. In other words, wonders so defined the way people imagined Arthur’s Camelot that one couldn’t write a story-poem about Arthur without majoring on wonders.

Apparently all of Arthur’s wonders are plunder; or imports, at least. Check the description of Guinevere’s dais:

Queen Guinevere the gay was with grade in the midst
of the adorned dais set. Dearly was it arrayed:
finest sendal at her sides, a ceiling above her
of true tissue of Tolouse, and tapestries of Tharsia
that were embroidered and bound with the brightest gems
one might prove and appraise to purchase for coin any day.⁶

“Sendal” here is silk, by the way, and “tapestries of Tharsia” are Turkish rugs—“Persian rugs,” we might say. Tolkien’s and Gordon’s archaic nouns and names exoticize them for modern readers, though; Edward Said would have lots to say about this. And note the wheel here in fitt I, stanza 4: Guinevere is the fairest woman in the known world, an exotic grey-eyed marvel (think of Athena, from Homer’s Iliad) kept in Arthur’s golden hall.

Arthur’s got this custom of not celebrating a holiday—literally, of not even eating the holiday meal—before he is first “apprised/ of some strange story or stirring adventure,/ or some moving marvel that he might believe in/ of noble men, knighthood, or new adventures[.]”⁷ Either that, or the sudden appearance of some champion looking to joust. Good food, a lovely woman, and tons of stuff aren’t enough; Arthur binge-watches wonders while he eats. There must be entertainment and it must be martial entertainment. Sound like your last Thanksgiving, anyone?

In fact, the connection with (American) Thanksgiving is more than incidental, but I’ll come to that in a bit. First, check this line: “Bishop Baldwin had the honour of the board’s service,/ and Iwain Urien’s son ate beside him./ These dined on the dais[.]”⁸ I’ve already mentioned the dais. But this phrase “the honour of the board’s service,” points to another type of wonder, one we barely remember, but which has had a profound influence on our material culture and on the things imagined in the romance, especially after 1800. The “honour of the board’s service” was often marked by something called a “nef.”

I could describe a nef for you, and I will; but really, you just need to take a minute and look at the photos of the Burghley Nef at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Alt de Tieffenthal Nef at the British Museum—both of these are in London, England; and also check out the Nef of Saint Ursule at the Palais de Tau in Rheims, France. These are among several described—with photographs!—by Charles C. Oman in Medieval Silver Nefs (1963). Charles C. Oman—if you go looking for him, don’t confuse him with his father, Charles W. C. Oman, who was a military historian—worked in the Department of Metalwork at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where he developed the expertise that makes his study such a pleasure to read (if you can find it—it’s rare). Think about that for a minute: the younger Oman spent his career poring over large collections of rare wonders, the kinds of objects depicted in Daston’s and Park’s study.

Oman dated the use of nefs to the thirteenth century, around a century and a half before SGGK was written, and he based this date on mentions of nefs in French romances. So reading “table service” as a reference to a nef aligns with the romance tradition from prior to SGGK. And to the extent we read “table service” this way, we’re to understand Arthur’s material culture as at least somewhat Frenchified. Oman cites several uses for nefs, including drinking, use as salt- or spice-cellars, or ornamentation. “The ornamental nef was what is now described as a status symbol,” he tells us.⁹ The nef marks the place of honor at table; and since it is Christmastide, it makes sense that Bishop Baldwin would receive honor.

The nef is a wonder of art crafted from metal, and it merges modes of transportation with animal forms. Oman cites a nef I cannot now find a name for via web search (a curious experience in the so-called “Information Age”) that is, or at least was, housed in “Zaragoza Cathedral”—which cathedral, I cannot tell. The ship in the nef has been crafted of gold and nautilus shell, and it’s perched atop a sea dragon. Here we see animal form and metalwork merging as early as the fourteenth century. And a nef made by one Esaias zur Linden of Nuremberg in the early seventeenth century, now housed at the Victoria & Albert Museum and simply titled “Nef,” boasts elaborate wheels which, according to the V&A website, “might indicate that it was rolled from guest to guest at the high table.” This corroborates Oman’s point that “The age of clockwork arrived and gilt metal nefs were made which could run down the dinner table and lower the tension at tedious banquets.”¹⁰ I guess they were like medieval or Renaissance Hot Wheels. And so, in the nef we see the historic roots of animal form, mechanicity, and modes of transportation all merge in complex metal work. When you’ve seen this, it’s hardly a wonder that, as I said it in a previous post, “Ford Rendered the Animal Body.”

In addition to those I’ve linked above, several other nefs featured in Oman’s study are difficult to find now, for a reason that’s built into the etymology of the word “nef,” an etymology that also refers to transportation. As the piece from the V&A simply titled “Nef” illustrates, these objects didn’t come with titles the way a painting might—titles had to be granted. So it stands to reason that their titles may have changed over time as scholars like Oman learned more about them. If you go searching for many of the “names” Oman uses for nefs housed at cathedrals, instead you will find shots of the interiors of those cathedrals. The word “nef” shares an etymological root with the word “nave,” the part of the cathedral where the congregation gathers. Incidentally, these two terms also share etymology with “naval,” as in, “pertaining to a navy,” and “navel,” as in, “the belly [of someone or something].” The connection with “naval” matters because churches were frequently imagined as ships, architecturally—was this a connection to the story of Noah’s ark?—an idea that enjoys a venerable history in literature, as seen in, just to take two examples, Robinson Crusoe and Moby-Dick. So a nef is always about transportation; but the connection to “navel” reminds us that nefs are also always corporeal. The fact that the hulls of the Burghley Nef and the unnamed nef from “Zaragoza Cathedral” are both made from nautilus shells—literally the body part of a cephalopod; also recall the hull is the “belly” of the ship—bespeaks the corporeality of this type of wonder.

This etymology opens up the text of SGGK for us quite nicely. After beheading the Green Knight, just when Gawain thinks he has won, the body rises, grabs its severed head, and turns it to face Guinevere while instructing Gawain: “To the Green Chapel go thou!” So Arthur, whose court is already encrusted with wonders, must have another wonder before eating Christmas dinner. The wonder he receives at first appears to be a natural wonder—certainly it does not seem a wonder of art—but then, with the whole talking head thing, it seems to be a supernatural wonder. Gawain, for taking Arthur’s place in the contest at the last second, ends up with a wondrous axe. But now he must go in search of the Green Chapel, a place that no one knows. It lies out there in the weird, beyond Camelot’s knowledge. And since it is a chapel, that is, a structure with a nave, it must be an architectural wonder of some sort. So Arthur’s wonder-ing leads to Gawain’s wandering.

But those of us who know SGGK well know that the Chapel itself is not the wonder with which Gawain will return to Camelot. How could it be? No, this is a romance, and so he will certainly return with the tale of his adventure, and with wondrous proof of the tale. So the Green Chapel isn’t the only wonder out in the weird—there are at least two wonders out there, as we shall see.

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Above I said that Arthur’s need for a wonder before eating, for example his interest in martial entertainment, bears a more-than-coincidental connection with Thanksgiving. And no, I’m not talking about the NFL. Let’s return to the nef again.

What if I told you that, at your grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving Day (assuming you had a grandmother growing up and were able to celebrate Thanksgiving with her), you encountered a nef? Think about it. A ship that holds salt? A drinking vessel—so, a ship that holds liquids? What about a ship that holds salty liquids?

I’d argue that, though garish in a much less European way, a nef of sorts adorned every mid- to late-twentieth-century Thanksgiving table, courtesy of Pfaltzgraff, or Corning-Revere, or Corelle: the humble gravy boat.

The best part is, I can show you a connection between the nef and the gravy boat, straight out of literary history. But we’ve a long way to go before we get to that post.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories,”

2. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1998), 67-68. Also, this post might make more sense if you first read my previous post “Wonders at the Edge,” which addresses Daston’s and Park’s work in more detail.

3. J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon, translators, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (New York, NY: Ballentine Books, 1980), I.3.

4. Tolkien and Gordon, I.3.

5. Tolkien and Gordon, I.2. In this and all future citations of SGGK, the Roman numeral designates a fitt of the poem and the Arabic numeral the stanza of that fitt. Hence, in this citation, I am referencing fitt I, stanza 2.

6. Tolkien and Gordon, I.4.

7. Tolkien and Gordon, I.5.

8. Tolkien and Gordon, I.6.

9. Charles C. Oman, Medieval Silver Nefs (London, England: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963), 3.

10. Oman, 10.