Borderland Subversions: Anti-imperial Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane

Abstract

Before a crowd of eager Arthurian spectators assembled near Carlisle, Galeron, introduced earlier as the "grettest" (greatest) of Galloway, kneels, signaling his submission to the stand-in for the imperial war machine to which he will soon swear allegiance. 1 It is thus through dispossession and repossession that TheAwntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelayne stages the centrality of land to power plays in the Anglo-Scottish marches. The poem does not present an "English" Gawain who defeats a "Scottish" Galeron, winning yet another soldier for the armies of a British empire, but rather simultaneously invites and forecloses readings of the poem's territorial conflicts as essentially national or ethnic. In portraying the practice of side switching, key to survival on the militarized Anglo-Scottish border, the Awntyrs joins with a text that, though of a more northerly provenance, also defies simple national classification and that is also grounded in the brutal and fluid world of border warfare, where profit regularly trumped patriotism in determining to which power player marcher lords and their retainers gravitated. The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawane, though ostensibly of "Scottish" provenance, joins the Awntyrs in speaking from a marcher perspective of the impact of the raids and invasions that wracked the Anglo-Scottish borderlands. 2 By bracketing our sense of the "national" origins of these poems, we can trace the manner in which they each manage critiques of imperialist expansionism. These critiques register regional reactions to processes of nation formation sweeping away the borderlands society that had fed off the almost continuous armed conflict of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Even as these texts reveal a nostalgia for the bravado and localism of war-torn times, they also speak to the devastation and misery produced by an economic world built upon violence. While the Awntyrs, set near the marcher stronghold of Carlisle, ultimately situates the collapse of the Arthurian empire at the very edge of its expanding frontier, Golagros offers