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Waldef: A French Romance from Medieval England
This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance plot of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc , Boeve de Haumtone , and Gui de Warewic . Waldef ’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published August 31, 2020
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July 29, 2024
I actually wrote a review of this for a journal, so is there any need for me to write another one? Well, why not! Except this time I’ll review it as a more casual squeeing medieval romance fan than as an academic reviewer. And also, this time I won’t be sick and preparing to drive back to South Carolina, which will make the process of writing more pleasant.
This is the first translation into English of a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman romance, and if you’re not into medieval romances, I don’t know that I’d start with this one, but if you are, I think this one has some real treats for you. It’s pretty long as far as this kind of text goes, going through multiple generations in Norfolk in East Anglia. The main character, as you might imagine, is called Waldef, but this book is full of characters with names that scream, “This author read other romances and historical texts.” Waldef’s father is named Bede, we have characters named Uther, Merlin, and Morgan, and of course we get some names drawn from historical monarchs like Emma and Edward. And in addition to names, there are some A+ medieval romance tropes—evil seneschals, forbidden love, long-lost fathers and sons reuniting, etc.
To give a couple of my favorite examples, there’s an episode where this soldier Dereman has an affair with Bede’s sister Odenild that reminds me a lot of the plot of Marie de France’s Yonec (except that Dereman is not a bird shapeshifter, more’s the pity). And then of course Odenild abandons the child, Florenz, in a move straight out of Le Fresne, except the kid’s life ends up more like Havelok from Havelok the Dane, except rather than getting to be the king he ends up being more like the king’s sidekick. There’s this bizarro subplot in which the king decides to get rid of all the old people over sixty in his land, but this policy is reversed through the misogynistic advice of an old guy named Gimund and his son, who is also named Gimund. (This ends up ruining Gimund, Jr.’s marriage—the misogyny sucks, but the weirdness of this interlude fascinates me. There’s a little bit of ‘trickster Merlin’ from the Prose Merlin or Of Arthour and of Merlin vibes.) Waldef does the ‘exiled heir makes good and kills the traitor’ thing that you’d expect out of a Havelok the Dane or King Horn-type insular romance plot. (There is also an exceptionally King Horn-ish thing later, where Waldef’s wife thinks he’s dead and identifies him with a ring, a plot point that would go on to be used by Giovanni Boccaccio in Day 10 Story 9 of the Decameron.) It is just a glorious mashup of all the trendiest romance tropes you would expect a romance fan in thirteenth-century England to be familiar with.
I think the only real drawback to just gobbling this up and rolling around in the medieval romance vibes of it is that it’s really long, with a lot of repetitive conflicts, and there aren’t really a lot of natural breaking-off points to pause. Like I said, if you’re not already familiar with the tropes of romance, I think you’d run the risk of missing a lot of what makes this one so fun, and maybe getting bored with Waldef and Bede and Waldef’s sons’ eighty bajillion battles with all the neighboring lords. I kind of wish the translators had broken it up into chapters, even if that’s a modern distortion of how it appears in the manuscripts, just because I think it might make it easier to read. But this would be such a blast to spend more time with, and I think it would read really well in a graduate seminar on romance. The translation is very clear and easy to read, and the footnotes are great for explaining weirdnesses in the original text, catching references, or providing background on the history or scholarship.
This is the first translation into English of a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman romance, and if you’re not into medieval romances, I don’t know that I’d start with this one, but if you are, I think this one has some real treats for you. It’s pretty long as far as this kind of text goes, going through multiple generations in Norfolk in East Anglia. The main character, as you might imagine, is called Waldef, but this book is full of characters with names that scream, “This author read other romances and historical texts.” Waldef’s father is named Bede, we have characters named Uther, Merlin, and Morgan, and of course we get some names drawn from historical monarchs like Emma and Edward. And in addition to names, there are some A+ medieval romance tropes—evil seneschals, forbidden love, long-lost fathers and sons reuniting, etc.
To give a couple of my favorite examples, there’s an episode where this soldier Dereman has an affair with Bede’s sister Odenild that reminds me a lot of the plot of Marie de France’s Yonec (except that Dereman is not a bird shapeshifter, more’s the pity). And then of course Odenild abandons the child, Florenz, in a move straight out of Le Fresne, except the kid’s life ends up more like Havelok from Havelok the Dane, except rather than getting to be the king he ends up being more like the king’s sidekick. There’s this bizarro subplot in which the king decides to get rid of all the old people over sixty in his land, but this policy is reversed through the misogynistic advice of an old guy named Gimund and his son, who is also named Gimund. (This ends up ruining Gimund, Jr.’s marriage—the misogyny sucks, but the weirdness of this interlude fascinates me. There’s a little bit of ‘trickster Merlin’ from the Prose Merlin or Of Arthour and of Merlin vibes.) Waldef does the ‘exiled heir makes good and kills the traitor’ thing that you’d expect out of a Havelok the Dane or King Horn-type insular romance plot. (There is also an exceptionally King Horn-ish thing later, where Waldef’s wife thinks he’s dead and identifies him with a ring, a plot point that would go on to be used by Giovanni Boccaccio in Day 10 Story 9 of the Decameron.) It is just a glorious mashup of all the trendiest romance tropes you would expect a romance fan in thirteenth-century England to be familiar with.
I think the only real drawback to just gobbling this up and rolling around in the medieval romance vibes of it is that it’s really long, with a lot of repetitive conflicts, and there aren’t really a lot of natural breaking-off points to pause. Like I said, if you’re not already familiar with the tropes of romance, I think you’d run the risk of missing a lot of what makes this one so fun, and maybe getting bored with Waldef and Bede and Waldef’s sons’ eighty bajillion battles with all the neighboring lords. I kind of wish the translators had broken it up into chapters, even if that’s a modern distortion of how it appears in the manuscripts, just because I think it might make it easier to read. But this would be such a blast to spend more time with, and I think it would read really well in a graduate seminar on romance. The translation is very clear and easy to read, and the footnotes are great for explaining weirdnesses in the original text, catching references, or providing background on the history or scholarship.
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