Nalans (Jun 2022)
Romancing the Ghost Story: Reading The Romance of Partenay and Sir Launfal as Medieval Ghost Stories
Abstract
Medieval people were fascinated with the tales that consist of supernatural elements. There are accounts of supernatural events and characters in various medieval works such as ballads, dream-vision poems, hagiographies, and romances. However, among all, ghost stories become prominent with their wide range of supernatural instances and characters. In these stories, the image of the ghost varies from a grotesque or scary one to a desperate or innocent one, presenting the ghost either as a menace or a victim. Although there was not a specific genre of ghost story in the Middle Ages, such stories developed and permitted the exploration of various issues related to death, revenge, punishment, apart from becoming a warning for the living. Medieval ghost stories were adapted to romance literature with the motif of a fairy lady pursuing a knight, or taking the form of an apparition either to help him or to warn him, and her subsequent punishment of the knight if he disregards her. Hence, through the fairy lady motif, medieval romance gained a moralising tone and caught the attention of the noble audience not only as an entertaining story but as a noteworthy warning against the presence of such beings who contact with the living and create unease. Indeed, instead of arousing fear, romances intended to entertain their audience; therefore, the fairy lady motif inspired from ghost stories evokes wonder more than dread. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to explore how the ghostly lady figure in ghost stories, particularly in “The Wife of Edric Wilde”, is corresponded to romance literature as the fairy lady motif, and used as a literary device with references to The Romance of Partenay and Sir Launfal, and argue that both romances, by focusing on the encounters of the knights with the fairy ladies, can be read as ghost stories, blurring the border between ghost story and romance.
