Abstract
In the most cited modern work on games and gaming, Homo Ludens, cultural historian Johan Huizinga defines play as a voluntary activity that proceeds according to fixed rules; has a beginning and an end; and can be repeated.2 As Nora Corrigan, who aptly describes this model, puts it in this book, Huizingan games “can be worked out within safe, bounded spaces, without permanent damage to the participants.”3 Few would still subscribe to Huizinga’s subsequent claim that playing games leads to moral improvement. Yet many scholars and nonscholars continue to describe games in these same fundamental terms, reading them as activities that occupy a fixed time and place. A soccer pitch, a cribbage board, a computer screen—these places of play allow players to engage in an activity that is safely cordoned off from the “real” world.4
Every native term which the Christian missionary can employ to communicate Divine truth is already appropriated as the chosen symbol of some counterpart deadly error.
Rev. A. Duff, India and India Missions1
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Notes
This argument lies at the center of my book Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Clifford Geertz was among the scholars who explicitly resisted the Huizingina model. His close study of Balinese cockfighting examines the ways a game can both mirror and reinforce social organization and status markers. It should, however, be noted that Geertz, too, tended to look on play as something discrete from quotidian events. In “Deep Play,” his well-known essay on cockfighting in Bali, Geertz writes: “What sets the cockfight apart from the ordinary course of life, lifts it from the realm of everyday practical affairs, and surrounds it with an aura of enlarged importance is not, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations… but that it provides metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment.” “Deep Play: A Few Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 448.
For a detailed account of the “Truman Show” Delusion, see Andrew Marantz, “Unreality Star,” The New Yorker (September 16, 2013): 32-7.
To get a sense of the multifaceted ways chess worked in a variety of medieval stories, see Daniel E. O’Sullivan, ed., Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012).
Each of the board’s thirty-two pieces is individually named. Soon after it ends, the Goddess Pallas appears to give a lecture on the power of a well-organized civic body, and her speech offers a further reminder that game actions extend off the board. For an extended, detailed analysis of the way Les Eschéz amoureux articulates ideas about political organization, see my own Power Play, Chapter 2. For more about the ways the poem works to rewrite the philosophical underpinnings of the Roman de la Rose, see Kristin Juel’s thoughtful diss., “Loving the Creator and His Creations: Ethical Reflections on the Nature of Love in the Fourteenth-Century Echecs amoureux” (Indiana University, 2002). For a recent critical edition of Les Echecs Amoureux, see Les Eschéz d’Amours: A Critical Edition of the Poem and Its Latin Glosses, ed. Daniel O’Sullivan and Gregory Heyworth (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
In some areas, the word virago came to describe the promoted pawn, with regina standing in for the original queen. In other areas, pawn promotion was restricted until one’s regina had been taken. Although neither of these solutions addressed the piece’s transgendered aspects, both at least solved the concomitant problem of the game’s potential to represent polygamy. Marilyn Yalom notes that early rules often prohibited pawn promotion “while the original queen was still on the board in an attempt to preserve the uniqueness of the king’s wife, his only permissible conjugal mate according to Christian doctrine.” Birth of the Chess Queen (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), p. 18. Yalom and Harold J. R. Murray offer some ideas on the fallout from the rules of medieval pawn promotion. Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, pp. 95-9 and Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 423-28.
Murray, A History of Chess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), pp. 423-28.
This integration is not surprising in a culture located at a crossroads of swirling cultural influence and during a century that experienced a massive influx of Eastern materials. Floris and Blancheflor, a romance that figuratively unites East and West through the union of the two main characters, appeared in Old Flemish very close to the time of Walewein’s composition. Notably, a chess set also appears in this story at a key moment and facilitates the reunion of the two characters. For more on the ways romances work to reimagine the East, see Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
For a quantitative breakdown of the poem and an analysis of the two authorial styles, see Karina van Dalen-Oskam and Joris van Zundert, “Delta for Middle Dutch-Author and Copyist Distinction in Walewein” Literary and Linguistic Computing 22.3 (2007): 345-62.
In his “Walewein in the Otherworld and the Land of Prester John,” Arthurian Literature 17 (1999): 79-100, Ad Putter compellingly argues that, unlike Chrétien, whose references to Otherworldly places provide inspiration for the Walewein narrative, Penninc approaches the Otherworld as something literal. Comparing the two poets, “one is struck by the way Penninc has literalized the Otherworld, which Chrétien hints at only by way of analogy.” p. 86.
In addition to elephant tusks, it was likely that hippopotamus ivory made it way north from Mali, which was, at this point, a Muslim territory. For somewhat recent work on sub-Saharan trade routes for goods such as ivory, see Timothy Insoll and Thurstan Shaw, “Gao and Igbo-Ukwu: Beads, Interregional Trade, and Beyond,” African Anthropological Review 14.1 (1997): 9-23
Timothy Insoll “Settlement and Trade in Gao, Mali,” in Aspects of African Anthropology: Papers from the 10th Congress of the Pan and African Association for Prehistory, ed. Gilbert Pwiti and Robert Soper (Harare: University of Zimbabwe, 1996), pp. 662-69.
J. Becker, Antapodosis (Hannover-Leipzig, 1915), pp. 6 and 5
See Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 69-74.
See Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, Function, Meaning, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998).
The Boke of Duke Huon of Bordeux, trans. Sir John Bourchier and Lord Berners, ed. S. L. Lee, EETS es 40, 41, 43, 50 (London: N. Trübner, 1882-1887), 50:ll. 13-17.
The English translation is from Joan Morton Jones, “The Chess of Love (Old French Text with Translation and Commentary)” PhD diss. (University of Nebraska, 1968), p. 1100. The French is from the edition Évrart de Conty, Le Livre des eschez amoureux moralisés, ed. Françoise Guichard-Tesson and Bruno Roy (Montreal: Éditions CERES, 1993), p. 668.
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© 2015 Serina Patterson
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Adams, J. (2015). Colonizing the Otherworld in Walewein. In: Patterson, S. (eds) Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497529_7
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