A Pious Knight’s Flaw, Quandary, and Burden: Gold and Fee inSir Isumbras

Abstract

This article argues that a close look at the concepts of “golde and fee” in the Middle English tail-rhyme romance Sir Isumbras reveals that the choice that is demanded of the hero at the start of the poem amounts to a subtle psychological strategy by God. Possessions and pride in them, which the poem announces as the hero’s main fault, end up being much more integral to his psychological makeup than he realizes when he first undertakes to reform himself. His reform plan thus proves inadequate, as his interview with a “hethen kynge” demonstrates. A Lacanian approach to this interview reveals that only a torturous disintegration of Isumbras’s psyche and a painstaking rebuilding of it can satisfy the Almighty’s plans for him. Systematically breaking down the operations of gold and fee for the hero, the king, in three distinct speech acts, presents language as a series of assumptions based on the idea of exchange. As a result, the hero of Sir Isumbras experiences loss in an entirely new way, despite the fact that most audiences of the poem would consider his losses to be extreme before he has the interview. He then must retreat from language, understand it anew, and thoroughly comprehend its relationship with the world before he can redefine himself in relation to society and renew his relationship with God.