Food, Sovereignty, and Social Order in Havelok the Dane

Abstract

as hannah arendt suggests in the above passage, there is a generic problem inherent to the story of the struggle of the working class. In myths humans labor heroically against nature and find victory and glory in their efforts. Even when a hero performs a seemingly ordinary act—for example, cleaning out a stable or competing in a swimming contest —the stakes become magnified far beyond what any other person could expect to achieve. For everyone else, there is only a “relentless repetition” of the struggle against decay and chaos, an interminable battle to maintain life itself. The circularity of labor, which must immediately reincorporate some part of what it produces in order to continue working, forestalls the question of heroism as much as its grinding endlessness overflows narrative bounds. To be recognized as extraordinary, a hero must wrest surplus into his possession, a feat that demonstrates excellence among others. In the narrative of productive labor, there are few of the remainders—wealth, honor, or glory—that allow a tale to be pushed toward climax, conclusion, and repose. Labor power as material phenomenon or human condition exists beyond the horizon of aristocratic genres, like tragedy, epic, and romance, and this exclusivity renders these literary forms unable to represent the actual source of the political power they celebrate. The romance of Havelok (ca. 1295) is an experiment in generic frontiers, an attempt to look into the vanishing point that is the unrepresentable space of labor. It is a narrative profoundly concerned with the human body’s distressing vulnerability in a world of sweat and hunger. It is a story pitched at the grand scale of international political maneuvering, of dynas-