The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the Light of Early Romance Tradition: An Assessment of its Plot and Characterization in Relation to Marie de France's Eliduc

Abstract

Although it is usually assumed that the Old English Apollonius of Tyre is the first illustration of the romance genre in English that has survived to our days, the work is still perceived in some scholarly circles as belonging to a hybrid category or as a sort of “proto-romance”.Apollonius is preserved in a miscellany—Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 (mid-eleventh century)—containing legal, religious and poetic materials, a circumstance that has continued to intrigue scholars, especially given the work's preoccupation with the theme of incest. Its presence in this manuscript has traditionally been explained on the basis of its affinities with hagiography and with other textual materials found in the miscellany. However, the incest topic is not normally dealt with in hagiography whereas in romance literature it is famously illustrated with Arthur's son Mordred. This raises the hypothesis that the Anglo-Saxon compiler(s)/scribe were probably conscious of the fact that they were handling something other than a hagiography. If this supposition is correct, the study of Apollonius may benefit greatly from the consideration of its thematic peculiarities as recognizable features of the romance genre. Interestingly, Apollonius shares some elements as regards plot and characterization with Marie de France's Eliduc (mid-twelfth century) that seem to have passed unnoticed by scholarship. By means of an analysis of the story's two main characters—Apollonius and Arcestrate, who will be compared with Eliduc and Guilliadun in Marie's lai— I intend to offer evidence of the ways in which the Old English Apollonius is tightly connected to early romance tradition. I will also try to show that even if the story in Apollonius occurs in a non-Christian milieu, there are some details in the characterization of both Apollonius and Arcestrate that suggest that the translator was consciously adapting the romance format to eleventh-century moral standards, since the work, as has been inferred by other scholars before, was targeting an ecclesiastical audience.