“To Play bi an Orchardside”

Abstract

In his archaeological study of elite landscapes in the medieval period, Oliver H. Creighton (2009, 47) states that “[g]ardens were, in a sense, transformative, mediating domestic spaces – carefully managed points of interface between the household and the natural world beyond.” It is the transformative, hybrid and liminal space of the enclosed garden that I will examine in this essay. In particular, I will argue that in Marie de France’s Anglo-Norman/Old French, twelfth-century lay Lanval and the anonymous fourteenth-century Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, the transformative nature of the orchard marks the space as inherently queer and creates the potential for transgressive acts and Otherworldly encounters. In Lanval, the setting of the orchard allows Marie de France to invert common conventions of medieval literature and gender politics to present an alternative gender dynamic between knight and lady. It is also the physical space in which the protagonist Lanval is directly accused of sodomy. In Sir Orfeo, the “ympe-tre” (Sir Orfeo, 70. All Middle English references are from Bliss 1966, and modern English translations from Tolkien 1975, with line numbers) in the orchard functions as a limen to the Otherworld and thus the orchard is presented as a permeable space which is open to the supernatural fairies.