Michael Twomey, Charles A. Dana Professor of Humanities and Arts, Emeritus (Department of English), has published “Environmental Realism in the Arthurian Forest of Adventure” in the journal Arthuriana 34.1 (Spring 2024), 45-60. The article is an expanded version of the plenary lecture that Twomey delivered to the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch, at the Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, St. Louis University, in June, 2023.
In the article, Twomey makes the case that contrary to modern assumption, the natural environment in the “Forest of Adventure”—where the chivalric protagonists of medieval romances about King Arthur and his knights prove themselves in random challenges—is represented just as realistically as the clothing, foods, social manners, and architecture comprising the romances’ human environments. The focus of the article is on trees of the forest and on marginal areas at the forests’ edges now called ecotones, for which medieval languages had a specific vocabulary.
The article examines romances written in French that were translated into other European languages.In England and Germany, whose forests were quite similar to forests in France, the environmental features of the Forest of Adventure were described simply by substituting the English or German equivalents of the French in the original texts. However, in Scandinavia, whose forests contained different trees and landscapes, and in Iceland, which contained no forests at all, the Forest of Adventure was re-imagined along the lines of local environments, using local vocabulary.The article concludes that environmental realism based on local conditions was a narrative convention, and it was as well understood by successive generations of Arthurian writers as the conventions of plot and character.
