The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic

Nahir I. Otaño Gracia’s The Other Faces of Arthur: Chivalric Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic is an exciting contribution to the University of Pennsylvania Press’s impressive RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern series. At a time when white supremacists still celebrate North Atlantic textual cultures as the foundation of a white and hypermasculine vision of the Middle Ages, the stakes for this study are pretty high. In The Other Faces of Arthur, Otaño Gracia extends the history of the association between whiteness and the medieval world. Over the course of the book she argues that Arthurian texts from the Global North Atlantic “rely on the institution of chivalry to racialize the enemies of the titular characters in order to excuse medieval colonization and thus allow readers/listeners to be engulfed by the fantasy of whiteness and white supremacy” (3). These texts, she submits, communicate anxieties over ideologies of power, sovereignty, kingship, and political turmoil only to then “resolve these conflicts and create stability through white supremacy—the idea that, owing to their whiteness, these knights innately deserve to expand their territories, and that their violence is justified instead of horrific” (31).Situated at the intersection of medieval studies, postcolonial studies, and premodern critical race studies, The Other Faces of Arthur adds two important concepts to our critical lexicon: chivalric whiteness and the Global North Atlantic. Equipped with these two terms, Otaño Gracia dives into an impressive archive of so-called “second tier” Arthurian texts to demonstrate how they “articulate the lands beyond the borders of the Arthurian milieu as places ripe for adventures and colonization” (31). Chivalric whiteness names how chivalry functions as “an institution that enshrines whiteness with everything that whiteness privileges and secures” (6). Through this concept Otaño Gracia makes visible the chivalric presentation of knights as both “good and under threat to promote the creation and reification of medieval colonization and medieval empire formation” (7). The framework of the Global North Atlantic reveals interconnections between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, two fertile areas of scholarship that have much to offer one another but are often siloed in their disciplines. Importantly, Otaño Gracia uses this framework to substitute hierarchical models of Arthurian narrative traditions, which often center British and French materials, for models that stress literary networks and connectivity.The first chapter, “Remapping Ideologies: Arthurian Reinterpretations and Whiteness in the Global North Atlantic,” sets the conceptual stage. This chapter provides a panoramic geographical and temporal snapshot of Otaño Gracia’s archive, as she argues that texts as diverse as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (twelfth century), the Norwegian Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar (thirteenth century) and the Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd (fourteenth century), and the Castilian Libro del caballero Zifar (ca. 1300), create and sustain artificial borders. This chapter opens with a discussion of the Historia’s designation of the Iberian Peninsula as a borderland of Christian Europe, a designation revised by the two Scandinavian texts, which promote a vision of Christian Europe that includes Spain and moves the borderland to North Africa. Clearly thinking alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s explorations of hybrid identities and cultural borders, Otaño Gracia asks: how do Arthurian texts exist across the perceived borders of language and culture? What does a medieval border culture look like in Arthuriana? Otaño Gracia demonstrates that these texts’ manipulation of borders are inextricably tied to the institution of chivalry—understood as a protean ideology committed to enshrining whiteness. This chapter demonstrates that, as Arthurian narratives circulated across the Global North Atlantic, writers negotiated these stories with local political and cultural needs, some justifying violence by disguising it as defense or even love.Chapter 2, “Godly Knights and Ladies: Strength and Worth in Castilian Arthurian Texts,” considers the Libro del caballero Zifar (ca. 1300), the Corónica de don Tristán de Leonís (ca. 1400, 1501, and 1534), and Cervantes’ Don Quijote. This chapter traces shifting approaches to the construction of Iberia as a Christian polity, from medieval romances that tasked knights like Zifar and Tristán with expanding the borders of their kingdoms and upholding the values of the Iberian Crusades, to Cervantes’s disavowal of medieval romances as propaganda on account of their erasure of the multicultural, multilingual, and multiracial realities of the Peninsula. “The Arthur of the Catalans: Expanding Books, Expanding Lands Beyond the Iberian Peninsula,” the third chapter, turns to Catalan Arthurian texts that situate the Catalan-Aragonese Crown at the heart of pan-European efforts against Islamicate forces in North Africa, the Western Mediterranean, Rhodes, and Greece. Examining texts like La faula (1370–74), Curial e Güelfa (1440–60), and Tirant lo Blanc (1490), Otaño Gracia persuasively submits that these texts position Catalans as the future of chivalric conquest, the inheritors of a tradition that they will supersede. Taken together, these two chapters demonstrate that, despite their attempts to homogenize the Iberian Peninsula through violence, these texts are unable to escape the multicultural and multiracial realities of their environment.The next two chapters move north to Scandinavia and Wales, two territories that medievalists generally approach as peripheral. Otaño Gracia observes that in this context, Arthurian narratives were deployed as responses to the alterity imposed on these regions. Accordingly, these narratives argue for the autonomy of these territories by displacing the alterity attributed to Iceland and Wales onto Islamic and pagan cultures. Chapter 4, “Vikings of the Round Table: Negotiating Colonial Power in Scandinavian Arthurian Texts,” examines the Norwegian King Hákon Hákonarsson’s commissioned translations of Arthurian narratives as an attempt to forge a relationship between the Norwegian and the English courts. The discussion then shifts to Icelandic texts like Ívens saga (1226) and Möttuls saga (ca. 1250) as expressions of resistance to Norwegian domination. Lastly, the chapter closes by revisiting the Norwegian Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar and the Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd; whereas the former deploys chivalric whiteness “to justify the killing of nonhuman (but still racialized) giants,” the latter “uses it to justify violence against pagan, Muslim, and African people,” thereby making an argument for Iceland’s inclusion in imagined white imperial projects (167). “Reappropriating Wales, Reappropriating Arthur: Constructing a Unified Welsh Identity,” the fifth chapter, examines Welsh Arthurian narratives as sites in which to rehearse “concerns over sovereignty, kingship, and political strife” (178). Otaño Gracia asserts that texts like Owain or Chwedl Iarlles y Ffynnon (twelfth or thirteenth century) and Peredur fab Efrawg (thirteenth century) legitimized Welsh kings and culture for Welsh courts by reclaiming Arthur as a Celtic/Roman Welsh hero. Combining ideologies of resistance and chivalry, these texts make a case for Welsh customs as courtly, chivalric, Christian, and European—in other words, they argue for the equality of Welsh subjects to their counterparts in the Christian courts of Europe. Chapters 4 and 5 illustrate how two “racialized medieval communities argued for their inclusion into whiteness” (31).Otaño Gracia invites us to revisit medieval Arthuriana from the perspective of sources often dismissed as derivative. But more than an invitation, she offers a navigational chart and a compass. The Other Faces of Arthur is a carefully researched comparative study that will help shape medieval studies, postcolonial studies, and premodern critical race studies for a long time to come. Otaño Gracia demonstrates how “second tier” Arthurian texts composed in Castilian, Catalan, Old Norse-Icelandic, and Welsh reveal important connections between the Norse, the Celts, and the Christian courts of the Iberian Peninsula. The concept of chivalric whiteness makes visible that the institution of chivalry was, among other things, an ideological project of self-fashioning that helped control who counts as human. The framework of the Global North Atlantic moves away from recent approaches to the Global Middle Ages that seek to reaffirm the impact of Northern cultures on those they encountered, to instead emphasize influence as a two-way interaction that also changed those same Northern Atlantic cultures. My one critique concerns the conclusion, which felt too short. While it synthesizes the findings of the study and expresses hope for future scholarship, it misses an opportunity to outline some of the new questions that emerge from this study. Yet, this issue is easily eclipsed by the rest of this remarkable study. I am confident that readers of Reception will find much to admire in Otaño Gracia’s comparative approach, its privileging of literary networks over hierarchies, and its framing of Arthurian narratives as cultural objects deeply concerned about the racial, religious, and multicultural realities of the Middle Ages at both local and global levels.