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Chapter 4 - “In His Contrie at Hame”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2021

Andrew M. Richmond
Affiliation:
Southern Connecticut State University
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Summary

Chapter 4 turns to literary descriptions of explicitly British landscapes, but to examine ideas of the “foreign at home.” I discuss here how the ballad-romances Sir Colling the Knycht, Eger and Grime, and Thomas of Erceldoune, characterized Anglo-Scottish Border landscapes via rugged topography and extreme weather, and emphasized their proximity to the otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. In particular, I argue that these texts anthropomorphize non-human environmental forces as fairy adversaries, and in the process conflate contemporary ecological, economic, and political anxieties. I also examine how these topics get developed in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes to later audiences. This chapter, then, allows me to consider how the issues I raise throughout the book form an important influence upon postmedieval understandings of human relationships with local and global landscapes.

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Chapter
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Landscape in Middle English Romance
The Medieval Imagination and the Natural World
, pp. 133 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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