Fluid Boundaries in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Sir Isumbras

Encounters with water shape the Middle English romances of The Awntyrs off Arthure and Sir Isumbras . In the latter, rivers and the ‘Greek Sea’ serve to distinguish separate sections of the narrative: the river marks the point at which the titular hero’s family unit begins to break down, while the beach of the sea marks the lowest point of his social power. Yet his later traversal of the Greek Sea itself allows him to reassemble his family and reclaim his aristocratic power. In Awntyrs , the Tarn Wathelene (or Wadling) ties the actions of the romance’s first episode onto a specific spot in the real-world English landscape, while connecting the text to a number of other Arthurian romances that also mention or take place near the tarn. This article, then, argues that the waterscapes in these two texts illustrate a late-medieval understanding of tarns, rivers, and seas as explicitly alien, yet intimately physical embodiments of divine power in the natural world. Taken together, these poems—one a metrical romance, the other alliterative—show how interests in waterscapes crossed boundaries within the muddy genre of romance itself, and reveal that water upsets such human categories as family and property. Tarns, rivers, and seas turn human bodies, instead, into their possessions; the disturbing experience of that dehumanizing process should, these texts imply, wear the world, its history, and its bonds away, until even the greatest knights or ladies are left alone with watery forms beyond the pale of human understanding.