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5 - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Sebastian I. Sobecki
Sebastian I. Sobecki
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
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Summary

May ocean waves engulf me and I fall

Headlong into the depths of hell below,

Ere I shall any secret trusts betray,

Or evil word find exit from my mouth.

Speculum Stultorum (twelfth century), spoken by the Cock, lines 3,157–60

So wode were the waghes & þe wilde ythes,

All was like to be lost, þat no lond hade.

The ship ay shot furth o þe shire waghes,

As qwo clymbe at a clyffe, or a clent hille, –

Eft dump in the depe as all drowne wolde.

The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy (fourteenth century), Book 5, lines 1,992–6

A Cold Embrace: Jonah in the Belly of the Whale

When God charges Jonah to proselytise among the gentile Ninevites, the prophet shies away from this task. The Bible is silent about the rationale for Jonah's conduct: ‘et surrexit Iona ut fugeret in Tharsis a facie Domini’ (Jonah 1.3) [And Jonah rose up to flee into Tharsis from the face of the Lord]. In the fourteenth-century alliterative poem Patience the causal relationship between the prospect of obedience to the divine will and the promise of suffering is made explicit: ‘If I bowe to His bode and bryng hem þis tale, / And I be nummen in Nuniue, my nyes begynes’ (lines 75–6).

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Information
The Sea and Medieval English Literature , pp. 119 - 139
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2007

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