Medieval French literature is replete with alien and exotic beings: magical creatures, such as fairies and werewolves; marvellous or savage beings, such as giants and wild men; and ethnically or culturally different humans, such as Saracens. While there might seem initially to be a great difference between ordinary humans of a different culture, and marvellous creatures of an entirely different order of being, in fact this difference is often elided in medieval texts. In the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, for example, the Saracen champion that Roland fights is a Syrian Muslim who calls upon 'Mahomet' at the moment of his death; he is also a giant with the strength of twenty men and skin so tough that it cannot be pierced with a sword. This chapter will examine selected examples of Old French texts involving fairies, giants, and Saracens. And while the aura of otherness surrounding magical beings may be more exciting, more exotic, and more dangerous, in the end all of these stories serve a common purpose, that of probing both the dangers and the delights of cross-cultural and inter-ethnic contact.

Attempted unions between humans and fairies figure in numerous medieval French texts, and are always presented as both alluring and problematic. Early examples can be found in the twelfth-century Lais of Marie de France. In Lanval, for example, the eponymous knight, a bit of a loner at Arthur’s court, is summoned by a fairy who offers him her love on condition that the relationship remain completely secret. This arrangement is successful for a time, though it has the effect of isolating Lanval, who constantly seeks opportunities to evade his companions so that he can enjoy the company of the fairy. The conflict comes to a head when Lanval gets into an altercation with the queen, who has attempted to seduce him, and tells her that she is less beautiful than his lady, or indeed, than his beloved’s least servant.

The vast fourteenth-century prose Roman de Perceforest, a fictional chronicle of pre-Arthurian Britain under Greek rule, offers a fascinating exposition of courtly ideologies. In this essay I will examine a single episode, that of the Aventure de l'espee vermeille, which is played out in the course of Book V. In this adventure, young knights are offered an easy sexual encounter with a beautiful young maiden, and given to believe that it is only through sexual “performance” that they can prove their manhood. As the adventure progresses, however, it becomes increasingly clear that this kind of sexual adventuring is actually antithetical to the chivalric ideals of Perceforest's courtly society. Gallafur, the only knight who refuses sexual contact, is the one who succeeds in staging the noblest form of chivalric masculinity, proving himself worthy of marrying the princess Alexandre and founding an illustrious lineage. Spectators, in turn, can be judged according to their reading of the knights’ performance of the adventure: those with more limited vision perceive Gallafur's reticence as a sign of impotence and effeminacy, while Alexandre herself sees him as proving his fidelity to a noble love. In all, the adventure with its many participants and onlookers becomes a complex staging ground for competing ideals of gender and sexuality.

The Aventure de l'espee vermeille is devised by four maidens, identified only as “filles de l'une des seurs de Morgane la Faee” (daughters of a sister of Morgan La Fay; V, 4v). Through their powers of divination, the sisters learn that the greatest of all British kings – the prophecy refers of course to Arthur – will be descended from the late Gadifer, a Greek knight crowned king of Scotland by Alexander the Great during the latter's sojourn in Britain. Determined to do whatever they can to inscribe themselves into this Arthurian lineage, the maidens devise a rose-colored sword and display it in the forest, casting a spell that will prevent it from being taken up by any knight unless he is descended from Gadifer. The “publicity” surrounding the adventure states only that a knight who succeeds in lifting the sword must then carry it through the forest; if it loses its color, he has failed, and must relinquish the sword.

‘Historical reality … is only available through textual sources and cannot be recovered independently of the processes of construction and manipulation which those involve.’ Thus Bart Moore-Gilbert sums up one side of Spivak's theoretical position and of Subaltern Studies in general. At the same time, Moore-Gilbert also acknowledges a counter strain in the work of Spivak and other postcolonial theorists, one that posits an absolute ‘real’ independent of such mediation: what is sometimes called ‘the “real history” of colonialism’ (ibid.). The problem of historical truth – of authentic, lived experience and its distortion or concealment beneath competing discursive layers of oral, textual, and visual commemoration – is central to Perceforest. And it is in the second half of the romance, with the restoration of the kingdom and its subsequent, definitive defeat, that these issues are most explicitly brought to the fore.

In the aftermath of the Roman invasion, the restored Greco-British kingdom stands at a point in history notably different from that of its original foundation under Alexander. Rather than positioning themselves as an originary moment that will become a glorious past for future generations to marvel at, as did Perceforest and his contemporaries, the knights of the restoration are positioned in a middle ground. And as such they seek to subdue the past, preserving it as history in the lais sung by the old minstrel Ponchonnet and in the chronicle discovered amid the ruins of the Franc Palais, but banishing it from active intrusion into the present. Unlike Perceforest and Gadifer, Gallafur and his companions have a British past, and they have to negotiate their position as a bridge between that past and the future that must be produced.

Perceforest portrays British history as a cyclical process of cultural rise and decline, in which different groups vie for dominance: the lignaige Darnant, the lineage of Brutus as embodied in Britus and his continental descendants, the Greek dynasties established by Alexander, the Romans, and various continental peoples such as the Sicambrians and the Norwegians. Overall, most of these ethnic and cultural bids for power are subsumed within the archetypal conflict that, according to legend, determined the shape of the ancient world: that between Greeks and Trojans. And the Trojan heritage of the British knights, with its elements both of glory and of shame, is a potent but unstable matrix for the production of identity. What it means to be British is inextricably bound up with the question of what it means to be Trojan.

To a large extent, stereotypical Trojan vices are identified with the lignaige Darnant, while the positive qualities of heroism and courtly refinement are revived through the conformance of the British aristocracy to their Greek rulers. However, the situation is not really this simple. Evil though the clan may have been, the virtuous Gelinant and his luminous grandson Lyonnel stand as reminders that the lignaige Darnant did harbour potential greatness, and this potential is salvaged in both the culture and the bloodlines of the new regime. And heroic though the knights of the Franc Palais may be, numerous episodes suggest, somewhat troublingly, that stereotypical Trojan shortcomings are resurfacing along with their recovered glory.