Je ne parle allemand qu’a mes chevaux: ‘I only speak German to my horses.’ This frequently quoted bon mot, attributed to King Frederick II of Prussia, is likely apocryphal, but the fact that the king had poor written and spoken German is well documented: his personal correspondence, notably with his sister Anna Amalia, was in French, and he only read books in that language. Voltaire, one of the King's favourite guests at Sanssouci, famously digressed about the Francophile atmosphere at the Prussian court that allowed him to hear Frederick's siblings, Anna Amalia and Prince Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig, declaiming French theatre ‘without any accent and with much grace. […] I find myself here in France. Only our language is spoken. German is for soldiers and horses; it is only necessary on the road.’

Such anecdotes highlight the disdain the eighteenth-century Germanspeaking cultural elite had for their own language and its literature. A prestigious equivalence equated French with the language of philosophy, literature, and theatre, making it the idiom of the German Hof-Kultur, the courtly culture. And yet, by the 1800s, there would barely be any reason left for the Germans to deride their own language. During the 1770s, the long-awaited re-evaluation of German was finally underway, prepared by the renewed interest for its historical origins that culminated with the works of the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who himself owed much to the Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bodmer, one of the founding fathers of medieval literary studies through his pioneering exploration of the Minnesang.

It was in this climate, driven by a resistance against French cultural supremacy, that poetic recitation emerged.

American intellectuals traditionally criticized “lowbrow” popular culture as a societal detriment when immigration and rising working-class culture concerned the elite. In the 1940s, the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers perpetuated such disdain for popular culture as the ruling class’s weapon for keeping the workers distracted from political realities. After World War II, many scholars reversed course and celebrated popular culture as democratic American consensus. But the social upheavals of the 1960s influenced the next generation of intellectuals, drawn to popular culture for how it might express social resistance. A new international model supporting this approach was Marxist-influenced British Cultural Studies, led by Stuart Hall, that embraced popular culture as capable of either social domination or resistance. Since then, feminist, ethnic, and queer studies critiques as well as acknowledgment of popular culture’s global reach and transnational flow have influenced pop culture theories and methods.

Introduction

As a scholar, Fiona Tolhurst was an astonishingly careful and discerning close reader; her attention to detail in a passage under consideration and her explication of said passage – its wording, nuance, inflection, pacing – calls to mind the skill of a surgeon in combination with the perception of a poet. Indeed, she often shared with friends the story about how her entire career as a medievalist began because of a single word in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Brittanie that caught her attention because she suspected that it was a mistranslation from the Latin. (Spoiler: she was right.) Even more impressive than her rigorous and judicious skills as a close reader, however, is the ability – repeatedly on display in her research – to shift her focus from the carefully specific to the importantly general. In her scholarship, she is able to speak confidently about large swathes of medieval literary tradition with discernment that is precise – never vague – and which insight is also illuminating, revelatory, and original.

For example, in an article from 2004 Tolhurst notes that: ‘Historiographers … tend to assume that judging the historicity of medieval sources is a relatively straightforward process. [Antonia] Gransden, for example, distinguishes between “reliable” and “unreliable” literary sources. However, she identifies a third term – “romance history” – that acknowledges the existence of hybrid texts that perform both literary and historical functions’.

The starting point of this chapter came from a scene in the Bayeux Tapestry which has long troubled the author. The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered narrative frieze, believed to date to the 1070s or 1080s, which depicts events, or alleged events, from about 1064 to October 1066. At Scene 14 (Fig. 3.1), Harold, Earl of Wessex, is depicted in vehement conversation with William, Duke of Normandy, at William's palace. Scholarly attention on this scene has chiefly taken the form of speculation about the subject of their conversation. Here we bypass that matter, and indeed the veracity of Harold's journey which is not mentioned in any English source, to consider one simple issue: the plausibility of this international dialogue. We must question if it is possible that Harold, a literate Anglo-Scandinavian, could have conversed face to face with William, a Norman, in the mid-eleventh century. An attempt to answer this question requires consideration of evidence for multilingualism and international communication in the ruling classes of England and Normandy.

Multilingualism in England

In the introduction to her recent discussion of multilingualism in early medieval Britain Lindy Brady asserts that

Early medieval Britain was a multilingual space: a place where multiple languages were in use simultaneously. Britain's various tongues did not merely coexist alongside one another, but also frequently overlapped within the same spheres: religious, intellectual, political, economic, and visually, whether on the pages of manuscripts or inscribed on stone monuments for passers-by to see.

In the National Archives there is a huge roll of stiff cream paper which contains the accounts of the Cranbrook Commissioners appointed to be responsible for the sales of French prizes before the declaration of war. The Treasury was determined that everything was done by the book, although it took until 1769 before finalising their accounts from the war.

Disposing of the captures made before war was declared took place without delay, the announcement taking place in November 1756 that Commissioners had sent ‘proper persons’ to Gibraltar, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Jamaica and South Carolina to begin the sales in January, so that ‘all merchants inclined to become purchasers, may have time to give orders to their correspondents accordingly’.

First refusal of the prize ship together with its tackle was given to his Majesty's Navy, and guns, arms and ordnance stores were offered to the Board of Ordnance. If accepted at a fair and reasonable valuation, these were paid for by bills or debentures. If rejected, the certificate of the refusal was given to the agent of the captor within six weeks, this certificate entitled the vessel to be considered as British built. The importance of this was that British trade could only be carried in British vessels, so these vessels could cheaply become part of the merchant fleet. The Navy or Victualling Boards were entitled to buy any naval stores without waiting for the condemnation of the vessel.

This chapter sets out to ask difficult questions and to explore how the context of writing, for example exile in the USA, overdetermines how a writer like Ngugi engages his craft. Has Ngugi’s audience shifted during his stay in the USA and what kind of publics is he seeking to hail in his fiction, essays and memoirs? Who reads him? Ngugi’s forced exiled in Europe and the USA has complicated Ngugi’s writing and especially his return to English. Deprived of direct contact with his target audience and working outside the institutions of learning in Africa, Ngugi has been forced to repurpose his works for a new audience.

Beginning with Wizard of the Crow, I argue that Ngugi radicalises the original concept of the novel by situating oral performance at the centre of the scribal narrative genre. The consequence is an epic that is at once the globalisation of an African artistic practice through the appropriation and reinvention of the novel tradition, while addressing critical issues around the politics of dictatorship, rumours, exile and globalisation. By exploiting his childhood and youth memory through a trilogy, Ngugi demonstrates aliveness to the cause of total artistic rendition. This is dramatised by the sense in which wider insights into his oeuvre attain sophisticated vent between fact and fiction in the recollection of the tensions between colonial violence and growth. Although The Perfect Nine is a commitment to myth-making and remaking, it doubles as an treatise on the necessity of environmental conservation. Anchored to multi-species justice, it illustrates mythology’s relevance in the present and justifies its amenability to continual reinvention. Taking Globalectics as representative, the chapter reflects on Ngugi’s transition from the discourse of nationalism to dismantling hierarchies in the production, circulation and reception of world literature by writing against linguistic feudalism. Central to the apparent shift is the primacy of context as informed by the dynamics of the twenty-first century.