Wrestling with Giants. Kingship and Tyranny in the 'Alliterative Morte Arthure'.

This thesis explores the portrayal of king Arthur in the Middle English 14th century poem 'Alliterative Morte Arthure', focusing in particular on the episode of the fight between the king and a Giant on Mont St. Michel. In a poem so concerned with issues of kingship and tyranny, this episode functions as a sort of microcosm of the whole narrative, where the distinctions and more importantly the similarities between the king and the monster are deeply explored. The scholarly history surrounding the Alliterative has for a long time recognized the importance of this episode, but it has been polarized between a praise of Arthur as the archetypal Christian hero and a critique of his more tyrannical aspects. The present study is an attempt to further the discussion without trying to resolve the tension inherent in the poem and instead, by exploring the traditional figure of the Giant in Christian thought, I aim to show how both characterizations of Arthur provided by the scholarship can coherently coexist. The first and second chapter place the Alliterative in the context of its only manuscript, the 15th century Lincoln Thornton MS 91, showing how the permeability and the interplay between religious texts and romances create a suitable space for the presence of such ambiguous figures such as those of the Giants, present in many of the texts of the compilation. The third chapter deals directly with the episode of Mont St. Michel, accounting for both its source material and its scholarly history. The analysis focuses mainly on those aspects that draw the figure of Arthur and the Giant close together and how this episode informs the reading of the rest of the poem. The fourth chapter deals with the traditional figure of the Giant in Christian thought, especially in the Biblical tradition and its Patristic interpretations.