Living with the Sea in Middle English and Icelandic Romance

The present dissertation compares two separate literary corpora, Middle English verse romance and the group of Old Norse-Icelandic romance sagas often referred to as the fornaldarsögur, or ‘legendary sagas’. I read these as literatures emergent from a shared North Atlantic archipelago, from insular (island) worlds whose relationship to the sea was fundamental and in some but not all ways shared or overlapping. Although comparative romance studies have sometimes looked at English and Icelandic romance texts in tandem, usually in terms of those that share a source in Anglo-Norman or French romance, no one has considered them in this context of their shared North Atlantic maritime environment, in terms of the marine ecologies and island activities of daily existence which are sometimes incidental yet nevertheless important to their narratives. The extended Anglo-Icelandic trade in staple goods and fish throughout the later Middle Ages and culminating in the fifteenth century engenders my comparison of medieval English and Icelandic romance literature. This trade is an important factor in considering how the separate, yet comparable genres of late-medieval English and Icelandic romance are connected by and possibly also take influence from the maritime environments of the North Atlantic. I argue that the sea in Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic romance is presented as an environment rich in resources which lie in wait for the canny individual to harvest and use. Furthermore, the ways in which the sea is represented in these texts comprises coastal maritime industries, movement, and ecologies, with both groups of texts presenting people living with the sea in maritime communities of the North Atlantic who are reliant on its resources and skilled in the knowledge of how to test its bounds to acquire and use them.