Text-Bearing Warriors: Inscriptions On Weapons

Abstract

Weapons are, as any dictionary entry will readily confirm, objects which can be used to inflict bodily harm or to defend oneself in conflict and combat. Certainly, this definition encompasses a rather large number of things that may potentially serve as an offensive or defensive weapon. The weaponry I will treat in this chapter, however, will be rather more limited since medieval knights, fashioned as they are by chivalric romances and chansons de geste, do not typically exhaust all such possibilities. This limitation is due to several reasons that have much more to do with the cultural imagination than with practical purposes and real-world requirements. And what is true for weapons in general is also true for inscriptions on weapons. The form and function of inscriptions are very much shaped by cultural concepts, by notions of heroism, for example, and by concepts of identity. Consequently, my discussion begins with a broader view of this cultural figuration before focussing more narrowly on several concrete script-bearing artefacts as case studies. Finally, I will provide a more detailed reading of Perceval/Parzival to show script-bearing weapons within a wider network of inscribed artefacts. As I have just suggested, the choices knights have with regard to the weapons they employ are culturally predetermined. This selection assures the knight’s status and restricts his behaviour. After all, chivalry obliges, at least according to courtly literature, that the knight must abide by a strict set of rules. Knightly etiquette, spelled out for example in Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein (524–542), allows for jousting and sword-fighting, but certainly not for a bar fight. These rules of engagement work to contain the violence of the encounter—urging the winner, for instance, to spare a defeated opponent’s life. Consequently, these rules construct a combatant’s victory not only as a function of his physical prowess, but as a manifestation of his superior moral values, with both qualities reciprocally establishing his honour. Vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages promoted those norms and standards firmly and effectively—mostly (but not exclusively) by means of male role models.1 Thus imaginative