Changing Perceptions of Marcolf the Trickster

Abstract

The wily peasant Marcolf was an outsider quite like no other. His very name, ‘Mark-Wulf’, or ‘wolf from the outer marches’, denoted him as an alien figure: beast-like by nature and from the eastern margins of the known world. In the medieval Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, he arrives at the court of Solomon in Jerusalem to enter into a series of debates with the Old Testament king on subjects as diverse as good and evil, the benefits of moderation, the importance of social hierarchies, or women and marriage. The Dialogue’s popularity was rooted in the comical inversion of Solomon’s abstracted wisdom into Marcolf’s crude and often scatological corporeality. While the king speaks ‘out of the abundance of the heart’, Marcolf counters with trumpeting buttocks. The verbal sparring from which the Dialogue takes its title is followed by a largely narrative sequence of eight pranks. Here, Marcolf purportedly fulfils the king’s orders, yet manages to outwit Solomon and escape punishment thanks to his clever resourcefulness. When, for instance, Solomon sentences Marcolf to death, the peasant requests that he be permitted to choose the tree he will be hanged from. Since Marcolf fails to find a suitable specimen, the punishment cannot be executed. Variations in both text length and levels of crudity in surviving manuscript copies suggest that there probably was a strong oral tradition of improvised Dialogues between Solomon and the grotesque peasant. In the twelfth century, for example, a ‘Merculfo’ appeared among a group of performers entertaining at the Northern French court of Arnould of Gûınes, and by the late Middle Ages, Marcolf was a firm fixture in the upside-down world of carnival plays. In physical appearance, intellectual character, and social rank, Marcolf was presented as the anti-type to Solomon’s type, an outcast who inserted himself into the king’s presence to provide an opposing worldview and temporarily defy accepted order. Upon the introduction of printing in the fifteenth century, the Dialogue became a bestseller across Europe. In Germany alone, no fewer than six editions were