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Muckle Sangs : (Re)Styling Greysteil

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One of the many challenges of the word ‘ballad’ is that its range of meanings, even in the Scottish context, is so wide that at times it seems to be almost a synonym for ‘song’.  That broadness is a challenge for anyone who relies on typing key-words into internet searches; in the Scottish context, the term encompasses border ballads, broadside ballads, bothy ballads, and more – all very different repertoires.  The Scots term “muckle sang” gets a bit closer to the topic in hand, describing a long, narrative form.

This post focusses on one example of “muckle sang”: a late medieval song, possibly with an ancient Celtic precursor, which was popular in oral performance in the Renaissance and thereafter leaves traces of literary transmission.  Songs about knights errant and maidens in distress were common in French chivalric literature and can be found in Western European poetry wherever French cultural influence was strongly felt, which included feudal Scotland (Lewis, 1936).  However, chivalric poetry inevitably interacted with different indigenous cultures to produce different kinds of narrative.  In the Scottish borders and lowlands, chivalric romance cross-fertilised with Scots traditions of oral epic to produce a unique repertoire of long-form, stanzaic sung ballads about warriors and their quasi-supernatural antagonists.  Some served to preserved memories of locally fought battles and raids. Others foregrounded the supernatural – fairies and wise women.  In the Scottish context, as research by Deanna Delmar Evans shows, stories of knights and ladies may also have reflected ancient anxieties about power transmission and, in the feudal context of the later medieval period, property ownership.

Greysteil, also known in a variant source as Eger and Grime, is perhaps one of the better-known of these supernatural ballads, a story of a powerful knight who is defeated by a magic sword.  The best-known source is probably the Percy Folio, a mid-17th century manuscript of mainly northern English songs which was the source used by antiquarian Bishop Thomas Percy for his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). The provenance of the Percy Folio was obscure even when Percy came across it, although its contents seem to be genuinely old.  The Percy folio was also drawn upon by Francis James Child when he started to work on The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883).  The language used is Anglicised material – not Scots – but this is the oldest extant source, running to some 1474 lines (Evans, 33). A longer version, which does use Scots or at least borders dialect, is now in the Huntington library in California, and was used for several editions in the early 19th century.  Evans agrees with Matthew McDiarmid’s assessment that the differences between the two versions suggests that while there might have been a common ancestor, the longer, Scots version has so many differences that it could be considered a separate story.

The plot of Greysteil contains some of the over allegory familiar to C. S. Lewis’s book on medieval chivalric literature.  Sir Greysteil lives in an imaginary land – the Land of Doubt – and is the obstacle that other knights need to overcome to win the hand of Lady Winglaine, who has sworn she will never marry a loser.  Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Greysteil believes that he cannot be beaten by any man borne of a woman.  Sir Eger is defeated trying to fight this formidable warrior; Greysteil cuts off the fingers of Eger’s sword hand as a trophy, and while he is being nursed back to health, his cause is championed by his friend Sir Grime (or Graham). Like a knightly game of paper, rock, scissors, the ‘no man born of woman’ barrier is magically circumvented by Sir Graham’s possession of a magic sword.  Graham cuts off Greysteil’s entire hand to take back as proof of victory and uses this to convince Winglaine that Eger had originally triumphed over Greysteil, but had, afterwards, lost his fingers in an ambush.  Eger, presented to his picky lady as a winner, can thus marry Winglaine.  Eventually Graham dies, and as they both stand grieving at his graveside, Eger confesses to his wife that it was Graham, not himself, who defeated Greysteil (this has been suggested to be one of the elements added by the Scottish variant).  Disillusioned, Winglaine leaves Eger to become a nun, and Eger goes off on crusade (many more adventures ensue).  At the very end of the story, when Winglaine eventually dies, the elderly Eger remarries the woman who nursed him through the initial injuries to his fingers.

It’s an odd story, which highlights the power of women to make decisions which determine the fate of even the strongest of men.  Greysteil is an uncanny figure, not quite human, not quite fairy; his hands are stained red, and he has the habit of cutting his enemies’ fingers off,  If one were looking for Celtic antecedents, another legendary story of supernaturally powerful warriors who cut off hands is of course the story red hand of Ulster, the seal of the O’Neills.  In that tale, land is claimed by a warrior giant who cuts his hand off and throws it to gain possession.  In Gaelic epics, great warriors commonly marked their banners with bloodied hands.  The man with the red hand carries the field, possesses the land.

By the 16th century, Renaissance nobles were clearly familiar with the story, which might have formed part of the allegory of power surrounding Stewart king’s competitive relationships with their more powerful nobles.  William Dauney’s extracts from the royal treasury accounts note in 1497, ‘tua fithelaris’ were paid for singing Graysteil to King James IV, and a few years later, in 1508, a luter who may either have adopted this name, or played the tune, it isn’t clear which, was paid well for playing to the king (Dauney, 356).   James IV’s son, the young James V, called Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, his ‘Gray-steill’; hence, a force to be overcome if he wanted to come into his full power as reigning king. (Purser, p.107)  References to Greysteil crop up in other songs – for example, in the Complaynt of Scotland (1549). Sir David Lyndsay’s poem ‘Squyer Meldrum’ also quotes from the legend: in the former, the eponymous Meldrum fights “alse weill / As did Sir Gryme aganis Graysteille” (Lyndsay, lines 1317-18).  John Purser presents us with a version of the tune from the Straloch lutebook (original now lost) that shows it was still in circulation in the 1620s: Purser suggests that this might have originally been a harp tune adapted for the then-fashionable aristocratic lute (Purser, 75).

Deanna Delmar Evans has written usefully on the modernisation of Greysteil in Walter Scott’ novel Redgauntlet, which uses the Scots (or at least, borders dialect) text of Eger and Grime that is now in the Huntington library (Evans, 33)  Walter Scott’s friend, David Laing, published this within his Early Metrical Tales including the History of Sir Egeir, Sir Gryme and Sir Gray-Steill in 1826, using a 1711 edition from Aberdeen. Prior to that, Scott also had access to a prose summary of the story published in 1805, and a version edited by Weber in 1810.  Scott’s own interest in romance fiction is well known: he discusses the Greysteil story as ‘Scottish’ in an 1819 essay on romance fiction (Evans, 34).  Redgauntlet loosely adapts the ballad, by now clearly a literary story rather than an oral ballad, into prose novel format.  In the process, the ancient, possibly even pre-medieval, story, becomes a Jacobite, 18th century historical tale, its theme of friendship under strain repositioned to sit in this recent period of national rebellions over succession.  Scott adds to this – or possibly brings out explicitly what was always under the surface of the allegory – a very modern concern for law disputes and property ownership, hot issues in the aftermath of Culloden.  The ending of the novel is different from the ballad, but I won’t reveal all here, except to quote Evans, “Scot describes not only the end of the Jacobite cause but also what he perceived as the collapse of the chivalric code in his native land” (Evans, 45).

So the song – the ballad – became literature.  But did it also continue to circulate in purely oral contexts? Perhaps – although Walter Scott’s 19th century popularity probably means that it reentered popular consciousness to generate a second-hand “folk” literature of its own.  Greysteil clearly became a name for a forbidding otherworldly presence far outside the borders: in Caithness, in the far north, ‘Greysteil’s Castle’ is a local name for an iron-age broch on Loch Rangag, making the Caithness Flow Country of bogs and water the geographic location of ‘The Land of Doubt’.  It’s not clear when this name first attached itself to a broch: in ancient or more modern times?  In this genre, in orally transmitted culture or in a literary retelling, either is plausible.

Further Resources

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