Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature by Aisling Byrne

Reviewed by: Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature by Aisling Byrne Helen Fulton Aisling Byrne. Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 212; $100.00 cloth. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae provided a less than flattering etymology for the Britons: “Some suspect that the Britons were so named in Latin because they are brutes” (“Brittones [End Page 315] quidam Latine nominatos suspicantur, eo quod bruti sint”). He goes on to describe them as “a people situated in the Ocean, the sea flowing in between as if outside the world” (“gens intra Oceanum interfuso mari quasi extra orbem posita”). The notion that Britain is itself an “other world,” marooned outside and beyond the rest of the world, is one of the ideas explored by Aisling Byrne in this engaging and sophisticated study of literary otherworlds in medieval romance. Recalling medieval maps in which Britain and Ireland are literally on the margins, squeezed into the left-hand corner of the world, Byrne argues for an archipelagic otherworld mapped onto the British Isles whose maritime location on the edge of the three main continents made them obvious sites of marvels and wonders. Though it is common practice to refer to “the Otherworld” as a proper noun, Byrne rightly identifies a plurality of meanings and concepts signified by what is, in fact, a modern term. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest citation for “Otherworld,” denoting an imaginary place of marvels and fantasy, is 1804, and there is no evidence that such a term, as a generic, existed in any medieval language. As in the example of Isidore and his phrase for Britain, “extra orbem” (outside the world), terms such as orbis alius (another world [literally globe]), and alius mundus (another world) are found regularly in classical and medieval writing, but with multiple signifieds attached to these signifiers. Such phrases can describe the land of the dead, unexplored parts of the globe such as the Antipodes, or even known parts of the world including Ceylon and Ireland. While we as modern readers interpret otherworlds as supernatural and imagined spaces, to medieval writers they belonged to the discourse of geography and exploration rather than fantasy. In destabilizing the idea of “the otherworld” and redefining it as “otherworlds” separately and consciously imagined by creative authors, Byrne theorizes the concept as a form of metafiction, an identifiable genre of discourse that constructs “an experience analogous to fiction itself . . . an extra perspective from which to view reality itself” (23). The central project of the book is to make the case that the discourse of the otherworld in medieval romance, far from being a naı¨ve expression of otherness, is deliberately linked to the exploration of social, religious, political, and geographical concerns in the “real world.” Before embarking on this project, Byrne does a good job in the “Introduction” of demolishing the idea of the “Celtic otherworld” either as an identifiable medieval concept or as an originating otherworld that [End Page 316] explains later versions. Much of this discussion comes from Patrick Sims-Williams’s account of the “Celtic otherworld” as a back-formation derived by modern critics from medieval Irish and Welsh texts.1 Byrne’s skepticism is equally robust, and she demonstrates very clearly that the otherworlds of medieval Ireland and Wales share a stock of literary conventions with other literatures. By the same token, the fairy kingdom described in Sir Orfeo “owe[s] rather more to the Bible than to any supposed Celtic or folkloric roots” (93). In her first chapter, Byrne isolates three key themes of otherworld narratives, desire, gender, and death, representing the kind of social complexities that can be explored in the space provided by an other-world. Beginning with the French Lanval and the Irish Immram Brain, Byrne describes the use of taboo in otherworld romances to destabilize a too-perfect bliss and encourage an ethical engagement with issues of self-denial and personal sacrifice in relation to love and desire. Utopian otherworlds create Christian anxieties about desire, often sublimated into images of food and consumption, satirized in The Land of Cokaygne and presented as dangerous temptations in The...