The House Always Wins: Death Personified and Game Studies in Medieval Literature

My research interest is death in the Middle Ages, and for my thesis I’m considering looking at the ways death is personified. Right now I’m using a wide range of texts because I haven’t figured out if I am a late or early medievalist, but hopefully I will figure that out as I find more examples. For this blog post, I’m looking at “The Death of Baldr and Hermod’s Ride to Hel” from The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (translation by Jesse Byock); “The Pardoner’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer; and Sir Orfeo from the Auchinleck Manuscript. All of these texts have a character who challenges Death, according to the model of games, which ultimately results in Death winning.

Death Playing Chess (15th century), Albertus Pictor, The Swedish History Museum/Lennart Karlsson

In mythology death personified takes two main forms: A character who causes death and collects a soul or a psychopomp escorting the soul to the afterlife with no control over the occurrence. My definition includes both of these ideas, but also includes anything playing the role of Death. The late fifteenth-century vaulted fresco of “Death Playing Chess” in Täby Church, Sweden — and my background writing narrative for video games— prompted me to consider ways that Death is playing a game. While definitions of “game” very from text-to-text on game studies, the common threads are that they must have rules, autonomy, known outcomes, and goals within a feedback system. The goal is a specific outcome that the player is trying to obtain by subscribing to a set of rules that limit the method of achieving such. When developing a game, the player must have autonomy, as in, there’s a sense of free will. Likewise, game needs known outcomes, which are quantitative or qualitative ways to measure the results that are clear to the player.

In Snorri Sturluson’s collection of Norse myths, The Prose Edda, Hel is the personified figure of Death. Her role as a god is to preside over the realm of the same, and in “The Death of Baldr and Hermod’s Ride to Hel,” she has control on who can come and go from her hall. At the start of the poem Baldr dies and Odin, knowing that his son’s death is the first part of Ragnarök, requests that someone goes to Hel and bribe her for his return. This encompasses both the goal and the known outcome for the game: retrieve Baldr or failure means ruin for the Æsir. The game is defined when Hermod asks to take Baldr back to Asgard and “Hel answered that a test would be made to see whether Baldr was as well loved as some say: ‘If all things in the world alive or dead, weep for him, then he will be allowed to return to the Æsir. If anyone speaks against him or refuses to cry, then he will remain with Hel” (Sturluson & Byock 68). Everything has the choice to weep, and exercising her free will, Thokk the giantess declines and “let Hel hold what she has” (Sturluson & Byock 69). Therefore, in Hermod’s failure to meet the “win conditions” Hel set, death personified won this game.

“The Pardoner’s Tale” of The Canterbury Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer is a narrative of three revelers who upon hearing of their friend’s demise, decide to seek out and kill Death. Serina Patterson even points in her dissertation that the Pardoner’s aim with his tale is to “[warn] his fellow pilgrims of the dangers of gambling”, (Game On: Medieval Players and Their Texts 40). The text is meta in the fact there is a critique of the greed of gamblers, but also, they test their luck in trying to kill Death. Personified Death is omnipresent in “The Pardoner’s Tale” because the revelers never actually physically find them; although some interpret the old man, who gives directions to where Death was last seen, is actually Death themself. Death is still present because when the revelers reach the tree, they find the pile of gold for which they kill each other over trying to gain possession. This text is different than The Prose Edda in that it is an unspoken game, but it still follows the framework outlined before. The goal is to kill Death, but like any good gamemaster, Death gives the revelers a strategic distraction by presenting them with a pile of gold. From the revelers’ perspective, the game has changed. They all want to take the gold for themselves, and the rules are to achieve such without letting the others know. The sense of autonomy is shown by all of them individually deciding to kill the others for the whole pile, which is a clear quantitative result. As mentioned before, the tale ends with the revelers killing each other, and that is how Death wins the game. Death’s strategic distraction, keeps the revelers from killing them, and Death instead comes for their lives. “The Pardoner’s Tale” can be summarized that the revelers sought out Death, and found it.

“Bag O’ Bones” Fables #11 (May 2003)

Sir Orfeo from the Auchinleck Manuscript, is the Middle English retelling of Orpheus. The Faerie King is personified death in this text, who takes the protagonist’s love to his castle in an Otherworld, or the underworld. Sir Orfeo is in self-induced exile mourning the loss of Herodis for ten years before winning her back. In this text the game isn’t realized until they’re in the middle of it. Sir Orfeo sets his goal to retrieve Herodis when he sees her among the faerie-band, but knows that he must hide is true motive to avoid joining the macabre scene at the castle. He enters the Otherworld under the guise of a minstrel, and plays so beautifully the Faerie King grants his whatever he wants. He asks for the woman under the ympe tree (Herodis), and when the king denies him, Sir Orfeo uses the king’s words (or his rules) against him: “as ye syd nouþe,/ What Ich wold aski have Y schold,/ And nedes þou most þi world hold” (lines 466-9). The Faerie King concedes, since he must keep his word, and Sir Orfeo brings Herodis back to life. While Sir Orfeo wins the game in this moment, Death (the Faerie King) still is untimely the winner because the poem concludes with the end of the lovers’ long life. One can presume the pair would then be returned to Death’s domain.

The texts mentioned above all have characters who challenge Death, and play a game with them according to game studies’ idea of “game”. While the details of each exchange differ, Death is ultimately the winner in these encounters. This sampling shows the continued desire to defy Death, even though dying is still an unavoidable concept. My further research into death personified can go in multiple directions: finding more example of Death’s games, looking at other common threads of how death is personified, or considering Death’s role as the adversary. While I don’t know which way I’ll go, it’s certain that games with Death are rigged since everything must end; therefore, when challenging Death, the house always wins.

Garden of Death (1896), Hugo Simberg, Ateneum Art Museum

Works Cited

Benson, Larry Dean, editor. “The Pardoner’s Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer, by Geoffrey Chaucer, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 196–202.

Byock, Jesse L., translator. “The Death of Baldr and Hermod’s Ride to Hel.” The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology, by Snorri Sturluson, Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 65–69.

Patterson, Serina Laureen. “Game on: Medieval Players and Their Texts.” T. University of British Columbia, 2017.

Treharne, Elaine M., editor. “Sir Orfeo.” Old and Middle English: c. 890 – c. 1400: an Anthology, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 550–563.

Life: The Harbinger of Death

To study death is to also study life, because whether it is through fate or fertility, the two are directly linked. My introduction to figures of death was watching Hercules as a child, and learning about the Greco-Roman deities of Hades and the Fates. The movie made it clear that Hades has no control over life and death and it is the Fates who are spinning the life tread or cutting it. The combination of life and death was furthered for me when I learned of Persephone, who is not only the queen of the underworld, but also a goddess of vegetation and fertility. As my interest in death embodied continued, I found that figures of death and life truly are, the cliché, “two sides of the same coin.”

Figures in charge of fate are also found in the Germanic tradition with depictions of the Valkyries and Norns. The Old Norse word valkyrja literally translates to “chooser of the slain” and bear the half dead heroes who die in battle to Valhalla. They clearly have the role of being psychopomps in Norse myths, but Snorri Sturluson furthers their intermixing with fate in that “they are sent by Odin to every battle, where they choose which men are to die” (45). In this way the Valkyries are Death watching over the battlefield, establishing who will die and carrying their souls off. One of the Valkyries is also the youngest of the three Norns, the Germanic embodiment of fate. The Valkyries get to specifically chose who dies in battle, but it is the Norns who “[lay] down laws, they [choose] lives for the sons of men, the fates of men” (Voluspa 21). They make these choices at everyone’s birth, one of which is the length of life.

Losbücher, 1450-1473, München, BSB, Cgm 312, f.98r

The Middle English motif of Lady Fortune is also in control of fate because of the ups and downs of life at the turn of her wheel. Lady Fortune, like the Norns, is present throughout a person’s life as she follows people from the cradle to the grave. One of the example of Lady Fortune I’ve encountered this year is in the Alliterative Morte Arthure Part IV. In a text mostly removed from the magical and otherworldly elements typically found in the Arthurian tradition, a figure of Death is still present when Arthure dreams of Lady Fortune spinning her wheel. Upon the wheel in this dream are the Nine Worthies, one of which is Arthure himself. It’s a nonverbal omen that shakes Arthure to his core: “And when his dredful dreme was driven to the ende, / The king dares fore doute, die as he sholde” (3224-25). Fortune is always spinning and it is his tine to take the turn towards the grave, just as the other eight worthies have on the wheel. If people get on the wheel at birth, the Lady Fortune is a figure of life and death as she takes each person through growth and decay.

Going back to the Nordic texts, it’s easy to forget about Freyia’s hall, Folkvang, where she houses “half the slain she chooses every day,” the other “half Odin owns” in Valhalla (Grimnismal 14). The existence of this hall where Freyia presides over the dead, makes her another embodiment of death. This role is in contrast to her role as the goddess of fertility. Kel in their blog post “How to Love Your Monstrous Mom: Thoughts on Acker’s ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf'” brought to my attention the concept that a mother gives us life but also death. Their work in this area perfectly illustrates the image of Freyia in that she is both a giver of life and a keeper of death, and that the roles are not mutually exclusive.

The Anatomy of an Angel (2008), Damien Hirst
Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.

Hel, the Norse goddess of death, also illustrates the blurring of life and death in Snorri’s description of her image: “She is half black and half a lighter flesh colour and is easily recognized. Mostly she is gloomy and cruel” (39). The side referred to as “black” is often interpreted to be a skeletal image in the state of decay, making her visually appear as the point the two states of being are meeting. Hilda Roderick Ellis discusses supernatural women and their connections to death in the book The Road to Hel, and such is a place for further study for me. I’m especially interested to look more in-depth at Baldrs draumar and the dead seeress that Odin calls up from the ground. The seeress also exists on this boundary by being dead, and being drawn back to life for knowledge of Baldr’s fate.

The earth is another point where life and death meet. The tradition in Middle English of earth to earth, is entirely based around the idea that life comes from the earth, and will be return to it upon death. Nature itself is a major motif when talking about the dead because of its role in decay; however, it is also associated with growth and fertility, which is exemplified in the figure of Mother Nature. It is interesting to note that all the figures mentioned above are feminine, or, at the least, described with female pronouns. James J. Paxton observes that personifications are innately female, and anything else is the deviant (“Personification’s Gender”). In my research it is only figures of death with connections to fertility or fate that are exclusively female. Further research will involve looking at why medieval literature reserves that dual identity for figures of femininity.

Sources:

Benson, Larry Dean. King Arthur’s Death: the Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure. Western Michigan Univ., 2005.

Caciola, Nancy. Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 2017.

Chism, Christine. “King Takes Knight: Signifying War in the Alliterative Morte Arthure .” Alliterative Revivals, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. 189–236.

Clements, Ron and John Musker, directors. Hercules. Walt Disney Pictures, 1997.

Ellis, Hilda Roderick. The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature. Greenwood Press, 1977.

Guthke, Karl S. The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge;New York;, 1999.

Knowlton, E. C. “Nature in Middle English.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 20, no. 2, 1921, pp. 186–207.

Larrington, Carolyne, translator. The Poetic Edda. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Menton, Kel. “How to Love Your Monstrous Mom: Thoughts on Acker’s ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf’.” þaes Wyrmes Wyrd, 30 Oct. 2019, https://wyrmeswyrd.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/how-to-love-your-monstrous-mom-thoughts-on-ackers-horror-and-the-maternal-in-beowulf/

Morey, James H. “The Fates of Men in Beowulf.” Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, by Charles Darwin Wright et al., University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 26–51.

Paxson, James J. “Personification’s Gender.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, vol. 16, no. 2, 1998, pp. 149–179.

Robinson, Fred C. “God, Death, and Loyalty in The Battle of .” Old English Literature: Critical Essays, by Roy Michael Liuzza, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 425–444.

Sturluson, Snorri, and Jesse L. Byock. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Penguin, London, 2005.

Tristram, Philippa. Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature. Elek, London, 1976.