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Heavenly Calm. The Role of Saintly Intervention in the Old Czech Chivalric Poetry
Jaluška, Matouš
The essay inspired by the Spatial and Religious Turns in contemporary humanities explores the role of space and safety in two Old Czech heroic romances adapted from Middle High German sources, Tristram a Izalda and Vévoda Arnošt. The Tristram story starts with a report about King Mark’s mili-tary campaign against the Slavs. It was during this conflict that Tristram’s parents got to know each other, the hero himself is, therefore, a product of an aggression against the listeners’ or readers’ homeland. The inevitable tragic end of the story looses a part of its grimness, because the public is aware of the connection between Tristram and the war. With Tristram’s death, the danger evapo-rated and the peace seemed to be restored. The benign closure is further secured by a new mo-nastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary, where the graves of Tristram and Izalda lie and where the former king Mark starts a new monastic career. Arnošt began his quest as a successful young nobleman whose widowed mother became a spouse of the Emperor. The jealousy of the Em-peror’s blood kin eventually drove Arnošt to vengeful murder after which he had to leave the country. After many adventures he finally arrived in the Holy Land, where he and his retinue of kobolds, giants and other humanoid creatures decisively defeated the King of Babylon and restored Christian dominance in the area. The story of Arnošt is inserted between two miracle-producing graves of mighty women, Empress Diana and Saint Ryngata, but the presence of a saint in this case did not facilitate the entombment of a difficult situation. Rather, it reminds the Christian reader about the ever available power of prayer and subsequent saintly intervention into this world. From this angle, Arnošt emerged as an especially powerful praying subject thanks to his unshakable de-meanor. Such slight adjustments of the Czech stories in comparison with their German counterpart lead to a palpable ΄sermonisation΄ of the material and can help us better assess the role played by the corpus of Old Czech chivalric poetry, in the milieu of the ΄Waning of the Middle Ages΄and gene-ral unrest of the 15th century.
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