Ipomadon

(ca. 1390)

   The title Ipomadon refers most often to an anonymous late 14th-century MIDDLE ENGLISH chivalric ROMANCE in 12-line TAIL-RHYME stanzas, probably produced originally in the area of northwest Yorkshire. At 8,890 lines Ipomadon is the longest of the tail-rhyme romances, and is also in many ways the most sophisticated in its concern with the psychology of its characters, its depiction of the details of court life, and its preservation of some of the finer points of the COURTLY LOVE tradition. This literary sophistication may derive in part from the poet’s source, an admirable Anglo-Norman romance by the poet Hue de Rotelande called Ipomédon (ca. 1190).

   The story revolves around the love of Ipomadon for La Fière, princess of Calabria. The princess has vowed to marry the greatest knight in the world. Ipomadon is prince of Apulia, but visits the Calabrian court in disguise. He earns no reputation in arms, but devotes most of his time to hunting, and thus is rebuffed by the princess and must leave Calabria in disgrace, determined to make a name for himself through valorous deeds in foreign lands.He returns (in disguise) to Calabria to compete in a tournament to win his beloved, though after he has won the tournament, he leaves without claiming La Fière. Later, after other adventures at the court of Sicily and after becoming king of Apulia upon his father’s death, he returns to Calabria disguised as a fool to defend his Lady from her enemies who besiege her, overcomes all adversaries, and ultimately weds the princess.

   Rotelande wrote his Anglo-Norman poem in the wake of CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES’s groundbreaking romances, and seems particularly influenced by Chrétien’s EREC ET ENIDE. The anonymous 14th-century poem preserves in English something very close to the spirit of those original French courtly romances. The story contains a good deal of humor and deals sympathetically with the lovers’ emotions, which are often expressed in the form of soliloquies. Although the story has been criticized for the apparent lack of motivation for Ipomadon’s constant disguises, its use of the “fair unknown” motif (in which the noble youth in disguise proves his true nobility through deeds) may have been influential on later adaptations of that theme, including the “Tale of Sir Gareth” in MALORY’s Le MORTE DARTHUR. Two other versions of the Ipomadon story in Middle English are extant: One is an earlier 14thcentury prose version called Ipomedon, and the other a shorter rendering in rhyming couplets called The Lyfe of Ipomydon, preserved in a 15th-century manuscript. The four very different extant versions of the story are clear indications of its widespread popularity in England in the later Middle Ages.

   Bibliography

   ■ Calin,William. The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

   ■ Purdie, Rhiannon, ed. Ipomadon. EETS 316. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2001.

   ■ Schmidt, A.V. C., and Nicolas Jacobs.Medieval English Romances. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980.