March-Stalkers Mighty: Introduction
march (n). Usually pluralised. A border region (e.g., the marches of Wales or Scotland, the contested regions on their borders with England), or an area demarcating a given boundary of land, especially land thought of as home or safe. Forming as they do the geographical boundaries of a community or nation, they are often contested zones of violence and mythology, and often become integral to a community’s sense of identity, helping to mark the psychological difference between us and them. Due to the flexibility of spelling in the later Middle Ages and the first centuries of the Early Modern period, this word has often been conflated or confused with marsh, especially in its generic sense as a wild and desolate place. Often used metaphorically.
Þæt hie gesawon swylce twegen,
Micle mearc-stapan môras healdan,
ellor-gæstas.
(Such a pair they have sometimes seen,
march-stalkers mighty the moorland haunting,
wandering spirits.)
(Beowulf c. ll. 1347-1350; Gunmere translation)
Manis [Man’s] soul is i-cleped orisoun [called a horizon]... as it were the next marche bytwene bodily and goostly [spiritual] thinges.
(1387: Trevisa trans. Higden, Polychronicon)
These marishes, and myrie bogs, In which the fearefull ewftes do build their bowres.
(1596: Spenser, The Faerie Queene)
The wild, war-blasted marches.
(1827: G. Darley, Sylvia)
Prologue.
Dedicated to two poets of forgotten name, creators of two great heroes. One hero leaped up from feigned sleep to fight his most famous battle without armour or weapons against a monstrous distortion of humanity and civilisation. The other fought his greatest battle while cowering under the bedclothes, lacking even the armour of carefully embroidered clothes, trying his best to outwit a very disconcerting (and expensively dressed) lady without failing in courtesy. Both bore out of that engagement some token of their ‘victory’, and both tokens were, literally or symbolically, a fragment of their opponent’s body.
Now, I’m sure that both poets would be horrified that I invoke their shadows in connection with sexualised angels and Gabriel’s foul mouth, but they’ve really no excuse. Between the broken bodies of the Grendel-kin, and of Beowulf, and of the dragon, and of Grendel’s victims, and the Green Knight holding up his own severed head to address Arthur’s hall, and Gawain’s own symbolic decapitation (and castration!), and the obsessively repeated tearing down and building up and treacherous changes of the bodies of both heroes in the guise of social forms and clothes and armour and family and court and nation, and each of them as metaphors for all the others... well, let’s just say that this fic rose out of the fact that there’s no way I could ever write a serious scholarly paper comparing too such famous poems so far apart in date without being torn (appropriately) to shreds, and leave it at that.
Thanks, guys. You never cease to entertain, and delight, and surprise.
And thank you also, of course, to kototyph and etoile_etiole, because who would have thought anyone would be willing to beta this behemoth at all, let alone so thoroughly? It was who gave me the nudge necessary to get the courage to reorder the entire second half of the fic to fix the Problem of the Six-Chapter-Long Denouement, so please send in that direction all the blame for the fact that Gabriel no longer gets to throw a book of porn at Dean’s head.