Introduction

It was seen in the introduction that the early Germanic summer was a sixmonth season; in Iceland and Norway, it began around the second week of April on the Julian calendar. It was also suggested that an associative consideration of the year tends to include the pleasant days of spring in the concept of summer. Perhaps in recognition of both facts, Middle English verse frequently references summer as an inclusive concept starting around April. This chapter will accordingly treat April and May as early summer (a concept still recognizable in Dutch voorjaar and borrowed into Danish as foraar) except where spring and summer are clearly distinguished.

The associations of spring and summer in later-medieval literature are well documented. Above all, spring connotes love in Middle English verse. In addition, the summer half-year claims centre stage in the popular topos of the nature opening, itself a subtype of the locus amoenus or pleasant natural setting inherited from classical tradition. These agreeable associations might tempt us to classify spring and summer as safe environments contrasting with the dangers of winter encountered in previous chapters. As we will see, however, the tendency in medieval romance and dream visions is instead to set confrontations with foreign elements, including moderately dangerous ones, in the warm season.

As in the two preceding chapters, here likewise a seasonal take on Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope may shed light on the dynamics of narrative space and time. The construct is particularly applicable to medieval romance, as Bakhtin recognized, because of the genre's extensive use of an adventure-space contrasting with the social environment that forms the protagonist's familiar sphere. It is the seasonal implications of this adventure-space that will form the central object of study in what follows. It will furthermore be demonstrated that the functions and seasonality of the natural world in Middle English dream visions and debates have considerable overlap with those of romance.

In Middle English as in Old English literature, and to a degree in Old Norse literature, much of the narrative action takes place beyond the safety of the court, hall, or farmhouse. However, Middle English literature relies more heavily than either of the other corpora on the concept of adventure in the sense of unforeseen or chance events befalling a protagonist when he or she is already beyond the confines of the home.