Languishing Latinate: Authorship and Plagiarism in the Encomium Emmae Reginae

     The collective story of Emma of Normandy as told by a nameless monk in the early 11th century discusses at length the influences that the one-time queen/queen regent/political pawn/political player had in the Danish and English monarchies throughout her life. The credence the unnamed monk gives to her legacy is further legitimized by the amount of detail he ascribes to the works of Cnut the Great, Emma's second husband. However, while the retelling of the Danish incursion is detailed with exceptional specificity, a number of the descriptions seem to mimic those of a far older text written by an author equally steeped in the Latinate linguistic tradition: Julius Caesar. Caesar's treatise on the Gallic Wars details a similar incursion into British territory, a strikingly similar storming of a beach, and a near identical success in the face of mounting odds. While it would be a speculative stretch to say that the monk lifted a great amount of his story from a far older work, the similarities make for an interesting instance of intertextuality that may, in fact, have something to say about the credence of Emma as well as her hired author.

     From a narrative standpoint, beginning a great portion of the Encomium with the details of the invasions of the Danes serves to tie Emma in with the glories of conquest, but the fact that the text itself was written specifically to honor Emma makes the half-hearted justification on the part of the monk seem less than genuine (7). Oddly enough, Caesar’s De Bello Gallico takes a similar rhetorical route, noting that the exploits and trumps listed in the work are (primarily) the works of Caesar by proxy, but can be attributed to a large number of consuls, imperators and soldiers. Both works are a attempting to tell the story of a single key player in a vast and complex situation, but this is not the only resemblance the works share.

     In Book II of the Encomium, newly risen King Cnut has assembled a force to invade the British mainland. Caesar, likewise, assembled a seemingly similar force after his successful incursion into Gallic territory (De Bello Gallico, Book IV). Both of the expeditionary assaults are described in detail, with the invading force at first struggling to gain a foothold, and then successfully repelling the defensive force after an extreme effort, adding to the "virtus" of the respective armies. While this could simply be a case of historical similarity, the monk in question is noted to be exceptionally well read in Latinate texts, as is seen in a number of allusions he makes early in his retelling. It could stand to reason that in lieu of more concrete evidence or knowledge as to the legacy of Emma of Normandy and that of her husband, the monk simply pasted a compelling known story onto a more recent historical narrative. The rhetorical reasoning, at the very least, seems to match.

     The question as to why this monk would have seemingly plagiarized remains. One possible explanation could be that there was little that the commissioned monk had to say concerning Emma. After all, the woman herself does not appear in her own work until late in Book II. The earlier stories of Sveinn and Cnut do not appear to be filler or a literary holding pattern to introduce Emma, but rather a focus of the narrative. Whether this chosen narrative order was the result of a lack of material, a kind of androcentric thinking, or a sort of literary micro-aggression remains to be seen.