ABSTRACT
The humans of romance do not always cooperate with nonhuman animals—they also hunt and fight them. Romance is suffused with opportunities for readerly panic: each moment on the hero’s quest demands affective engagement and insists that the reader confronts the fear of death. The Gawain poet’s description of the deer drive is laced with sensory details: cues that exhort the noble medieval reader to recall hunts personally experienced, and especially to recall the bodily sensations associated with the emotions of the hunt. While the deer is the most commonly discussed quarry in romance, and certainly the one whose death is treated with the greatest fascination in literature, the boar also plays an important role as a worthy opponent with lessons to offer the heroes of romance. Medieval texts display a great deal of ambivalence about the moral quality of the domesticated pig.
