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This brief discussion of Sir Gawain's journey across the Wirral seeks to open up questions of how literature 'thinks' landscape and how that might feed into eco-critical debates. It deals with lost geographies and invented ones, and touches on notions of the otherworld as underpinning our responses to this one. (GR)Cir Gawain and the Green Knight is a text which apparently cries out for 'green reading.' The name by which we all know this text now ensures that Gawain shares the stage with a figure whose title positively invites ecocritical reading. What could be more appealing than a giant Green Knight? Here, it seems, is a creature who embodies nature, and so can be regarded as the representation of how humans think about and react to the non-human world. As such, this Green Knight acts as a representation of the human concept of Nature in a poem that abounds with descriptions of the physical world, from birds to boars and icicles to grass knolls. It is a world through which man travels, with which he battles and aspects of which he hunts, but it is also a world which fundamentally ignores man when it can. The natural year is marked by the seasons that follow their own rhythm, as the much-praised opening stanzas of Fitt II show, and while human festivals are mentioned in passing, they are irrelevant to the shift from winter to spring and back again. It thus works well to read the Green Knight as the embodiment of the natural world, whose bursting in to Camelot's Christmas festival easily lends itself to being interpreted as the powers of nature interrupting the rituals of culture-a reading which again fixes that Knight as a personification of all aspects of the non-human world.1 However, the Green Knight should not be the only feature of the poem to draw ecocritical attention, as Michael W. Twomey's consideration of the poem in terms of the 'green world' indicates.2 What follows here continues such investigations, albeit taking a slightly different stance, and is a brief discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Wirral journey with a view to opening up questions of how literature 'thinks' landscape and how that might feed into eco-critical debates. It deals with lost geographies, and indeed invented ones, touches on notions of the otherworld as underpinning our responses to this one, and is also, I hope, a further example of how practical theory, to borrow Paul Strohm's phrase, may help reveal aspects of a text about which it is otherwise silent.3 It is, in short, an attempt to perturb the text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and it does so by focusing on the landscape in which Gawain himself seems least at ease-the natural and somewhat inhospitable one of the Wirrai in winter.I. THE WILDERNESS OF WIRRALThe Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sets forth from Camelot (exact location unnamed) to find the green chapel where he is due to meet for the second time the Green Knight who features in the received title of the poem. The journey is described in just over two stanzas of the poem (lines 691-752) during which we are told he travels through 'J^e ryalme of Logres' (691) into North Wales, leaving Anglesey on his left, crosses the ford at Holy Head and thence enters 'J^e wyldrenesse of Wyrale' ten lines later at line 701.4 All this seems geographically precise. We may not be sure of the exact whereabouts of the Holy Head ford, but the poet and his contemporaries probably were, or at least as sure as one can be of something that might conceivably shift location in the wake of particularly high tides or heavy storms. However, once across that ford, the poem's landmarks become progressively vague, so that having taken unfamiliar paths ('gates straunge,' 709) Gawain finds himself in 'countrayes straunge' by the time he reaches the next stanza Here we are among generic or at least unspecified hills, fells and rivers, as the poem no longer links its hero's journey to named areas of the country. …

Introduction The idea for this special issue began as a proposal for a double session on the convergences of Eastern and Western Drama for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in the spring of 2003. Entitled "East Meets West in Drama," these sessions were intended to provide an opportunity to initiate a dialogue and to engage in a broader discussion of an area of drama that had not previously been addressed in a venue of its own at the Congress before. The two-part session, located that year in one of the infrequently used and out-of-the-way buildings on the campus of Western Michigan University (Sangren Hall), drew a modest audience of interested conferees, some more knowledgeable on the subject than others, but all there to share what they knew and to learn more of what they did not know. What became apparent from the active exchange of information and the sharing of firsthand viewing experiences was that another series of sessions would be necessary to continue the discussion we had just initiated. With that in mind, the next year brought further development of the topic, a broadening of its parameters, and a decision to feature mixed-media presentations, one by Max Harris on the Croatian sword dance (written with Lada Cale Feldman) (1) and another by Zvika Serper, which included a live performance. Two of the essays in this special issue derive from that early beginning--Mikiko Ishii's analysis of weeping mothers in Japanese Noh and early English drama and Serper's discussion of the complementarity of Noh and Kyogen drama. The three other essayists and their topics--Dongchoon Lee on the carnivalesque function of Korean mask dance, Min Tian on the script markings of Chinese Yuan zaju, and Cecilia Pang on the history and development of Chinese opera in the United States--were added along the way to expand the purview of the subject as well as to demonstrate the range and adaptability of Asian modes of drama. Whether read individually or in conjunction with one another the work presented here initiates a project rich in implications for contemporary audiences both expert and novice. Early Asian drama, subject to change, and adaptable to the surrounding sociopolitical environment whatever that environment might be, was at the same time able to retain distinctively traditional characteristics: skills and performance techniques, instrumental and vocal music, dance, gesture, costume, masking, and script markings to name a few. From folk drama to more formalized presentations, these plays engage their respective audiences and encourage both imaginative and physical interaction in the symbolic world they engender. Whether high art or low, whether artfully stylized or profoundly parochial, the symbolic meanings of colors and shapes, of gestures and props, of masks and movement, transport their audiences to an otherworld, one jarringly unusual yet at the same time comfortingly familiar. It is in the realm of the symbolic, these plays seem to suggest, that certain truths about human existence can be expressed most openly even when those truths are represented as frequently by visual juxtapositions, percussive instrumentation, and nonverbal modes of communication as they are by verbal expression. Despite the most obvious differences between Asian drama and its Western counterpart, the many points of convergence and familiarity of themes--for example, the loss of a loved one, the disenfranchisement or alienation of self or community--suggest the presence of an underlying effort to address the circumstances and conditions of human experience from the most fundamental of family interactions to the place of humanity in the larger scheme of things. In the essay that launches the collection Dongchoon Lee maps out the operations of such themes in Korean drama. Entitled "Medieval Korean Drama: The Pongsan Mask Dance" Lee's focus on mask dance, a form he calls a "composite art" demonstrates how dance, music, and symbolic meaning converge in carnivalesque fashion to defuse the frustrations of the "common people. …

Using selected examples, this article investigates the problem of spatial representation in European fairy tales and brings together a number of elements for a systematic analysis of its significance for narration. Aesthetic space, which Ernst Cassirer (30) distinguishes from mythical and theoretical space, constitutes in a general sense an artistically presented reality. The virtual space in narrative art, particularly in the folktale, can be regarded as such an aesthetic space, but one that is not independent of the narrators personality and context (i.e., the narrator's performance), of the story's narrative perspective, of national or regional variants, or of oral and written adaptations. The European fairy tale creates two nonhomeomorphic worlds-a magical world of supernatural beings from the beyond, and a nonmagical one of normal human beings-worlds that are divided from one another through occasionally fluid but sometimes also inflexible boundaries and frontier regions. With this first structure a second coexists in that for the narrator and the listener both worlds belong in any case to the same "magic" virtual world of the fairy tale, which is clearly separated from their own real one. Between the areas of the here and the beyond there are crossings and frontier regions such as a bridge, river, pond, seashore, well or spring, stone, forest, thorns, and so on. The forest is a passage-way of particular importance. Its name alone ("forest," "wood") seems to characterize a scenic court (Meder 123). It is regarded, in both the real and metaphorical sense, as a place of mortal danger and forbidden desires (140).1 It is represented negatively as an antithesis of courtly urban society and linked to the stereotypical adjectives "dark," "huge," and "lonely." And yet it is not always possible to distinguish, in the Euclidian sense, the spatial areas of the real and the other world. On the contrary, we are confronted with a fabled shifting of spheres. For example, when the hardworking daughter in the fairy tale "Frau Holle" (AT 480) is down in the underworld making the bed and energetically shaking out the bolster so "that the feathers fly, then it is snowing in the world."2 And the vertical movement of the daughter's jump into the well is at variance with the horizontal movement of her homecoming, which "happens not by arduous climbing up out of the depths, but simply by stepping out of the otherworld" (Heindrichs 64). While the printed fairy tale relies solely upon linguistic means for spatial construction, the oral storyteller, who performs the tale and uses the additional elements made possible by performance, is able to transform the narrative space (composed of the narrator and the audience) into the narrated scene of the fairy-tale action, to make it visual. He does this by employing not only linguistic means of narration3 but also gestures and significant movements, and by using props or models to illustrate and visualize the story being told: the wine glass that he moves back and forth across the table is at one moment the ship on which the hero sails the seas, at another an animal. In this way the space surrounding the storyteller is re-created as the world of adventure (Karlinger 266). At the beginning and end of the fairy tale the two worlds are at variance, and their synthesizing has to be established by narrative or by formula. A Breton storyteller, for example, achieves this in an amusing way at the end of his narrative by asserting that he had never had a share of the wedding feast; instead, he had been given a kick that sent him flying through the air to land in the chair he was now sitting in.4 His rhyming conclusion draws attention away from the fairy tale to the teller of tales, from the world that was being described to the world of the narrator. Whereas the formulas at the beginning set the narrated fairy-tale world in a faraway place and a far-distant time in the past, the formulas at the end serve, among other things, to collate this narrated world with the world of the storyteller, the narrated space with the narrating space (Koll 3). …

Through their depiction of incidents in which "goodness" is rewarded and "evil" deeds punished, folk and fairy tales function as pedagogical tools that illustrate cultural values, enforce the status quo, and define socially acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Yet this function certainly is not limited to the prose tales alone: traditional ballads, the old story-songs still performed in Anglo-American cultures, also tell the stories of men and women who must cope with established cultural conventions. The 305 traditional Scottish and English ballads collected by American folklorist Francis James Child at the end of the nineteenth century are filled with such stories, and their commentary on human relationships and social strictures has been the subject of some interest to both folklorists and social analysts in the twentieth century. The following essay identifies the sociocultural messages underlying one of the more well-known of these ballads, "Tam Lin," through an examination of the metaphorical meanings of the ballad's basic motifs and plot sequences, first in its oral form of folk ballad and then as it has been recast into prose narratives for twentieth-century British and American children and young adults. The purpose of this examination is to explore what constitutes the resonance, or core, of the "Tam Lin" ballad: that is, what elements, motifs, or meanings remain or are retained throughout various transformations, including those regarding genre, plot, characterization, and audience, and why the story still has meaning for today's audiences and storytellers. Traditional folk ballads can be categorized, as ballad scholar David Buchan notes, into three major groups: the magical and marvelous, the romantic and tragic, and the historical and semihistorical, along with a fourth, smaller group consisting of comic ballads (Scottish Ballad Book 5; see also Lang, "The Ballads" 520-21). Although some folk ballads-those Buchan labels as "historical"-either are concerned with the deeds of legendary figures, such as Robin Hood and Allen-a-Dale, or derive from actual historical or political events, folk ballads as a whole most often tell about love won or lost in some way; the early twentieth-century ballad scholar Gordon Gerould observed that "of the 305 specimens printed by Child, by far the largest number have to do with what may be called private and personal affairs rather than matters that concern the larger social units of clan or nation," and that nearly half of the ballad stories in the Child corpus are "love-stories of one sort or another" or concern crimes of violence that derive from sexual relationships (38-39; see also Buchan, Scottish Ballad Book 5). This focus is particularly true of the supernatural ballads, which tell of lovers won or returned from Fairyland or released from fairy enchantments. The conventional approach in modern ballad scholarship has been to treat folk ballads as an entity separate from folktales-as indeed they are as far as form and genre are concerned. Yet as Buchan observes, interrelationships between the genres of traditional material do exist: many ballads have motifs that can be found in the Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk Literature, a tool commonly used to categorize folk narratives, and several of the supernatural ballads share themes and motifs with fairy tales found listed in the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index between AT 400 and AT 450 (Scottish Ballad Book 7-8). Like fairy tales, the ballads that narrate supernatural events involve interactions with the Otherworld as well as with inhabitants of this world. Concerning this particular group of ballads, nineteenth-century folklorist Andrew Lang commented on their "close resemblance to prose Marchen [. . .] with their folklore incidents, based on universal superstitions and customs" and diffuse authorship, calling them "popular Marchen in rhyme" ("The Ballad" 521). Transformation and enchantment, and supernatural beings such as fairies and ghosts, infuse the narratives of these ballads and contribute to the action of the plot, as these elements do in traditional folk and fairy tales. …