Using Computational Methods to Explore Selma Lagerlöf'

Keywords:

The article explores the main structuring elements of the national mythology of Sweden as promoted in Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Journey through Sweden (1906/07), understood as mythemes of social knowledge. After a perhaps too short discussion of the main theoretical and methodological choices, including the concept of mytheme and homo narrans in the context of general narratology and media change, the article proceeds in the discussion of the results obtained by a computational method developed by Ludovic Stappazzon and the author. 196 common mythemes are mapped as a network of units representing the probability of co-occurrence in the narrative. Most Central Chronotope mythemes are Forest, Way, Water, Farm, Land and Lake, which are until today main elements of a national imaginative geography. Action mythemes relate to the idea of education, related in turn to the concept of family. Human and non-human actors and chronotopes are clearly divided as two spheres in the narrative grammar, underlining the nature-culture-divide central to the narration.

Résumé

L'article explore les principaux éléments structurants de la mythologie nationale de la Suède telle qu'elle est promue dans le Merveilleux voyage à travers la Suède de Selma Lagerlöf (1906/07), entendus comme des mythèmes du savoir social. Après une discussion peut-être trop courte des principaux choix théoriques et méthodologiques, y compris le concept de mythème et d'homo narrans dans le contexte de la narratologie générale et de l'évolution des médias, l'article passe à la discussion des résultats obtenus par une méthode computationnelle développée par Ludovic Stappazzon et l'auteur. 196 mythèmes communs sont cartographiés sous la forme d'un réseau d'unités représentant la probabilité de cooccurrence dans le récit. Les mythèmes de chronotope les plus centraux sont la forêt, le chemin, l'eau, la ferme, la terre et le lac, qui sont jusqu'à aujourd'hui des éléments principaux d'une géographie imaginative nationale. Les mythèmes d'action sont liés à l'idée d'éducation, elle-même liée au concept de famille. Les acteurs et les chronotopes humains et non humains sont clairement divisés en deux sphères dans la grammaire narrative, soulignant la division nature-culture au coeur de la narration.

Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey through the Mythemes of Sweden. Using Computational Methods to Explore Selma Lagerlöf's Narrative Geographies for Everyone Thomas Mohnike Université de Strasbourg, MGNE Without a doubt, Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey Through Sweden (1906/7) by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf is one of the most read and best researched single literary works in Scandinavian literature. The book had sold over 500,000 copies by 1959 in a country of at the time approximately 6 million inhabitants. It was used as a textbook in schools and can be described as an important vector for the construction of the Swedish welfare state and its imagined political community as a nation. The book conveyed knowledge about not only physical, natural, and cultural geography, but also aesthetic and ethical values and categories. It participated decisively in the cultural construction of a national mythology of Sweden -both inside and outside of Sweden. 1 The term "national mythology" here implies that we are dealing with a set of myths, i.e. narratives organized in a specific way, which in turn participate in what could be called the narrative structure of the nation as a belief system. These myths can be expressed through various media, and this is certainly the case with Nils Holgersson. Even if the book is mostly known for its text, it was conceived as a multimedia object with illustrations accompanying the narration, designed for both quiet reading and interactive teaching situations. 2 In the first editions, a series of 57 photos and 15 mostly realistic paintings and drawings were reproduced in the book. Apart from three of the 72 illustrations in total, none of them illustrated the story directly, but they reproduced the frequent narrative elements by depicting realistic exemplary details mostly from Swedish natural scenery, creating an effect of authenticity. 3 As the mostly photographic illustrations suggest by focusing on specific landscape features, it appears that it was not so much the individual myths that counted in the book, but rather their components, or basic units. I propose that we might call these units 'mythemes', inspired by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Consequently, it is not the story of Nils Holgersson per se, which became influential, but rather its components, its mythemes, and the way they were combined. It was not so much the wild geese and the little boy that became the main elements of the national mythology, but a standardized representation of a specific ecological system of Swedish nature, its flora and fauna, including its farmers and ordinary Swedes. It is these elements of national myths, these mythemes, that 1 Gunnar Ahlström, Den underbara resan: En bok om Selma Lagerlöfs Nils Holgersson, Stockholm, Bonnier, 1958; Erland Lagerroth, Landskap och natur i Gösta Berlings saga och Nils Holgersson, Stockholm, Bonnier, 1958; Annelie Jarl Ireman, "Le merveilleux voyage du livre de Selma Lagerlöf," in Cahiers Robinson, 29, 2011, p. 97-112; Bente Heian, Skolebok og diktverk. En analyse av pedagogiske mål og litteraere virkemidler i Selma Lagerlöfs Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, Oslo, Univ. i Oslo, 1983; Bjarne Thorup Thomsen, "Lagerlöfs Relative Landskaber. Om Konstruktionen Af et Nationalt Territorium i Nils Holgersson," in Edda 91/2, 2004, p. 118-33; Annelie Jarl Ireman, "Lire et relire 'Le merveilleux voyage de Nils Holgersson à travers la Suède, '" in Nordiques, 23, 2010, p. 67-79 In fact, there was a teacher's manual that suggested different ways of using the book in teaching. See Valborg Olander and Selma Lagerlöf, Handbok till Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1918. 3 This calculation is based on my copy, which I acquired antiquarian and belonged to the first ten thousand copies of the first edition. Since the images were printed separately and then inserted into the book layers during binding, errors are not excluded and variations are possible. The use of photos was apparently a stopgap solution, as the desired illustrator, Bruno Liljefors, was not available. Liljefors was known for his depictions of nature, in which animals were shown in their natural habitat. The reproductions in the book of some of his paintings confirm this exemplarily. John Bauer, who developed a style of enchanting reality through references to folklore, was rejected by Selma Lagerlöf. It was not a matter of distancing oneself from the world, but on the contrary of anchoring the narrative in the real world as a narrative of reality. On the motives to choose Bruno Liljefors, see Christopher Oscarson, "Nils Holgersson, Empty Maps and the Entangled Birds-Eye View of Sweden," Edda 96/02 (2009): 105-6. became influential, and the way they were combined. They became part of the "horizon of expectation" 4 of readers and amateurs of the European North, shared social knowledge that any other text and narrative media had to relate to when referring to the Sweden and -in an international perspective -Scandinavia.

But which are the most significant mythemes in this context? It is my ambition here to identify them not by qualitative analysis, but by using a set of computational methods. As a result, some of the observations from previous research using qualitative methods will be confirmed by a quantitative approach, thus validating other findings by different means. When doing so, I am not so much focusing on Nils Holgersson as a single work, but as expression of narrative knowledge about Sweden, supposed to be shared by its implied reader at the beginning of the 20th century. When referring to "narrative knowledge", I do this in reference to the work of several scholars modelling the human species as homo narrans, that is to define our species by its ability to circulate knowledge through narration, fiction or non-fiction. Some of the underlying narratological ideas were presented in an article published in 2020, along with some preliminary computational experiments. 5 Since then, the computing methodology has been thoroughly revised and enhanced by data engineer Ludovic Strappazzon and myself, and a publication that discusses its premises, choices and pitfalls in detail is in preparation. 6 Meanwhile, the following overview will have to suffice.

What is a Mytheme? Some Comments on Theory

In recent years, several scholars from different fields have suggested changing the name of our species from Homo sapiens, the 'wise, discerning man' to homo narrans, the storytelling man. Evolutionary theorists, information and communication experts, linguists, scholars from religious and literary studies as well as sociologists note that most human knowledge transfer is based on narration; decision making is often more reliant on narrative framing than on facts and rational argument. 7 Based on this and his own research into cognitive and neuroscience, Fritz Breithaupt shows that we have a "narrative brain", that the latter is actually constructed in order to process information in a way that can be described as having a narrative structure. 8 The concept of narration is here not restricted to literature or text, but englobes all media used to transmit narratives, that is accounts of at least one "change from one state of affairs to another" 9 . Obviously, narratives can only be studied on the basis of their realization in specific media, be it oral, comic, film or novel, and the characteristics of each media form have an influence on the narration.

The research of Breithaupt and others explicitly links new experiments and results from cognitive science to the long tradition of poetic and narratological reflection. In fact, already Aristotle had underlined the advantages of the narrative form, saying that narration helps to transmit what is probably going to happen by focusing on the typical -and not the accidental, on "what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity" 10 . Aristotle thus suggests that narratives are devices for understanding and coping with the complexity of life, or to put it anachronistically: they are algorithms that prepare us for what we will encounter. He is consequently preparing the field for a modern 4 Hans Robert Jauss, "Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft", Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, ed. Hans Robert Jauss, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 144-207, here especially p. 175-189. 5 Thomas Mohnike, "Narrating the North. Towards a Theory of Mythemes of Social Knowledge in Cultural Circulation," in Deshima. Arts, lettres et cultures des pays du Nord, 14, 2020, p.9-36. 6 Another case study using the present method in order to trace change in Narrative grammar in a bigger corpus is published as Thomas Mohnike, "Tracing the Grammar of Old Norse Myth. Mapping Mythemes in English Language Young Adult Literature from the Second Half of the Long Nineteenth Century", Þáttasyrpa -Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Sprache in Nordeuropa. Festschrift für Stefanie Gropper, eds. Anna Katharina Heiniger, Rebecca Merkelbach, and Alexander Wilson, Beiträge Zur Nordischen Philologie 71, Tübingen, Narr, 2022, p. 367-78. 7 Walter R. Fisher, "The Narrative Paradigm: In the Beginning," in Journal of Communication 35/4, December 1985, p. 74-89, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1985.tb02974.x; John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: the understanding of the function of narration and narratives. Narratologists like Käthe Friedemann would in the beginning of the 20 th century describe this approach as "the epistemological conception familiar to us since Kant that we do not grasp the world as it is in itself, but rather as it has passed through the medium of an observing mind"11 -narratives thus being part of human processing strategies. As such, the concept of homo narrans is both an invitation to reconsider the way human beings function and an invitation to revisit narrative theory.

Such discussions about whether narration is a dominant form of information processing and transmission are, of course, part of the social and media transformation that we could call the "electronic age" with Marshall McLuhan. At the latest in the 1950s,12 literature as a leading medium for cultural negotiation was beginning to lose its status, when screen-based information media started to come to the fore -along with numerous more or less new forms of narratives. With these transformations, the world of the "typographic man" disappeared, i.e. the human being determined by a media configuration based on the printing industry, and questions of the interrelation of different media became evident, especially how narratives changed when passing from one media to another. 13 The advent of the Internet has exponentially accelerated these trends. These transformations have invited us to reflect on the nature of narrative knowledge and the specific laws of expression in different media. This relates to all the different works on the narratology of the realistic novel, folklore, comics, and their declinations in cinema studies, game studies or politics, marketing and academic practice as historiography, and so on.

Many approaches to narration in this general sense are primarily interested in where and when narrations and narrative framings are used with which poetical or narrative figures; they focus on intertextuality or the techniques of medial storytelling. Others, and this is obviously the case with the approach I am proposing here, seek to apply ideas from classical general, mostly structuralist, narratology, which had some of its beginnings in the beginning of the 20 th century in Germany and Russia and then developed especially in the 1950s and 1960s, to the new media situation. The recourse to these approaches is not accidental, since many of the theories and methods of this period respond precisely to the invention of first the cinema, television, and then the computer, and to the theorization of information and knowledge that underlie the technical solutions of our electronic age. An interesting effort in this context was for example the collective volume Narrating Complexity, edited by Richard Walsh and Susan Stepney in 2018, bringing together complex systems scientists and narratologists. 14 Mark Alan Finlayson's work on "Inferring Propp's functions from Semantically Annotated Text" or on automatically identifying narrative diegesis and point of view15 are similarly interesting approaches, as are Timothy R. Tangherlini's explorations into creating a generative model of what he calls "the legend", i.e. popular storytelling, to cite just a few inspiring examples from the vicinity of the present project. 16 In the context of the Mythemes of the Knowledge project, however, I propose not to focus as much on narrations or genres of narrations as such, but on what social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called the "constituent units" of narrations: mythemes.17 It is from these basic units of narrations that I suggest starting -just as a chemist would start rather with atoms than with molecules, even though the rarely come isolated. Lévi-Strauss in fact insists that mythemes are to be defined as "bundles of […] relations and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning" 18 . It is important to note that mythemes are elements at the level of diegesis in a narratological sense, that is the narrated, not narration per se, and they produce meaning not necessarily through temporal vicinity in the narration but through connecting through patterns of similarities and opposition on what Roland Barthes called a "second-order semiological system". In fact, in his book on Mythologies, Roland Barthes defined myth as "a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it […]. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second." 19 So what we are dealing with here is not identical to a linguistic semantic analysis, even though in this case we are studying a text that is accompanied by realistic illustrations. When interpreting the narrative as expressed in a text, we use linguistic units (words) as signifiers for narrative units. We seek to describe phenomena not at the level of language, but of narration. This means moving to a second level of the text, the narrative level that potentially would be identically to the narrative level in a faithful film adaptation, even though of course the medium would have an impact on the narration. This distinction is important to the understanding of the result that I present below: the network of probable relations between mythemes is not identical to the linguistic patterns, although of course, we have to refer to words in a text and thus to language-based narratives when analyzing narrative texts. Mythemes exist at the level of narrative knowledge, detached from its medium, even only tangible in specific media.

Each mytheme is characterized by its capacity to relate to other mythemes -as "bundles of relations". 20 In consequence, I have defined the narrative grammar in my above-mentioned article "as the probability of connectivity of mythemes in narration". 21 That means that we expect some mythemes to be used together -this often creates an effect of authenticity, while other co-occurrences are considered to be improbable. In a realistic novel of the turn of the 19 th century, men would meet in coffee shops and discuss life and literature, but a dragon would be unlikely to make an appearance. However, in fantasy novels published after Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, one would not be surprised to meet a dragon in a pub. Narrative grammar -the probability that some mythemes are used together with others, thus changes and depends on contextual elements such as time, genre and many more.

In this perspective, mythemes can be understood as the narrative units that Selma Lagerlöf uses to tell in a fascinating way the story of Nils Holgersson exploring Sweden on a goose's back, thereby creating a "national mythology", that is a repertory of narrative elements that can be used to imagine, and especially narrate, Sweden as a nation. She uses mythemes and groups of mythemes that were already known to her readership, combining them in a new and productive way that then became canonical. By studying how Lagerlöf combines certain mythemes -and avoids combining others, we can trace how her book is conceptualized to evoke a unified national geography out of a multiplicity of regionally-based episodes. This narrative geography should potentially be able to be explored in a variety of media -the illustrations are one beginning, the maps used in the classroom another, the board games and journeys later developed to walk in Nils Holgersson's footsteps are still other media variants.

The concept of mytheme is known to be difficult to define in a way that avoids arbitress and thus comparability of results. In addition, the same author sometimes uses different definitions of the term. Often, a means to identify mythemes in a given text, events are used, that is "a change from one state of affairs to another" in the narrative flux,22 combined with a character and some themes. However, it seems to me that it is more helpful to discriminate these elements as constituent entities and define the combination of them as a complex of mythemes. In previous studies, it proved to be helpful to distinguish four types of mythemes. This proposal is based on classical narratological concepts, but attempts to reduce them to a few abstract units for our needs.

• Actor Mythemes -narrative entities that can function as the object or subject of action. This category unites all possible expressions of actants in the sense of Greimas. • Action mythemes define the narrative relationship between actor mythemes. This category often relates to events, that passing an actor from one state to another. • Chronotope mythemes define the place and time of an action.

• Concept mythemes structure the plot through abstract ideas, most often not directly engaged in narration except in the case of allegories. They represent the themes related negotiated in the narrative. 23 Evidently, the categories are not as clear-cut as they might seem. A specific mytheme can, for example, sometimes be classified as an actor and a concept at the same time; we can think here of Amor as a figuration of Love. A mytheme can be both a chronotope and an actor -a stone can be a place to meet or a tool to hurt somebody. As long as these ambiguities do not affect the value of the analysis, it seems to me that they have no effect on the validity of the approach. In the analysis that I present here, such mythemes were defined in the database as belonging to several categories. In my study, I will map mythemes that can be categorized as actors and chronotopes alongside chronotope mythemes proper when mapping the narrative geography of Nils Holgersson, and the same mythemes will appear on the maps of actors describing the projected social network of the imaginative community of the Swedish nation according to the book.

How can mythemes be traced computationally? Some comments on method I need to start this part with a disclaimer. For two reasons, the approach used here is deliberately low-tech. First, we have not yet asked for or received any significant financial support. The project therefore relies mainly on what is at hand, to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, in everyday university life. It is a testimony to bricolage in the positive sense. Second, the project is guided by the conviction that one must first conceive the model as simply as possible and then develop it in the same spirit, perhaps refining it later technically. We draw on techniques from semantic text analysis and network analysis, and add a step that may take us to the second semiotic level described above. Other studies in computational literary studies are sometimes more technically complex, but do not have the same epistemological goal. As the lengthy introductory remarks suggest, this project is hypothesis-driven rather than technology-enabled. [START_REF]Some fascinating, but rather technologically driven studies include Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas[END_REF] The data has been generated by the Mytheme Laboratory, a software that Ludovic Strappazzon and I have developed for this purpose, and which of course relies on several open source elements developed by others. The Mytheme Laboratory is accessible online as is the statistical data calculated. [START_REF] Strappazon | Mytheme Laboratory[END_REF] As the Laboratory is a work in progress, the accessible data might differ slightly from what I use here when the reader accesses it. It is therefore stored in its current state in an archive at Nakala. [START_REF] Mohnike | /07)[END_REF] The text file analyzed was created by the Litteraturbanken project. [START_REF] Litteraturbanken | Litteraturbanken | Svenska klassiker som e-bok och epub[END_REF] For the present analysis, the two text files created from the two volumes of the book have been merged into one single file and cleaned of paratext and secondary commentaries such as, for example, frequent indication of blank pages and illustrations.

The analytical algorithm of the Mytheme Laboratory is programmed in Python. It first lemmatizes the text with the help of the Spacy-Library. [START_REF] Montani | Explosion/SpaCy: V3.0.6: Assemble CLI, Matcher Alignments, Training from Streamed Corpora and Many Bug Fixes[END_REF] It then searches for Mythemes in the text. Mythemes are defined as independent objects in the laboratory, composed by a label in English, a definition of the type and lists of lemmas (i.e. dictionary form of a word) in different languages that can be seen as traces of mythemes. A trace is a lemma that indicates with high probability the presence of a mytheme in a passage of text. In the case of the protagonist of the book, Nils Holgersson, this can be three different words [nils; pojke; tummetott], as he is addressed by the narrator with one of these words. Of course, the word "pojke" (boy) can signify yet another protagonist in the story, but as a short look at the result table shows, this is rather seldom. To avoid "pojke" being used as a trace for the mytheme of Nils Holgersson even in other works in the laboratory, a filter is implemented: if there is no [holgersson] in the text, the trace will not be accounted for.

Then, in the 120 words around the mytheme trace, the Laboratory calculates which lemmas are more frequent. Lemmas with a frequency of less than 5 are discarded from further analysis as statistically irrelevant. Lemmas with a Coefficient of Overrepresentation (CSR) greater than 1.2 are considered significant. The slightly different Coefficient of Representation (CR) is later used as a normalized CSR. 29 Mythemes that share significant surrounding lemmas are supposed to share characteristics as they are evoked using similar words or in similar narrative contexts. After having noted the link, all lemmas found from this point on are excluded from further analysis as we move to the second semiotic level; they were only necessary to trace mythemes in the text and as traces for probable relations. They will be saved in the definitions of the edges in the resulting graph-file, but of no further relevance to the analysis. The laboratory then generates a network with mythemes as nodes and edges with the help of the Python library NetworkX. It uses the total CR as a means to calculate the weight of the edge, implying that the edge between two mythemes with many shared traces with high significance is weightier than those with few shared traces with a low CR. Additionally, it calculates the probability that the link is significant.

In a last step, the laboratory calculates the betweenness centrality and the closeness centrality for each mytheme. Betweenness centrality is defined, according to Graph Theory, as the number of shortest paths between every node in the network that passes through the node. Closeness centrality, on the other hand, can be described as the average distance from one node to all other nodes. The two values appear to be good measurements for the importance of a mytheme in the narrative grammar of a given text. Mythemes with high betweenness centrality are the central nodes that connect all parts of the narrative texture, mythemes with high closeness centrality structure the different subcomplexes. The results are documented on the wiki-pages, and the laboratory creates a graphml-file containing the information described. It can be downloaded for further exploration.

For the purpose of this article, I imported the graphml-file produced into the network visualization software Gephi. [START_REF] Bastian | Gephi[END_REF] However, there is also a very simple visualization-module implemented in the laboratory. With the algorithm Force-Atlas-2 or its variation Multigravity Force-Atlas-2 that seeks to organize the graph according to proximity and distance between nodes based on a gravity model, [START_REF] Jacomy | ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization Designed for the Gephi Software[END_REF] I generated the visualizations of the network that I present in the following section of my paper. If not otherwise mentioned, mythemes with high closeness centrality are represented with larger fonts and circles. Colors can either represent types of mythemes or communities of nodes. Communities are calculated using the Modularity algorithm implemented in Gephi.

Mapping Narrative Geographies

The Laboratory identified 197 frequent mythemes for which it could establish 2358 relations (edges) to other mythemes. In the calculated network, I deleted the mytheme "folk" as there was a very similar mytheme defined as "people", resulting in a network of 196 mythemes with 2298 edges. The next step was to filter all edges with a probability of a link calculated as less than 0.99, resulting in a network with 1632 edges. Then, the graph was organized using the algorithm Multigravity ForceAtlas 2. Different mytheme types received different colors; the font size was adapted to the closeness centrality calculated. The thickness of the lines is calculated proportionally to the total CR. Illustration 1 shows the result. As the mythemes in the laboratory are defined as objects with labels in English, they appear in English in the map even though the analyzed text was in Swedish. A first reading of the generated map shows that action mythemes like "talk", "ask", "listen", "understand" and "think" seem to be of central importance for the narrative grammar, as the corresponding nodes have a high closeness centrality. This fits well with the overall idea of the bookto tell the story of a school of life. The character of Nils, who is discovering Sweden, and the activities mentioned fit with the theme of learning. Interestingly enough, in the triangle between "say", "listen" and "talk" are "Mother" and "Father", "knowledge" and, in close neighborhood, "Child", "Åsa" and "Mats", relating to the family as the core place of transmitting knowledge. This is closely related, of course, to the parallel story of the two children Mats and Åsa who make the same journey as Nils, just not on a goose's back, but on foot, trying to find their father after losing their mother to tuberculosis. They will meet him in Laponia where even Nils' journey will have its turning point. This story is represented on the map by the smaller nodes to the right "Hike", "Ola", "cabin", "Lapp", as they meet him, after wandering to the North, in a cabin owned by the Sami man called Ola. Furthermore, in the middle of the map we see Nils Holgersson with his goose friends Akka, Martin and Dunfin, Martin's wife. Forests and lakes, Water and Way are around them, with the action mythemes "see" and "follow", confronting Danger in the upper left of the map with Fox Smirre, the Crows etc., all central storylines in the first part of the book. The group around the recomposed goose family, which Nils has joined, and the (human) family seem to mirror each other, and another map will show this even better (illustration 3). The 30 mythemes with highest betweenness centrality, ordered from high to low, represent the central narrative themes, actors and places of the story (see table 1). The main chronotope mythemes are here Forest, Way, Water, Farm, Land and Lake.

Another interesting detail in the map is most chronotopes are concentrated in the lower left part of the map (blue), well distinguished from actors (orange), actions (grey) and concepts (green). Chronotopes form a coherent whole, which actors interact with. Most concept mythemes are concentrated in the upper half. The map appears to suggest that the places are opportunities to reflect and develop concepts, actors and actions connecting places and concepts.

Figure 2 Map of Chronotopes with colored mytheme complexes

Figure 2 shows the map of chronotopes filtered from the previous map and reorganized with the above-mentioned algorithm Multigravity ForceAtlas 2. I used Gephi to reveal mytheme complexes by using the modularity function. Gephi found 5 complexes, rendered in different colors. Interestingly enough, almost no concrete place with a localizable place name has a high closeness centrality in the narrative geography, despite the fact that I had defined all place names with a number of concurrency of five or more as mythemes. On the contrary, generic chronotopes have high closeness centrality and thus high significance for the text's narrative grammar. The book is thus structured around types of landscapes rather than specific landscapes. Forest and Water are typical for the landscape of the journey, water being differentiated in lakes, sea, shores and rivers -in the map rendered in blue and orange, as well as some farms, villages and churches, to be found in the pink area. Cities are almost completely missing except for Stockholm. This can be interpreted as a sign that the actual goal of the book was not to transmit a detailed geography of Sweden, but what seems to be typical for all landscapes of Sweden. The reader is supposed to find in the local description of their own home characteristics of a general, seemingly national character linking all parts of the country. Nils Holgersson thus serves as a method for the stereotyping of a national geography, representing what is to be understood as typical of Sweden as a nation, not primarily as a documentation of a diversity of regions: forests, lakes, shores, farms, villages, and churches, a national life closely linked to nature.

The few exceptions confirm the hypotheses: Lake Tåkern is indeed described in the book as representative of the wild Swedish lakes untouched by man. It is actually the story of its threat that is told, the story of farmers wanting to transform the lake into fields; Nils and the geese intervene at the last moment to prevent the catastrophe, teaching the farmers respect for nature. The river Storån, on the other hand, has a chapter of its own that narrates its coming into being and transforming of the landscape as emblematic for the big rivers of the North.

Another important characteristic of the map is a clear human-nature divide. All chronotopes clearly connected to human activity are in the pink area apart from some exceptions in the green area that we have to discuss separately. Contact between the two spheres is provided by land, farm, cabin, door that lend themselves naturally as zones of encounter. Similarly, we find in the green area Glimmingehus, an old castle that at the time of narration, however, was no longer extensively used by humans and could thus be colonized by Swedish rats, defending themselves from intruding foreign grey rats. The place is thus no longer a place of human dwelling, but a second-hand biotope.

The green area of the map is peculiar. The mythemes Year and Place, the most general chronotopes that one can imagine, dominate this mytheme complex. Linked are the seasons and the mythemes of school, Nääs -the model school narrated in chapter 52, Sweden and abroad on one side and city, Stockholm and Skansen on the other side. If we look at the first map generated, we find these chronotopes in close relation to the mythemes that are used to describe learning -word, book, tell/narrate, as well as to people, king and Swedish. They appear thus to be the places of learning proper -the Nääs and the School, of course, but even Skansen as the famous outdoor museum of Sweden being the most emblematic places of learning; the word and the book, the central media of education, and of course Swedish nationality being an important subject for a book on Swedish national geography.

Although not a frequently used mytheme in the book and therefore not in the center of the map, the king is, interestingly enough, very closely connected to Swedishness as a concept, to wisdom of course, Stockholm and Uppland as the capital city and surrounding landscape, and to the people. Map 3 was generated with the same principles as map 2, except for actors being the object of mapping. Once again, all human actors are in one mytheme complex, rendered again in pink for convenience. We see here, as announced above, the clustering of the recomposed goose family -with its adopted children, Nils Holgersson and the eagle Gorgo, as well as the close friend, a stork named Ermenrich. Mirrored are mother, father and child as the typical human family -at least as the sought for, but not experienced ideal of the book. As readers of the book know, Nils leaves his family because he has difficulties finding his role; and the family of Mats and Åsa is destroyed by a complex story of family catastrophe related to tuberculosis. Jon, the children's father, is in the center of the net, but not with a high closeness centrality, as the purpose of the children's journey is to find him, but he is not a very active participant in the narrative. In addition, although God is not important for the narrative, he is connected, as is the case in the Lutheran tradition, to the father.

More important than God is the people -and this is obviously the case as this is a story that serves to define the Swedish nation. The people is linked to the family on one side and the king and man on the other. It seems thus to be defined as part of the collective identity. The collective identity is related to the concept of work: on the map, all humans are related to the mytheme of worker, and in the general map in illustration 1, work is a significant neighbor of the people as well. It is part of the Protestant work ethic that informed the new idea of a national ethic at the time of writing. 32 All mythemes directly connected to "people" are, ordered according to the CR of the edge, Ask, Dalarna, Evening, Farm, Forest, Help, House, Ice, King, Land, Mother, Say, School, Sit, South, Stockholm, Summer, Sweden, Swedish, Talk, Vittskövle, Word, Work, World, Abroad, Hand, Listen, Man, Nääs. The other mytheme complexes in map 3 relate to specific parts of the story: the conflicts with the fox Smirre (orange), the Kolmården story about the menace of the forest, the domestication of animals such as the moose Gråfäll and his friend, the dog Karr, at one side of the blue area, and the similar story of lake Tåkern with the dog Cesar and the duck Jarro at the other, and so on. Interestingly enough, the two stories are connected by the fact that in both of them dogs figure in prominent places, Cesar and Karr, being in both cases important intermediaries.

Conclusion and Perspective

Taking the maps as a point of departure, it would be an amusing exercise to invent a continuation of the story of Nils. With these maps, we have at our disposal the most important narrative elements and grammar to improvise the continuation of the story in the spirit of Lagerlöf's book. We would certainly remain in a rural, forest environment, meet more animals -preferably birds and dogs, some cows, horses and bears, but only very few cats and/or exotic animals like lions and rhinoceroses. We would meet people working and carrying out their duties when they are not telling stories or learning, in some corner, a reindeer herding Sami would appear, but very seldom meet workers in industrial or urban milieus. If we were to expand our analysis to the illustrations added to the first edition, we would probably meet the same elements, creating the national mythology of Sweden that we had set out to analyse. In fact, most of the 72 illustrations depict non-urban motifs, most often with forests, lakes and rocks as central elements. If they portray human habitats, they frequently appear without any human beings, often placed in a park or being reconquered by nature. The dominant human activity is farming, besides four illustrations of mining infrastructure. The narrative grammar depicted in the maps above opens the way for imagination and, perhaps, the desire to break up this universe by provoking change and introducing elements which are foreign to this stereotypical, nationalistic world. What would happen if we told the continuation of the story with a young girl riding on an antelope? Would this open up or restrict the national narrative universe?

One might think that all this is speculation, but it says much about Lagerlöf's book and the narrative grammar used and transmitted. If we expand our analysis to other media from other moments in the Swedish 20 th and 21 st century, we would probably find that many of these elements constitute stable parts of the national narrative. For example, we could find many of these mythemes in touristic representations of Sweden until today. The internal and external communication of what is Sweden was based almost exclusively on these identified elements except for a slightly evolved openness to variation coming from outside. The urban milieu is almost as absent in these narrations as it was in the text by Selma Lagerlöf, even though the majority of the Swedish population lives in cities. As I have shown elsewhere, the city is often depicted in these advertisement products as a variation on natural landscape. 33 We have thus seen how quantitative methods can reveal the underlying narrative knowledge used to create a universe, which establishes clear references to create a national collective geography and identity. We have seen that the geography is structured around a nature-human divide, which even if the book discusses possibilities to bridge it, is fundamental to its outcome. Additionally, when it comes to social structures, the family is the central pattern, although none of the families in the book correspond to the ideal as it is presented in the course of the narration. However, at the end, as we know, Nils is happily reunited with his family, Åsa with her father, and the geese have offspring. The Swedish king is close to the level of human family, the father of the people.

When studying all four types of mythemes (actor, action, concept and chronotope) together, we have seen that the traveling communities of the wild geese and the new human family are motivated by learning, exchange of knowledge and dialogue. Learning by coming into contact with the world, that is 32 Cf Mohnike, "Nature, Work, and Transcendence", 79. 33 Thomas Mohnike, "Raconter la ville dans la nature suédoise. Une forme narrative paradoxale dans les récits identitaires actuels en Suède", De la ville durable à la nature en ville, eds. Isabelle Hajek and Philippe Hamman, Villeneuve d'Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2015, p. 193-209. developing central concepts in interaction with the chronotopes of the represented landscape, is the central theme. That the landscape is stereotyped, the chronotopes used being quite generic, only reinforces this intention.

Seen from the perspective of homo narrans, it seems probable that readers that have learned and appreciated the narrative geography of Sweden in the book will tend to reproduce or reuse it when telling themselves stories about Sweden and Swedishness. These mythemes and their connectivity -narrative grammar -could pass into the horizon of expectation, the canonical way of telling stories about Sweden. Of course, this is a hypothesis that seems probable when using our current knowledge of Swedish national narratives. However, it would be interesting to prove this in a later study by carrying out similar analysis with a large number of texts, comparing Nils Holgersson's geographies and narrative grammar with other books of the same period and in a diachronic perspective.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Map of all mythemes identified, colored according to mytheme type

Figure 3

 3 Figure 3 Map of all identified actor mythemes, colored depending on mytheme complex

  ; Anna Bohlin, "Nils and the Social Mother as a Migrating Goose," in Tijdschrift Voor Skandinavistiek 36/2 2018, https://rjh.ub.rug.nl/tvs/article/view/31573; Thomas Mohnike, "Nature, Work, and Transcendence. Christian Intertexts in Selma Lagerlöf's Nils Holgersson's Marvelous Journey through Sweden and the Modern Swedish Welfare State," in European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 52/1, 2022, p. 6-25, https://doi.org/10.1515/ejss-2022-2067 2

  Fritz Breithaupt, Das narrative Gehirn: Was unsere Neuronen erzählen, Berlin, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2022. 9 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction : Contemporary Poetics,London, Routledge, 1999, p. 15.

	poetics and anthropology of oral
	literature, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999; Pascal Boyer, Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of
	religious thought, New York, Basic Books, 2001; Alain Rabatel, Homo narrans: pour une analyse énonciative et
	interactionnelle du récit, Limoges, Lambert-Lucas, 2009; Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories : Evolution, Cognition, and
	Fiction, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2009.

8 10 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher, Project Gutenberg, 1999, book IX, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1974.

Table 1

 1 Mythemes with highest betweenness centrality

	Say	0,091417	Action
	Forest	0,046312 Chronotope
	Nils Holgersson 0,045415	Actor
	Talk	0,044834	Action
	Listen	0,04338	Action

Quoted after the English translation in Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2010, p. 1.

Lev Manovich suggests that this starts even earlier with the advent of cinema. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, passim.

Richard Walsh and Susan Stepney, eds., Narrating Complexity, Cham, Springer International Publishing, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64714-2.

Mark Alan Finlayson, "Inferring Propp's Functions from Semantically Annotated Text," The Journal of American Folklore 129/511, 2016, p. 55-77, https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerfolk.129.511.0055; Joshua Eisenberg and Mark Finlayson, "Automatic Identification of Narrative Diegesis and Point of View," In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNS 2016),Austin, Texas: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2016, p. 36-46. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-5705

Timothy R. Tangherlini, "Toward a Generative Model of Legend: Pizzas, Bridges, Vaccines, and Witches," Humanities 7/1, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.3390/h7010001.

In what follows, it will appear evident that I do use Lévi-Strauss' approach only as an interesting point of departure, using his ideas in a manner that I want to describe as "productive misunderstanding".

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," The Journal of American Folklore, 68/270,

1955, p. 428-479.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York, The NoondayPress, 1972, p. 113.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," The Journal of AmericanFolklore, 68/270, 1955, p. 428-479.

Mohnike, "Narrating the North. Towards a Theory of Mythemes of Social Knowledge in Cultural Circulation," p. 322.

 op. cit., p.15.

Formulae: Coefficient of Representaion (CR) of a distinct lemma = number of occurrences of the Lemma in the sample divided by the number of occurrences of the lemma in the work. If all occurrences of a lemma in the work are part of the sample, consequently, the CR equals 1. The Coefficient of Overrepresentation (CSR) is calculated based on the CR, multiplied by Number of distinct Lemma in the work divided by Number of distinct Lemma in the sample.


William Langland

Marco Nievergelt

European Poet

William Langland's Piers

de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

affinities of Langland's poem, and emphasise his nuanced and sustained engagement with French poetic traditions, the French language, and francophone culture more broadly. Following recent reassessments, I want to argue that 'echoes to French materials' play a 'submerged but central role' in Piers Plowman, to the point of being 'thoroughly naturalized' as part of Langland's own, unique poetic idiom (Galloway 2006: 228;Zeeman 2016: 300).

In what follows I will be arguing that the widely shared assumptions about Langland's 'Englishness' are to a very large extent a function of the ideological investment of successive generations of the poem's medieval, early modern, and modern readers. As Robert Adams has recently observed, the poem 'looks tailor-made for interpretive restyling', since 'Langland's undocumented life openly invites [...] critics to rework him and his poem completely, in their own ideological image' (Adams 2013: 15, 14). An important strand in recent Langland studies has accordingly consisted in debunking a whole range of Piers Plowman 'mythologies' that have emerged throughout the poem's reception history [START_REF] Warner | The Myth of Piers Plowman: Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive[END_REF]Benson 2010: 1-107). Despite such demythologising manoeuvres, Langland continues to be widely viewed as a quintessentially English, insular poet.

The fabrication of Langland's 'Englishness' begins early, and a number of different factors contribute to its enduring success. These include Langland's use of the alliterative long line that had emerged in Anglo-Saxon England; the wealth of localised geographical and historical references in his poem; the topicality of the poem's allegory, often inviting and examination of the state of late fourteenth-century English society; and the poet's real or imagined social radicalism, often associated with unmistakeably localised, English forms of public insurgency and religious dissent.

Surviving evidence suggests that the perceived social radicalism of Piers Plowman was the earliest and most important factor facilitating the emergence of the myth of Langland's 'Englishness'. Already during Langland's lifetime the poem became associated with domestic political developments and controversies. In letters sent to his fellow insurgents in preparation for the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, John Ball, one of the leaders of the uprising, famously 'biddeþ Peres plouȝman go to his werk'.

Much about the precise circumstances and wider significance of this mention remains unclear: Langland's poem exists in three different versions, the A, B, and C texts, the first two of which are known to have circulated before 1381, and Ball may well have been alluding to some of the more socially radical and revolutionary elements found in the A and B texts. A number of critics have in fact suggested that Langland's C version of Piers Plowman, usually dated to the 1380s or even 90s, was specifically designed to mitigate the potentially seditious and heterodox ideas found in the earlier versions. Other critics, by contrast, have suggested that Ball was not alluding to Langland's poem at all, but rather to a wider, pre-existing, and largely oral 'Piers Plowman tradition'. 1

Regardless of the precise circumstances behind John Ball's invocation of 'Piers the Plowman', this event shaped nearly every subsequent response to the poem over the 1 There is a vast amount of critical literature on the subject. As a starting point see e.g [START_REF] Hudson | Piers Plowman and the Peasants' Revolt: A Problem Revisited[END_REF]and, more recently, Johnston 2016: 29-74. following two centuries. Langland's poem as well as its titular character became inextricably associated with specifically English ideals of communitarian social justice. This marked the beginning of a process that would turn Langland into 'the literary father of English dissent'.2 This close association of Langland's poem with ideals of radical social reform is particularly evident in the so-called 'Piers Plowmantradition' that develops from about 1400 onwards and begins to subside just before 1600 (Barr 1993;[START_REF] Barr | Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition[END_REF]. All poems in this group of otherwise unconnected texts are written using the alliterative long line, they employ the figure of Piers the Plowman for purposes of social satire, and are often marked by a strong anti-clerical bias. The popularity of the figure of Piers the Plowman appears to have increased further after about 1530, when he reappears as a character in a number of Protestant polemical tracts that often drew inspiration from Lollard writings and ideas, and when the poem went through four printed editions, three by Robert Crowley in 1550, and one reprint by Owen Rogers in 1561 (Kelen 2007: 43-76). In the context of England's break from papal authority under Henry VIII, the rise of Lollardy and anti-papal sentiment in late fourteenth century England came to be viewed as an event foreshadowing and prophetically announcing the later English Reformation [START_REF] King | English Reformation Literature: the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition[END_REF]Hudson 1988).

In the aftermath of the 1536 Act of Supremacy, then, protestant readers like John Bale, Robert Crowley, or Stephen Bateman would not hesitate to identify the Protestant, English 'national' Church with the original apostolic Church, engaged in an apocalyptic struggle with the papal church of Antichrist. Within this prophetic and apocalyptic framework, it was felt that both Langland's poem and the wider Piers Plowman tradition were saturated with prophetic significance, and texts were carefully scrutinised in the search for clues about the unfolding destiny of the True English Church during the Last Days [START_REF] Horobin | Stephan Batman and His Manuscripts of Piers Plowman[END_REF]. As Sarah Kelen observes, 'For John Ball, Piers Plowman authorized the 1381 rebels; for John Bale, [...] Langland authorized the Reformation ' (2007: 41). The poem's first printer Robert Crowley therefore identified Langland as a disciple of John Wyclif, and supplemented the poem with a collection of strongly partisan Protestant glosses. Whereas the larger question of the actual historical relation between Langland, John Wyclif's writings, Lollardy, and the early reception of Piers Plowman before and after the Reformation is formidably complex and continues to be debated, it is evident that for sixteenthcentury readers Langland had already become inextricably associated with this quintessentially English heresy and the unfolding of the English Reformation.3

In the context of these antiquarian and revisionist endeavours, the poem's archaic language, characteristic of alliterative poetry more widely (X-REF Warner Chapter), helped to compound a sense of its historical authenticity and clearly localised 'Englishness'. This link with the land was further reinforced by the specifically agricultural activities of its titular character: 'Piers represents England's past, and his antiquity implicitly authorizes his perspective. Piers's agricultural labor also marks him as being "of England," a true native of the land' (Kelen 2007: 48). This sense of a clear historical and topographical localisation was reinforced by the numerous geographical indications that anchor Piers Plowman in a recognisably English Despite the long hiatus in the critical history of the poem between Tudor times and the Enlightenment, the notion of Piers Plowman's quintessential 'Englishness' resurfaces in the later Eighteenth century. Antiquarian-critics such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton (see [START_REF] Percy | Reliques of Ancient Poetry: consisting of Heroic Old Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets[END_REF]Warton 1774-81) began to associate the poem more explicitly with the alliterative versification of the Anglo-Saxon, preconquest period, and it was not long before this feature was appropriated to support a nativist narrative of Anglo-Saxon resistance to the mounting influence of Norman, i.e. francophone language and culture. 5 The poem's first modern editor, Thomas Whitaker, in 1813 described the poem's language as being 'uncorrupted by additions since the conquest' (Langland 1813, p.xxxii 5 For all pre-twentieth century criticism on the poem I refer, wherever possible, to the summary description of items available in DiMarco 1982.

and not Gower's and Chaucer's, is a well of English undefiled' (D'Israeli 1841: 302;DiMarco 1982: 43), alluding to Edmund Spenser's famous words in praise of Chaucer (Faerie Queene, IV.ii.32.8). Even Walter Skeat, the most enlightened and sensitive early editor of Piers Plowman, notes that Langland 'loves best to exercise his shrewd English common sense upon topics of everyday interest' (Langland 1867: v;DiMarco 1982: 51). Similar examples abound at the close of the century: 'Nowhere had the English mind found so real an opportunity of poetic utterance [...] as in Langland's unique work, national in its allegorical form and its alliterative metre' (Ward 1880: 174); 'It was the glory of England to have produced such a thought' (Gardiner 1980: I.259); 'in returning toward the Old English standard in the structure of his verse, Langland was [...] rejecting the newer French fashions' (Hopkins 1894: 279-80;DiMarco 1982: 78).

Arguments about Langland's Anglo-Saxon 'purity' intensified in the build-up to the Second World War, mixing nostalgia for a bygone era of peace and harmony with increasingly stark forms of nationalist pride. For Christopher Dawson Langland owes nothing to the courtly tradition with its gay rhymed measures and its cult of love and romance. He looks back to the forgotten Nordic World, and to the grave Christian poetry of Saxon England. He uses the old alliterative accentual measure which was the native speech of English and Teutonic poetry and which now arose, as it were from the dead, as a sign of the Renaissance of the English spirit. (Dawson 1954: 210) Increasingly, Langland's Englishness is invoked as part of a defensive and militant identitarian rhetoric, as in R.W. Chambers's collection, published in 1939, '[i]n a time of danger and responsibility'. Chambers observes that 'in Piers Plowman we find the English spirit as it still exists', and goes on to cite the (unreferenced) observations of Stanley Earl Baldwin, former Prime Minister of Britain (Chambers 1939: 15): '"How much the less man you, if you do not know Piers Plowman? For therein is to be found the key to the Englishman of to-day, with the same strength and weakness, the same humour, immutable."'Also writing in 1939, Stanley B. James exhorts English readers to turn towards Piers Plowman in the attempt bolster a sense of national pride, insisting on the importance of doing so at a time when England is confronting 'other peoples whose racial consciousness has been quickened by recent tendencies'. He adds that

[i]f it is desired to discover the basic element in the racial character [of our typical Englishman], we shall have to pass over the centuries during which he was in process of becoming "a good European" [...], a time preceding even that which saw the intermingling of the original Anglo-Saxon blood with the imported Norman strain.

In a striking rhetorical elision of three centuries of English history, he concludes: This is my apology for dealing with William Langland, author, as is generally supposed, of Piers Plowman [...]. Though Langland lived in the fourteenth century, he represents the older strain in the national life, and voiced a tradition which was then beginning to disappear. (James 1939: 189-90) Such views are characteristic of a more widespread tendency to view late medieval alliterative poetry as a manifestation of a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon mindset. Randy Schiff has provided a powerful and nuanced analysis of this recurrent phenomenon, analysing how late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century perceptions of late medieval alliterative poetry are shaped by a complex set of implied cultural values and ideological assumptions. According to Schiff, such 'revivalist fantasies' postulate the post-conquest survival of a nativist, atavistic, distinctly Anglo-Saxon poetics that is gradually sidelined and eventually driven underground by the accumulating detritus of a foreign poetic tradition, characterised as French, courtly, and implicitly effeminate. For twentieth-century 'revivalists', then, alliterative poetry as a whole thus comes to embody a more authentic linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and political 'Other', eventually marginalised and submerged by the rise of a more inclusive, urbane, internationalist, and pluralistic Chaucerian literary aesthetics [START_REF] Schiff | Ohio State UP)[END_REF]. Instead of exploring such wider affinities, however, Bloomfield emphasises Langland's highly individualistic and idiosyncratic artistic genius: 'Langland is extremely original', and his '"conscious borrowing from the French strain appears to be very slight" ' (1939: 230, 229). 6 This insistence on Langland's incomparable uniqueness and originality is not without precedent, and is widely attested among earlier critics who had taken pains to discuss Something of this tendency to emphasise Langland's uniqueness and fundamental difference from any potential French models survives in modern scholarship, and can be discerned even in the work of some of the most astute and perceptive Piers Plowman scholars. In her influential study of Langland's 'bibliographic ego' from 1997, for instance, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton reviews different modalities of authorial self-presentation available to fourteenth-century European poets, from those of Jean de Meun to those of Petrarch and Gower, and concludes that '[t]here is no doubt that Langland's authorial self-concept was much more traditionally Anglo-Saxon in character. [...] In the A-text the authorial role projected into the text is virtually that of the alliterative scop' (Fulton 1997: 104). 7 Andrew Galloway provides a more nuanced 7 Kerby-Fulton does however suggest that Langland's authorial self-representation evolves across the three versions of his poem. In the C text apologia (Piers Plowman C V.1-108) Langland's poem manifests the 'intricate meshing of narrative levels

[where] the narrator occupies positions before, during, and after the narrated events' just as in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose (1997: 74). assessment of Langland's debt to French models in his 2006 Penn Commentary, but ultimately refrains from exploring the full depth and complexity of Langland's engagement those models: although he identifies several potential echoes of Deguileville's Pèlerinages trilogy, he finally concludes that the French allegories 'lack the uncertainties of where authority might be found that pervade and vitalize or disorder Piers Plowman' (Galloway 2006: 9). Yet more recent readings of Deguileville's poetry -long neglected and misunderstood -have insisted precisely on the conflicted status of authority in his poetry, and on its troubled and ambivalent relationship with its main source of inspiration, the Roman de la Rose [START_REF] Maupeu | Bivium: l'écrivain nattier et le Roman de la Rose[END_REF]Nievergelt 2015). As Emily Steiner observes, here 'French is an integral part of London speech, as in the hypermetric line in which shiftless labourers sing snatches of French songs (or catcalls) to pass the time' (Steiner 2013a: 10). 8 The same applies, a fortiori, to the intellectual life, as is suggested by Langland's code-switching elsewhere in the poem: having to engage in an extended intellectual disputation with the character Scripture, the scholastically inclined dreamer, Will, automatically relapses into macaronic academese: 'For, quant OPORTET vient en place il ny ad que PATI' (B X.438). 9

Langland was not only broadly familiar with French as a language of poetry, song, and intellectual inquiry, but also appears to have possessed a subtle and nuanced grasp of its expressive possibilities in colloquial everyday speech. In her discussion of Langland's 'poetics of penetration', Sarah Watson demonstrates that the poet did not only engage with the tradition of the Rose, Machaut, and Deguileville on the level of imagery, larger poetic structures, and narrative devices, but also on the level of the individual French words, word clusters, expressions, and recurrent rhymes, aware of their richly ambivalent, ironic, and at times obscene connotations. When Langland plays on the multiple, sexual/spiritual, obscene/theological resonances of the rhyming pair 'wiket' and 'cliket', inviting his readers to visualise the immaculate conception 8 For in-depth discussion of the relevance of this French song, see Perry 2016. 9 The formulations are borrowed from traditional university debates or disputationes, but have been transposed into a macaronic mixture of Latin and French. I follow Schmidt in italicising both the French and Latin, rendering the latter in capitals. This roughly translates as 'When NECESSITY is given, consequences inevitably FOLLOW (i.e. must be borne)'. through an elaborate anatomical/architectural allegory, he is in fact mobilising a range of established associations that the words had acquired in the recent intertextual history of French dream vision poetry: Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, and Guillaume de Machaut had employed those same terms -'guichet' and 'clichet' -to describe a hortus conclusus, figuring both the body of the Virgin Mary and/or a courtly lady imagined as a gated garden [START_REF] Watson | Grace Holds the "Clicket" to the Heavenly "Wiket": Piers Plowman, the Roman de la Rose, and the Poetics of Penetration[END_REF]. Simply put, Langland recognised a sly double entendre when he encountered one in a French text, and knew how to use it in poetically and spiritually enabling ways within his own allegory.

Similar observations could be made, for instance, about Langland's punning on 'wine','divine', and 'divination'. In his depiction of the drunken 'doctour' of Theology, who 'on þe heiȝe dees drank wyn so faste' (B XIII.61), Langland establishes an aural/causal link between overindulgence in wine, the corruption of 'divinity', and delirious 'divination': 'For now he haþ dronken so depe he wole deuyne sone' (B XIII.90). The pun again builds on similar polysemic wordplay deployed in Jean de Meun's Rose: there too doctors of divinity indulge in endless and futile attempts at 'divination' ('devin qui an devinent / qui de ce deviner ne finent'; RR 12597-98), and the hypocritical Faux Semblant (False Seeming) compares his own liking for 'wines' to that of a 'divine' theologian: 'de tres bons morseaus et de vins / tex con il afixert a devins' (RR 11205-6). In both Piers Plowman and the Rose theological wisdom originates 'from wine' (de vins), exposing a respected doctor of divinity as a delirious, drunken 'dyuynour' (B XIII.116)-a cheap practitioner in obscure arts of divination-with further implications of blasphemy given the Eucharistic resonances of the image. 10 The larger implication of such elaborate interlingual punning, then, is that Langland was a careful and perceptive reader and speaker of French, and that he had a precise and nuanced understanding of the kind of referential slipperiness at work in the Rose and later Francophone poetry that developed in its wake: 'Langland perceived these texts as part of his own literary culture rather than as interpolations from a foreign body of literature' (Watson 2016: 223). This provides a helpful illustration of a more general point made by Anne Middleton regarding Langland's unrivalled ability to use wordplay as a springboard for more profound intellectual or epistemic reflection. This unrivalled ability to crate and interrogate multiple meanings ultimately emerges, Middleton submits, from Langland's familiarity with multiple forms of French speech and writing that cuts across a wide range of registers -from the domestic and mundane to the didactic, intellectual, courtly, patronising, playful, equivocal, subversive, and downright obscene [START_REF] Middleton | Loose Talk from Langland to Chaucer[END_REF]. Even Langland's notoriously irregular, idiosyncratic use of alliterative metre is demonstrably shaped by his familiarity with French poetry. In his recent analysis of the poem's prosody, Eric Weiskott 'turns up new evidence of Langland's formal cosmopolitanism', and demonstrates that he was keenly aware of the cultural resonance of his own alliterative poetry. Producing his poetry for a readership that was intimately familiar with the very different aesthetics and poetics of contemporary Francophone verse, Langland adjusted his own use of alliterative metre accordingly.

10 For similar puns in the Rose see also 4373-74, 17456-57. On this scene in Piers Plowman see further Middleton 1987. Compared with alliterative poetry written by other, roughly contemporary English authors, Langland's metrical and alliterative practice appears unique in its attempt to balance native traditions of alliterative diction on the one hand, and francophone metrical reflexes on the other. This 'bespeaks a poet consciously internationalising a marked verse form for an audience more acclimated to syllable-counted metres in English, French, and Latin' (Weiskott 2016: 159). Thus even Langland's alliterative practice -the feature once considered to be the incontrovertible hallmark of the poet's deep-seated Anglo-Saxonism -was informed by the dominance of Francophone literary aesthetics.

Langland's political allegory, too, refracts the contemporary awareness that domestic politics were inextricably bound up with international relations, specifically the ongoing 'Cold War' with France (Galloway 2016;[START_REF] Strakhov | But Who Will Bell the Cat?": Deschamps, Brinton, Langland, and the Hundred Years' War[END_REF]. As Andrew Galloway has argued, Langland's response to the Roman de Fauvel appears to be inflected by remarkably precise recollections of Anglo-French cultural relations and political frictions during the mid-fourteenth century -relations that may well have provided the occasion for Fauvel's circulation in England in the first place. In particular, Galloway argues that Langland's description of the trial of Meed (Piers Plowman B II-IV) is informed by his familiarity with the ostentatious, 'aggressively Francophone' court culture that crystallised around Queen Isabella. Much maligned and detested, Isabella lived a life of leisure and opulence in England after the abdication of her husband, Edward II, in 1327, until her death in 1358, and her presence became 'a magnet for international visits, lavish entertainments, and elite French prisoners detained in England' (Galloway 2016: 244, 236, passim). While it cannot be said that Langland promotes a nationalist, anti-French agenda, his portrait of a conspicuously 'frenchified' lady Meed nonetheless demonstrates a 'tendency to connect French with social pretensions but also hypocrisy, and to use it as a metonym for disingenuousness' (Zeeman 2016: 300) Langland's engagement with francophone culture is thus remarkably varied and multi-faceted, suggesting that his use of French literary 'sources' needs to be placed in a much wider and richer context. In terms of more strictly literary affinities, Anne Middleton long ago insisted on Langland's debts to the French chansons d'aventurea suggestion that has been explored further by recent discussions of Langland's familiarity with the tradition of the French lyric more widely (Middleton 1982;[START_REF] Jirsa | Piers Plowman's Lyric Poetics[END_REF]. Nicolette Zeeman has provided a thorough discussion of Langland's debt to French chivalric-allegorical romance, specifically Arthurian Grail-romances, and other readers have stressed Langland's familiarity with romance traditions in general, both French and English (Zeeman 2008;[START_REF] Turner | Guy of Warwick and the Active Life of Historical Romance in Piers Plowman[END_REF][START_REF] Clifton | The Romance Convention of the Disguised Duel and the Climax of Piers Plowman[END_REF]. The most important single literary influence on Langland's entire poetic project, however, appears to have been -pace Jusserand, Owen, and Bloomfield -the French tradition of dream-vision allegory in the lineage of the Roman de la Rose and Deguileville's Pèlerinages. Previous critics have repeatedly noted the potential relevance of this connection,11 but the details, magnitude, and significance of Langland's engagement are yet to be properly measured and understood. Given the recent surge in research examining the English reception and circulation of texts and manuscripts from this tradition of French allegorical poetry throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and beyond [START_REF] Kamath | Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England[END_REF]2012;Nievergelt 2012;[START_REF] Knox | The 'Romance of the Rose' and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature[END_REF], the moment seems ripe for a more broadly-based reassessment.

Recent discussions of this corpus of French allegorical literature concur in suggesting that many English readers -including Chaucer and Langland, but also Gower, the Gawain-Poet, Hoccleve, and Lydgate -were not only aware of both Rose and Pèlerinages, but also had a nuanced understanding of the troubled intertextual conversations obtaining between these two French allegories, pitching a poem of erotic devotion against a spiritual quest narrative. These two poems jointly define a wider space for Langland's encounter with further francophone poetry that emerges in the wake of the Rose, such as the exuberantly satirical Roman de Fauvel or the subtly playful poetry of Machaut. Langland, then, is not only distantly familiar with the tradition of the Rose and the Pèlerinages, borrowing occasional details from specific texts: rather, this tradition defines the very paradigms of poetic vision and poetic craft that Langland himself adopts, explores, and theorises. Langland's own, seemingly idiosyncratic poetics is in effect best understood as emerging out of his sustained, indeed obsessive conversations with a number of influential francophone texts in the tradition of dream vision poetry. 12 As part of an effort to recalibrate critical approaches to a 'European' Langland -and as a fitting conclusion for a chapter in the present volume -it is worth adding that the tradition of French dream vision allegory is not, strictly speaking, a 'French' poetic tradition at all. Deguileville's Pèlerinages or portions thereof circulated widely, and were adapted or translated into nearly every Western European language apart from Italian (Kamath and Nievergelt 2013;Kablitz and Peters 2014), and the success of the Roman de la Rose too is best seen as a pan-European phenomenon. 13 See e.g. David Wallace 1985: 61-67;Bel and Braet 2006.

  landscape, both rural and urban. The dreamer's vision famously begins on 'Maluerne Hulles' in the West Midlands (B/C Prol.6), and in the C text Will later awakes the middle of London, 'whan Y wonede in Cornehull' (C V.1). 4 While much of the poem is played out in an unspecific dream world, then, many episodes nonetheless situate the poem in a realistic English land-and cityscape, from St Paul's Cathedral (B XIII. 65) and the 'Westmynstre' of Meed's trial (B II.161), to wealthy merchants 'in þe Cite of Londoun' bearing gold chains around their necks (B Prol. 160), or the irresistibly demotic surroundings of a London tavern, full of local colour with characters such as 'Clarice of Cokkes Lane', 'Peronelle of Flaunders', 'Godfrey of Garlekeithe and Gryfyn the Walsh' (B V. 311-16).

  ]; DiMarco 1982: 37-8; Kelen 2007: 107-26), while in 1841 Isaac Disraeli observed that '[t]his volume [i.e. Piers Plowman], 4 I use the parallel text edition, Langland 2011.

  (X-REF V.4 ??)Even though post-war criticism largely abandoned the explicitly nationalist agendas of nineteenth-century philology, the mythology of an English, and more specifically Anglo-Saxon Langland appears to have had a durable impact on the work of later scholars, albeit one that is difficult to pinpoint and quantify. In particular, Piers Plowman scholars have consistently played down Langland's debt to francophone literature and culture. A case in point is Morton Bloomfield's important and influential survey article from 1939, which is often seen as marking a watershed moment in the modern history of Piers Plowman criticism, ushering in a new era of historically rigorous scholarship free from partisan cultural agendas. On the one hand Bloomfield clearly distances himself from earlier generations of critics by declaring that 'the belief [...] that Langland was essentially Germanic in tone, thought, and Language' was untenable, since '[t]he use of such a term as Germanic is unscientific'(1939: 229). On the other hand, however, Bloomfield appears strikingly reluctant to contemplate the possibility that Langland would, or even could have engaged with francophone literature and culture in any sustained and productive fashion:There is no evidence that Langland knew any French, for the French expressions he employs are those that any one living in England, at the time, would know[...]. The closer resemblances are the result of the closer traditions of mediaeval England and mediaeval France.

  Langland's relation to his sources, including French ones. At the end of the previous century Jusserand had already observed that Langland has read Rutebeuf's "Voie de Paradis," the "Pèlerinages" of Deguileville, the "Roman de la Rose"', borrowing 'tools and brushes from the workshop of Lorris and Meun'. Yet he concurs with Bloomfield in stressing that 'Langland uses such elements to paint a quite dissimilar6 Bloomfield quoting Cazamian 1930: 85. picture', and ultimately 'showed himself the better artist'(Jusserand 1894: 173-74). In 1912 Dorothy Owen similarly argued that: 'Piers Plowman reveals a personality very different from the ingenious writers of French allegories'. What differentiates Langland's work, for Owen, is 'a strongly marked individuality [...], an individuality that stands out clearly in comparison with the French writers'. The implication is again that anything provided by the French sources lacks the artistic and poetic value of Langland's poem, since 'it is in Piers Plowman alone that we find the allegory used to record the writer's mental and spiritual experience'(Owen 1912: 130-31).

  Recent work is beginning to point up the inadequacy of many established assumptions about Langland's lack of serious engagement with French poetry. Firstly, it is worth pointing out that Langland's engagement with French goes far beyond his creative reworking of individual literary sources, and embraces his wider attitude to French language and culture as a whole. Despite the adoption of an Anglo-Saxon verse form, Langland's poem is written in a language that attests to the inextricable interpenetration of English and French as they would have been experienced in real life by a late fourteenth-century Londoner:Of alle lybbynge laborers lopen forþ somme -As dykeres and delueres þat doon hire dedes ille And dryueþ forþ þe longe day wiþ 'Dieu vous saue, Dame Emme!(Piers Plowman B,

  . Meed's arrival at court thus provides an almost perfect illustration of how Langland counterpoints the romance vocabulary of courtly pleasure, pomp, and obsequiousness with the far more austere, monitory sounds of alliterative diction of Anglo-Saxon derivation: Curteisly þe clerk thanne, as þe king hiȝte Took Mede bi þe myddel and broȝte hire into chambre. Ac þer was murþe and mynstralcie Mede to plese: That wonyeþ at Westynstre worshipede hire alle. Gentiliche wyþ ioye þe iustices somme Busked hem to þe bour þer þe burde dwellede, Conforteden hire kyndely by Clergie's leue, And seiden, 'Mourne noȝt, Mede, ne make þow no sorwe, For we wol wisse þe Kyng and þi wey shape To be wedded at þi wille and wher þee leef liketh, For al Consciences cast and craft, as I trowe'. (B III.9-19) Masterfully, Langland does not merely juxtapose different languages and associated literary modes or genres, but establishes a subtle dialectic between two divergent poetic soundscapes and their respective cultural resonances and ideological affinities.

  Langland's careful and varied attention to the manifold aesthetic, socio-political, and ideological resonances of different types of francophone language, poetry, and culture suggests a very different kind of author from the reactionary, monolithically Anglo-Saxon Langland constructed by his early critics. Instead of a cantankerous and xenophobic malcontent, a crusty agricultural worker displaced from the idyllic surroundings of the Malvern Hills to the grubby streets of London and venting his sense of injustice in an uncompromisingly localist, nativist, earthy verse, this Langland appears to have been a careful and discerning observer of both elite and popular culture. Such a picture fits remarkably well with the profile of the most likely author candidate, William de la Rokele (Adams 2013: 77-123). From a wellestablished and well-connected gentry family, William appears to have embarked on a promising pastoral career before renouncing all worldly aspirations for a life of selfimposed humble 'poverty', probably entering the service of a noble household on the outskirts of London. As Adams has suggested, this may well have been the family of Thomas Beauchamp, eleventh Earl of Warwick (1313-1369), one of the most powerful barons of the land. Intriguingly, the presence of one 'William Rokele' is recorded also on a diplomatic mission led by Beauchamp's son in 1368, heading for neighbouring France. According to Adams' admittedly hypothetical but eminently plausible biography, then, William would have had ample opportunity to observe, absorb, and participate in the francophone culture of both English and French aristocratic elites, notably through the Rokele's historical associations with the Essex household of Queen Isabella of France herself (Galloway 2016: 236-38).

  13 Not only does the Rose circulate widely across Europe well into the sixteenth century, but much of the poem may well have been drafted in Italy by an itinerant scholar named Johannes de Magduno (or Jean de Meun). Johannes -one time ambassador for Charles d'Anjou in Naples, and later Archdeacon of Beauce in the Orléonnais -studied law at the University of Bologna between 1265 and 1269 before returning to Paris, where he 12 See further Nievergelt 2021; 2016.

The phrase comes from Middleton 1988: 6. See further[START_REF] Kelen | Langland's Early Modern Identities[END_REF]

For an overview of the various positions, see e.g. the contributions in[START_REF] Cole | Special Section: Langland and Lollardy[END_REF]

E.g.[START_REF] Barney | Allegorical Visions[END_REF]

126-28; Burrow 1993: 113-18.

appears to have previously earned the title of magister in the arts faculty. 14 This Italian connection would also explain the strikingly precocious reception of the Rose in Italy, and the vigorous early responses to it in Brunetto Latini's Livre dou Tresor, Durante's Fiore and Detto d'Amore (often ascribed to Dante Alighieri), and Dante's own Vita Nova and Divina Commedia [START_REF] Brownlee | The Conflicted Genealogy of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and La Commedia[END_REF]Tonelli 2016). French was, of course, the pre-eminent language of international culture and diplomacy at the time, and this facilitated the spread of francophone literary traditions well beyond the realm of France (X-REF Busby and ?? Ashe), particularly through the movements, contacts, and various transnational relations of multilingual and/or internationally mobile writers -from Machaut to Froissart, Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, Eustache Deschamps, John Gower, Christine do Pizan, Thomas Hovccleve, John Lydgate, Charles d'Orléans, Alain Chartier, Othon de Grandson, and many others. Each of these poets not only responded to the Rose, but also engaged with previous and/or contemporaneous responses, becoming an additional conduit for the enlarged circulation of the Jean de Meun's allegory, prompting further discussion and exchange between readers, fellow poets, and intellectuals in different parts of Europe, and contributing to the growth and development of an intertextual conversation across linguistic, cultural, political, and temporal boundaries. Langland's own place in this complex, transnational and multilingual configuration needs to be reassessed. This will throw some much-needed light on the emergence and evolution of Langland's allegorical poetics, while opening up a number of fertile avenues for further research.

14 See especially the work of Luciano Rossi, discussed and referenced in Morton and Nievergelt, with Marenbon 2020: 14-21.