The Wolf and His King / an duilleag gheal

Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King is billed as a queer retelling of the Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France’s lai Bisclavret, and it obviously is that, but to be honest I think the queerness is already in the original poem (for a certain value of “queerness”; if you’re unfamiliar with the original poem I highly recommend it, and there’s an engaging rhymed translation by Judith P. Shoaf online), so I’m more interested in the novel’s other interpretive moves.

The Wolf and His King moves between three perspectives: Him, which is to say Bisclavret, the third-person perspective of a young man troubled by lycanthropy, encouraged by his cousin to ask the new king to restore the lands he should have inherited from his father; You, which is to say the king, addressed in second person, who is immediately captivated by Bisclavret for reasons he does not fully understand, not only restoring his lands but making him a knight; and Other, which is to say Bisclavret in his lupine form, speaking in free verse, struggling to retain his human(oid), first-person voice in the face of his lupine instincts.

the interplay of perspectives and persons — first (sometimes singular, sometimes plural), second, third — is extremely effective. it serves, first of all, to clearly differentiate the multiple perspectives in a book with only one named character (Bisclavret himself, as in the lai). more importantly, each perspective says something about the character/s it represents: Bisclavret, always the outsider, is decentered by the third person; the king is addressed as you, as kings are always addressed — a demand on his attention, asking something of him; the Other moves between an impersonal third-person voice for the wolf and a desperate first-person voice — sometimes singular, sometimes plural — for Bisclavret’s sense of self. the choice to do the Other sections in verse is a good one, both because the fragmentary nature of verse serves to differentiate between Bisclavret’s humanoid and lupine subjectivities and because it lets parts of the narrative move across time more concisely.

I was a little glib above re the queerness of Bisclavret; really what I meant is that Longman and I have similar readings of the poem as queer, centering on the relationship between Bisclavret and the king. Longman’s approach is guided by their background as a medievalist (albeit a specialist in Ireland rather than Anglo-Norman England), with a particular focus on the social structure of fealty that binds kings and vassals: what it means to offer, or to be offered, an oath of (notionally) absolute loyalty, and how a man who desires other men might navigate the homosocial world of chivalric romance. I think they handle it adeptly, and I also appreciate their attention to the real political structures of vassalage. it’s still a book about a king and one of his barons, but it’s a book that’s consciously exploring medieval romance’s fantasy of Good Kingship and the social constraints imposed by the expectations of chivalric romance. if the king desires to be “a king of peace”, the book reminds both him and readers that this is only possible for a certain value of “peace”:

when I say, then, that I’m more interested in the novel’s other interpretive choices, what I really mean is the novel’s portrayal of lycanthropy. Longman and I have, it turns out, basically diametrically opposed readings of lycanthropy in Bisclavret, which made this book something of a novel experience for me: I rarely read retellings of specific literary texts, and I’m not sure I’ve ever read one of a text that I already have a strongly-argued interpretation of.[*] that Longman’s interpretation is so different from my own didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the novel, but it made for an extra-enstranging reading experience, as I was both enjoying the novel in its own right and situating its reading of Bisclavret in relation to my own.

Longman’s reading treats lycanthropy as a chronic disability, exploring, variously, Bisclavret’s alienation from a society he cannot fully participate in; Bisclavret’s sense of self-alienation, as he clings to the idea that only his humanoid form is his real self and his lupine form is something external to him/something Other; the grief that comes from having a condition that means there are some things you simply, categorically cannot do, however much you want to; the dynamics of passing as abled vs. disclosure and the fear of abandonment by friends and loved ones when they find out how much support Bisclavret actually needs; and a profound sense of shame. this interpretation adds a rich, wide range of both emotional resonances and characterization to an original text where characterization as such — as in so many medieval texts — is fairly sparse. Longman’s portrayal of Bisclavret as disabled is extremely compelling in its own right and adds depth to the novel’s portrayal of his relationship with the king.

this is particularly striking because the king’s queerness is relatively unmarked — there is some stigma attached to his desire for other men, but what matters most in the context of his social and political context is that he eventually contract an appropriate marriage and produce an heir. there is certainly pressure on him to marry a woman, and there are clearly limits to how desire between men can be expressed publicly, but desire for men is not entirely out of the question: there is some room to maneuver, as long as it stays within the bounds of plausible deniability.

this is an extremely refreshing approach, one I wish more pseudohistorical work would take, neither handwaving away homophobia and the social pressures of Family and Reproduction (often without a serious consideration of how a world truly without heteronormativity would be genuinely, radically different from either our own or the social norms of an imagined feudal past) nor projecting modern homophobia back in time wholesale. the king is both recognizable as queer (probably gay) in a twenty-first century sense and also clearly situated in his (psuedo-)high medieval context, where he transgresses certain norms but not others, and perhaps not the ones readers might expect.

Longman’s prose is also just lovely: stylized and mildly archaic without belaboring either, moody and pensive without being ponderous. it feels mid-century, in a good way. they’re also just a really good technical writer — markedly better than a lot of even the best other new English books I’ve read in the past few years. not a comma splice in sight!

all of this is to say: I highly recommend this book. it is both a conceptually sophisticated retelling of a rich, engaging source text and a gripping, gorgeous fantasy novel in its own right, a moving meditation on disability, desire, and the mortifying ordeal of being known.

[*] the difference turns in part on the word plusur in the proem, which the translation Longman uses as an epigraph renders as “some” but which is more accurately “many”: hume plusur garulf devindrent “many men became werewolves”. as I read the proem, becoming-garulf (or garwaf or garvalf) is something voluntary, something hume plusur “many men” once chose to do; as Longman reads the poem, being-garulf is an involuntary and perhaps unwanted condition.

(my reading is related to the question of the poem’s moral judgment of werewolves: we are told in the proem that werewolves do grant mal “great evil”, but there is no actual textual evidence of Bisclavret — or any other werewolf — doing evil within the poem. on the contrary, Bisclavret’s affirmation that when in lupine form he goes al plus espés de la gualdine “to the deepest part of the wood” would seem to suggest that he habitually isolates himself from humans, which makes sense, since in lupine form he lives on game (de preie; while this could also be read as something like “booty”, implying theft, the relative nonchalance with which he gives this account of his behavior make me think “game” (literally “prey”) is more accurate), which human activity would likely render scarce, or at least scarcer.)

The Wolf and His King, Finn Longman

English / UK / 2025