From Tar to Tartar: The Sedimented, Nay, Sedimenting, Legacy of The King of Tars
Listen to me, young and old, for the Love of Mary, and I’ll tell you about the sedimented, nay, sedimenting, legacy of conversion fantasy, racial/religious categorization, and the use of women as conversion tool and justification for land-claiming and mass-slaughter ever since “a war began between a Christian king and a heathen Lord” in The King of Tars. Sara Ahmed writes that “something can matter because it is made to matter” (p. 94). In Ahmed’s essay, that something is race, one of the “heavy histories that weigh us down” (p. 95). In King of Tars, we explicitly see race, gender, and religious categorizations colliding in service of colonization and its mass-killing accompaniment, with women fulfilling a tartar sauce-like function of making consuming and subsuming the other and that other’s land more palatable.
Tartar sauce, the French mayonnaise and pickle amalgamation, ultimately derives its name from the Europeans’ naming of the area in Mongolia, Tartary, derived from Tartarus: Greek for hell, the deep abyss and dungeon of torment for the Titans. Self-naming has historically been an act of empowerment, and naming another one of the ultimate methods of taking away the other’s power. As Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh argues in “The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure,” medieval scholars’ use of the term Saracen over Muslim continues this tradition of Christian domination over Muslims by calling Muslims by another name, which makes their erasure more palatable. Through her article, she writes, Rajabzadeh ascribes the word “Muslim” rather than “Saracen” to medieval literature such as The King of Tars, while simultaneously asserting herself “in the audience of scholarship on representations of Muslims in the Middle Ages–even when those works have forgotten that Muslims are readers–and I speak from that place” (p. 2). She does so by “sanctioning” her “own experience of Islamophobia as an Iranian-Muslim-American woman as knowledge,” which is generally not considered as “rigorous” as speaking “about the historical object on its own terms” (p. 5). Rajabzadeh, building on the scholarship of Geraldine Heng, who she writes has “shown us how the Saracen label itself operated as part of a racial, political, and social project to represent Muslims as inferior to Christians and to motivate their expulsion from and extinction in the Holy Land” by “attributing the invention of the name Saracens to the enemy, as a sly act of self-naming by the enemy” in a lie that “brilliantly names the enemy as liars in the very act of naming them as enemies” (Rajabzadeh, citing Heng, p. 2). By translating Saracen into Muslim in King of Tars, this stops perpetuating the offensive term Saracen; it also raises awareness of the violent, anti-Muslim sentiment motivating the text. However, the word Tar continues another tradition of naming the “enemy” by continuing to equate Muslims to pagans–or as the poet writes in the opening line, “heathens”–Tartar reminiscent of Greek/pagan Hell. This consuming and subsuming tradition via naming continues in the name for mayonnaise and pickle sauce, which westerners consume.
I had to research where a so-called “King of Tars” might reside in medieval times. Due to my recent research interest in the tradition of “Warrior Women” broadside English ballads, which were hawked as cheap-print in the streets and sung in taverns to perpetuate English culture and domination during the Empire’s heyday, the long eighteenth century, I recalled a ballad named “The Female Tar” and became interested in what it might “mean” to be both a female and a tar in this ballad’s context. In “The Female Tar,” a man named Jemmy sings to his “dearest” that he is “bound for the ocean … in hopes to gain riches, honor, and promotion.” He tells his “dearest,” when she says “we may both sail together” that she should not come with him, because when “the blood from [his] woulds should be pouring, / The love that you bear me, it surely would grieve me.” She replies “Your wounds I would dress, ay, and never be fearful, / So let me go with you, and be no longer urgent, / My dear, I will be both your doctor and surgeon.” Reading this ballad in conjunction with the King of Tars reveals the perpetuation of the name Tar from 1330 into the heyday of the British Empire as a complicated term that continues to intertwine race with gender in service of plundering other cultures “to gain riches, honor, and promotion.” Poll, Jemmy’s dearest, who in the ballads could stand for any other white, British woman, is a Female Tar, an inheritor of the Princess of Tars in that both are willing to lay down their lives to serve as the men’s “doctor and surgeon” as they lay claim to foreign lands by slaying and conquering foreign people.
This “merry interlude” could go on forever, yet it is becoming too unwieldy for a weekly response for a seminar class, so I must move from subverting to containing and end this tale. “This all happened exactly as I am telling it to you,” the King of Tars poet writes, quite authoritatively (p. 9). The King of Tars begins by offering to tell the reason for the war that began between a “Christian king” and a “heathen Lord,” which sentence is immediately followed by “the King of Tars had a wife,” and continuing to name their daughter as “lovelier than anyone can say,” “chase with cheerful looks, … eyes a shining gray, lovely-shouldered, white-necked” (1). The tale ends with “her wisdom” which “brought her friends out of sorrow” (16), containing this male-dominated war within gender, both blaming the woman for the men’s behavior and crediting her as its physician. By defining the English as an “Anglo-Saxon” “race,” this signifies the “myth of white ‘heritage’ that has been put to service in the settler colonial project” (Miyashiro 2) can continue to perpetuate when this naming of self and other tradition goes unmodified and unchecked.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Response Essay: Race as sedimented history.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2015, pp. 94-97.
Dugaw, Dianne. “A Catalogue and Collection of Female Warrior Ballads.” The Warrior Women Project, Wayne State University, 2020 (forthcoming), p. 406.
Heng, Geraldine. “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race.” The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 1-14.
King of Tars. Translated by Hilary E. Fox, 2020.
Miyashiro, Adam. “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics.” Literature Compass, 2019, pp. 1-11.
