Indonesian Spices in The Land of Cokaygne (1330s)
The Land of Cokaygne is a whimsical poem in an Irish dialect of Middle English about a land ‘west of Spain’ where everything is wonderful and beautiful. It’s a vision of paradise centred on material things, and it’s often compared to the American folk-song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’. The Land of Cokaygne naturally includes a good few references to Indonesian spices, including cubebs, clove, and mace, and in this post I’m going to have a quick look at those.
The poem was written in Ireland in the 1330s, probably in Waterford (not Kildare, as I had originally written), and it survives in one manuscript (London, British Library, Harley MS 913, f.3r-6v). It was probably written by a Franciscan friar, so it has something in common with the Codex Cumanicus, another early-fourteenth-century text I’ve already discussed on this blog. I’m going to translate a couple of short sections of the poem here; my translation is a bit literal, in part because I’m a crap poet, but it should convey the sense. (You can read a full non-verse translation here.) Below I’ve also included some images from the digitised manuscript (Figures 1, 2, and 3) and transcriptions of the relevant parts.
Two letters in the manuscript are tricky if you’re not used to them. One is <þ>, which stands for dental fricatives like the ‘th’ in ‘teeth’ and ‘this’. It looks a bit like a <y> but it’s pronounced very differently. The other is <ȝ>, which in modern English orthography has been replaced by <gh>, as in modern English ‘sight’, equivalent to the manuscript’s <siȝt>. It was probably pronounced something like [x] (‘ch’ in ‘loch’) or [ç] (as in the ‘h’ in ‘hue’ or the ‘ch’ in German ich).
I’m putting two extracts from The Land of Cokaygne below, both from a description of a wondrous abbey where the columns are made of precious stones and exotic sights and smells abound. The first section (beginning on line 71) is about a magical tree with roots of ginger and galangal and flowers of mace (etc.). The second is a description of miraculous roasted and stewed birds flavoured with clove and cinnamon. As with other posts in this series, I’ve included notes on the commodities and their names as found in the text.
TEXT
(f.4r)
[…]
In þe praer is a tre. (71)
swiþe likful forto se.
þe rote is gingeuir and galingale.
þe siouns beþ al sedwale.
tri maces beþ þe flure. (75)
þe rind canel of swet odur.
(f.4v)
þe frute gilofre of gode smakke.
of cucubes þer n’is no lakke.
þer beþ rosis of rede ble.
and lilie likful forto se. (80)
þai faloweþ neuer day no niȝt.
þis aȝt be a swet[e] siȝt.
TRANSLATION
‘In the meadow is a tree
really delightful for to see.
The root is ginger and galangal,
the branches be all zedoary, [1]
True mace be the flowers, [2]
The rind, canel of sweet odour,
the fruit, cloves of good flavour. [3]
Of cubebs there is no lack. [4]
There be roses of red hue,
and lilies delightful for to see.
They never fade by day or night.
This ought to be a sweet sight.’
NOTES
[1] Ginger, galangal, and zedoary are all plants in the ginger family (Zingiberaceae); the Indonesian names are jahe, laos, and temu putih respectively. Ginger (Zingiber officinale) and zedoary (Curcuma zedoaria) both grew west of Indonesia and could easily have been procured from India, although they probably have Southeast Asian botanical origins. The word ‘ginger’ <gingeuir> is ultimately from the Old Tamil compound of iñci ‘ginger’ and vēr ‘root’. (I’m relying on Burrows and Emeneau [1984], A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, p.41, for the evidence here.) ‘Zedoary’ <sedwale> is from the Persian jadvār (جدوار), probably by way of Arabic and Latin.
Galangal is trickier as the name refers to the roots of several plants, all of them from South, Southeast, and East Asia. The likely source for most of the galangal in medieval Europe is Alpinia galanga, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Java was a major exporter of this. The etymology of ‘galangal’ is controversial, although it is claimed to have Chinese origins — from 高良薑 or 高粱薑 (pinyin: gāoliángjiāng), the Middle Chinese pronunciation of which was [kaw ljang kjang] (taken from Kroll [2017] A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, pp.129–130 sub 高). This may originally have meant ‘Gaoliang ginger’ (where Gaoliang is a toponym) or it may instead be ‘sorghum ginger’.
[2] Mace is the aril surrounding the seed of Myristica fragrans, the nutmeg tree. This only grew in Banda in eastern Indonesia. I’ve gone on about this enough; see older posts for more info on mace, nutmeg, and the Banda Islands. The idea of mace as a flower was, in any case, common in medieval European texts, presumably because dried mace does look and smell floral. The Malay/Indonesian name is bunga pala ‘nutmeg flower’.
[3] The word for ‘clove’ here is <gilofre>, ultimately from Greek καρυόφυλλον via Latin gariofilus (vel sim) and French gilofre. You may remember it from the reference to cloves in The Canterbury Tales from the last post. Cloves are the flowers (not the <frute>, as The Land of Cokaygne has it) of Syzygium aromaticum, a tree that also grew on a small number of tiny islands in eastern Indonesia. I’ve gone over this plenty as well.
[4] Cubebs, the manuscript’s <cucubes>, are the dried fruits of a plant native to the western islands of Indonesia known to science as Piper cubeba (Indonesian: kemukus). The plant is in the same genus as pepper, although cubebs are rounder and less shrivelled than peppercorns and they have a citrusy note. They taste pretty good if you ask me. The English name comes from the Arabic kabāba (كَبَابَه), a word of uncertain derivation, via French.
TEXT
(f.5r)
[…]
þe Gees irostid on þe spitte.
fleeȝ to þat abbai god hit wot.
and grediþ /gees al hote, al hot.
hi bringeþ garlek gret plente. (105)
þe best idiȝt þat man mai se.
þe leuerokes þat beþ cuþ.
liȝtiþ adun to man-is muþ.
idiȝt in stu ful swiþe wel.
pudrid wiþ gilofre and canel. (110)
TRANSLATION
‘The geese roasted on the spit
fly to that abbey — God knows it! [1]
And cry out “Geese, all hot, all hot!”
bringing garlic in great plenty,
the best-dressed [geese] that man may see.
The larks be well-known
to alight down in a man’s mouth,
dressed full and well in stew,
powdered with cloves and cinnamon.’ [2]
NOTES
[1] This means something like ‘believe it or not!’.
[2] If you look at Figure 3 you’ll see that there’s an error here, corrected by the scribe using dots below the line. Cloves I’ve mentioned; cinnamon <canel> is the name for a number of different plants in the genus Cinnamomum, including C. burmannii, which grows in Sumatra and was certainly exported from there in the Middle Ages. The best cinnamon (C. verum) came from Sri Lanka, though, and there’s a Chinese type, which is now often called ‘cassia’ — but in medieval European texts you often see ‘canel’, ‘cinnamon’, and ‘cassia’ (vel sim) used as synonyms. The Indonesian name for these is kayu manis, literally ‘sweet wood’.
Like the mentions of cloves and nutmeg in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, these references to Indonesian (and other Asian) spices are magical and overblown. They seem to treat cloves and cubebs (etc.) not as earthly plant-derived flavourings but rather as things so wonderful and exotic that they could only grow in a paradisiacal land where life did not operate as it did in the real world. The intent here, as in Chaucer, is clearly humourous — but the humour only works because these things really do seem to have been thought of in this way.
Post-Script: An Abridged Irish Marco Polo
Another medieval manuscript from Ireland is of interest: The Book of Lismore, a miscellany written in Irish in southern Ireland in the early fifteenth century and now kept in the library of University College Cork. (When I originally wrote this piece the book was still in Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, England.) Part of the text is an abridged Irish version of the Divisiment dou Monde (the account of the travels of Marco Polo) known as Leabhar Ser Marco Polo ‘the book of Sir Marco Polo’. This probably includes the earliest extant mention of Java (and some other Indo-Malaysian place names) in Irish (Figure 4):
I’m afraid I can’t read Irish at this level, but the toponyms here are unmistakeable: Java <iana> (first column, seventh line from top), Perlak <ferlech> (in northern Sumatra — look for the paragraph after <iana>), Lamuri <Lambrii> (also northern Sumatra), and <Fanfur> (Barus, Sumatra, famous for its camphor — second column, third line from bottom).
Polo’s account was frequently translated, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that there’s an Irish version out there. It’s often assumed, I think, that accounts like Polo’s were known only to a small number of elites literate in Latin or French, and that knowledge of Asia in medieval Europe was restricted to a small number of people. I’m not sure that’s true: There were a number of translations into other European vernaculars, including English and Czech as well as Irish, and the text was probably intended to be read aloud as entertainment. At least one person in medieval Ireland had heard of Java and Sumatra, in any case.
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