Figures of Clamor: Belliphony and the Song of the Sword in the Old French Arthurian Romance

Abstract

In Old French Arthurian romance, combat announces itself first as an affair of hearing: before the sequence of gestures arranges itself into recognisable trajectories, war enters the narrative as a sonic pressure that seizes space and constitutes a community of listeners. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer’s morphology of the soundscape and on J. Martin Daughtry’s notion of the belliphonic, this article reads chivalric clamour not as mere acoustic intensity, but as a sensory regime capable of territorialising the environment and producing symbolic prestige. In dialogue with Steve Goodman’s reflections on sonic warfare, medieval noise emerges as a force of contact operating at a pre-semantic level, shaping perceptual dispositions and collective bodily postures, and granting places and built structures an active function in propagating and amplifying the event. Within this ecology, the sword appears as a principle of condensation – timbre, spark, rhythm – a brief signature through which value becomes publicly legible, since matter itself “speaks” in the form of vibration. From the metallic lai of Cligès to the woodland resonances of Perlesvaus, and onwards to the urban shockwaves of Lancelot en prose, the blade’s “song” reveals itself as a hinge between heroic gesture, archaic memory, and a politics of the sensible.