Chaucher's Eagle and the Element Air

Abstract

Although Chaucer's Hous of Fame appears in so many ways to have been iconographically inspired, one is surprised that critical and interpretative activity has most often been concerned with the explication of the purely literary and scriptural sources of the poem. An early exception was Rosemond Tuve, who, in relating it to a poem by Guillaume de Deguilleville, noted that several manuscripts of Lydgate's translation of Guillaume's Pélérinage de la vie humaine contained illustrations of a revolving tower and a bird with a man's face. J.A.W. Bennett, in his illuminating study of the poem, has made several brief allusions to its traditional iconography. However, until the recent appearance of an article by John Leyerle, 'Chaucer's Windy Eagle,' neither the central importance to the poem of the Eagle nor the complicated variety of its sources had been persuasively emphasized. In addition to origins in literature, natural history, and astronomy, Leyerle proposes and demonstrates as a source the gleaming brass eagle lectern of the church, which resembles Chaucer's golden eagle. At the risk of increasing the existing complexity, I should like to suggest for Chaucer's great bird another possible iconographic source, which, though not obvious, is nonetheless worth recording.