A Hero Named (Twice) for the Frontier: The Landscape of the Grottaferrata Digenes Akrites
A Hero Named (Twice) for the Frontier: The Landscape of the Grottaferrata Digenes Akrites

Summary/Abstract: The frontier is essential for Digenes Akrites, right down to the protagonist’s name: the “Two-blood Border Lord” or “Frontiersman of Double Descent.” For generations scholars have addressed the historical contexts of this tale of love and heroism set on the Middle Byzantine borderlands, yet the question of how the spaces of the poem function in literary terms remains largely unexplored. Focusing on the Grottaferrata or “G” version of the text, this essay argues that attending to the landscape of Digenes reveals much about both the work’s larger narrative strategies and the nature of its imaginative engagement with its setting. The concrete verbal presentation of space in G is occasional, sparing, and repetitive, but the text overall conveys a vivid impression of place. Taking inspiration from the recent comparative and theoretical revival in the study of Byzantine literature overall and of Digenes specifically, the essay adapts techniques from narrative theory and geography in order to understand how G draws such rich significance out of its limited repertoire of spatial markers. The resulting method enables us to set beside the storied forests of Western medieval literature a distinctly Mediterranean or western Asian terrain of adventure, drawn out of plains, hills, and passes, of mixed woods and scrub. Tracking such spaces across the poem’s two major narrative blocks – each centered on its own environment – demonstrates how, no less than the twin appellation of its hero, the Grottaferrata Digenes Akrites as a literary work is built out of landscape in both deep structure and incidental detail.

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