A MONSTER SPEAKS

The fragmentary Ruodlieb, an epic poem probably written by an eleventh-century German monk, includes a remarkable verbal exchange between the eponymous hero and a captive dwarf. The hominoid begs to be freed, promising to lead Ruodlieb to hidden treasure, and frames his plea in terms of the unreliability of human speech:

The English translation distinguishes between “dwarves” and “man” for the sake of clarity, but masks the ambiguity of a speech that alternates between collective terms, such as cuiusque and eius, and the contradistinctive “us” (nos) and “you” (vos). If uncertainties in the Latin phraseology mirror the ontological ambiguity of the dwarf, the accusatory “you” clearly implicates all humans as liars. Even if the dwarf exaggerates his point in hope of gaining his freedom, he offers a utopian vision of truthful speech that is only possible for those who are not human. Far from casting the dwarf as a monstrous Other, this passage effectively imagines an inversion of the traditional Christian hierarchy of being, at the top of which man exercises dominion over all earthly creatures, for the dwarf provides a human with a moral lesson. Indeed, the dwarf keeps his word by showing the exiled knight the location of the treasure and then predicts that Ruodlieb will marry Heriburg. In short, this monster offers the knight much.

We might regard the Ruodlieb episode to be an exceptional case, for it runs counter to the negative connotations surrounding dwarves found elsewhere in medieval culture, including the visual arts. The south tympanum of the cathedral of Orense, for example, shows the dwarf Marcolf conversing with King Solomon.