On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems 9781442698758

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction
1. Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith
2. Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle
3. Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style
4. Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty
5. ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry
6. Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection
7. Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest
8. Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation
9. Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth
10. The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry
11. The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire
12. ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote
Contributors
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

ON THE AESTHETICS OF BEOWULF AND OTHER OLD ENGLISH POEMS

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EDITED BY JOHN M. HILL

On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9944-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication On the aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English poems / edited by John M. Hill. (Toronto Anglo-Saxon series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9944-0 1. English poetry – Old English, ca. 450–1100 – History and criticism. 2. Beowulf. 3. Art and literature – England – History – To 1500. 4. Literature – Aesthetics. I. Hill, John M. II. Series: Toronto Anglo-Saxon series PR203.05 2010

829'.1009

C2009-907359-5

University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in the publication of this book. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the U.S. Naval Academy.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction 3 john m. hill 1 Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith 24 howell d. chickering 2 Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle 43 tiffany beechy 3 Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style 64 geoffrey russom 4 Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty 81 peggy a. knapp 5 ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry 101 sarah larratt keefer 6 Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection 114 michael d.c. drout

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Contents

7 Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest 135 robert d. stevick 8 Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation 161 john m. hill 9 Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth 176 thomas e. hart 10 The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry 209 janet thormann 11 The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire 227 yvette kisor 12 ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote 247 tom shippey Contributors 267 Works Cited 269 Index 291

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the organizers of the Medieval Association of the Pacific and the International Congress on Medieval Studies for opportunities to organize sessions on aesthetics and Old English literature. In small ways they were the forerunners of what has become this volume’s gathering of provocative essays. I am grateful for the participation in those sessions of Robert D. Stevick and Janet Thormann, as well as for the spirited audiences who joined with us in lively discussion. The anonymous readers for University of Toronto Press were comprehensive and quite helpful in their review of each essay and of the overall edition. Much credit goes also to the editors at University of Toronto Press, especially Suzanne Rancourt, who early on saw merit in this project, and to Barb Porter for her always timely managing skills. Charles Stuart deserves a fine facsimile of his favourite Gospels carpet page for excellent copy editing. Finally, On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems would not have been as strong a volume without Howell D. Chickering’s ‘Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith,’ with permission to republish from Studies in Philology 106 (2009): 119-36.

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ON THE AESTHETICS OF BEOWULF AND OTHER OLD ENGLISH POEMS

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On Aesthetics and Quality: An Introduction john m. hill

What is quality in art? And is ‘quality’ something objective or mainly a mix of subjective response and traditional values? Those are core questions any aesthetic has to confront if it is to mature beyond a weak aestheticism, say art for art’s sake, or beyond a naïve celebration of the superficially sensual aspects of art, even if such a celebration would combine the sensuous with open-ended cognition.1 Indeed, such a confrontation is crucial if aesthetics hopes to gain some purchase on real beauty and truth. Quality, whether expressed as ‘value’ or otherwise, is something we can articulate in ways more objective and analytical than I.A. Richards would allow when writing that ‘value cannot be demonstrated except through the communication of what is valuable.’2 An objective component in value judgments is a function of repeated experience, training, and a funding of changing, deepening engagements within a community of ‘artistically sensitive and trained observers,’ as Jakob Rosenberg puts the 1 Peggy A. Knapp, ‘Aesthetic Attention and the Chaucerian Text,’ The Chaucer Review, 39 (2005): 241–58, champions such a process from a Kantian perspective modified through Hans-Georg Gadamer (Philosophical Hermeneutics [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Hans Robert Jauss (Toward an Aesthetics of Reception [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982]): in part because of where we enter the hermeneutic circle, and given historical distance, ‘the “horizon of expectation” brought to a work of art is never available in objective or even objectifiable form, not for its author and his/her contemporaries and not for later Recipients’ (251). Whether purposiveness or the registering of beauty is ever fully objectifiable or not, more than a shared, subjective sensitivity between observers operates in aesthetic analysis. What one expects and the beauty that calls one out depend upon deep assumptions about the make-up and quality of art, often stemming among differing respondents from radically different commitments. 2 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York and London, 1954), 11.

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matter.3 Rosenberg goes on to say that the ‘composite nature of value judgment leaves room for the strengthening of the objective aspect, thus allowing us to attain a measure of validity.’4 Corroborated validity within a community in turn suggests the possibility of structured approaches to aesthetics grounded in observable realities, depending upon one’s analytical perspectives. In recent commentaries aesthetics coupled with art or literature has taken political and ethical turns: good art invites us into new moral and ethical perspectives, ‘as well as new and valuable ways of seeing things in the world,’ especially when one considers how the work of literature presents its content, rather than giving us transparent pictures of worldly affairs.5 Some writers on politics and aesthetics think of aesthetics as ‘the distribution of the sensible,’ defining how various art forms are involved in politics by forming a sense of community.6 That position has some indebtedness to Marxist thought of the sort Raymond Williams broaches: ‘We have to reject the “aesthetic” as a separate, abstract dimension … At the same time we have to recognize … the specific variable intentions and … responses that have been grouped as aesthetic in distinction … in particular from information and suasion. Indeed we cannot rule out, theoretically, the possibility of discovering certain invariant combinations of elements within this grouping.’7 While Williams leaves out a judgment of quality, such exclusion is not inevitable. Different categories of analysis can comprise those ‘invariant combinations’ for different aesthetics, each possessing a standard of quality. Moreover, art, and thus the aesthetic, can participate in politics and culture by increasing the aesthete’s ‘power of making distinctions.’8 Implicitly, better art comes closer to maximizing that power, giving the engaged observer more choices, choices on grounds that rise above the welter of political and social contention.

3 Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence Past and Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), xxiv. 4 Rosenberg, On Quality in Art, xxiv. 5 See, for example, David Davies, Aesthetics and Literature (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2007), 176–7. 6 As in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 14. 7 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 155. 8 Alan Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 40.

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In all that follows I use ‘aesthetic’ in relation to the question of quality in art, which is the big question in the philosophy of aesthetics, much as what is the Good is the big question in moral philosophy and much as the question of Justice drives political philosophy. Quality always entails a standard of beauty, that standard related to a standard of truth as well – directly so in Plato’s thinking about transcendent forms or in Aristotle’s about immanent forms, such as the form of tragedy. The closer a play comes to that form, the more it corresponds to it, the truer it is, and the better it is in relation to other tragedies. It is also more beautiful. Such a judgment is absolutely objective for Aristotle, the perfect form preexisting its increasingly fuller discovery by dramatic poets (a naturalist is similarly objective when determining the variety of characteristics that make a particular species identifiable, even if no species is entirely stable). The relation between beauty, assessed qualitatively, and truth is equally direct and objective, although derived from very different analytical categories in the aesthetic of New Criticism, which descends indirectly from nineteenth-century German nature philosophy and is largely familiar in literary study as the terms of poetical criticism that Coleridge articulated. In turn, twentieth-century critics such as William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks turn that criticism into a closed system of formal analysis. The more integrated strong contrasts or ironies or paradoxes are, and the more such there are, the better the poem. A complex, highly integrated poem is more beautiful and true than is a simpler, less integrated one. Integration is the means by which apparent fragments or contrasts resolve themselves into a greater whole, that whole either being or showing forth a clear, that is, objective truth previously obscured by those unresolved fragments. The truth-beauty relation, however, is present only indirectly within any other aesthetic system broadly imagined, being so only potentially, for example, in Stephen C. Pepper’s notions of Mechanism and Contextualism. In Mechanism, the truth-beauty relation is potential in relation to what craft renders, refined clarity or elegant solutions being beautiful; in Contextualism it is potential in relation to experience or perhaps phenomena, where, if we look to art as John Dewey does, the qualitatively vivid, ‘fused’ moment deepens our appreciation for whatever experience or dramatic, ongoing event the artist has captured. In that appreciation there is awe and thus a sense of beauty as well as recognition of the artist’s insight.9 9 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam, 1934), 36, 48. ‘In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity and yet do not disappear and lose their character as they do so … If the artist’s perception is not also esthetic, it

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In Mechanism the standard of objective truth is correlation – the correlation of one’s particular models with phenomena understood as deeply structured by particulars in motion, forming systems within systems, or, as it were, machines within machines. A simple machine, such as a lever, is a core concept. The designation and interaction of its parts, and the work it can do, can be expressed abstractly in an equation, independently of an actual, sensorially present machine. But as such, as a simple machine, Mechanism lacks scope, a defect remedied by its expansion into field theory, and has trouble productively linking underlying structures, the positing of matter in motion, with or without spin and charge, to emergent phenomena, to the sensuous surfaces of things. However, beginning with those surfaces, the art version of that standard is one of realized particularization or depiction correlated with some image or event or phenomenon. The finer, more subtly particularized and complex the depiction, the more beautiful the object, when considering realistic art; when considering objects of craft the correlation is with like objects – the finer the construction the better, the more beautiful, with considerable room here and in realistic art for appreciating the artist’s or the furniture maker’s skill, facility, richness, and variety in construction (which apply in non-representational art as well). Pleasure is in the eye of the beholder here to a far greater extent than in any other aesthetic, for the highly particularized object is in effect ‘possessed’ by its admiring connoisseur. In Contextualism, to return, we have a dual standard of beauty and truth – one of correspondence to a phenomenon, especially an experience, and one of operational consummation (if we achieve what we expect in the ways in which we proceed, then our anticipations, as built into the processes we undertook, and those processes themselves, can be said to have been true – as in a working hypothesis that works out). Contextualism requires both of those standards, for the one, correspondence, if standing alone threatens to tip Contextualism into Platonism or the Aristotelian (any experience approximates some idea of such an experience); and the operational test threatens to be interminable unless one anticipates and apparently achieves some temporary end point or moment. In art, especially in the literary arts, but also in some unframed painting (as well as in

becomes mechanical.’ ‘The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.’ For Stephen C. Pepper, the key works are World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942) and The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945).

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‘movements’ or effects in a painting), and in kinetic performances or moving images, one would value intense, vivid moments, often dramatic moments that have a kind of ongoing present to the viewer: they come from somewhere, exist in a present context, and are changing into something else (in Contextualism, change is categorical). Thus they have intensity and spread, as well as a sense of being something in the moment and going somewhere, a spread one can think of as a specious present. While that ‘ongoing present’ lacks a sense of permanence, nevertheless quality arises from just how far anything vivid engages sensorial, emotional, and intellectual depths for the reader or viewer confronted, for example, with a dramatic development of competing or crossing desires or sensory paths, those desires in turn produced in each protagonist or along each line of development by a converging of motives and influences, perhaps with one influence blocking another and motives being disparate when they are not fused or when they do not commingle. Those standards are aspects of general frameworks drawn from the great epochs of Western philosophical and scientific thinking. In that history, once a culture reaches a philosophical threshold, those frameworks are suddenly present, though never equally prominent, and always susceptible to objective, analytical development, each with its own categories of analysis; that is, each framework has its own way of conceiving of the object of analysis: of how the object exists in the world (ontology), of how to perceive and analyse it (epistemology and truth standards), and of just how the analytical categories work together while resting on some foundation (metaphysics), such as a root metaphor, concept, or figure (for example, similarity and simile, the machine and syntax, experience and metaphor, integration and synecdoche). In addition, each would develop its own sense of ethics, which is one reason, for example, why Aristotle’s differs notably from Machiavelli’s. But they are also culturally contingent: the empiricism built into each framework either does not appear or can disappear when a culture is either pre-scientific or given to mystical thought. In such environments aesthetics loses touch with the evaluative, dispersing perhaps into our species’ long fascination with three-dimensional design in excess of function, with communal dance, gesture, and ritual, and with surface ornament and pattern. Historically, the frameworks sketched above are prominent or not given the ascendancy of one or another in any given period. For every Plato in or near Athens there is also, or behind him, albeit subdued and perhaps even derided, a Heraclitus. And of course for every Plato and Heraclitus there are less capacious thinkers and responders who may be less sensitive and so less likely to move far from

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what is subjective in their views. But aesthetics itself is not inherently subjective. In modern times, the mechanical philosophy and its accompanying aesthetic triumphs in part, and objectively via experimentation, over German nature philosophy and American pragmatism, but doing so without making its competitors subsets of itself (especially not in the arts). The four essentially metaphysical frameworks he articulates, what Stephen C. Pepper has called World Hypotheses, are then both empirical in their orientations and radically analytical in relation to each other. Because they have different centres of authenticity, no one can subsume the others. Pepper identifies them as emerging into prominence at different times from the plethora of philosophical and scientific thought since the beginnings of such matters in ancient Greece. Each World Hypothesis aspires in its own analytical categories to be a theory of everything. Pepper’s Mechanism is roughly our seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanical philosophy of matter in motion – whether reflected in ancient atomism, Lockean positivism, Hobbes’s political philosophy, Hume’s and Berkeley’s idealism, or modern field theory with its strong and weak forces. Such matter in motion eventually is organized, at least as projected in a unified field theory, as particular systems within systems or else as an overall system of particles or quarks and forces. Such a field system would become the only (projected) ‘particular’ there is. Mechanism in this sense is of course the most successful of World Hypotheses in modern times. What Pepper calls Contextualism arises out of American Pragmatism beginning at least with Charles Peirce.10 Here the operational-correspondence standard of truth is highly developed in Peirce’s acute logic: there is a world to which our constructs correspond, which pre-exists them and to which they are referential in our operations. His triadic logic of reference to ground (or quality), to correlates, and to interpretant, involving a further triad of representations through either likeness, pointers or indices, and symbolization, has largely eluded literary circles, which favour his standing as a semiotician, where an interpreted sign is another sign and so on (in a sense inverting the relationship of logic to semiotics in his work). Pragmatism develops in less acutely logical and semiotical ways in William James’s writings and then is bequeathed to the likes of John Dewey and perhaps Pepper himself. Quality and beauty arise from the rich or profound and possibly painful vividness of ongoing events often dramatically enlivened. Organicism, the fourth of Pepper’s World Hypotheses, is most familiar to us in terms of German nature philosophy on the one hand and a 10 See Charles S. Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, ed. Max H. Fisch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 471–90 especially.

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truncated, New Critical practice on the other (truncated because tightly focused on the object as ‘well-wrought urn’). Its dynamic genius is the power of evolving integration whereby apparent fragments or strongly contrasting somethings attract each other within some nexus and given some irritation or friction, integrating together then into larger wholes or unities into which the prior fragments completely disappear. As it were, contrasting fragments evolve mutually into a whole they have prefigured. The more that is integrated and the higher the level, the more quality and thus beauty the object has. Successful integrations reveal truth. Qualitatively, beauty is a direct consequence of any standard applied to objects of art and the results assessed; thus each World Hypothesis, and there may be more than four, has its own aesthetic within which value judgments – evaluative judgments – are more or less objective given the knowledge, experience, thematic interests, and powers of the assessor. An interesting outcome of this is that contrary assessments, rooted in different analytical frameworks, can be equally valid. The contributors to this volume have not, as far as I know, directly considered the aesthetic in any of the large terms I have rehearsed. However, their individual understandings of ‘the aesthetic’ more often than not fall, in one aspect or another, into one or more of the frameworks briefly indicated above. For example, Michael D.C. Drout’s essay on the survival of the most pleasing owes much to a mechanistic mode of thought – as indeed does a good deal of contemporary criticism where the work of literature is seen as part of ‘discourse,’ an interplay of determining forces and structures. Peggy A. Knapp’s essay on the strange necessity of beauty owes something to Kant’s disinterested aesthetic, which relates to mechanical work and purposefulness by denying that connection. Moreover, the poet’s intricate craft, his posing of differing perspectives and ambiguous foregrounding, suggests a refined Mechanism potentially, albeit in a nonlinear narrative style and without final determination. Yvette Kisor’s sense of the aesthetic owes much to reader response criticism, with its grounding in phenomenology and its quasi-mechanistic idea of reception, wherein the reader ‘receives’ the author’s work by partly composing it, given ‘blanks’ or discontinuities in relation to the reader’s ‘wandering’ although textually regulated viewpoint. The outcome is the emergent, aesthetic object – an outcome mixing the indeterminate and determinate.11

11 These points come from my reading of Wolfgang Iser’s ‘Interaction between Text and Reader,’ from The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan Suleiman and I. Crossman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), reprinted

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Formal analyses based on discovered proportion or a controlling module, such as Robert D. Stevick’s, Thomas E. Hart’s, or mine, owe something to Classical thought about form and universal order when based on number modules or else on proportions that either express or approximate true measures or the harmonious (thus are related to Pepper’s Formism); but an inventive generation of forms and, thus, a refined, inventive sense of proportion and design might reflect something else (where clarity is conserved at different scales and within both symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns – possibly a mechanistic feature). In contrast, Sarah Larratt Keefer’s analysis of choral-type verse reflects organic integration. Additionally, some of the contributors (Stevick, Hart, and Hill) search for a particular Anglo-Saxon aesthetic, whether formal and deeply ordering the arrangement of text or spiritual (Keefer), while others apply their own, later in part organic and in part structuralist – that is mechanistic – understandings to a qualitative evaluation of one or more Old English poems (Chickering, Beechy, whose sense of ambivalent binding has something in common with Contextualism and with Hart’s larger patterns) or else to metrical, prosodic, and lexical aspects of that poetry (Chickering again and Russom, although Russom reaches for implicit standards of the ‘wellformed’ and the exceptional in Old English verse). All lines of enquiry and all orientations, however heterodox, are equally welcome given the call for this volume, which by raising many voices would stimulate discussion on this neglected topic, and especially on the inherent question of evaluation, of deciding what is good and less good (and on what grounds) in Old English and medieval poetry generally. The contributors go beyond what has generally been done for, say, style and Anglo-Saxon poetry – or at least they push through descriptions of style, design, and ornament towards issues of quality (and therein beauty). Privately each of us might hold that some poems are simply better than others; some passages in poems are better than others; and in any poem some lines are better than others. Collectively and in terms of an apparent consensus, Anglo-Saxonists have for more than a century settled on a core of poems we think of as exceptional literary achievements, at least if the many Old English Readers bear something like aesthetic witness. However, there is little to no conversation about these matters in Anglo-Saxon studies, and so we have collectively had very vague grounds for feeling right about such appraisals. in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1673–82.

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Because each contributor offers his or her working notion of the aesthetic, this volume does not strive for consensus around a controlling idea or set of categories. As outlined above, there are many possibilities for comprehensive, global ways of conceiving of the aesthetic in Western art and literature. In simpler terms, one aesthetic might emphasize open form, free verse, the celebration of process and contingency; another might emphasize integrations of opposites or of highly charged contrasts; yet another might be classically philosophical, seeking ever fuller glimpses of form in always imperfect materializations; yet another might conceive the work of art as an intricate set of systems – a complex of machines one might say. Beauty may be in the eye of the informed, repeatedly funded beholder. Or it may exist out ‘there,’ cognitively discoverable to some extent. Or it may appear in the triumph of art over problems of contradiction and fragmentation. Or it may appear just there where vivid processes are at their most dramatic (Art as Experience à la Dewey). I’m sure one can think of a few additional ways in which the poems we most admire, given our orientations, bring beauty into our ken, qualitatively differing from lesser work. I have arranged the essays to reflect approaches that focus on surface and rhetorical features, then on the smaller scale shaping of half-lines, and then on various mixtures of ‘horizons,’ where one poses the lure of beauty and the presence of the pleasing, before moving deeply to considerations of embodied structure, form, proportion and then out again to psychology and reader response. Thus it is fitting to begin with Howell D. Chickering. In his ‘Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith,’ originally published in Studies in Philology, Chickering especially notes such features of Judith as ‘its half-line rhymes at emphatic times, and its purple patches of pulsing polysyndeton.’ In his view ‘exuberance’ takes in the most important effects of the poem, such as dramatic irony, comedy and a playing with traditional topoi. Yet not all exuberance is equal. The poet’s exuberance in Judith ‘exerts such strong tonal and ideational control that it thoroughly stabilizes the text when we read it on its own, rather than against other texts.’ Although a fragment, Judith is an artistically complete episode, its sounds, verses, dramatic irony, and humour quite pleasing and well orchestrated. In contrast, a modern take on the aesthetic almost leads to delirious sensory and cognitive effects in Tiffany Beechy’s ‘Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle.’ Working with a Jakobsonian notion of the poetic function as that in which a word is felt as a word, as palpable, rather than as only addressing or pointing to or referring to something, Beechy lines up binding poetic effects in laws, performative nonsense in charms, and dizzying, loosening play with

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likenesses upon likenesses in the riddles. Although Beauty is not hunted for here, an exuberant love of play, one might think, is where Beechy plants her aesthetic flag, especially so in some of the Old English riddles as she concludes that in ‘the charms, ritualized language itself becomes the experience … enabling humans to fantasize whatever they desire. And in the riddles, beauty is the unreachable horizon where signifier and signified “must” meet, but never do.’ Granting such play, one can still probe for criteria that recall an older sense of the aesthetic in Old English verse, especially in heroic traditional style. Goeffrey Russom, in ‘Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style,’ discusses points of aesthetic refinement in Beowulf that suggest aesthetic criteria, however elusive, within a confined metrical and usually partial syntactic space. For example, a type A1 variant with two trochaic words ‘was highly valued and must have cost significant effort to construct.’ Poetic compounds can show metrical patterning ‘that distinguishes Beowulf from poems less highly regarded’; moreover, their placement can ‘reveal an aesthetic constraint on their usefulness,’ with the poet varying compounds ‘when repetition in close proximity might prove tedious.’ The poet has a largely traditional aesthetic, it would seem, although not one that is then predictable or automatic. The poet can push hard metrically, especially in verses with two poetic compounds. And he can reach for archaic equivalents when varying redundant compounds as well as form syntactic archaisms when he does not have to. In many such ways the poet transforms his plot ‘into formally heroicized narrative, into authoritative language that memorializes courage in a good cause.’ That conclusion fits interestingly with Tom Shippey’s account of style and heroic ethos, outlined below. Peggy A. Knapp, in ‘Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty,’ employs a partially Kantian sense of ‘disinterestedness’ in aesthetically approaching Beowulf for both its ‘intricate craftedness and for its testimony to the strange necessity for beauty in a world filled with dangers.’ For Knapp, the poem haunts thought, in part because it ‘eludes conceptual fixities, continually slipping away from conclusions that at first blush seemed obvious.’ Looking to seventh- and eighth-century carpet pages for inspiration, Knapp sees foreground and background, main episodes and digressions, producing ‘a gestalt that seems purposive without [final, conceptual] purpose’ and thus generating an overall impression of ‘rich movement and complexity held in a formal order’ that is not symmetrical and yet hardly ‘incomplete or haphazard.’ Even in Beowulf’s funeral rites we see that no ‘single conceptual system control[s] the energies of this

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haunting narrative.’ In this respect, her analysis sits quite companionably next to Tiffany Beechy’s view of riddles. How might an Anglo-Saxon have sought beauty? We have no treatises on the matter from Anglo-Saxon times but we do have, at least in spiritual contexts, some witnessing, as Sarah Larratt Keefer shows in her study of Latin prayer and Old English liturgical verse, ‘“Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness”: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry.’ What can we detect in a poetical, vernacular personalizing of liturgical prayer? Keefer argues that one aspect of holiness in this poetry, the ‘lovely paradox of an eternal now,’ must have been intensely comforting, as must have been the reassuring presence of God called by many names in fairly brief compass (twenty-two epithets in one case within forty-three lines). No matter how metrically useful those half-lines might be, such poetry, rich in comforting words and phrases for God, can also assume a choral form of singing and solo response, a kind of Responsorium, as in the case of The Creed, thus suggesting a sophisticated, creative mind at work. Insofar as a contrapuntal effect arises, we might have a heard analogue to some of the harmonious proportions Robert Stevick discovers in the underlying forms of long poems. Does especially memorable poetry give pleasure? Can one rest a standard of aesthetic quality on some such criterion? Michael D.C. Drout would say yes as he applies an approach inspired by evolutionary biology to three Old English poems, in ‘Survival of the Most Pleasing: A MemeBased Approach to Aesthetic Selection.’ In relation to being memorable and giving pleasure, are some poems more ‘fit’ in their world and in ours? A kind of cultural selection operates when poetical statements and expressions are broadcast. There is ‘selection pressure on memes [something imitated, such as a word, gesture, sentence, tune, or other behaviour, an ‘entity’ that ‘has managed to replicate itself from one mind to another’] to become easily taken up by the perceptual system and to be able to be passed unchanged through the mnemonic and cognitive machinery of the mind. Two “good tricks” that would differentially replicate those memes that evolve to them are distinctiveness (so as to enter into the perceptual system) and the creation of pleasure.’ But, Drout continues, memes that may be pleasurable must not ‘conflict with other memes in the mind’ and need to fit in with the mind’s active interests and ideology. Memorable poetry is so in part because of verbal art and the poet’s ability ‘to cast abstract ideas and principles as agents,’ as something one can visualize acting. When thinking about The Fortunes of Men, The Gifts of Men, and Precepts, Drout considers them most aesthetically effective, and even

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qualitatively so, in the order given. Precepts has a simple, obvious structure but there is no story arc, and the precepts themselves could be moved around, added to, or dropped almost randomly (an important point for the integrity over time of basic or underlying form). There is no memorable design or else line of development and reiteration one can hold on to. That is not the case with Gifts or Fortunes. They have complicated structures involving preambles, envelope patterns, and conclusions, although there is much more of a sense of agency in the latter poem. Moreover, because of an interlinking of sections, the envelope structure of Fortunes ‘is more mnemonically stable’ than is the case with Gifts. Although Michael Drout does not quite say so, aesthetic effectiveness as presented contains an implicit (mechanistic) standard of quality: retainable structure and complexity, with clarity conserved in that complexity. Thus Fortunes is more beautiful than Gifts and also truer to posited structures of the mind. Furthermore, as a cultural side note, Gifts and Fortunes reflect Benedictine Reform movements better than does Precepts, thus probably enhancing their hold in that respect as well on Anglo-Saxon minds. Along with memorable rhetorical structures, which help preserve a poem’s integrity over time and through copies, are Anglo-Saxons capable of generating sophisticated, proportional forms for their long narratives? Robert D. Stevick, in ‘Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest,’ thinks so and has in fact discovered something we can call an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic in large forms, perhaps one of several aesthetics and necessarily involving a circumscribed group of designers and poets. They worked within a ‘geometry,’ if one uses that term loosely, to encompass ‘formal features, both extensive and comprehensive, crafted from management of quantities, whether in two-dimensional designs or in linear compositions.’ In studying those features in quantitative, relational terms, the sectional or fitt divisions of poems matter; in fact, they are quite likely to be authorial. And what is produced has nothing to do with numerology. Taking up The Phoenix, Stevick demonstrates how the eight sections of the manuscript, given ‘the common factors of their lengths, the interconnections of the proportions among lengths of section groups, the subject matter of the text as it is disposed among the sections’ – how ‘all these aspects resonate among themselves, so to speak, that is, they form a harmony of relations among themselves.’ That ‘harmony of relations’ can morph in the work of different artists and poets into original designs, the sets of key quantities of which depend upon an irrational number, such as the golden ratio or the square root of two. Deep forms so developed become a way of ‘ensuring as best one can the integrity of any

Introduction

15

copies of it.’ Once one grasps the plan, any aberrations or changes over time can be detected. What then is the aesthetic aim here? For Stevick the goal in both the visual arts and long poems ‘appears to have been a formula by which a given measure and an underlying relational “given” will generate a plan that has not simply “just proportion,” but perfect mathematical coherence.’ When achieved at the highest level, ‘the formula is usually very simple, and the form … comprises a perfect coherence in a complete equilibrium,’ which we can take as ‘an aesthetic imperative within that culture.’ Filling in here, what is ‘best’ in the poetry is not simply the management of shaping quantity Stevick describes. Diction, metre, subject matter control, dialogue, the disposition and variation of formulas in collocation – all of that has to be best and is a ‘consistent part of the package, inherent in all the principal texts.’ At ‘the highest level of mastery, large forms … employ a kind of counterpoint to achieve development and resolution’ – a kind of ‘aesthetic excellence which Anglo-Saxons would not have achieved without knowing, and without valuing it.’ Whereas the aesthetic of Anglo-Saxon geometric art – think of carpet pages, for example – produces amazing, obvious complexity for eye and mind, that of geometrically determined literary form, as Robert Stevick reveals it, has an abstract, unobtrusive complexity based on either a number module or irrational numbers, most often an inventive employment of the harmony-inducing two true measures – the root or else further roots of two (found initially by taking the diagonal of a square) or else the golden ratio (found by taking the diagonal of a rectangle that is half a square and mapping it onto the square’s side from the midpoint of that side). The poet establishes a geometrical frame he translates into a total line count on one of its dimensions (so he needs to decide that end count in some harmonious or else modular way). That in turn makes possible, given further employment of compass and straight-edge, a number of commodular divisions, as Stevick brilliantly shows, that is, a proportioning of lines within and across sections from the first line to the last given the initial module or else the choice of a true measure as a constant.12 This level of formal design, of the sectioning of lines across a long narrative, is sophisticated and presents the poet with a particular number of fitts, a variable number of lines within each, an end-line count to which he must compose, and possible ways of establishing overlapping sectional patterns within the 12 See Robert D. Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms before A.D. 1000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

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narrative (that is, sequential groups of fitts whose lines add up to multiples of the module or else to a value reflecting the measure involved). Fitt numbering, then, is likely to be authorial and not always in harmony with our sense of narrative logic or structural breaks. The poet works out from within a sophisticated, generative form, fitting his material to that form, where formal sectioning or grouping has priority over mere narrative logic, much as God’s mind has priority over the human. Thus, if this is right, to pose scribal responsibility for fitt numbers when placement seems narratively odd, as Robert Fulk does, would be an insecure business, although clearly enough Beowulf, one of Fulk’s key exhibits, is likely to remain an unresolvable case in this debate regarding scribal or authorial responsibility. Lately I have come to think the poem has changed intellectually over time. Perhaps any original form marked by a good run of fitts has been deranged by narrative additions, alterations, or deletions, perhaps beginning with the Exordium as an addition to some version of the Hrothgar and Heorot opening, which in turn sets up the poem’s narrative pulse from Beowulf’s several arrivals among the Danes to his final departure, return home, and extended assertion of loyalty to Hygelac. Possibly an edited final third, the last episode from what may have been a Beowulf life cycle, has been attached to that, following Hygelac’s conferral of sub-kingship upon Beowulf (for Fulk and others the most ‘irrational’ fitt number placements appear after l. 2199). The narrative might then have been thoroughly reviewed so that idiosyncratic usage, even archaic usage, is consistent across the whole and with various effects desired in the placement of allusions and digressions (see note 14). Finally, an overall aesthetic unification may have been achieved by the kind of word and phrase ‘music’ for which Thomas Hart argues. But for most long poems, the kind of patterning Stevick discovers is keyed to fitt numbers and may highlight sections proportionally separated from each other or else sections that are in the overlap between two groupings. However, one’s discovery and understanding of such design does not rise or fall on an empirical count of existing, that is, surviving lines and divisions in the religious poems in question (and that they are religious poems may matter). Rather, discovering the form given good sections and their line counts, as well as an end count, determines how many lines are missing and where – or when a section has an extra line or two, or where a section number has gone missing. Again, to repeat, while this sophisticated production of form and internal divisions within a long narrative is a ghostly and even wondrous reality

Introduction

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discoverable by cognoscenti with the text’s divisions and line counts within divisions available to them, only occasionally does it produce literary and rhetorical effects for someone listening to a reading or a performance of the poem. Those effects are mainly ones that signal boundaries between proportionally determined sections, although the proportioning is not available without special aids to the mere listener (such as an emphatic beating out of lines, making them countable). That signalling includes homiletic and parable-like closure, clear turns in plot, demarcations between speeches, and rhetorical emphasis – that is, senses of temporary climaxes, endings, and beginnings. While not nearly as apparent, deep forms and their generative coherence are of the designing intellect. They are beautiful to the mind, in effect the beauties of mind projected, and thus aesthetic even if not immediately or richly apparent to the superficial senses of sound or to immediate perception of pattern and surface design. In the beautiful, visually appealing geometric arts ‘transparent complexity,’ according to Derek Hull, involves an inverse relationship with highlevel symmetry, symmetry in turn involving translation, rotation, and mirror reflection.13 As ornamentation increases, so does quality, whereas symmetry declines, provided that clarity is conserved at all observable scales. Indeed, clarity concerning complexity increases at ever smaller scales in the finest instances. Transparency means that one can unravel what at first glance, or even second and third appraisals, seems like fantastic complexity, yet not muddy. That unravelling is really a mode of fine particularization concerning design along frames and within quadrants and circles. Symmetry declines as complexity increases and as scale diminishes. Hull suggests the phrase ‘ordered chaos’14 for the degrees of variation one finds in the patterns of carpet pages – perhaps a desire for ‘free’ variation within apparent pattern for the artist (thus chaotic because not quite predictable and ordered because that is clearly the case). A nearly mystical impulse towards the complete filling of space is apparent: God the great geometer is everywhere and nowhere, circumference and the uncircumscribed. The art space is a plenum as is God and His creation. Although Neoplatonic, that idea does not seem to provoke among Irish and Anglo-Saxon artists (or their poetical peers) notions of platonic form and thus an aesthetic of approximation to transcendent form, where quality is a reflection of ever better approximation to pre-existing form never 13 Derek Hull, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Art: Geometric Aspects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003). 14 Hull, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Art, 140.

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completely graspable by the intuiting mind. Rather, one might speculate that in some way, through geometry, the forms they produce and work within are thought of as though God-given. One might even suggest that for the religious poets in this aesthetic God formed or in some sense designed the poems; the poets simply articulated a kind of dictation within God’s plan. Hull differs in orientation from Stevick’s work by hardly ever considering how the frame is generated geometrically; Stevick differs from Hull in not considering grids and the filling of space, especially through interlacing – a design feature in part inherited from earlier, northern peoples. Interlace itself is interesting in that regular interlace, as Hull describes it, usually follows four conventions: the requirement of a single, continuous chord; an over and under path at intersections; an orientating of turns or loops on a simple grid; and a uniform spacing of those turns. Those conventions in regular interlace produce a basket-weave of sorts. Irregular interlace involves uneven spacing productive of asymmetrical ellipses, elongated loops, medallion-like shapes, and room for zoomorphic forms in something like an open knot (the pentangle on Gawain’s shield in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is called an endless knot). Whether formed by geometric measures or not – and perhaps involved also with other ways of numerically arranging, ordering, balancing, and emphasizing material – Old English narrative poems at narrative levels of course have no trouble filling their space (the discipline is in doing so well given pre-established sections and line counts). If geometrically sectioned, properties of the true measure might proliferate in the ratios between various groupings of the sections – thus ‘mystically’ filling geometric space, so to speak. However, the literary analogues in narrative poems to transparent complexity in the visual, geometric arts are more important and could be set out as matters of style and diction: as chiastic patterns (any structure that reverses established elements, as in ABBA with the elements being words or phrases usually in parallel constructions), as ‘interlace’ perhaps (such as in an interchange of motifs), as repetition with a difference, as appositive variation and as parallels, contrasts and analogies at the level of scene, plot, and character. The more complex the better so along as clarity is conserved and even amplified at small scales in relation to large, that is, at the level of scene or moment in relation to plot, and then in line, phrasing and diction in relation to discrete passages of verse, then perhaps moving down to the level of compounding and to morphemic variation (undividable words and meaning units at the word level, such as ‘pre’-‘fix’ or ‘sub’‘set’), and even the phonemic (sound at the letter or even allophonic level,

Introduction

19

as in hard and soft ‘g’) in relation to line and phrase.15 For aesthetic effect, all of that relies greatly on some kind of proportioning and thus arrangement, perhaps even producing an abstract rhythm. A similar attention to aesthetic effect may be found in short poems, such as The Dream of the Rood. By attending to clear openings and closures, to changes of perspective, and to conventionally edited syntactical stops and beginnings, John M. Hill, in ‘Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation,’ exposes proportional and harmonic possibilities for both structure and form. Overall, the poem has an expansive cast: an opening of 27 lines, 94 lines of Cross talk, broken into a narrative first part and a second part of direct address to the dreamer, then 35 lines to the end which are all dreamer, further divided at line 144, producing a Coda, a concluding prayer to Christ. All of those divisions participate, along with the end-line count, in two kinds of proportional forms: an harmonic form of a 4 to 3 ratio – four groupings of three, thirteen-line sets each – separate ratios governing both parts of the Cross’s talk, and a recursive ratio, the so-called Fibonacci sequence, tied, from beginning to nearly the end, to the poem’s affective developments, to its emotional drama. The result of that analysis is an enhanced view of an aesthetically sophisticated interplay of proportional relations for a poem beginning with high verbal and imagistic artistry before settling into powerful narration and then the dreamer’s personal,

15 These paragraphs on Stevick and Hull come from my ‘Episodes Such as the Offa of Angeln Passage and The Aesthetics of Beowulf,’ Philological Review 34 (2008): 30–3, an issue honouring Robert D. Stevick. There in addition I argue that, aside from probably irrecoverable deep forms in the poem, if they once existed, or an aesthetic of surface proportionalities, as Thomas Hart argues in the current volume, there are other ways of aesthetically construing dramatic moments and asides. For the major digressions, for example, ‘the immediate, dramatic effects are usually four-fold : 1) the poet heightens the formal, even ritualistic weight of the social moment; 2) he establishes complex analogies and contrasts if the moment involves a story that in some way parallels a character or action or possibility in the foreground; 3) he characterizes the mind or mood of the passage’s speaker or singer – or else he inflects the mood of the halloccasion itself; 4) he produces a narrative sequence that values recursive and analogical patterns – largely chiastic ones – while emphasizing contingent complexity; that complexity in turn is valued but only insofar as clarity is conserved. Seen in terms of the first three effects, and according to the fourth, which contains a (largely mechanistic) standard of quality, the extended reference to Anglian Offa has little if anything to do with the Mercian Offa. Rather that passage, often taken as awkward or even as an interpolation, is a qualitatively rich moment in the hero’s return home’ (35–6).

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spiritual joy. The Dream of the Rood’s aesthetic, unique to itself but not in its general character to an Anglo-Saxon thought world, is a wonder to behold. Resting next to Elene in the Vercelli Book, The Dream of the Rood aesthetically joins its large-form companion (as Stevick has elucidated that form). Moreover, upon careful examination, one might find the general aesthetic they share inhabiting other poems long admired by readers of Old English. Pursuing beauty and truth via proportion in Beowulf and De consolatione philosophiae, in ‘Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth,’ Thomas E. Hart discovers principles governing word patterns in both works. He notes ‘observable regularities of quantity and quality’ given some intriguing, aesthetically reflective sets of words, their repetitions and derivatives. These are all small-scale, albeit expansive, proportional structures within, and thus in part homologically filling out, large-scale divisions of the poem. With schematic visualizations, that is, graphics, Hart more than adumbrates his sense of the Beowulf poet’s literate, sophisticated design above the level of line, and thus of metre, as well as above alliterative artistry and envelope patterns. If in fact the poet brings together versions of the Beowulf story already composed, effecting such a design overall might well be the poet’s primary aesthetic ambition (whatever else appears in the poem). What Hart finds is a poem-encompassing word music set in overlapping, however various relations, in three- and four-part proportionalities, given the poem’s total line count as an ever-present factor. Using those precise summaries as visual aids, Hart first establishes the existence of word patterns and then describes some of the design principles involved. Those include both symmetry and apparent closure as well as asymmetry and apparent non-closure within reticulate forms, given the poem’s total line count as the basis for setting secondary proportional relationships. Recursively, the components of a word pattern are more than just themselves: they exist as part of a textual pattern within which they are bound to each other and ‘to their ensemble.’ In turn, those relationships often participate in more than one, ‘numerically discrete’ pattern, that is, patterns that are not corollaries of them, making them ‘polyvalent.’ Finally, they include contextually specific, topical similarities – in short, meaning. When the words are ‘poetological,’ that is, referring to or expressing creative activity, adornment, and beauty, they implicate the entire poem as song and the poet’s making as theme. In this connection the word patterns are possibly heuristic.

Introduction

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Boethius’s word patterns and music, so to speak, are shown in several frames as a bravura performance, becoming a powerful parallel or even incitement for uncovering similar design in Beowulf, given the likelihood of shared intellectual worlds rather than direct influence (although a third figure, Virgil, could be adduced here). Important patterns in Beowulf involve ‘geardagum,’ ‘on þæm dæge þysses lifes,’ ‘þusenda,’ ‘hroden,’ ‘gebunden,’ ‘writan’ and its derivates and shaping. Through these and related patterns and collocations the poet suggests his conception of truth and beauty as well as the labour and wisdom required to achieve it. From spiritual and meditative interiority, and from ideas of a poem’s superior fitness to its cultural world, one can move, albeit gingerly, to psychological matters and therein a deeper aesthetic. Do applied, psychological approaches offer us engaging ways of assessing differential quality in Old English poems? Many such studies, because of their reductive purposes – more often than not because they would use poetry to illuminate a theory of psychological dynamics – do not address the question of quality. However, that failure is hardly a necessary one. Janet Thormann, in ‘The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry,’ has come to canonical Old English poems with a supple feel for rich and even profound developments. For her a fruitful, Lacanian evaluation of Old English poetry, especially of poetry depending upon ‘the immediacy of a voice speaking for and to a community,’ takes us far beyond Freudian mechanics of repression or sublimation – where one characterizes the poet as a psychological patient and his work as desires repressed and sublimated – to a series of aesthetically important insights. By focusing on ‘immediacy of voice, materialism of language, and the functioning of cultural memory,’ three important characteristics of Old English poetic language, Thormann shows how the best poems have a ‘direct emotional impact’ as they reveal ‘what it means to be a human subject in a social world.’ Various poems hold on to the past and are nostalgic; others refuse nostalgia and instead live with loss and ambivalence. There lies quality, especially when ambivalent identifications with what is lost or with the past or even with a near present are not foreclosed. By that criterion, ‘that is, the refusal to close up contradictions or to fix desire in static identifications, a poem like Juliana is a lesser work.’ Further, ‘if aesthetic value is created in sublimation, if the pleasure and work of art derive, in part, from lifting repression, the process of sublimation in Juliana remains incomplete.’ In her psychologically articulate, transparent, and also literarily sensitive

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study, Thormann would have us see that Beowulf and many of the Old English elegies demonstrate the high capacity of their brilliant language ‘simultaneously to open up and to veil the unconscious and hence to reveal subjectivity.’ Modern critics of Beowulf, mainly averse to psychological approaches, are happier with what we might call an aesthetics of reception, which of course depends upon how, aesthetically and structurally, one construes the object of attention. Yvette Kisor, in ‘The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire,’ has explored the poem’s critical reception in terms of what scholarly readers perceive about structure and what those perceptions reveal about something we might call reader response. Is the poem difficult or confused or has its reception been so? What is the reader’s role in defining the aesthetic of the object interacted with? Are there basic categories that guide critical appreciation, such as ‘wholeness,’ and is there a recoverable, perhaps even geometrically or proportionally formal aesthetic built into the poem that can help us appreciate it? After an overview of reader-response and reception positions, Kisor moves to the ways in which a modern reader has to fill in and perhaps even ‘write’ the many gaps he or she encounters in the poem. This raises an aesthetic view that abandons the ‘desire for wholeness’ and instead emphasizes ‘an interplay between elements present in the text and the desires of readers.’ For Tom Shippey, in ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote,’ the reader’s desires very soon meet an annoyingly but perhaps ethically profound series of unanswered questions, of informational failures and seeming confusions at a local level, at least if we bring a Homeric expectation of clarity to the poem. Beowulf lacks poetic qualities we have been taught, via Homer, to admire. Is the poet then simply inept or dealing with a different ethical and therein aesthetically presented world? There is always an ethical dimension to aesthetics: how one views the best object is also how one views the best social and political relationships. Aristotle’s writings on poetics are of a piece with his writings on honour, emotion, and politics. So, in this connection, where is the Beowulf poet and what is the cultural world like that he has rendered? By examining how the poet presents information, what he says and does not say, what he leaves seemingly confused or unclear, Shippey decides that despite all the apparent illogicalities, such as why it is that Ongentheow turned back when he heard of Hygelac’s warfare, ‘the poet’s concern is above all, and felt much more strongly than any concern with clarity or logical order of

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narrative, to express the ethos of a group’ – that of a war-making but not yet a hereditary aristocracy. This is an honourable society defined by values and behaviour, with understatement a prominent speech pattern and the way in which notable action is expressed. That ethos is morally neutral; it does not demonize the enemy; and it expresses itself in an ‘oral-formulaic style … [providing] an inexhaustible flow of phrases, collocations and even dislocations … that are less context sensitive than they are ethos specific.’ Finally, Beowulf ‘represents a poetic tradition, and a social tradition, which has vanished from the world, and like some unfortunate Amazonian tribe, may be written off as a mere evolutionary blind alley, no part of the development of mimesis, as traced by Auerbach, from Homer to Virginia Woolf.’ Its aesthetic, one might say, is ethically and stylistically archaic; its morality, at least insofar as the main characters are concerned, is usually neutral.

1 Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith* howell d. chickering

Most recent criticism of Judith considers the poem in terms of something else. Often it is the Vulgate story of Judith, or Ælfric’s homily upon it.1 Or the poem can be mapped against Anglo-Saxon politics, thanks to a comment made by Ælfric in his Letter to Sigeweard that equates the * Special thanks to Susan Niditch, Religion Department, Amherst College, for sharing her scholarship on women in the Old Testament, and Calista McRae, Amherst ’09, for her bibliographical assistance and critical insights into the Old English text. I am grateful to Nancy Mason Bradbury of Smith College and Carolyn Collette of Mount Holyoke College for helpful criticism of an early draft. A version of this essay was presented at the October 2006 Southeastern Medieval Association conference (SEMA) in Oxford, Mississippi, where responses from Patrick W. Conner and John D. Niles helped improve its final form. 1 See, for example, James F. Doubleday, ‘The Principle of Contrast in Judith,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971): 436–41; Carl T. Berkhout and James F. Doubleday, ‘The Net in Judith 46b–54a,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973): 630–4; Hugh Magennis, ‘Adaptation of Biblical Detail in the Old English Judith: the Feast Scene,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 84 (1983): 331–7, and his ‘Contrasting Narrative Emphases in the Old English Poem Judith and Ælfric’s Paraphrase of the Book of Judith,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 96 (1995): 61–6; Paul de Lacy, ‘Aspects of Christianisation and Cultural Adaptation in the Old English Judith,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97 (1996): 393–410. Ælfric’s Homily on Judith has been edited by Bruno Assmann, Angelsächsische Homilien und Heiligenleben, Bibliothek der angelsächsische Prosa, III (Kassel, 1889), reprinted with a supplementary introduction by Peter Clemoes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 102–16; and more recently by Stuart D. Lee online at http:// users.ox.ac.uk/~stuart/kings/main.htm, which has a more accurate text but lineates it as prose. Clemoes accurately describes Ælfric’s text as a ‘summary’ rather than a homily (Assmann reprint, xxvii–xxix). In this paper I use the text of Judith from Beowulf and Judith, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records IV (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), with occasional silent emendation or repunctuation. All translations are my own.

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Assyrians with the Danes.2 If one takes the text as a fragment, which it certainly is, one can hypothesize about the lost whole or treat its fragmentation and the fragmentation of Holofernes as metaphorically interchangeable. Once a critic goes outside the poem and puts it into context with other materials, interpretive possibilities flower like an exotic jungle.3 This is especially true when critics use non-medieval contexts. Lacanian interpretations have been popular, given the sexual and violent elements of the story. So too have been readings of its gender roles, their reversals, and slippages.4

2 Ælfric writes that Judith has her own book, between Tobias and Esther, about her own victory, which ‘ys eac on Englisc on ure wisan gesett eow mannum to bysne, þæt ge eowerne eard mid wæpnum bewerian wið onwinnendne here’ (‘it is also translated into English in our manner as an example for you men, that you defend your homeland against an attacking army’). The Old English Version of the Heptateuch: Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis, ed. S.J. Crawford , EETS, OS 160 (London, 1922), 22, text from MS. Laud Misc. 509. For discussion of Ælfric’s application of the story here and in the homily, see Mary Clayton, ‘Ælfric’s Judith: manipulative or manipulated?’ ASE 23 (1994): 215–27. 3 This is especially true when critics assume the meaning or implication of a word in one text is the same as in another text. For instance, in the poem the unusual descriptor ‘wundenlocc’ (‘curly-haired’), which refers to Judith at 77b and 103b and to the Hebrews at 325a, seems clearly a racial identification since it is applied to both, just as the word ‘Judith’ itself identifies the heroine as a Jew. In the obscene Riddle 25 ‘wundenlocc’ (again meaning ‘curly-haired’) describes a woman’s pubic hair. This has been taken by some critics as a context that permits highly sexualized interpretations of Judith. No one would want to deny the sexual elements in the Book of Judith. However, the scholarly consensus is that the Old English poem erases the biblical Judith’s sexual attractiveness and, unlike the patristic treatments of her, does not emphasize her as a symbol of chastity. Is the appearance of ‘wundenlocc’ in the riddle then at all relevant to the poem? I think not, and opt to stay inside the Judith story as the poem presents it. 4 Freud himself opened the way for such treatments of the biblical story, as Mary Jacobus describes in ‘Judith, Holofernes, and the Phallic Woman,’ in Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 110–36. She does not discuss the Old English poem in Lacanian terms, but others do. See John P. Hermann, Allegories of War: Language and Violence in Old English Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 173–81; Susan Kim, ‘Bloody Signs: Circumcision and Pregnancy in the Old English Judith,’ Exemplaria 11 (Spring 1999): 285–307; Norman Simms, ‘From Judith to Grendel and Beyond the Prepuce: The Blood of Menstruation, Decapitation and Circumcision,’ in his Sir Gawain and the Knight of the Green Chapel (Lanham, MD, New York, Oxford: University Press of America, 2002), 32–74; Heide Estes, ‘Feasting with Holofernes: Digesting Judith in Anglo-Saxon England,’ Exemplaria 15 (2003): 325–50; and Kate Koppelman, ‘Fearing My Neighbor: The Intimate Other in Beowulf and the Old English Judith,’ Comitatus 35 (2004): 1–21.

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Treated from these points of view, the text becomes exceedingly labile, self-inverting, and psychosexually complex. In our postmodern world it appears to some critics that Judith actually rapes Holofernes. At the very least, she appears to castrate him. Or else she metaphorically circumcises him as she beheads him. In one interpretation based on sign theory, the beheading episode is literalized not only as intercourse but also ‘as a perverse sort of impregnation,’ and the head that is carried in the food sack to Bethulia is the ‘outcome of symbolic pregnancy.’5 One may yearn to say that sometimes a head is only a head, but, in point of fact, we cannot easily limit its meaning as a sign when in the poem itself the word heafod is a deliberate and playful pun. If these excesses of critical exuberance arise mainly from the unusual nature of the full Judith story, then, given the hold it has exercised upon the Western imagination over the centuries,6 we can’t assume that such interpretations will cease any time soon. There is too much imaginative energy in the biblical story itself.

The Old English Judith is claimed along with other ‘warrior women’ to have Old Norse roots by Helen Damico in chapters 2 and 3 of her Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) and again in her ‘The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature,’ in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 176–90. Discussions of gender and heroism in the poem itself include Peter J. Lucas, ‘Judith and the Woman Hero,’ Yearbook of English Studies 22 (1992): 17–27; Patricia A. Belanoff, ‘Judith: Sacred and Secular Heroine,’ in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 247–64; and Hugh Magennis, ‘Gender and Heroism in the Old English Judith,’ in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), 5–18. Interpretations that treat the poem’s gender roles and boundaries as permeable or reversible, often in a political context, include Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, ‘Inversion and Political Purpose in the Old English Judith,’ English Studies 63 (1982): 289–93; Alfred G. Litton, ‘The Heroine as Hero: Gender Reversal in the Anglo-Saxon Judith,’ College English Association Critic 56 (1993): 35–44; Maria Flavia Godfrey, ‘Beowulf and Judith: Thematizing Decapitation in Old English Poetry,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1993): 1–43; Karma Lochrie, ‘Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith,’ in Class and Gender in Early English Literature, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University. Press, 1994), 1–20; and Mary Dockray-Miller, ‘Female Community in the Old English Judith,’ Studia Neophilologica 70 (1998): 165–72. 5 Kim, ‘Bloody Signs,’ 300, 301. 6 For a readable and wide-ranging treatment, see Margarita Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture (Hartford, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith

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The Old English poetic text is much more limited in scope and simpler in design than the apocryphal Book of Judith, yet it has a tremendous exuberance of its own. In the present essay I want to consider the poem on its own terms, in order to describe what is poetically remarkable about its celebratory energy.7 ‘Exuberance’ is not exactly a technical literary term, but we all know it when we see it. Forty years ago, Arthur Brodeur offered, quite unguardedly, this brief and passionate characterization: ‘Judith exhibits an intensity of feeling and an eloquence in conveying it unmatched in any other Anglo-Saxon poem. Its author was incapable of detachment … It is this complete emotional identification which gives his narrative its flaming vigor.’8 The 1960s are long past and we don’t use such overheated subjective language any more, but Brodeur’s words do seem to name what drives the overall behaviour of the text as a poetic construction. That behaviour is what I mean by its ‘exuberance.’ I will touch not only on the poem’s irony and temporal scheme, but also on other features such as its half-line rhymes at emphatic times, and its purple patches of pulsing polysyndeton. This rubric covers most of the important effects in the poem, certainly the most playful ones. I will conclude by suggesting

7 ‘Celebratory energy’ is Carolyn Collette’s felicitous phrase. Descriptions of the various literary properties of the poem appear in Judith, ed. B.J. Timmer, Methuen edition 1953, revised reprint in the Exeter Medieval English Texts series (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1978), 11–14; Alain Renoir, ‘Judith and the Limits of Poetry,’ English Studies 43 (1962): 145–55; Jackson J. Campbell, ‘Schematic Technique in Judith,’ ELH 38 (1971): 155–72; Jane Mushabac, ‘Judith and the Theme of Sapientia et Fortitudo,’ Massachusetts Studies in English 4 (1973): 3–12; Ian Pringle, ‘Judith: The Homily and the Poem,’ Traditio 31 (1975): 83–97; Constance B. Hieatt, ‘Judith and the Literary Function of Old English Hypermetric Lines,’ Studia Neophilologica 52 (1980): 251–7; Robert E. Kaske, ‘Sapientia et fortitudo in the Old English Judith,’ in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982), 13–29, notes at 264–8; Ann W. Astell, ‘Holofernes’s Head: tacen and teaching in the Old English Judith,’ AngloSaxon England 18 (1989): 117–33; Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘Style and Meaning in Judith,’ Notes & Queries n.s. 39 (1992): 16–19; Eric G. Stanley, In The Foreground: Beowulf (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 152–3 [on lines 159–66]; and Lori Ann Garner, ‘The Art of Translation in the Old English Judith,’ Studia Neophilologica 73 (2001): 171–83. Most particularly I must single out Mark Griffith’s edition of Judith in the Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies series (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), which synthesizes and refines the best prior literary criticism of the poem, and on which I have relied heavily. 8 Arthur G. Brodeur, ‘A Study of Diction and Style in Three Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poems,’ in Nordica et Anglica: Studies in Honor of Stefán Einarsson, ed. Allen H. Orrick (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 109.

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that the wholeheartedness of this exuberance exerts such strong tonal and ideational control that it thoroughly stabilizes the text when we read it on its own, rather than against other texts. This suggestion about wholeheartedness is more problematic than it may sound because not only is our text a fragment, the last 349 lines of a poem of unknown length, but also because its story and Judith’s character have been sharply simplified from the biblical version.9 Moreover, how we define the source here is a murky question. It is probably Jerome’s Vulgate with some readings from the Old Latin version of the Old Testament, but it is hard to sort them out exactly, while Thomas D. Hill, in his Speculum review of Mark Griffith’s excellent recent edition, suggests that the story is so far modified from the biblical text that the poet may not have worked from written sources at all and perhaps only heard the story in church.10 His intimate knowledge of the diction and type-scenes of secular heroic poetry is also a sort of source, or resource, as is his apparent familiarity with the genre of saints’ lives. That he successfully combines heroic poetry and hagiography, however, is not in doubt. And even though estimates of the lost prior text vary from one hundred to one thousand lines,11 the fragmentary nature of the poem is no barrier to the appreciative interpretation that I propose. Many critics have shown that the extant fragment is held together by a complex organization of internal echoes, contrasts, and parallels, both in its diction and its narrative structure.12 9 See Griffith, Judith, 55–8, for a convenient comparison between the Old English and Old Testament characters. For the Book of Judith I have mainly relied on Carey A. Moore, Judith: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Bible, vol. 40B (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985). 10 Griffith, Judith, 47–50; Hill review of Griffith, Speculum 75 (October 2000): 932. 11 Modern scholars who think around one thousand lines have been lost include Dobbie, Timmer, and Hieatt. Those who think that only about one hundred lines are missing include Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Lost Opening to the Judith,’ Modern Language Review 50 (1951): 168–72; David Chamberlain (who also reviews earlier scholarship on the question), ‘Judith: A Fragmentary and Political Poem,’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation, For John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese (Notre Dame, IN, and London: Notre Dame University Press, 1975), 135–59; Peter J. Lucas, ‘The Place of Judith in the Beowulf-Manuscript,’ Review of English Studies 41 (1990): 463–78; and Margarita Häcker, ‘The Original Length of the Old English Judith. More Doubt(s) on the “Missing Text”,’ Leeds Studies in English 27 (1996): 1–18; and Griffith, Judith, 3–4. 12 See for example such critics as Renoir, Campbell, Pringle, Kaske, Astell, and Tyler (all cited in note 7 above). Because of these properties of the fragment, I often refer to it as ‘the poem.’

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The action of the narrative is simple. We might consider it a two-part section complete in itself. The fragment begins when Judith is brought to the feast of Holofernes on the fourth day of her stay in the Assyrian camp (chapter 12:10 in the Vulgate). The soldiers carouse and Holofernes gets so drunk that he passes out. Alone with him in his tent, she prays at length to God for strength, then beheads the general with two strokes of his own sword. His soul immediately descends to Hell for all eternity. She and her handmaiden take his head back to Bethulia in the food sack they brought with them. As she approaches the shining city, she calls out to her people and announces their liberation from the Assyrians. They rush out to greet her. When she enters the city, she displays the head as a token of God’s help and blessing, and then incites the Hebrews to battle. In the second part of the fragment, they march vigorously through several type-scenes Griffith, Judith, 92, shows how the beginning and end of the fragment are bound together by deliberate repetitions. Adapting his display of these features, I use boldfaced italics for the thematically binding repetitions and half-line rhymes. (Often both features occur in the same words.) The repetition of ‘hehstan’ across the caesura of line 4 shows the complete contrast between the ‘highest’ Lord and the ‘highest’ terror from which He saves Judith. [ne] tweode gifena in ðys ginnan grunde. Heo ðær ða gearwe funde mundbyrd æt ðam mæran Þeodne, þa heo ahte mæste þearfe, yldo þæs hehstan Deman, þæt he hie wið þæs hehstan brogan gefriðode, frymða Waldend. Hyre ðæs Fæder on roderum torhtmod tiðe gefremede, þe heo ahte trumne geleafan a to ðam Ælmihtigan. Ealles ðæs Iudith sægde wuldor weroda Dryhtne, þe hyre weorðmynde geaf, mærðe on moldan rice, swylce eac mede on heofonum, sigorlean in swegles wuldre, þæs þe heo ahte soðne geleafan to ðam Ælmihtigan; huru æt þam ende ne tweode þæs leanes þe heo lange gyrnde. Ðæs sy ðam leofan Dryhtne wuldor to widan aldre, þe gesceop wind ond lyfte, roderas ond rume grundas, swylce eac reðe streamas ond swegles dreamas, ðurh his sylfes miltse.

(1b–7a)

(lines 341b–345)

For envelope patterns in Old English poetry, the seminal work is Adeline C. Bartlett, The Larger Rhetorical Patterns in Anglo-Saxon Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). See also Elizabeth M. Tyler, ‘How deliberate is deliberate verbal repetition?’ in Studies in English Language and Literature: ‘Doubt Wisely.’ Papers in honour of E.G. Stanley (London: Routledge, 1996), 508–30, which is about the Old English Phoenix but also applies to Judith.

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to the Assyrian camp, where the head soldiers (a clear pun in the Old English) stand round the tent in agonies of embarrassment at disturbing their general in what they mistakenly think is his lewdness. An Assyrian warrior finally ventures in, finds the headless torso, falls in a paroxysm to the ground, then tells his fellows that here is a token of their coming destruction. They throw their weapons down and flee the Hebrews, only to be cut down to the very last man. The Hebrews plunder the slaughter-field, and bring back to Bethulia Holofernes’ treasure and war-gear, which they bestow upon Judith as a reward.13 She gives thanks to them, and to God to whom her success is due. The poet gives thanks to God in similar language, and the fragment ends. The two episodes of the fragment reflect each other in their obvious thematic parallels and contrasts, which the poet develops with schematic gusto. For instance, Holofernes’ body, once divided into two parts, is both a token of God’s help and the Hebrew victory and a token of the Assyrians’ defeat. Judith announces the head as the first token, and, in ironic symmetry, the discoverer of the torso announces it as the second. Bold emphases like this are of a piece with the simplified conception of the two main characters. Holofernes is called a leader through various epithets, but morally he is described only as ‘diabolical’ and ‘lascivious’ [‘deofulcunda’ 61, ‘galferhð’ 62]. Once dead, the parts of his body become symbols of God’s greatness and grace. Judith’s character is much less complex than in the biblical story. There she is a rich widow, clever and devout. She sets out to save the Bethulians without revealing her plan. She lies to Holofernes, even dresses up and vamps for him a bit, and her speeches are glinting with delightful ironies. For instance, she tells him that if he will follow her words, ‘the Lord will do with thee a perfect thing’ (11:6). But the heroine of the poem is more ‘a romanesque statue,’ in Bernard F. Huppé’s memorable phrase, ‘chiseled in rigid simplicity, without personal expression, yet alive because she emblem[at]izes the heroic virtue of faith and its triumph over the forces of evil.’14 She is neither mendacious nor 13 For discussions of the treasure-giving at the end of the poem, see Estes, 340–2; Richard M. Trask, ‘Why Beowulf and Judith Need Each Other,’ In Geardagum 20 (1999): 75– 88; and Erin Mullally, ‘The Cross-Gendered Gift: Weaponry in the Old English Judith,’ Exemplaria 17 (2005): 255–84. Also pertinent is Christopher Fee, ‘“Beag” and “Beaghroden”: Women, Treasure and the Language of Social Structure in Beowulf,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 97 (1996): 285–94. 14 Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words: Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems ‘Vainglory,’ ‘The Wonder of Creation,’ ‘The Dream of the Rood,’ and ‘Judith,’ with Texts and Translations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), 157.

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seductive, nor does she join Holofernes in his feasting and drinking. She is not identified as a widow. Pious in prayer and vigorous in exhortation, after she beheads Holofernes she is given several heroic epithets that define her as ‘bold’ and ‘courageous,’ which her action certainly is, but beyond that she has only two basic character traits, both of which are emphasized at the beginning and end of the fragment in an envelope pattern: she is ‘gleaw’ (wise) and she has ‘trumne geleafan’ [firm faith]. Her inner spiritual beauty also shines out like a halo in the early and unusual epithet ‘ælf-scinu’ (14a).15

15 She is an ‘ides ellenrof’ (‘courageous woman’) at lines 109 and 146; ‘ellenþriste’ and ‘collenferhð’ at 133–4, both meaning ‘bold’; and ‘modigre’ (‘courageous’) at 334. Her courage may derive from her wisdom and faith, or may be considered another intrinsic quality. Kaske, ‘Sapientia et fortitudo in the Old English Judith,’ wants to see her wisdom and courage as representing the balanced binary theme of sapientia et fortitudo, but these two qualities, while touched on throughout the poem, are only paired once: ‘gleawe lare, / mægð modigre’ (‘wise in learning, courageous woman’) at 333b–34a. By contrast, her wisdom and faith are paired early and late, and it could be argued that her faith is her essential quality. Or it might be said that wisdom leads to faith, and faith leads to courage. The poem’s implicit emphasis on faith seems borne out by one more epithet: the much-debated ‘ides ælf-scinu’ (‘elfin-bright woman’) at line 14a. Probably meant as a definitional term, it, and the other descriptors of Judith and her adornmnts, have been analysed thoroughly by Kathleen Parker, ‘Is the Old English Judith Beautiful?’ AION: Filologia germanica [Naples: Istituto universitario orientali, Annali, Sezione germanica] n.s. 2:1–3 (1992): 61–77. Parker examines the question of her title from all sides, using the Dictionary of Old English data-base, and answers in the negative. She shows that there are no clear words for female loveliness in the poem, and that the adjectives for Judith’s brightness (‘torht,’ ‘beorht,’ etc., as well as ‘-scinu’) are best taken to refer to her inner spiritual beauty, traditionally figured as light. The supernatural connotation of the ‘ælf-’ element suggests further that Judith’s role in the poem is as ‘a conduit to the divine’ (77). Parker points out that this interpretation is coherent with those of Pringle, Chamberlain, Olsen, and Astell, and suggests that ‘ælf-scinu’ may be the verbal equivalent of a halo (77, 68). Is there anything more to Judith’s character in the poem? In the Douay-Rheims online version of the Vulgate http://www.drbo.org/lvb/chapter/18013.htm, chapter 13:6 reads, tantalizingly for today’s readers: ‘stetitque Iudith ante lectum orans cum lacrimis et labiorum motu in silentio’ (‘And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion of her lips in silence’). Griffith sees this verse as a ‘disturbing’ and ‘incongruous juxtaposition of sentimental emotion and homicidal intention’ (56), but that seems a highly subjective reading-in. Tears are often associated with prayer, and God’s destruction of his enemy through human agency is not usually thought of as homicidal. In the poem itself, at the crucial moment of slaying, we cannot in fact read into Judith’s character any further than the general terms that she and the poet use. He says that she was ‘sorely mindful of how she might most easily deprive that terrible one of life before

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This simplified conception of her character, which owes something to exegetical interpretations of the biblical Judith but remains poised between the literal and the allegorical,16 neatly fits the ironic pattern of the action that at once belittles the Assyrians and elevates the faithful handmaiden of God. That pattern always has the potential to become Schadenfreude. Thus the language that damns Holofernes to Hell is close to invective, while the ‘outstanding instance of dramatic irony’ and ‘the poet’s highest achievement,’17 namely, the scene outside the tent, is a richly comic moment. The Assyrians fear their general’s anger so much that they stand around coughing – whether noisily or delicately, scholars cannot agree18 – and grinding their teeth in anguish. In these ‘comic attempts to reconcile necessity with tact,’ T.A. Shippey writes, ‘the poet is surely inviting his readers to relish and find amusement in their shock and despair.’19 The poet’s comic sense arises not only from his joy at the discomfiture of evil but also from the fact that the Assyrians are conceived as a negative image of the Hebrews. Almost everything they do can be seen as a parody of heroic action. In a 1970 article that could be cited more frequently than it is, Fredrik J. Heinemann analyses lines 236–91 – from the Assyrians’ preparations for battle through their flight – as ‘a mock-heroic approach-

16

17 18

19

the unclean sinful one should awake’ (74b–77a). In her subsequent prayer to God, she says she is ‘sorely inflamed in heart and sad in mind, mightily afflicted with sorrows’ (86b–88a) and repeats this doublet at 93b–94a where she is ‘grievous in mind, heated in my heart’ (‘torne on mode, / hate on hreðre minum’). When the Lord grants her prayer, ‘Þa wearð hyre rume on mode / haligre hyht geniwod’ 97b–98a, which can be translated as ‘then hope became abundantly renewed for the holy one in her heart,’ with the difficult adverb ‘rume’ (‘abundantly’) indicating that she felt elation and relief. We might name her afflictions as shame at the thought of defilement, fear for her life, sorrow and anger at the prospect of the annihilation of Bethulia, but all these imputed feelings derive from her narrative situation, and are not intrinsic character traits. Astell, ‘Holofernes’s Head,’ 125, 131, says the poet is literalizing patristic allegorical interpretations of Judith. Griffth, Judith, 79–80, concurs, seeing the poem not as allegorical but with the exegetical commentaries silently shaping its narrative. Brodeur, ‘A Study of Diction,’ 108. Griffith, Judith, 136–7, opts for a noisy ‘hem and haw.’ Huppé, The Web of Words, 180, hears ‘timid’ and ‘delicate’ coughing. This is the only instance of ‘cohhetan’ in Old English. Shippey, ‘“Grim Wordplay”: Folly and Wisdom in Anglo-Saxon Humor,’ in Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Jonathan Wilcox (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 39, 40. In the same volume, John D. Niles, ‘Byrhtnoth’s Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture,’ sees ‘most images of laughter’ in Old English as ‘of this sardonic type’ (28).

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to-battle type scene.’20 He argues that many of the moments in this extended-type scene are parodic versions of the topoi found elsewhere in Old English battle poetry. To take only one example, the panicky speech by the discoverer of the body travesties (Heinemann’s term) the ‘brave retainer’ topos we find in Wiglaf’s speeches or Offa in The Battle of Maldon. A contemporary audience must have taken particular relish in this playing with the traditional elements of the genre, especially in contrast to the dignity and vigour of Judith’s speeches and the lively depiction of the Hebrews’ speed and Godspeed in battle. While the contrast between good and evil is not ironic in itself, objective irony is intrinsic to all tellings of the Judith narrative: the destroyer is destroyed, the head of the army loses his head. Even the sober Ælfric, after summarizing the biblical story in his homily, savours this type of irony with wry satisfaction: Iudith behet ærest þam wælhreowum ealdormen þæt heo wolde hine gebringan binnan to hire folce. Ac hit næs na ealles leas, þæt þæt heo him behet, þa þa heo bær his heaford binnan þam weallum and þam folce aeteowde hu hire fylste God. Þam sy a wurðmynt to worulde! Amen.21

(418–23)

[Judith had first promised that bloodthirsty leader that she would bring him within [Bethulia] to her people. But it was by no means entirely a lie, what she promised him, when she bore his head within the walls and showed the people how God had helped her. Glory be to Him forever throughout the world! Amen.]

The structure of the poem depends even more importantly upon dramatic irony, those moments when the poet shares with us knowledge that the 20 Heinemann, ‘Judith 236–291a: A Mock Heroic Approach-to-Battle Type Scene,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 71 (1970): 83–96. Type scenes in Judith have also been analysed by Donald K. Fry, ‘The Heroine on the Beach in Judith,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 68 (1967): 168–84, and ‘Type-Scene Composition in Judith,’ Annuale Medievale 12 (1972): 100–19. Although overly taxonomic in its approach, Heinemann’s article clearly contradicts Eric G. Stanley’s assertion that ‘the prospecting of Old English poetry for parody yields not so much as one firm nugget.’ See Stanley’s ‘Parody in Early English Literature,’ Poetica 27 (1988): 1–69, quote at 7. 21 Assmann, 115, with transcription corrections from Lee (note 1 above).

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characters do not have. Mark Griffith notes that this type of irony is not used by the Vulgate narrator but that it has a focused moral function in the poem.22 It tells us how to evaluate the action in the light of God’s eternal truth even as it takes place in narrative time. Thus, when Judith first comes to Holofernes, the Assyrians are called his ‘weagesiðas’ (16b), his ‘companions in woe.’ Upon finishing the poem, we realize that this ‘woe’ is not merely the misery they have inflicted upon the Hebrews, but also the woe they will shortly suffer. Three lines after this double meaning, as they sit drinking, the poet makes his first ironic aside: hie þæt fæge þegon, rofe rondwiggende, þeah ðæs se rica ne wende, egesful eorla dryhten.

(19b–21a)

[They, fated to die, drank that [drink], brave shield-warriors, though their general, terrible lord of men, did not expect it (i.e., that they would die)].

These asides continue throughout the poem, at lines 59b–61a, 63–5, 272b, and notably at 274b: the warriors outside the tent hope to waken their lord, but that hope ‘him wiht ne speow’ [did them no good at all]. Such confident anticipations occasionally lead the poet into scornful jeering, as at 64b–65:

on eorðan unswæslicne,

hæfde ða his ende gebidenne swylcne he ær æfter worhte

[He had then attained his end on earth, unpleasantly, just such an end as he had earlier worked toward].

He is still unbeheaded at this point. Here the past perfect is applied to the event still to come, and evil’s impetus toward self-destruction is acknowledged with scorn. God’s transcendence over human time is also seen in the manipulation of tenses when Judith makes her joyous and confident proclamation to the Bethulians as she enters the city: ‘Ic eow secgan mæg þoncwyrðe þing, þæt ge ne þyrfen leng 22 Griffith, Judith, 64–7, 91–2, and throughout his textual commentary.

Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith murnan on mode. Eow ys Metod bliðe, cyninga Wuldor; þæt gecyðed wearð geond woruld wide, þæt eow ys wuldorblæd torhtlic toweard ond tir gifeðe þara læðða þe ge lange drugon.’

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(152b–58)

[‘I can tell you a thank-worthy thing, that you no longer need to mourn in your hearts. God is pleased with you, the Glory of kings; it has become known throughout the wide world, that bright glory-fame, [is] approaching you and glory [is] granted [to you] for those afflictions that you long suffered.’]

The present tense at the end of her speech may have future force, but the past tense of ‘þæt gecyðed wearð’ shows us that the victory is in some sense already accomplished. At this point, she hasn’t even shown them the head yet. After they rush to greet her, she displays it as a ‘behðe’ [a token] and she rallies them to battle, proclaiming victory in God’s present tense: ‘—… Fynd syndon eowere gedemed to deaðe, ond ge dom agon, tir æt tohtan, swa eow getacnod hafað mihtig dryhten þurh mine hand.’

(195b–98)

[‘… Your enemies are condemned to death, and you [shall] have renown, glory at battle, as mighty God has signified to you through my hand.’]

The outcome is not in doubt, and it has been implicit since the opening of the fragment, when the poet says that ‘There she then readily found protection from the famous Lord’ (2b–3a). This double time-scheme allows for more effects than just dramatic irony. As readers of the second episode (the Hebrew attack and Assyrian response), we float above the exciting action-writing, detached but interested even though the outcome is foreknown, and capable of viewing the action from either side. The poem in fact switches its viewpoint back and forth between the two sides with increasing frequency as the battle comes to an end. Perhaps the most energetic example of this manipulation of

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viewpoint occurs as the Hebrews are charging toward the Assyrian camp, about forty lines before the discovery of the headless torso: Swa ða magoþegnas on ða morgentid ehton elðeoda ealle þrage, oðþæt ongeaton ða ðe grame wæron, ðæs herefolces heafodweardas, þæt him swyrdgeswing swiðlic eowdon weras Ebrisce.

(236–41a)

This translates as ‘Thus constantly on that morning the warriors pursued the foreigners, until those who were fierce, the head-guardians of that army, perceived that the Hebrew men displayed to them mighty swordswings [sing. with pl. sense].’ It is already amusing that the leaders don’t perceive the attack right away, but the syntax is further delayed and inverted in the Old English, so that literally it reads: ‘perceived the headguardians that mighty sword-swings showed them the Hebrew men.’ This laborious syntax comically mimics the ineptitude and imperceptiveness of ‘those who were fierce’; equally, we can regard it as comically periphrastic litotes for ‘they saw their men being cut down.’ And then there is the lovely pun of ‘heafodweardas,’ which usually means ‘leaders’ or ‘bodyguards’ but here, with obvious and gleeful irony, anticipates the Assyrian discovery that there is no more head to guard. The poet is delighted to capitalize on this play between ‘head’ and ‘chief,’ doing so again later when ‘the greatest part of the total number (or head count) of the Assyrian leaders fell to the dirt’: þær on greot gefeoll se hyhsta dæl heafodgerimes Assiria ealdorduguðe

(307–9)

‘Heafodgerimes’ here is, as Ann Astell says, ‘a final, irresistible pun’ (Astell, 132). It makes clear for one last time that the body of the Assyrian army lacks its head, Holofernes, and his head men. By contrast, of course, Judith has quite a head on her shoulders, always ‘gleaw on geðonce’ and firm in her faith. This self-delighting wordplay goes hand in hand with the poet’s artful management of pace. Constance Hieatt has shown in detail how the hypermetric and regular-length lines alternate in envelope patterns of echo-words throughout the poem, reinforcing the parallels and contrasts

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between Judith and Holofernes.23 Overall, this combination of metres gives a leisurely pace to the poem, but the narrated events are consistently described by adverbs of speed: ‘snude,’ ‘ofoste,’ ‘ædre,’ ‘fromlice.’ (This is another indication of the double time scheme.) More importantly perhaps, as Ian Pringle notes, amid ‘the steady, inexorable movement of the narrative’ there is ‘a very keen sense’ of just how long the poet can ‘afford to delay each step in the action in order to heighten the feeling of satisfied expectation when the climactic moments come.’24 But the hypermetrics do more than help the poet control his timing. Thomas A. Bredehoft, in Early English Metre, demonstrates how the dense hypermetrics in the first one hundred lines support, indeed encourage, an ‘intensified sound patterning’ that comes through the added ‘use of rhyme, secondary alliteration, cross alliteration, and cluster alliteration.’ He explains these sonic enrichments as creating ‘at the very least, a kind of emphatic effect’ as well as slowing us down to pay close attention to the beginning. By contrast, the last 250 lines ‘really do seem to hurry along’ to draw to a close what began in Holofernes’ tent.25 This larger shift of pace is paradoxical in its mimesis, as the Assyrians seem paralysed within the quickly moving brief sentences, which routinely begin in the b-verse. These added emphatic effects can also be mimetic in a different way. Enriched alliteration can stand as a solemn icon: Bredehoft cites crossalliteration in the first four lines of Judith’s prayer as a deliberate rhetorical heightening that gives it ‘the feeling of almost supernatural eloquence’ (65). I have boldfaced the alliterators: ‘Ic ðe, frymða God ond frofre Gæst, Bearn Alwaldan, biddan wylle miltse þinre me þearfendre, Ðrynesse Ðrym. Þearle ys me nu ða …

(83–6)

23 Hieatt, ‘Judith and the Literary Function of Old English Hypermetric Lines,’and Tyler ‘Style and Meaning,’ both cited in note 7 above. 24 Pringle, ‘Judith: The Homily and the Poem,’ 93. See further Griffith, Judith, 83–7. This appreciation of the poet’s timing is not shared by all readers. Burton Raffel sees the hypermetric lines in Judith as a sort of padding that leads to verbosity, even though he acknowledges that they serve both to delay the action and to drive it forward. See his ‘Judith: Hypermetricity and Rhetoric,’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. Nicholson and Frese, 124–34. 25 Bredehoft, Early English Metre (University of Toronto Press, 2005), 63–6, quotations at 66. He takes the definitions of these various forms of enriched alliteration from their extensive description in Griffith’s edition.

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‘I wish to pray to you, God of Creation and Spirit of Joy, Son of the Almighty, for your mercy to me in my need, O Glory of the the Trinity,’ reads the first sentence, which Thomas D. Hill has shown to have affinities with St Patrick’s Lorica.26 This suggests something of the poet’s great range of effect in employing verbal devices. The most exuberant devices are surely his vigorous polysyndeton and his half-line rhymes for thematic emphasis, and he wields them with such freedom because he has so firmly established the central concept of the entire poem. When the Assyrian drinking begins in earnest, the poem noisily breaks into enthusiastic polysyndeton (boldfaced and italicized): Ða wearð Holofernus, goldwine gumena, on gytesalum. Hloh ond hlydde, hlynede ond dynede, þæt mihten fira bearn feorran gehyran hu se stiðmoda styrmde ond gylede, modig ond medugal, manode geneahhe bencsittende þæt hi gebærdon wel.

(21b–27)

[Then Holofernes became, gold-giver to men, merry from drinking. He laughed and clamored, roared and made a din, so that the sons of men might hear from afar how the strong-minded stormed and yelled, proud and mead-drunk, often exhorted the bench-sitters that they should cry out in joy.]27

The repeating sounds and rhythms of the polysyndeton – line 23, alliterating on ‘hl,’ is particularly energetic – create a powerful sense of Holofernes’ wild and violent lack of control. There is a similar passage, with a different effect because it has a different sense, when the Hebrews come out to meet Judith. There the polysyndeton is more elaborate:

wið þæs fæstengeates

Here wæs on lustum, folc onette,

26 Hill, ‘Invocation of the Trinity and the Tradition of the Lorica in Old English Poetry,’ Speculum 56 (1981): 259–67. 27 This last verb can also be translated as ‘behave themselves well.’ Either injunction is heavily ironic.

Poetic Exuberance in the Old English Judith weras wif somod, wornum ond heapum, ðreatum ond ðrymmum þrungon ond urnon ongean ða Þeodnes mægð þusendmælum, ealde ge geonge.

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(161b–66a)

[The army was in joys, the people hastened past the city gate, men and women together, in a multitude and a crowd, in troops and powers pressed and ran toward the maiden of the Lord by the thousands, old and young.]

Their tumultous rushing forward is mimetically enhanced, Griffth notes, by the repetition of words for ‘crowd,’ and thus, in his happy phrase, ‘Stylistic inflation imitates the magnitude of the crowd’ (85). In the earlier drunkenness passage, there is also exuberant play on the notion of Holofernes drowning his men in drink, as if they were slain by death (which they will be), until like their own cups they are emptied of all good: Swa se inwidda ofer ealne dæg dryhtguman sine drencte mid wine, swiðmod sinces brytta, oðþæt hie on swiman lagon, oferdrencte his duguðe ealle, swylce hie wæron deaðe geslegene, agotene goda gehwylces.

(28–32a)

[Thus the wicked one through the long day drenched his retainers with wine, the mighty giver of treasure, until they lay in a swoon, all his troop completely flooded, as though they were slain by death, emptied of every good.]

The emphatic device most noticeable to readers of Old English poetry, however, is not polysyndeton but rather the intermittent yet clearly intentional half-line rhymes. They stand out because they are not intrinsic to the poetic form.28 They seem always used to intensify the sense of the line,

28 Rhymed half-lines and internal rhymes within half-lines are not unique to Judith, however. Elizabeth Sklar points to such features in ‘The Battle of Maldon and the Popular Tradition: Some Rhymed Formulas,’ Philological Quarterly 54 (1975): 409–18, and Patrick W. Conner has called my attention to the cascade of rhymed half-lines in

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as when, with metathesis of ‘r’ and ‘w,’ the Hebrews respond to Judith’s exhortation: ‘Þa wearð snelra werod snude gegearewod’ 199 [Then the troop of keen ones became quickly prepared]. Or later at 231, when ‘ecgum gecoste slogon eornoste’ [with trusty edges they fiercely struck down] the Assyrian warriors. The most astonishing use of half-line rhymes, and my final example of poetic exuberance, comes when Judith takes her second sword-stroke:

105

110

115

120

Sloh ða wundenlocc þone feondsceaðan fagum mece, heteþoncolne, þæt heo healfne forcearf þone sweoran him, þæt he on swiman læg, druncen ond dolhwund. Næs ða dead þa gyt, ealles orsawle; sloh ða eornoste ides ellenrof oðre siðe þone hæðenan hund, þæt him þæt heafod wand forð on ða flore. Læg se fula leap gesne beæftan; gæst ellor hwearf under neowelne næs ond ðær genyðerad wæs, susle gesæled syððan æfre, wyrmum bewunden, witum gebunden, hearde gehæfted in hellebryne æfter hinsiðe. Ne ðearf he hopian no, þystrum forðylmed, þæt he ðonan mote of ðam wyrmsele, ac ðær wunian sceal awa to aldre butan ende forð in ðam heolstran ham, hyhtwynna leas. Hæfde ða gefohten foremærne blæd Iudith æt guðe, swa hyre God uðe, swegles Ealdor, þe hyre sigores onleah.

(103b–24b)

Cynewulf’s Elene, 1236–50. See The Vercelli Book, ed. George Philip Krapp, AngoSaxon Poetic Records II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 100. Bredehoft, ‘Old English and Old Saxon Formulaic Rhyme,’ Anglia 123 (2005): 204–29, shows that verse-internal rhyme could replace double alliteration in both corpora, and seems to have been present, off and on, from the first. Perhaps rhymes are best regarded as special instances of the general feature of echo-words, which occur throughout Old English poetry in various patterns, from remotely repeating words to verbatim refrains. Their effect in Judith is to emphasize the sense very pointedly, whereas in the Elene passage Cynewulf submerges himself as a Christian poet in a highly repetitive soundtexture that stands as a sonic icon for the salvific power of the True Cross.

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[Then the curly-haired one struck that enemy harmer, the hostile-thinking one, with the decorated sword so that she cut through half his throat, so that he lay in a swoon, drunken with a gaping wound. He was still not dead then, not completely soulless; then in earnest she struck, the courageous woman, a second time that heathen hound, so that his head went rolling forth upon the floor. The foul torso lay behind, dead; his soul went elsewhere under the deep cliff and was brought low there, sealed in torture forever after, wound round with snakes, bound up in torments, cruelly imprisoned in hell-fire after the journey there. He had no need at all to hope, enwrapped in darkness, that he might ever [escape, understood] from that worm-hall, but there he must dwell for ever and ever without end in that dark home, deprived of all hope of joy. [She] had then won by fighting pre-eminent fame, Judith at battle, as God granted her, the Ruler of heaven, who granted her victory.]

Off goes Holofernes’ soul, riding a long and rapid sentence down to Hell on the sonorous rhymes of lines 113 and 115, which notably contain both rhyme and cross-alliteration. The poet does not skimp on emphasizing the permanence of the soul’s residency there, either. He then rhymes ‘guðe’ with ‘uðe’ (in another cross-alliteration) to underscore that it was God who ‘granted’ Judith victory at ‘battle.’29 However, the most astonishing and imaginative use of rhyme is in line 110, where it is actually an offrhyme, but, as Bredehoft says, is ‘probably the most effective off-rhyme in all of Old English verse.’ I cannot improve upon his analysis: ‘the “hund”/“wand” off-rhyme pair implicitly evokes, for readers or listeners, each of the corresponding true rhymes, calling to mind both the “hand” of Judith, and the “wund” of Holofernes. As the passage insists, this crucial moment of separation (Judith from Holofernes; head – and soul – from body) is simultaneously a moment of binding (Holofernes’s soul is bound 29 The word ‘guðe’ of course also directly prefigures the coming battle and the Hebrew victory.

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in hell), and the use of rhyme and secondary alliteration serves to emphasize the binding aspects of the passage through a kind of linguistic or poetic interlacing.’30 Bredehoft shows convincingly that the poet’s wordplay here is entirely of a piece with his central concept. I see such integration throughout the poem, and therefore I would characterize the poem as wholehearted. I use the word ‘wholehearted’ because it is the combination of all these special effects that creates the sense of exuberance. That exuberance is playful and serious at the same time, and it can be so because the poet knows so firmly what he is about. He is in full tonal and ideational control of his material, something that one might not say of every exuberant poet. These claims arise from reading the text on its own as a poem, or at least as a poetic episode, that is artistically complete in itself. I have tried to track the energy of the Old English poetic text with an appreciative eye and ear for its own literary effects and the sheer élan of their execution. Its confident exuberance takes many forms, large and small, as I have tried to show, all of which stabilize and reinforce the poem’s simple central themes of Judith’s wisdom and faith, and God’s mercy and grace towards His faithful.

30 Bredehoft, Early English Metre, 64–5.

2 Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle tiffany beechy

My use of the word aesthetic is meant to invoke not a notion of transcendent ‘beauty’ with positive ontological status, but rather the twentiethcentury renovation of the word to denote the cognitive and sensory effects of all kinds of stimuli, which necessarily constitute signs.1 In treating aesthetic effect in language, linguistic analysis, that of Roman Jakobson in particular, provides key technical tools. One of Jakobson’s definitions of the ‘poetic function’ of language is that ‘the word [is] felt as a word,’ bearing what the Indo-Europeanist Calvert Watkins calls a ‘reflexive indexical function,’ pointing to itself rather than outside itself to an addressee or an addresser or anything else.2 The poetic function may inform genres other than self-conscious verse, helping structure many kinds of messages, from political slogans to medieval law codes. At least since Tolkien’s ‘The Monsters and the Critics’ we have recognized the poetry of a work like Beowulf in Old English.3 The text evinces a regular metre, treats a heroic story comparable to other narratives in verse, and rewards structural scrutiny with ever-deeper layers of significance. But poetry is a far more widespread phenomenon than modern treatments of Old English verse lead us to believe, especially metrical studies that take Beowulf as the standard of regularity. In Jakobson’s 1 This definition and the critical praxis it implies come to me by way of Helen Vendler, who for her part credits Adorno. See Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1–6. 2 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 378; Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29–30. 3 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95.

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terms, Beowulf is simply the most heavily dominated by the poetic function, whereas, for instance, in the vernacular homilies, there are also admixtures of the conative (focus on the addressee, appropriate for didactic discourse) and the referential (there is matter to be taught). But the poetic function is prominent almost everywhere in the corpus, no doubt due in part to the culture’s residual orality (a state that would persist even past the Renaissance). What follows is part of a larger project that seeks to characterize the poeticalness that permeates the generically diverse texts of the Old English corpus, and to engage these texts in rigorous, linguistically informed aesthetic evaluation. The three (highly poetic, though not uniformly metrical) genres discussed here, Old English law, charm, and riddle, have different but mutually illuminating ways of constructing the relationship between signifier and signified, and this difference attests to the sophisticated verbal culture of the Anglo-Saxons. I: Bind and Loose The most fundamental characteristic of the earliest English law is the principle of the balanced equation: action and compensation. In the examples that follow I have highlighted in bold the equated values.4 Godes feoh 7 ciricean XII gylde. (1) [God’s property and the church’s (is to be compensated) with 12-fold compensation.] Gif eage of weorð, L scillingum gebete. (42) [If an eye becomes gouged out, let him pay with 50 shillings.] Gif man gekyndelice lim awyrdeþ, þrym leudgeldum hine man forgelde. (64) [If a person damages the genital organ, let him pay (with) three person-prices.]

4 Quotations of the laws of Æthelberht, Hloþhere and Eadric, and Wihtred are from Lisi Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Unless otherwise specified, translations (of these laws only) are hers as well, because the language is highly ambiguous and Oliver’s translation is based on comparative analysis with cognate material. Statutes are cited according to Oliver’s enumeration, not by page number.

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The compensation-based system of Æthelberht sets up statutes as statements of equivalent values – ‘Gif eage of weorð, L scillingum gebete’ [If an eye becomes gouged out, let him pay with 50 shillings] (42) – the structure of which a reader can rely on throughout the text once he or she perceives it. The code also clearly conforms to an abstract verbal structure in all but the first seven statutes (which, as Oliver asserts, constitute the latest addition [61]): Gif + CONDITION* + COMPENSATION† * (usu. with a verb in 3p. subj. or indic.) †(usu. in scillingas, but sometimes in gold or other moveable wealth, including women) The repeated statute structure can be compared to the unit of the line in oral poetry, and the two elements within the statute (the equated, balanced values) to the two separate verses that constitute the line, each with its own set of constraints. Just as the lines of Old English poems are demarcated not by graphic representation (lineation) but by their metrical structure, so are the early law statutes distinguished one from another by their structure. Editors give them numbers, but in the manuscripts they are written continuously, as Oliver’s diplomatic transcription conveniently shows (181–94). The equivalence-based system of Æthelberht’s code, even before we examine its preponderance of more localized poetic devices, is a clear example of Jakobsonian poetic structure: What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function? … The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure.5

In Æthelberht’s statutes, the constituents highlighted above, which are repeated from statute to statute, become equated values by which the poetic text is parsed or measured. 5 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 71 (boldface mine).

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Further, however, because of the apparent structure of the code, because of the artificial repetitions, the otherwise simply asserted, referential equations made by the individual statutes are promoted to the status of poetic equivalence as well. One is led to read them as though the verbal equation were merely an affirmation of a priori equivalence, because they fit into the set pattern of the law’s utterance. The structure of the law code, therefore, generates authority and hence binding force for the statutes it asserts. Patterned language creates an objective correlative for the order one wishes to impose on the world. Within the structure of Æthelberht’s code with its parallel clauses, less  regular but recognizably poetic structure further underwrites the authority of the system. Again, in a residually oral culture, poetic language often equals authoritative language. Alliteration is the device most familiar from classical Old English poetics. It appears throughout Æthelberht, including in the sections Oliver considers, based on the linguistic evidence (notably the use of the archaic dative of quantity, scillingum) to be the oldest.6 Gif banes blice weorðeþ, III scillingum gebete. (34) [If exposure of a bone occurs, let him pay with 3 shillings.] Gif banes bite weorð, IIII scillingum gebete. (35) [If cutting of a bone occurs, let him pay with 4 shillings.]

The alliteration is often quite complex, involving word pairs locally, as well as patterns that span the entire sequence. In the second example, I have grouped alliterating (and assonance-linked, see below) words with parentheses to show the local alliterative structure; I have underlined the parallel finite verbs, which are linked both through alliteration and assonance in a complex way: Gif man mannan ofslea, agene scætte 7 unfacne feo gehwilce gelde. (30) [If a person should kill someone, let him pay (with) his own money or unblemished property, whichever.]

6 See Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law, 32–4 for a discussion of the archaic ‘dative of quantity.’

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Gif (friman wið fries mannes) (wif geligeþ, his wer)7(gilde abicge), 7 (oðer wif his agenum) (scætte begete) 7 (ðæm oðrum æt þam) gebrenge. (31) [If a freeman lies with a free man’s wife, let him buy (him/her) off (with) his/ her wergild and obtain another wife (for the husband) (with) his own money and bring her to the other man at home.]

The verbs form an echoic string of their own, forming a syntactic figure as well as a phonetic one using both assonance and alliteration. The assonance extends to other words as well, such as wergilde above. Another very common device in Æthelberht is the figura etymologica, a kind of word pair that makes use of an actual- or false-cognate similarity in the root of each member to create a figure in which meaning and phonetic/ morphological likeness seem ‘always already’ linked, prior to this particular sequence. In the following examples, two words thus appear to have the same root. They suggest some radical similarity, even identity, between them, and further, they figure inevitability – the totalitarianism of the law. Gif cyning mannes ham drincæþ 7 ðær man lyswæs hwæt gedo, twibote gebete. (9) [If the king drinks at a person’s home, and a person should do anything seriously dishonest there, let him pay two(-fold) restitution.] Gif frigman cyninge stele, IX gylde forgylde. (10) [If a freeman should steal from the king, let him compensate with 9(-fold) compensation.] Gif frigman freum stelþ, III gebete, 7 cyning age þæt wite 7 ealle þa æhtan. (15) [If a freeman steals from a freeman, let him pay 3(-fold), and the king obtains (lit. ‘possesses’) that fine or all the possessions.]8 7 I have placed the parenthesis at the compound boundary for clarity’s sake; both the common scribal practice of alienating compounds and the phonology of compound structures (being more easily alienable than, say, the morphosyntactic structures of a finite verb) provide some insurance against illegibility. 8 Oliver suggests that in early Old English, and (represented by 7, the equivalent of the modern ampersand [&]) could function either as a conjunctive ‘and’ or as an adversative ‘or’ (65).

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Alliteration, the figura etymologica, and the use of local or discrete word pairs along with more global patterns are characteristic of the homilies as well, and since the laws constitute the older tradition, it is logical to infer that the homilies drew either on the laws or on a discourse of which the laws were a part. Eduard Sievers’s seemingly forgotten Sagvers comes to mind as a possible descriptor for this common, irregular, but still poetic discourse. It is not classical poetry, but it is highly poetic, characterizing much language that has been neglected from an interpretive and aesthetic or formal standpoint because of the catch-all label ‘prose.’9 The tenth- and early eleventh-century laws, influenced and often written by Wulfstan, display the basic poetics of the laws we have already seen in the earlier ones – word pairs, alliteration patterns, balanced equations – developed to Wulfstan’s characteristic degree of stylistic effect. To this inventory Wulfstan adds the technique of lexical negation, juxtaposing a word with its ‘un-’ antonym, for instance, riht and unriht (‘right’ and ‘unright’). I quote from II Cnut, because Wulfstan is associated most squarely with this body of law.10 Ðæt is þonne ærest, þæt ic wylle, þæt man rihte laga upp arære & æghwylc unlaga georne afylle, & þæt man aweodige & awyrtwalige æghwylc unriht, swa man geornost mæge, of þysum earde, & arære up Godes riht. (1) [That is then foremost what I desire, that a person should uphold right law and eagerly oppose any ‘un-law,’ and that a person weed out and uproot any ‘unright,’ as earnestly as one may, from this earth, and hold up God’s ‘right’ (=law).]

Wulfstan’s opening statute is picturesque in many ways (notably the two horticultural images for ‘uprooting’ unriht and several alliteration patterns). The double antithesis, however, constitutes a ring composition that asserts riht as the central concept of earthly law and God’s. Humanity is to hold up right law, cast down un-law, weed out and uproot un-right from the earth.

9 See Dorothy Bethurum, ‘Stylistic Features of the Old English Laws,’ Modern Language Review 27 (1932): 269–70 and 276 for a concise history and description of Sagvers. 10 See Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West (Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon Press, 1999). Quotations from II Cnut are from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, CD-ROM (University of Toronto, 2004), LawIICn. Translations are my own, and citation is by statute number.

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The directional particles (up, down, and out in Modern English) take us in every direction, which is even clearer in the Old English, as we are to hold up (‘upp aræran’) the right law, cast down (afyllan) un-law, and then, since two roughly synonymous uprooting verbs are used (‘aweodige & awyrtwalige’), one imagines we are to cast away un-right first to one side and then to the other. This schematic even mimics the tracing of the cross, and is reminiscent of the strong spatial component of many of the charms. The final phrase, ‘& arære up Godes riht’ [and hold up God’s right], in repeating the initial verb (upp aræran) suggests that performing all of the above as regards earthly law culminates in upholding the law of God as well. The riht of God at the end and the riht of man at the beginning open and close the ring structure, in rihte laga (‘right law’) and Godes riht (‘God’s right/law’). Coupled with the lexical negations, the structure asserts that if you eradicate the antitheses of riht and laga, as it instructs, you end up with Godes riht. This construction poetically aligns itself with a Christian Augustinian world view in which evil is but the absence (the unfactor) of good, and in which the world of mortal life is characterized by the un-state, flesh having fallen away from the good. Gif hwa Godes flyman hæbbe on unriht, agyfe hine to rihte. (66) [If anyone should harbour against the law God’s fugitive, let him give him up to the law.] And gif hwa wylle georne fram unrihte gecirran eft to rihte … (67) [And if anyone desires eagerly to turn back from ‘unright’ to ‘right’] Forðam a man sceal þam unstrangan men for Godes lufe & ege liþelicor deman & scrifon þonne þam strangan; forþamðe ne mæg se unmaga þam magan, we witon full georne, gelice byrðene ahebban, ne se unhala þam halan gelice. (68.1) [Thus a person shall for God’s love and awe judge and dictate to the ‘unstrong’ man more lightly than for the strong; for the unmighty cannot, we know full well, lift the same burden as the mighty, nor the unhealthy the same as the healthy.] & gyf hwa hwæt ungewealdes gedeð, ne byð þæt eallunga na gelic, þe hit gewealdes gewurþe. (68.3)

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Tiffany Beechy [And if someone does something not of his own volition, it is not altogether the same as that which is done (lit. ‘happens’) on purpose.]

This last assertion in particular illustrates the spirit of Wulfstan’s intervention in Anglo-Saxon legislation. Miller notes the Old Norse edict (perhaps more ancient than the caveats that follow it in the text) that states there is no such thing as an accident.11 The Germanic worldview is based on positive value. There are no accidents, only actions and effects. Accordingly, the balanced equation system observes only positive values. When a valuable thing is lost or damaged, money must compensate. The ARGUMENT/NEGATED-ARGUMENT pairs add to the balanced equation paradigm the ethos of antithesis, of evil or exclusion, the opposite of a positive value. Now, specifically with the term riht (‘right’ but also ‘law’ and ‘domain’ and ‘sovereignty’) and its un- antonym, there exists a state of being not merely lordless or outside the bond of the community, but rather allied with the anti-lord, with the anti-law, what one can only relate to a state of sin. Wulfstan’s use of antitheses to label people, states, and behaviours as the very negative of good highlights a difference between the Late Antique, Augustinian, Neoplatonic order of values and the Germanic system of positive worth (in which there is no un-worth – just solitude and exclusion). With the infiltration of Christianity the exile is no longer defined by his position outside, but according to a binary system that labels his very being in terms of what it is not. The laws stretch their juridical credibility in our eyes in other manifestly ‘literary’ or aesthetic or ludic qualities, here and there, qualities that are most often ignored by editors and commentators. These instances of poetic fabrication show the way the laws foreground the authority of language itself, a characteristic inherent in Anglo-Saxon linguistic praxis. For example, an exceedingly interesting statute in Ine’s code shows that in Old English, a sensibility more commonly identified with riddles can also serve legal language. Riddling language is obsessed with the slippage between names and things. The assignment of novel names is part of many kinds of initiation practices, and naming participates in ordering and controlling the environment. In Ine 43, the penalty for burning down trees, sixty shillings, is given an explanatory, name-giving gloss missing in comparable tree-burning statutes (such as Alfred 12 and 13), a gloss that justifies the penalty by linking it to the more basic crime of theft, which incurs the same price (see Ine 10): 11 William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 62.

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Ðonne mon beam on wuda forbærne, & weorðe yppe on þone ðe hit dyde, gielde he fulwite: geselle LX scilling, forþamþe fyr bið þeof. (Ine 43) [When anyone should burn down a tree in the woods, and it becomes known who did it, let him pay full penalty: let him give sixty shillings, because fire is a thief.]

Thus when Ine 43 sets the fine for burning down a tree, a riddling explanation, ‘because fire is a thief,’ links that penalty to a more basic one that ‘explains’ it. This is counter-intuitive. The law requires no explanation; that is part of the definition of the law, especially the Old Testament–type law for which Anglo-Saxon churchmen had such affinity. Here, though, a different sensibility asserts itself. Fire is a thief because it takes something away entirely, and the man who sets the fire is metonymically assessed the penalty for that crime. This is a metonymic operation because the man who sets the fire isn’t exactly a thief. He doesn’t get to take anything valuable away, as is the case with robbery in Ine 10. ‘Fire is a thief,’ and this metaphoric idea is what the text implies as justifying the attachment of such a fine to the setter of the fire. None of this is logical in any way except through the logic of play and poetry. ‘Fire is a thief’ is a riddlic identification, one that was apparently acceptable to Anglo-Saxon lawmakers and transcribers working with the serious purpose of making legislation. The subclause of Ine 43 continues and complicates the riddle: Gif mon afelle on wuda wel monega treowa, & wyrð eft undierne, forgielde III treowu ælc mid XXX scillingum; ne ðearf he hiora ma geldan, wære hiora swa fela swa hiora wære: forþon sio æsc bið melda, nalles ðeof. (43.1) [If anyone should fell a great many trees in the woods, and it is afterward disclosed, let him compensate for three trees, each with thirty shillings; he does not have to give more of (for?) them, however many of them there be; because the axe is a discloser/informer, not at all a thief.]

Sweet ‘solves’ the riddle of Ine 43 by offering that the key is sound: fire is a thief because it is silent, while the axe is an informer because it makes noise.12 It might also be operating on word-play. Fyr- is one of the variant stems of the verb feorran (‘to remove, withdraw, alienate’). Æsc- is a variant stem of the verb ascian (‘to ask,’ but also ‘to announce’). It is possible 12 Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, rev. Dorothy Whitelock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 245.

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that fyr (‘fire’) is a thief because it ‘removes’ things (here, trees), with a pun on fyrran, and æsc (‘axe’) is a ‘maker-known’ because it ‘announces’ things (here, the felling of trees), with a pun on æscian. In any event, the penalty given, that thirty shillings compensate the felling of three trees only, and for only half the penalty assessed for burning (ten shillings each as opposed to sixty), supports a reading of ‘taking away’ rather than of silence, since burning renders a tree useless (taking it entirely away). Chopping a tree down is less severe, since the wood may be reclaimed. Whatever solution(s) were on the mind of the person responsible for this riddle becoming part of a law, the most remarkable point about it is that it does produce, through linguistic artifice, the effect of satisfying logic of a sort. This particular logic draws on the poetics of riddles, though not completely. Whereas a riddle would go from calling an axe an ‘informer/discloser’ to calling it several other things suggesting wholly divergent attributes with the intention of misleading and confusing, Ine 43 gives one name for fire, and one for the axe. The punning occurs within that framework of the one-to-one correspondence. Thus Ine’s riddle still participates in a discourse that seeks to bind and fix, to assert authority and create an ordered world. It plays with the arbitrariness of fines and names and categories, but in a circumscribed way that reasserts closure. True riddles, of course, are obsessed with (mis)identity and (mis)categorization. Another strange edict in the Anglo-Saxon record gives a similar riddlic example of naming something a melda, though its logic is even more obscure. A code of uncertain issuance called Hundredgemot (‘The Meeting of the Hundred’) contains a poetic clause concerning three objects that make a sound: Hryðeres belle, hundes hoppe, blæshorn: ðissa ðreora ælc bið anes scillinga weorð; & ælc is melda geteald. (8)13 [Heifer’s bell, hound’s hoop (collar), blow-horn (some kind of trumpet): of these three each is one shilling’s worth; and each is held a melda.]

There must have been some some common lore surrounding melda and objects that make noise. Note the dense poetic structure in the chiastic alliteration pattern in the first clause (h-b, h-h, b-h), the grammatical parallelism in the second clause (gen. gen. nom. bið gen. gen. nom.), and the slant rhyme in the third clause (melda-geteald). 13 The quotation is from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, LawHu.

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These eruptions into lyricism and wit are not mere anomalies but apparently perfectly acceptable verbal strategies. Moreover, these strategies are not ornamental flourishes but rather further the discursive projects of their texts and genres. The projects of the Old English laws, as we have seen, differ from text to text, but both a small group of subcategories with distinct characteristics and a few main, overarching ones can be discerned. Wulfstan’s tracts introduce the binary word pair, related to Augustinian conceptions of good and its opposite (evil as not-good). This innovation is related to the figura etymologica and other kinds of word pair, a tradition that goes back to Indo-European and asserts the unquestionable, natural likeness between words and thus between the values they represent. The oldest structural principle we can discern, as we see in Æthelberht, is the balanced equation (Gif + CONDITION + COMPENSATION). Alliteration underwrites the authoritative, binding poetics throughout the legal corpus. And in the verbally and referentially picturesque riddle statutes, poetic suggestion drives the very meaning of the text – providing both statements of value-and-compensation and their rationales. The laws efface the problematic relationship between sign and referent by asserting equation at many levels between different signs. This system of equations, based largely on poetic equivalence, contrasts with more typically recognized, Neoplatonic medieval conceptions of signification as a vertical channel linking a fallen form (a material object or spoken word) to an ideal one. In the Old English laws, signification is largely horizontal, substituting one ‘fallen’ (materialized) thing for another, culminating in a monetary sum. The end of the signifying chain in Old English is not a transcendent Logos but a pile of gold. Value is the central concept in Anglo-Saxon law, and the (poetically bound) word of the law binds every conceivable thing to it. II: The Binding Word and Old English Charms The genre we most expect to speak of in terms of binding forces is of course that of charms. Their pragmatic function, as many have noted, is to ‘bind’ elements of the real world in order to bring about some desired effect, such as a healthy birth or relief from a toothache. To be spellbound, as Frye notes, is to be under the influence of a charm.14 But in Beowulf and many other examples of Old English poetry, the act of poetic creation is 14 Northrop Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), 130.

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also described with the lexicon of binding, as in the famous passage from Beowulf: Hwilum cyninges þegn, guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig, se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena worn gemunde, word oþer fand soðe gebunden. (l. 867b-71a)

[At times the king’s thane, a man laden with praise, mindful of music, he who remembered many of the old tales, found other words truly bound.]

Charms are primeval expressions of the poetic function: ‘The rhetoric of charm is dissociative and incantatory: it sets up a pattern of sound so complex and repetitive that the ordinary processes of response are shortcircuited. Refrain, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, pun, antithesis: every repetitive device known to rhetoric is called into play.’15 Frye’s description in fact conflates and resolves two seemingly distinct definitions Jakobson gives for the poetic function: the word felt as a word, and equivalence, or repetition, as the constitutive device of the sequence. What Frye notes is that charms, as absolutely poetic, use repetition per se to create the poetic experience of their language, words as words, not as pointers to other things. This is why nonsense is perfectly acceptable as charm-language: the point is the form, not the meaning. Much more than any other genre the charms attest to mixed codes – for instance, English, Latin, Celtic, and what appears to be sheer nonsense. The sheer nonsense usually appears in charms that are more Christian in content, since Latin or Greek words barely understood operate as effective talismans and require less of an attempt to make sense of their forms than a language truly close to one’s everyday tongue, as in the case of charms in Old English. Hence, the ‘Holy Salve’ charm prescribes ‘Acre arcre arnem nona ærnem beoðor ærnem nidren acrun cunað ele harassan fidine.’16 I provide no translation because there is no meaning to translate; the language is perfectly opaque. Because of the importance of the verbal pattern as pattern, magical language is more perseverant than other kinds of language. The normal spoken language goes on changing normally, but magical locutions will retain archaic forms because they are not perceived as normal components of the language but as special, holy speech. This is the case with the thee/ thou pronouns and archaic verb paradigms of biblical language that people 15 Ibid., 126. 16 G. Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1948), 236.

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still invoke in modern America, for instance, when quoting commandments (‘thou shalt not kill’). Thus frozen forms appear in magical formulas as islands amid a much changed language. Synchronically, then, frozen forms that can still make sense historically, such as a reference to the dragonslayer in the charm ‘Against a Toothache,’17 coexist with nonsense words and half-sense words and words in other languages, all operating as magical, poetic speech with a life of its own that is very much the antithesis of reference. It may respond to a ‘real-world’ situation, but the message itself refers not to that situation, but to its own pattern. That message is then put to its pragmatic, real-world application. For many if not most charms, it is not the great power or poetry of the verse that carries the effect, but sheer repetition. For instance, the ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ prescribes recitation of the metrical portion three times over each of the nine herbs and once into the mouth, once into each ear, and once over the wound of the ailing person.18 The prescription is thus thirty-one recitations of a metrical charm sixty-three lines long. This makes for a performance of 1,953 lines – almost two-thirds the length of Beowulf. According to Benjamin Bagby, a performance of Beowulf in its entirety would last around five hours, so the prescribed recitation of the Nine Herbs Charm would take at least three. The text would no doubt etch itself into the memory of the reciter after the first handful of repetitions, and repetition after repetition would give the words the kind of unthinking, lulling, otherworldly quality modern mainly memorized texts have for us today (the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance). The linguistic function of charms is the most straightforward of any genre. The goal is to bind the world through language in its primeval, perfect function: naming = binding. To utter perfect speech is to create order in the cosmos. If the language of the laws is to order the relations between human beings, the language of charm is to order the cosmos in relation to human beings. Through sympathetic signification (verbal and ritualistic action) the world is made more favourable to humanity, reordberend (‘speech-bearers’) in the suggestive locution from The Dream of the Rood (l. 3a). Ordering the social world (the world of human beings) and the cosmos (the plane of existence on which we interact with forces vaster than ourselves): these are both heavy semiotic tasks. As Derrida makes clear, signification is not an unproblematic process. It involves an effort of 17 Ibid., 297. 18 Ibid., 186–90.

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repression and forgetfulness to bind in language, because language is a system of signs, and the world is external to it, indifferent and amorphous. The logocentric solution of the Western tradition is to posit the perfect language of God, the Word that was with God and that was God (Logos),19 as the dualistic counterpart to the fallen language of humanity. All apparent gaps and lapses in signification can be chalked up to the imperfection of this mortal language, and effaced or ignored through faith in the transcendent ideal forms these imperfections supposedly obscure. Derrida’s alternative solution, his reaction against logocentric effacement, is to invert the logocentric relation and assert language (in a broadened sense of ‘writing’) over ‘reality,’ denying any transcendent realm beyond signs, at least in terms of any possibility of human ability to ascertain it. Thus we have the dualistic model of the classical tradition as passed from Late Antiquity through Latin Christendom and into the modern era on the one side, and the postmodern proclamation that the emperor has no clothes – there is nothing ‘there’ in the direction in which signs point, or they are actually pointing at a mirror or pointing straight but in curved space – on the other. In between we have Jakobson’s structuralist model, focusing persistently on the linguistic code, inferring meaning from formal relations. All three frameworks bear on Old English riddles, on their textual strategies, and on their epistemological implications. III: Riddles and the Word Unbound All modern commentators on riddles (Old English and in general) who are not purely concerned with source studies describe in one way or another riddles’ interstitial quality, which fundamentally involves play. As Huizinga says, ‘The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination. The word-bound concept is always inadequate to the torrent of life. Hence it is only the image-making or figurative word that can invest things with expression and at the same time bathe them in the luminosity of ideas: idea and thing are united in the image.’20 Huizinga is speaking about poetry more generally, which, as we have seen in the language of charm, unites ideas with things in a magical fusion. What riddle does, however, is play with the process by which this fusion 19 See John 1:1. 20 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 133.

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occurs. A metaphor or metonym creates an association that brings to mind an image, the solution to its mini-riddle (is this not what metaphor is, a juxtaposition of two things that asks what is articulated by the overlap between them?), but then the next metaphor or description contradicts it. Anita Riedinger charts the ways Old English riddles play similarly with specifically poetic categories and expectations.21 They exploit the conventions of the oral-formulaic tradition in order to throw the riddle-guesser off the track by leading him or her into wrong associative networks. Using Riddle 5 (Williamson 3) (‘shield’ and/or ‘chopping block’),22 Riedinger shows how traditional formulas (such as ‘beado-weorca sæd’ [sated by battle-deeds] and ‘frofre ne wene’ [I do not expect comfort]) mislead the guesser to construe the object as a warrior, and then how the very few non-formulaic verses (‘ac me ecga dolg eacen weorðað’ [but the gashes of edges become increased]) offer truly helpful clues that steer the guesser toward ‘chopping-block,’ the furthest removed solution from the battlefield imagery urged by the formulas.23 The solution to the riddle is only part of what the riddle ‘is’ or ‘does.’ I return now to the riddle’s ‘interstitial’ quality. According to Daniel Tiffany, in an essay on ‘lyric substance’ in riddles, the speaking objects in Old English riddles are both, or between, persons and things. The riddle’s effect is to render the ‘corporeal aspect of obscurity,’ which is to say, to figure in language the fundamental indeterminacy of ‘real’ things (since these are only definable or expressible in language).24 If objects can talk, then the strict boundary between human and non-human becomes problematic, and if objects cannot be designated easily by linguistic signs, then the very idea of signification becomes problematic. What is human, and what is real – or how do we know what we think and say is real, really is?

21 Anita R. Riedinger, ‘The Formulaic Style in the Old English Riddles,’ Studia Neophilologica 76 (2004): 30–43. 22 Quotations of riddles are from the Exeter Book, ed. G.P. Krapp and E.V.K. Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), which numbers the riddles differently from Williamson, their most recent editor (there are a few ambiguous riddle boundaries, leading to numbering discrepancies according to one’s interpretation). Williamson’s enumeration is given in parentheses throughout; see Craig Williamson, ed. and trans., The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). 23 Riedinger, ‘The Formulaic Style in the Old English Riddles,’ 33. I have reproduced Riedinger’s translations. 24 Daniel Tiffany, ‘Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity,’ in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 74, 82.

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Similarly, Rafał Borysławski considers the Exeter Book riddles to be concerned with the mystery behind signification and its relation to the mystery behind creation itself.25 In this respect they are fundamentally in the tradition of Aldhelm’s Latin riddles, which Borysławski reads as expressing the pneuma or Logos pervading all creation. Thus for Borysławski Aldhelm’s Anglo-Latin and the Exeter Book’s Old English riddles function in a dualistic paradigm (for all the traces of northern pagan sensibilities he finds in the latter) through which the obscurantism and play of riddle language serve to incite wonder at the pristine inscrutability of the created universe. Just as creation is difficult for us to ‘read’ for its proper ideal order, so a riddle is difficult to read one’s way through to the proper solution. Hiding and cleverness in riddles mimic the mysterious ways of God. The one obvious difference between the Anglo-Latin and Old English riddles in their relationship to ‘solution’ and the idea of transcendent meaning Borysławski sees as trivial, but I do not:26 the Latin riddles have their solutions as their titles; the Old English riddles have neither title nor solution. They are word puzzles with no key. The riddles appear as the Derridean ideal (oxymoronic as that may seem): they admit to no solution; they are language at play. Indeed, according to Craig Williamson, the riddles’ most recent editor, what they mean is the riddle-solver’s meaning. What they mean is that reality exists and is at the same time a mosaic of man’s perception. What they mean is that man’s measure of the world is in words, that perceptual categories are built on verbal foundations, and that by withholding the key to the categorical house (the entitling solution) the riddlers may force the riddle-solver to restructure his own perceptual blocks in order to gain entry to a metaphorical truth. In short the solver must imagine himself a door and open in.27

The play of the Old English riddles reveals that there is a space between things and words, between real and ideal. ‘The riddle is essentially a charm in reverse: it represents the revolt of the intelligence against the hypnotic power of commanding words,’ according to Frye, contrasting the main

25 Rafał Borysławski, The Old English Riddles and the Riddlic Elements of Old English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). 26 Williamson, as well, sees the absence of solutions to the Exeter riddles as integral to their significance. See The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, 23–8. 27 Ibid., 25.

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attributes of charms and riddles.28 Charm, from Latin carmen (‘song’), and riddle, from Old English rædels(e) (‘riddle,’ ‘opinion,’ ‘conjecture’), govern two distinct associative groups: sound (charm) and sense (riddle), or rhyme (charm) and reason (riddle).29 In different terminology, Frye’s opposition captures the way charms employ pure poetry, perfect language, to enact and thus embody desired results in the world, and the way riddles have something to do with knowledge and metalinguistic awareness. Although, initially, Frye also attempts to associate charm with sound and riddle with vision (hence, sense = vision), his further discussion reveals what is really behind the distinction: not sound and vision, but rather form and a paradox or crisis of meaning: ‘The trouble with [William Carlos] Williams’ anti-conceptual statement [‘no ideas but in things’] … is that in poetry there is, so to speak, no such thing as a thing. Word and thing are frozen in two separate worlds, and the reality of each can be expressed only by the other in its world. This paradoxical deadlock is precisely the essence of the riddle.’30 Charms are obsessed with form as form (operating almost exclusively on the poetic function), whereas riddles are obsessed with the relationship between form and meaning, and thus involve a tension among the poetic function (form; message referring to message), the referential function (meaning; message referring to the world outside the message), and the metalingual function (the code; message referring to the linguistic code itself). The common riddle refrain, ‘say what I am,’ signals the metalingual function. It challenges the reader or listener to have understood the clues in the riddler’s intended way (a cruel exigency) and to produce proof of it in the form of the answer. This metalingual check-in, in other contexts so routine, is in riddles a hair-pulling affair (one reader, it seems, inscribed his or her frustration in drypoint runes on folio 125a in response to Riddle 64 [Williamson 62]: ‘Beo unreþe’ [be merciful!]).31 The difficulty is, of course, the point – the ordeal that initiates the reader into a metaphysical secret: essentially Derridean differance. Frye, too, riddles out for himself that the answer is in fact beside the point, again, as is strongly implied by the absence of answers to any of the riddles in the Exeter collection. But he adds to the assertion of indeterminacy, which is the general ontological orientation of the riddles, the positive

28 29 30 31

Frye, Spiritus Mundi, 137. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 145. Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, 59.

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element of interpretation, not for a monolithic meaning but for the associative tendrils sent out in all directions by the peculiar texture of a riddle. Frye ends his discussion of riddles with a consideration of Riddle 33 (Williamson 31), a riddle that does appear to have a clear solution. Frye says, The answer is supposed to be ‘iceberg’ … But the answer hardly does justice to the poem: like all interpretations that profess to say ‘this is what the poem means,’ the answer is wrong because it is an answer. The real answer to the question implied in a riddle is not a ‘thing’ outside it, but that which is both word and thing, and is both inside and outside the poem. This is the universal of which the poem is the manifestation, the order of words that tells us of battles and shipwrecks, of the intimate connection of beauty and terror, of cycles of life and death, of mutability and apocalypse, of the echoes of Leviathon and Virgil’s Juno and Demeter and Kali and Circe and Tiamat and Midgard and the mermaids and the Valkyries, all of which is focused on and stirred up by this ‘iceberg.’32

Thus Frye insists both on the riddle’s Derridean refusal of transcendent, unitary significance, and on a positive play of significance in its associative dynamics (however much he then succumbs to a universalizing crescendo at the end). Derrida, without really altering the validity of Frye’s point here, would no doubt emend ‘both … and’ to ‘neither … nor’ above. It is not significance, it is differance. This difference moves us past the allusions to formal or structural relationships, the effects produced by bodies juxtaposed and estranged, the play of their differences. Frye’s iceberg riddle serves this kind of reading just as well. Riddle 33 contains, by my tally, eight verses in which the ambiguity is due either to a word with two plausible but disparate meanings or to the ambiguous meaning of the entire phrase. The indeterminate, in-between riddle-meaning, which I have attempted to document from the point of view of several riddle commentators, takes place in the mental operations one performs locally in each of these verses, and in the way one must try to build a picture of the solution (meaning a concept, not a literal picture) while maintaining a stance of openness. One must remain open because one is aware of being constantly misled, miscued, to close off possibilities in favour of the field of images a given clue produces. I reproduce the riddle below with the ambiguous verses in bold:

32 Frye, Spiritus Mundi, 147.

Aesthetics and the Word Wiht cwom æfter wege wrætlicu liþan, cymlic from ceole cleopode to londe, hlinsade hlude; hleahtor wæs gryrelic, egesful on earde, ecge wæron scearpe. Wæs hio hetegrim, hilde to sæne, biter beadoweorca; bordweallas grof, heardhiþende. Heterune bond, sægde searocræftig ymb hyre sylfre gesceaft: ‘Is min modor mægða cynnes þæs deorestan, þæt is dohtor min eacen up liden, swa þæt is ældum cuþ, firum on folce, þæt seo on foldan sceal on ealra londa gehwam lissum stondan.’

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[A creature came after the crest, curiously sailing, comely from the keel/chill (it) called to land, rang out loud; (its) laughter was gruesome, awful on earth, edges were sharp. She was merciless, too careless in combat of bitter battle-work; (she) scored the boardwalls, hard-hitting, engraved with a curse, spoke cunning(ly) about her own creation: ‘My mother is the rarest kind of maiden, that is my daughter grown big, thus it is known to the wise among the people, that she shall on the soil of each and every land stand peaceful.’]

We see immediately that the riddle breaks into two parts, and we know from studies such as Williamson’s that the motif of the mother who is also the pregnant daughter (as the iceberg is the mother of the water that is the mother of the iceberg, and so on) goes back at least to antiquity.33 The second part is thus the basic motif on which the first part of the riddle elaborates and makes an original contribution. The first double entendre with which the reader must grapple is ‘cymlic from ceole’ [comely from chill/keel]. While many commentators insist that ceol cannot possibly mean ‘keel’ (because it never refers to a keel in the extant record), it does often mean ‘ship,’ and it can also mean something like ‘chill’ or ‘cold.’ The previous description of the creature coming over the sea weights the meaning in favour of ‘ship,’ which is of course the wrong choice. Since the guesser knows it is probably a trap, he or she holds both possibilities in mind, and even juxtaposes them: a cold ship; a ship of ice, a beautiful vessel 33 Williamson, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, 238–9.

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of ice, or from the frozen north. All the sound-making in the following lines is consistent with other descriptions of ships in the riddles, for instance, the ship that makes a sound when it grinds against the sand (Riddle  32 [Williamson 30]). The next ambiguous verse introduces martial imagery, logically bringing to mind the blades of soldiers being carried on a warship: ‘ecge wæron scearpe’ [edges (usually metonymic for swords) were sharp]. The unproblematic addition of soldiers to one’s mental ship (though one is still keeping in mind the cold vessel; what is cold over the sea with sharp edges like swords?) leads into the complicated statement of the next line, ‘wæs hio hetegrim, hilde to sæne.’ This might mean, ‘she was hatefully deadly, slow to battle,’ but might also mean, ‘she was hatefully deadly, in battle too careless.’ In fact, both make cryptic sense in light of ‘iceberg’ and both are no doubt intended. Icebergs are slow moving as well as careless – literally and in their destructiveness. The final cluster of ambiguous verses is, in my mind, the tour de force of the riddle and constitutes its final knot of confusion before resolving into the derivative final riddle-within-the-riddle, which is actually the riddle’s key. The creature, after a four-verse martial description, is now said to have ‘engraved’ or ‘carved’ bordweallas (normally ‘shields,’ but here reinvesting its constituents with lexical meaning, as ‘board-walls,’ or the sides of a ship). Carving or engraving shields is a lovely poetic image for battle, but it is a misleading image in terms of the riddle’s solution. We are meant to build and hold onto it, but the seeking mind must also grab hold of the literal meaning of the object bordweallas, a complex and thoroughly pleasing mental operation – a chance to play with language and not only its synchronic but its historical processes as well, in the form of metaphor-reconstitution. Heardhiþende, too, is radically ambiguous: ‘hard-hitting’ in terms of what might be expected of swords, but what also describes the seafaring iceberg and its effect on another seagoing body. Further, the similar sounding past participle liden in line eleven recursively suggests a third reading, ‘hard-growing,’ which accurately describes the frozen water that becomes an iceberg. Finally, ‘heterune bond’ [bound with a hate-rune] takes up the engraving image of grof from the line before, suggesting the writing of a curse – writing specifically, because of grof (‘engraved’); it is the only previous clue the new verse can attach itself to. This image, though, is immediately subverted by the phrase ‘sægde searocræftig’ [spoke cunning(ly)], since it shifts the guesser’s sense of the medium away from writing towards speaking. By this point in the riddle, it is all too much to keep in one’s head, and the guesser has shifted into a mode of local enjoyment: the words themselves tease and play, reveal and

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conceal, and this is the riddle’s literary effect. There are indeed many other levels on which the riddle operates: the recognition and misrecognition of traditional formulas, the surprise and new perspective one gains on the solution-object if one happens to guess it and can go back and contemplate all its metaphoric aspects (what one might call the riddle’s contemplative value). But the language itself, on the level of linguistic operation, in the absence of a titular solution, is performing multiple signification, which plays with referentiality, poetic effect, and the very possibility of a shared code. The nature of the language of riddle is play, the refusal of one-to-one correspondence and ‘correct’ solution. Poetic language, as Jakobson says, uses likeness to construct a sequence. Riddles construct a sequence based on both likeness and difference, not the difference that is a binary opposition, but the difference that suggests one kind of likeness but also another. And another and another. Riddles operate on a fundamentally indeterminate verbal epistemology, which refuses ontology altogether, I think. This is why their spirit may be identified as Derridean. The Old English riddles give the lie to a monolithic construction of the Western tradition from Late Antiquity until the abruption of postmodernity. There were ‘other traditions,’ to borrow a phrase from Marjorie Perloff, in counterpoint to that of the elite and hegemonic intellectual culture of Latin Christendom. Anglo-Saxon verbal culture was not permeated by a concept of a transcendent Logos that unified everything into a coherent system. Perception and poetic praxis were specific, driven by detail, and by an ephemeral ontology. Aesthetic effects perform cultural work. Although our association of aesthetics with bourgeois refinement tends to limit that term, the emotional, cognitive, sensory effects that structure consciousness itself and determine how we interact with the world far exceed the boundaries of ‘literature,’ ‘art,’ and ‘high culture.’ The beautiful, meaning the aesthetically apt and effective, varies according to genre in Old English, but in general the poetic turn, the word that is palpable rather than transparent, seems to be the standard. In the laws, the balanced equation suffices to suggest and enforce an ordered world; it justifies. In the charms, ritualized language itself becomes the experience rather than pointing to experience, enabling humans to fantasize whatever they desire. And in the riddles, beauty is the unreachable horizon where signifier and signified ‘must’ meet, but never do.

3 Aesthetic Criteria in Old English Heroic Style geoffrey russom

During the 1950s, Francis P. Magoun represented the Beowulf poet as an oral improviser with limited aesthetic interests.1 Arthur G. Brodeur promptly disagreed, arguing that Beowulf pioneered a movement from short, orally composed lays to literate epics.2 A decade later, Eric G. Stanley elaborated a position between the two extremes, judging that ‘this highly wrought poem is the product of a lettered poet, or at least of a slow, non-extemporizing poet.’3 Since Magoun, other researchers have made serious attempts to reconcile the poem’s quality with its debt to oral tradition, but there is still no agreement about how Beowulf was composed or exactly how to define its style.4 Many researchers prefer, like Stanley, to think of the author as lettered, but we lack the necessary foundation in stylistic analysis for claims about the ‘sophistication’ of Beowulf: its relation to writing, artistic creativity, and Graeco-Roman urbanity.5 Here I 1 Francis P. Magoun, Jr, ‘Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry,’ Speculum 28 (1953): 446–67. 2 Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 3 Eric G. Stanley, ‘Beowulf,’ in his Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature (London: Nelson, 1966), 104–40; rpt in Peter S. Baker, ed., Beowulf: Basic Readings (New York: Garland, 1995), 3–34. 4 See especially Larry D. Benson, ‘The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic Poetry,’ PMLA 81 (1966): 334–41; Stanley B. Greenfield, The Interpretation of Old English Poems (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); John D. Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Calvin B. Kendall, The Metrical Grammar of ‘Beowulf’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). 5 Influential ideas about the ‘sophistication’ of Beowulf are illustrated by a hypothetical biography of the author in Kendall, Metrical Grammar, 2–4. Born into an aristocratic family, Kendall’s author grows up in a royal court where he learns rituals of courtly

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call for fresh approaches to Old English heroic style, focusing on two essential preliminaries: the usefulness of formulaic strategies and their indebtedness to oral tradition. In exploring these topics, I attempt to work outward from uncontroversial cases. A traditional type of line introduces the heroic speech of Wiglaf, Beowulf’s young kinsman: (1) WĦglăf maðelode, Wďohstănes sunu (2862)6 [Wiglaf spoke, Wistan’s son]

Lines like example (1) satisfy important metrical requirements with the alliteration that often links children’s names to a parent’s name in early Germanic cultures. Patronymics like ‘Wďohstănes sunu’ add colour to the narrative but seem to be used primarily for their alliterative value, and the poet will repeat them when the same need arises. Example (1) is recycled verbatim as line 3076 to introduce another speech by Wiglaf. The second mention of Wiglaf’s father in 3076 seems entirely redundant. Verses like example (1) introduce speeches by a wide variety of named Germanic characters: (2) Unferð maþelode, Ecglăfes bearn (499) [Unferth spoke, son of Ecglaf] (3) Þá qvað þat Brynhildr, Buðla dóttir (Gðr. I, 23/1) [then Brynhildr spoke as follows, daughter of Buðli] behaviour and becomes adept at oral-formulaic composition. A reflective temperament draws him to a monastic milieu, where he encounters full-length epic narrative for the first time in Vergil and Prudentius. The author refines his talent before an appreciative audience of monastic brothers, lengthening traditional tales and enriching them with religious meditations. Finally, with the encouragement of his abbot, the author writes down some of these tales, and one survives to us as Beowulf. See Orchard, Critical Companion, chapter 5, for a survey of recent publications linking Beowulf to Latin literary or religious culture. 6 Beowulf is cited from Frederic Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1950). Other Old English poetry is cited from George P. Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–53), with macrons added to highlight the metrical significance of long vowels.

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In example (2), the type of line used for Wiglaf serves for Unferð. Example (3) illustrates similar use of a patronymic in the Old Norse Guðrúnarqviða in fyrsta.7 Comparable lines introduce speeches by two other characters in this Eddic poem.8 A formulaic technique routinely employed for the same well-defined purpose in Old English and Old Norse poems must surely have originated in a common Germanic tradition before the North Germanic peoples separated culturally from the West Germanic peoples. Milman Parry showed that the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad is ‘economical’ in the sense that a given metrical function is performed by just one descriptive epithet.9 Whether the ships in a Greek contingent will be ‘hollow’ or ‘black’ can be predicted from the metrical value of their number when it is specified in the same line with the adjectival epithet. When the number of ships is forty, fifty, or eighty, the ships will be ‘black.’ When the number of ships is thirty or ninety, they will be ‘hollow.’ The Greek words for ‘black’ and ‘hollow’ fill well-defined metrical gaps in the line, and Homer never fills these gaps with other epithets for ships. In a suspiciously large number of cases, the number of ships is an even multiple of ten, suggesting that Homer sometimes simplifies the world of discourse to facilitate composition. Stylistic differences between Beowulf and the Iliad emerge when we take a larger sample of speech introductions: (4) HrĿðgăr maþelode,

helm Scyldinga (371)

[Hrothgar spoke, lord of the Scyldings] (5) þæt tĿ healle gang

Healfdenes sunu (1009)

[that Halfdane’s son (Hrothgar) came to the hall] (6) Þá kvað þat Þrymr,

þursa dróttinn (Þrk. 22/1, 25/1, 30/1)

[Then Thrym spoke as follows, lord of the giants]

7 Old Norse poetry is cited by stanza and line number from Gustav Neckel and Hans Kuhn, eds., Edda: die Lieder des Codex Regius, nebst verwandten Denkmälern, 5th ed. (Heidelberg: Niemeyer, 1983). 8 ‘Þá qvað Giaflaug, Giúca systir’ (4/1), ‘Þá qvað þat Gullrʏnd, Giúca dóttir’ (12/1, recycled as 17/1 and 24/1). 9 Milman Parry, L’epithète traditionelle dans Homère (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1928), 135–9.

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Strict Homeric economy would predict employment of the patronymic in (5) to fill out example (4), yet we find a royal epithet instead. Old English specialists soon realized that economy of the Homeric type had no exact equivalent in Beowulf.10 On the other hand, example (4) cannot be attributed to an aesthetic of innovation. As example (6) shows, royal epithets were also well established in Germanic tradition as a way of filling out lines to introduce speeches. Here I will not reiterate an earlier critique of oral-formulaic theory,11 except for a few points that seem to require emphasis. My primary concern will be to analyse aesthetic refinements overlooked by ‘hard Parryite’ critics like Magoun. Such refinements may not justify a return to the opinion of Tolkien, who believed that Beowulf was probably composed in writing by a fully literate author.12 Similar refinements occur in long improvised epics by illiterate Yugoslavian singers. Claims about oral epic that Brodeur found inapplicable to Beowulf are also inapplicable to some living oral poets.13 As inheritors of a doddering behaviourism, the ‘hard Parryites’ simply got it wrong about oral-formulaic composition, overlooking the creative power of the human language faculty.14 Parry may not provide an ideal theory for Beowulf, but it does not follow, as Calvin B. Kendall supposes, that the poet must have composed with pen in hand.15 Similar false deductions vitiate Larry D. Benson’s attempt to place Beowulf in a milieu of scribal literacy.16

10 Donald K. Fry, ‘Old English Formulas and Systems,’ English Studies 48 (1967): 193–204. 11 Geoffrey Russom, ‘Artful Avoidance of the Useful Phrase in Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and Fates of the Apostles,’ Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 371–90. 12 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95, at 263. 13 Russom, ‘Artful Avoidance,’ 389. 14 For a critique of positivist language studies contemporary with Magoun, see Noam Chomsky, review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner, Language 35 (1959): 26–58. 15 In Metrical Grammar, 6–9, Kendall interprets some stylistic features of Beowulf as possible indications of literacy, but without explaining why these features would be unlikely to occur in oral poems. When discussing ring composition, for example, Kendall simply cites an oral-formulaist’s caveat that this elegant structure, which occurs in the Iliad, has not yet been identified in a living oral tradition (Niles, Poem and Tradition, 6). 16 Geoffrey Russom, ‘Verse Translations and the Question of Literacy in Beowulf,’ in Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley (Columbus: Slavica, 1987), 567–80.

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Although the Beowulf poet varies traditional expressions, the variations themselves often have traditional precedents. (7) Bďowulf maþelode,

bearn Ecgþďowes (529)

[Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow] (8) *Bďowulf maþelode,

bealdor Gďata (constructed)

[Beowulf spoke, the leader of the Geats] (9) Bďowulf maðelode – on him byrne scăn, searonet seowed smiþes orþancum (405–6) [Beowulf spoke – the mailcoat shone on him, a cunning net sewn with the skills of the smith]

Line (7) illustrates the special problem of Beowulf, whose name does not alliterate with his father’s. In this situation, the author satisfies metrical requirements not with a new kind of epithet but by inverting the word order of a typical patronymic b-verse, *‘Ecgþďowes bearn.’ With this special problem solved, the poet recycles the line verbatim eight times (lines 631, 957, 1383, 1473, 1651, 1817, 1999, and 2425). Recycling continues as late as line 2425, after Beowulf has become king. Elements of the poet’s own diction could be combined here to vary the pattern of (7) with a royal epithet. In 2567a, Beowulf is called ‘winia bealdor’ [lord of retainers]. In 2901a, he is ‘dryhten Gďata’ [lord of the Geats]. Ingredients for a line like (8) are ready to hand, but are not employed. The pattern of (7) is varied in another way, however. In example (9), the poet replaces the patronymic with descriptive detail, an aesthetic refinement that complicates the world of discourse and makes composition more difficult. The stock phrase was clearly available. If a scribe had replaced the two lines of (9) with the formula represented by (7), that change would be undetectable today. Our author is neither an innovator nor the remorselessly practical songsmith posited by Albert Bates Lord.17 In dactylic hexameter, the major syntactic division (called the ‘caesura’) usually falls inside one of the metrical feet. We cannot divide Homer’s 17 Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 45.

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lines systematically into half-lines with coherent metrical patterns. In Beowulf, on the other hand, the domain of metrical patterning is the halfline, usually referred to as the ‘verse,’ and the line is a couplet of half-lines joined by alliteration. In such a couplet, the first half-line is called the ‘averse’ and the second is called the ‘b-verse.’ Sentences often begin with a b-verse and end with the a-verse of a following line, illustrating the secondary, derivative character of line patterns. A formula, as generally understood, links an important concept to a well-defined metrical pattern. Given the predominance of the verse in Old English metre, Old English formulas are normally one verse in length. The whole-line formulas so characteristic of Homer are the exception rather than the rule in Beowulf. At the level of the line, the most useful formulaic devices are ‘alliterative collocations’ adaptable to a variety of verse patterns. These resemble the stereotyped rhyme pairs of modern popular ballads, e.g., ‘love / (heaven) above.’ In the rhyme pair, the semantically inessential ‘above’ provides a rhyme for ‘love,’ the indispensable word of romantic song. A similar collocation modifying ‘heaven’ with a redundant ‘above’ appears in alliterative tradition: (10) eorðan eallgrďne

ond ŗpheofon (Andreas 798)

[earth all-green and heaven above] (11) iorð fannz æva,

né upphiminn (Vsp. 3/3)

[earth was not yet made, nor heaven above]

This collocation appears in Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Norse poems.18 The usual context for ‘earth / up-heaven’ is the creation of the world, whether by Jehovah, as with the Old English example (10), or by the Germanic gods, as with the Old Norse example (11). There will be more to say about alliterative collocations when we consider the relation of writing to originality. The rather short verse cannot readily accommodate a complete sentence with fully specified noun phrases. Most verses in Beowulf are subcomponents of sentences such as subjects, objects, verb phrases, or prepositional 18 See Paul B. Taylor, ‘Heorot, Earth, and Asgard: Christian Poetry and Pagan Myth,’ Tennessee Studies in Literature 9 (1966): 119–30; and Ursula Dronke, ‘Beowulf and Ragnarok,’ Saga-Book 17 (1969): 302–25.

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phrases. The occasional one-verse sentence might consist of a subject and an intransitive verb, like ‘Bďowulf maðelode,’ or realize a noun phrase compactly as a pronoun, like ‘on him byrne scăn.’ Few ideological formulations would fit within this confined metrical space. A Germanic proverb usually requires two or more verses. The disjunction between formula and ideology makes it possible to use heroic style for narratives with diverse cultural agendas. Most surviving narrative poems in Old English retell imported religious stories in plausible epic diction. The poet’s usual way of constructing sentences is illustrated in lines 607–10: (12) (Þă wæs on sălum sinces brytta, gamolfeax ond gŗðrĿf;) (gďoce gelʭfde brego Beorht-Dena;) (gehʭrde on Bďowulfe folces hyrde fæstrʉdne geþĿht.) [Then the distributor of treasure was in a happy mood, old haired (i.e., grey haired) and brave in battle; he expected help, that prince of the Bright-Danes; the shepherd of the people heard in Beowulf a firmly fixed intention.]

The first parenthesized clause in (12) begins with 607a, an a-verse of type A3 providing all essential constituents of the clause except for the subject, which follows in 607b. Type A3 is a convenient site for routine grammatical material. Only its last word must alliterate, and an unlimited number of lightly stressed or unstressed words may precede. Verse 607b is a type A1 variant consisting of two trochaic words. This variant was highly valued and must have cost significant effort to construct. Comparable phrases do not often occur in prose.19 ‘Sinces brytta’ can serve as a grammatical object in its accusative form ‘sinces bryttan,’ which has the same metrical value. Tradition conserves and disseminates verses consisting of two trochaic words. ‘Sinces brytta(n)’ appears in five other poems.20 The usefulness of ‘sinces brytta(n)’ is not lost on the Beowulf poet, who exploits it once more as a b-verse and twice as an a-verse (1170a, 2071a; 1922b). Use

19 See Geoffrey Russom, ‘Dating Criteria for Old English Poems,’ in Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, ed. D. Minkova and R. Stockwell (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 245–65, at 248. 20 Genesis 2642a, 2728b; Elene 194b; Wanderer 25b; Judith 30a (in a hypermetrical verse); Metrical Preface to Wærferth’s Translation of Gregory’s Dialogues, 24b.

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of two-word type A1 with single alliteration in the a-verse is also illustrated by ‘folces hyrde’ in the last parenthesized clause of item (12). This phrase appears four additional times in Beowulf (1832a, 1849a, 2981a, 2644b). It also appears in The Fight at Finnsburh (46b) and in King Alfred’s Meters of Boethius (49b). The second parenthesized clause begins in line 608 with a b-verse containing all sentence elements except the subject, which appears in the next verse, 609a. The second alliteration in 609a is supplied by ‘Beorht-Dena,’ a poetic compound with a semantically inessential first constituent called a ‘combinative.’21 Similar terms used elsewhere for Hrothgar’s people are ‘Găr-Dene’ [Spear-Danes], ‘Hring-Dene’ [Ring-Danes], ‘Norð-Dene’ [North-Danes], ‘Sŗð-Dene’ [South-Danes], ‘Ďast-Dene’ [East-Danes], and ‘West-Dene’ [West-Danes]. This set of compound synonyms is economical in that no two have the same alliterative value, but assessing the overall usefulness of the set raises subtle problems. Since ‘brego’ stands first in the verse, its two short syllables must be resolved into the equivalent of one long syllable, and the verse will need three more syllables to reach minimum size. ‘Dene’ contributes two such syllables and ‘Beorht-’ adds a necessary third. Poetic compounds are not used simply to fill out the verse, however. They must always alliterate.22 Such compounds obviously facilitate composition when providing the only alliteration in a verse, but was ‘brego Beorht-Dene’ significantly easier to construct than, say, *‘baldor Denigea’? Poetic compounds provide a variety of metrical patterning that distinguishes Beowulf from poems less highly regarded.23 Type D and E verses, which normally consist of a compound and a stressed simplex, would have much lower frequency if forms like ‘Beorht-Dene’ were unavailable. Placement of poetic compounds reveals an aesthetic constraint on their usefulness. The poet varies these compounds when repetition in close proximity might prove tedious, as in the opening section of Beowulf. Here

21 Style critics have occasionally claimed that combinatives with high frequency in Beowulf express fine shades of meaning appropriate to immediate context. For detailed argumentation and a survey of previous work on war combinatives, see Caroline Brady, ‘“Warriors” in Beowulf: An Analysis of the Nominal Compounds and an Evaluation of the Poet’s Use of Them,’ Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1982): 199–246. Such claims sometimes strike me as ad hoc and I fail to see how they can be reconciled with parallel usage of cognate Old Norse combinatives (Russom, ‘Verse Translations,’ 569). 22 Geoffrey Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 92–7. 23 For work on metrical variety see Russom, ‘Dating Criteria,’ 259.

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the parallel entries of a Scylding genealogy provide good opportunities for recycling, but the poet refuses to exploit them. In line 31, Scyld is called ‘lďof landfruma’ [beloved leader of the land]. In line 54, the Scylding Beowulf is called ‘lďof lďodcyning’ [beloved king of the people]. Both ‘land-fruma’ and ‘lďod-cyning’ alliterate with ‘lange’ [for a long time] in statements attesting to the length of a successful reign. The collocation ‘lďod- / lang’ has significant utility in Beowulf, appearing in four other lines with triple alliteration (192, 905, 1722, and 2751) and meeting all alliterative requirements in five lines with double alliteration (1336, 1708, 2093, 2159, 2130). Line 31a, by contrast, is the only example in Beowulf of a ‘land- / lang’ collocation. Variation of ‘lďod-cyning’ with ‘land-fruma’ provides the best imaginable evidence for deliberate artistry. The Beowulf poet can solve a verse-making problem in more than one traditional way and shows off that ability when recycling would be very useful but also very conspicuous.24 Poetic compounds sometimes facilitate composition but do not necessarily do so. To understand the Beowulf poet’s aesthetic, we must not confuse ‘traditional’ with ‘predictable’ or ‘automatic.’ The term ‘semantically inessential’ identifies a constituent that could be removed from a poetic sentence without grammatical disruption and without significant change in truth conditions. Asserting that the beloved leader ruled for a long time is not essentially different from asserting that the beloved leader of the land ruled for a long time. Since the identity of this leader is already known, both assertions would hold true under the same conditions. Nothing forces addition of ‘land-’ to ‘fruma.’ Poetic words, however, have meaning beyond the grammatical clause. In canonical English sonnets, for example, a line-final word often enters into a secondary semantic relationship with its rhyming partner in a different clause. Shakespeare’s much-anthologized sonnet 18 foregrounds semantic kinships in the rhyming pairs ‘day / May’ (times associated with youth), ‘shines / declines’ (high point and descent), ‘dimmed / untrimmed’ (loss of beauty), and ‘fade / shade’ (loss of colour as the common semantic feature in metonyms for old age and death). We need to determine whether semantically inessential language in Beowulf can have secondary relationships worth interpreting. Returning once again to citation (12), consider verse 608a, ‘gamolfeax ond gŗðrĿf’ [grey haired and brave in battle]. This metrically necessary averse is semantically inessential: the subject has already been introduced as ‘sinces brytta,’ and preceding discourse makes it clear that the distributor 24 For detailed analysis see Russom, ‘Artful Avoidance.’

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of treasure is Hrothgar. Verse 608a could be removed with no grammatical awkwardness and with no significant change in truth conditions, but its poetic compounds have semantic as well as metrical value. In lines 856–61, Hrothgar’s retainers, mightily impressed by the defeat of Grendel, declare that no one in the whole world is a better warrior than Beowulf or more worthy of kingship. The poet then calls a halt to the narrative and states that no one is praising Beowulf at Hrothgar’s expense. Just in case this nudge proves insufficient, the poet provides a personal evaluation in 863b: ‘ac þæt wæs gĿd cyning’ [for that was an able king]. Except for ‘ac,’ which acknowledges that the audience might have the wrong idea about Hrothgar, these are the same words used earlier to praise Scyld, the glorious founder of Hrothgar’s line (11b). We are not to interpret Beowulf’s success as Hrothgar’s failure. As the poet later insists, ‘that was a king blameless in all respects until old age, which has injured many, deprived him of the joys of strength’ (1885b–87b). Given such persistent – even anxious – efforts to represent old Hrothgar as a great warrior-king, we cannot refuse to interpret ‘gamolfeax ond gŗðrĿf,’ which insists once more that the king’s age is consistent with heroic stature. The unusual metre of 608a provides additional evidence for a secondary semantic relationship. Verses with two poetic compounds represent an extreme departure from the two-stress norm and have correspondingly restricted frequency. Only five other verses in Beowulf contain two poetic compounds (193a, 485a, 1698a, 1719a, and 1881a). This is not the kind of two-word verse that tradition conserves and proliferates. The author pushes the metrical envelope in 608a, presumably because its content has thematic importance. Verse 608a guides our interpretation of 1885b–7b, which can hardly mean that Hrothgar is pathetically weak when Beowulf arrives. Given 608a, we should interpret Hrothgar’s loss of strength as his death. Hrothgar seems to have died when still ‘felahrĿr’ [very strong], as with Scyld (27a). Combinatives like ‘gŗð-’ in ‘gŗð-rinc’ may well seem meaningless at first glance: (13) Grăp þă tĿgďanes, gŗðrinc gefďng (1501) [(She) reached out then, seized the war-warrior]

Here the useful ‘gŗð-’ provides alliteration and a fourth syllable for the b-verse. Since ‘rinc’ can appear in isolation with the meaning ‘warrior,’ ‘gŗð-’ is semantically redundant. Klaeber makes important observations about compounds like ‘gŗð-rinc’ in his introductory section on tone, style,

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and metre, though he has surprisingly little to say about their usefulness.25 With reference to ‘guð-,’ Klaeber observes that this combinative occurs thirty times in Beowulf. Seven additional high-frequency combinatives also refer to combat, directly or metonymically: ‘wæl-’ (24X), ‘hild(e)-’ (25X), ‘heaðo-’ (20X), ‘wĦg-’ (16X), ‘here-’ (14X), ‘beadu-’ (12X), and ‘heoro-’ (7X). The only other combinatives with anything like such frequency are ‘sʉ-’ [sea] (19X), ‘medo-’ [mead] (11X), ‘mʉgen-’ [power] (9X), and ‘hyge-’ [mind] (8X). Combinatives meaning ‘war’ can be used quite freely for metrical purposes in heroic epic, of course, because the resulting compounds are suited to the genre. Strength can be ‘war-strength’ (gŗð-cræft), a sword can be a ‘war-sword’ (gŗð-bill), and so on. Use of combinatives like ‘gŗð-’ is deeply rooted in Germanic tradition. All the war combinatives of Beowulf have cognate combinatives in Eddic poetry, with the predictable exception of ‘Hʏð-,’ an Old Norse cognate of ‘heaðo-’ that appears only in proper names.26 Aesthetic values begin to emerge even in the least promising compounds when we consider what the poet might have done. Instead of ‘gŗð-rinc,’ why not *‘gŗð-mann’ [war-man]? If the poet needs a secondary constituent (or base) with the meaning ‘man,’ the ordinary word ‘mann’ would surely come to mind before ‘rinc,’ a word restricted to poetry. The archaic status of ‘rinc’ is underscored by the fact that its Norse cognate ‘rekkr’ is also obsolete, appearing only in heroic poems and in ancient laws that employ alliterative formulas.27 Use of ‘rinc’ for alliteration is easy to understand, and the word still performs that function in fourteenth-century alliterative poems.28 There is no practical reason to choose ‘rinc’ over ‘mann’ as the non-alliterating base word of a compound, however. ‘Rinc’ and ‘mann’ are metrically interchangeable, with a short vowel in a closed syllable that would remain closed under inflection. Why make a less obvious choice that creates such conspicuous redundancy? The Beowulf poet employs other ‘gŗð-’ compounds with the meaning ‘warrior,’ for example, ‘gŗð-beorn.’ Like ‘-rinc,’ ‘-beorn’ is an obsolete base word that can mean ‘warrior’ in isolation. Once more the poet selects 25 Klaeber, Beowulf, lviii-lxviii. Observations by Klaeber discussed below can all be found in this important section. 26 Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, 2nd edition with supplement by Sir William Craigie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), s.v. ‘Höð.’ 27 Ibid., s.v. 28 Marie Boroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 42.

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an archaism rather than ‘-mann,’ the more idiomatic and less redundant choice. Employment of ‘gŗð-beorn’ and ‘gŗð-rinc’ represents a straightforward violation of Homeric economy, since both compounds have exactly the same metrical value. A similar violation occurs with ‘gŗð-freca’ and ‘gŗð-wiga,’ which employ metrically identical base words consisting of two short syllables. When uncompounded, ‘freca’ and ‘wiga’ can both mean ‘warrior,’ so the combinative ‘gŗð-’ is redundant in this second pair of ‘warrior’ compounds as well. The poet is not stuck in a rut but tends to vary redundant compounds with compounds that are equally redundant. Klaeber identifies twenty-seven nouns with significant frequency in Beowulf that do not appear in prose. Seventeen of these archaisms also appear in poetic compounds as combinatives and/or as bases, though Klaeber does not say so. The combinatives include ‘ben(n)-’ [wound] in ‘ben-geat,’ ‘beorn-’ [man] in ‘beorn-cyning,’ ‘ferhð-’ [mind] in two different compounds, ‘gum-’ [man] in seven different compounds, ‘hige- / hyge-’ [mind] in eight different compounds, ‘mago-’ [son] in three different compounds, ‘mʉl-’ [time] in ‘mʉl-cearu,’ ‘mund-’ [hand] in ‘mund-gripe,’ ‘sæld-’ [hall] in ‘sæld-guma,’ ‘sele-’ [hall] in seven different compounds, ‘swăt-’ [blood] in two different compounds, and ‘gamol-’ [old] in ‘gamol-feax.’ The bases include ‘-ben(n)’ in two different compounds, ‘-beorn’ in ‘gŗð-beorn,’ ‘-drďor’ [dripping blood] in three different compounds, ‘-ferhð’ in four different compounds, ‘-folm’ [hand] in two different compounds, ‘-guma’ in two different compounds, ‘-mago’ [son] in three different compounds, ‘-rinc’ [man] in seven different compounds, ‘-sæld’ in ‘medu-seld,’ ‘-sele’ in twelve different compounds, and ‘-swăt’ in two different compounds. Most of these archaic bases could be replaced by ordinary words with the same metrical value, as with ‘-beorn’ and ‘-rinc’ discussed above: ‘-drďor’ and ‘-swăt’ by ‘-blĿd’ [blood]; ‘-ferhð’ by ‘-mĿd’ [mind], an ordinary term for the concept in Old English; ‘-folm’ by ‘-hand’ [hand]; and ‘-mago’ by ‘-sunu’ [son]. Given a free choice, the poet actually prefers archaisms to ordinary words in poetic compounds. Beowulf contains syntactic archaisms with no obvious practical utility. These are relics of preliterate Germanic word order, which was subjectobject-verb (SOV). A consistent SOV language will employ postpositions (the SOV equivalent of prepositions), since these constituents govern objects and assign case to them, as verbs do.29 In Old English, the shift from

29 William Croft, Typology and Universals, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 59–73.

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SOV order to our modern SVO order is well underway, but postpositional phrases can still be found in Beowulf. (14) Scedelandum in (19b) [In South Swedish lands] (15) tĿ Wedermearce (298b) [to the boundaries of the Weders (in South Sweden)]

‘Scede-landum’ and ‘Weder-mearce’ differ in alliterative value but are otherwise metrically identical. Reversal of word order in example (14), a postpositional phrase with a type E metrical pattern, would create a prepositional phrase like (15), which realizes the more common type C pattern. The easy choice is clearly *‘in Scede-landum,’ but the poet achieves metrical variety with the archaic word order of (14). Diminished frequency of type E, along with type D, has been identified as a symptom of decline in the Old English metrical tradition.30 This decline is attributable in part to diminished use of compounds31 and in part to diminished use of archaic syntax. An important aesthetic dimension of Beowulf is regulation of verse-type frequency according to deviation from the type A1 norm. Sampling of deviant types at appropriate intervals provides metrical variety, while frequent return to type A1 preserves metrical coherence.32 Even ‘gŗð-rinc,’ it seems, has significant thematic value. Its base ‘-rinc’ is worth interpreting as an index of antiquity that validates the traditions in Beowulf (compare lines 1–3).33 Redundant combinatives like ‘gŗð-’ may have evolved as devices to change the alliterative value of a noun, but the very appropriateness to genre that makes them so useful also seems to function as an index of heroism. Each genre-appropriate combinative in Beowulf has a secondary semantic link to the theme of undying glory, stated explicitly in lines 1386–9. This prototypical theme of Germanic and Indo-European epic is intimately associated with the poet’s cultural role. 30 Thomas Cable, ‘Metrical Style as Evidence for the Date of Beowulf,’ in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 77–82, at 80. 31 Robert D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 255–6. 32 Russom, ‘Dating Criteria,’ 259. 33 For discussion of the narrative index, see Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill, 1977), 79–141.

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When Hrothgar’s scop celebrates the defeat of Grendel (867b–915b), he does so by placing Beowulf in the company of ancient heroes whose glory survives in epic song, as with the glory of Homeric heroes.34 Even redundant features of poetic diction help transform the Beowulf plot into a formally heroicized narrative, into authoritative language that memorializes courage in a good cause while denouncing abuses of power by monsters like Grendel or by heroes gone wrong like Heremod. Magoun claims that the metaphorical compounds called ‘kennings’ are purely mechanical devices of a practical improviser. The Beowulf poet, he thinks, had no interest in ‘connotative effects produced by passing mention of sails, swans, or whales’ in kennings for the sea like ‘segl-răd’ [sailroad], ‘swan-răd’ [swan-road], or ‘hron-răd’ [whale-road].35 What Magoun fails to notice is the metrical identity of ‘segl-răd’ with ‘swan-răd,’ a clear violation of Homeric economy that also sets aside the obvious combinative ‘sʉ-’ [sea]. The availability of ‘sʉ-’ is highlighted by its appearance at 393b in ‘sʉ-wylmas’ [sea-wellings, ocean], another violation of economy in the set of ‘sea’ compounds alliterating on ‘s-’. The constituents of ‘sʉwylm’ are not archaic, but the compound is attested only once in Old English and can hardly be considered a prosaic choice. Equivalent prosaic compounds do exist. Two of them, ‘sʉ-flĿdas’ [sea-floods] and ‘sʉstrďamas’ [sea-streams], appear in the Paris Psalter, a body of alliterative poems not much admired for their craftsmanship that are based closely on biblical texts.36 Compounds for ‘sea’ alliterating on ‘w-’ in Beowulf attest to the same stylistic preferences. There is exact metrical equivalence between ‘wʉg-holm’ [billowy sea], a unique occurrence, and the kenning ‘wind-geard’ [court of the winds]. The unique compound ‘wæter-ʭðas’ [water-waves] has the same metrical value as the prosaic compounds ‘wæter-flĿdas’ and ‘wæter-strďamas,’ which appear in the Paris Psalter but not in Beowulf. Given such stylistic evidence, it seems more than reasonable to posit a secondary semantic relationship between ‘swan-răd,’ for example, and the description of Beowulf’s ship in line 218 as ‘flota fămĦheals fugle gelĦcost’ [the foamy-necked floater most like a bird]. Here the author makes explicit some connotative effects produced by passing mention of swans in poetic compounds. Sailors and birders will readily visualize precise detail in the simile: a boat with s-shaped prow and wide sail running

34 Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79, 173–8. 35 Magoun, ‘Oral-Formulaic Character,’ 455. 36 Russom, ‘Verse Translations,’ 575.

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before a favourable breeze is indeed most like a European mute swan gliding on the swells with wings arched. Shortcomings of Magoun’s analysis guaranteed a sympathetic reception for Brodeur’s claim that the wealth of compounds in Beowulf implied deliberate craftsmanship. Brodeur did not provide a direct response to the ‘hard Parryites,’ however. Magoun’s analysis is refuted not by the sheer number of compounds or by the poet’s ability to create new ones but by violation of Homeric economy in the poet’s compounding technique. Brodeur assumed that oral poems of the preliterate era were short lays of limited ambition, but as Stanley has observed, there is little evidence to support this assumption.37 Supposed examples of the primitive lay in Old English and Old High German are fragments with a rather leisurely narrative pace. Hildebrandslied and The Fight at Finnsburh might be scraps of epic. Brunanburh and Maldon are probably too late to be relevant; moreover, they deal with contemporary historical events, making no use of heroic legend. I see no legitimate reason to suppose that the advent of Christianity transformed an oral tradition of the lay into a literate tradition of Christian epic, with the author of Beowulf leading the way.38 Although the fine details of Parry’s analysis are inapplicable to Beowulf, we need to confront, rather than sidestep, Parry’s more general claim that oral poets use formulas differently from poets who compose with pen in hand.39 If we take Parry’s challenge seriously, problems for Brodeur’s hypothesis appear at once. The Old English poets working most closely with written material have techniques that are not only different, making relatively little use of poetic compounding, but also aesthetically inferior, wringing the last drop of usefulness from alliterative collocations.40 These stylistic shortcomings correlate with deficiencies in verse construction. Ælfred’s Meters of Boethius violate metrical rules observed in Beowulf,

37 Eric G. Stanley, ‘The Germanic “Heroic Lay” of Finnesburg,’ in his Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 281–97. 38 Brodeur, Art of Beowulf, 32–3. 39 Milman Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style,’ Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147. 40 In Meters of Boethius, 10, for example, the collocation ‘wĦsan / Wďlandes’ provides the only alliteration for three verses that stand very close together: ‘Hwʉr sint nŗ þæs wĦsan Wďlandes băn’ (line 33), ‘Forþʭ ic cwæð þæs wĦsan Wďlandes băn’ (line 35), and ‘hwă wăt nŗ þæs wĦsan Wďlandes băn’ (line 42). Such close-proximity repetition never occurs in Beowulf.

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and The Paris Psalter is more deviant still.41 Judith is a fine poem based on a biblical text and its metre adheres well to traditional standards,42 but the Old English version of the plot is radically heroicized, making little use of textual detail in the source, as if some tenth-century Caedmon had heard the story in church and chewed it over. Genesis A, though not literally Caedmonian, looks like the kind of poetry Caedmon composed. The closest analogue to the Beowulf poet, as imagined by Brodeur and Kendall, might be Cynewulf, who cites written sources in poems that are ‘metrically quite exact.’43 The Beowulf poet never claims to be literate, however, and never refers to religious texts in verses like Genesis A 227b, ‘þæs þe ŗs secgað bďc’ [as the books tell us] or in lines like Elene 364, ‘Hwæt, wď þæt gehʭrdon þurh hălige bďc’ [Lo, we have heard this through holy books]. The only writing mentioned in Beowulf is a runic passage about Jehovah’s feud with the giants inscribed on the hilts of a magic sword (1687–93). I find it difficult to understand why an Old English poet with the rare gift of Christian literacy would take such pains to hide it. That sort of masquerade might be appropriate in an Old English riddle, of course; and Fred C. Robinson interprets Beowulf as a kind of riddling discourse in which the poet’s urbanity is masked for a sympathetic representation of pre-Christian heroes.44 Yet to me, at least, the failure of Latin Christian culture to surface anywhere on the literal level remains unexplained. The author never mentions Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the church, or even England. His overt religious interests focus on biblical history in the era of Genesis, a kind of history that could easily be learned by ear, like the  secular lore mentioned in lines 1–3. Arguments for a ‘sophisticated’ Beowulf depend too heavily on assumptions with no textual basis about what its author and audience must have thought, given the supposed urbanity of their cultural milieu.45 What seems to be missing is an argument that sophistication of the monastic type predominated in the secular sphere. Why, exactly, is it so difficult to imagine brilliant epic poets with little or no ability to read, selective interest in the fruits of Christian scholarship, and sufficient authority to get thoughtful responses for their questions? Close inspection of Beowulf reveals unsuspected stylistic virtues,

41 42 43 44

Fulk, History, 35, 410–14. B. Rand Hutcheson, Old English Poetic Metre (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 37. Ibid., 35. Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). 45 Ibid., 7.

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but these make systematic use of Germanic archaisms and have no demonstrable link to Christian-Latin style. Perhaps Old English specialists should revisit the alternative scenario envisioned by Stanley: that the Beowulf poet composed with care before performance in something like the manner of Caedmon. Responsible objections to this scenario will require a better analysis of preliterate versecraft.46

46 Thanks are due to colleagues on ANSAX-L who helped me assess current opinion about the Beowulf poet’s style. It would require a better mathematician than I to evaluate numerological claims debated by these colleagues, which might have important implications, if valid, for the question of literacy.

4 Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty peggy a. knapp

Hans-Georg Gadamer has written, ‘of all the things that confront us in nature and history, it is the work of art that speaks to us most directly.’1 While Beowulf is useful to historians and linguists of many stripes, it also presents itself as impressive and memorable artistry. It ‘greets us,’ as Elaine Scarry puts it, producing a particular kind of pleasure, one that we are eager to share, often as a judgment – ‘beautiful!’ – without our attempting to argue anyone into agreement. We offer such judgments and pay attention to the judgments of others in the hope that we ‘will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.’2 Aesthetic attention revivifies things otherwise lost, dead, or irrelevant, revealing their energeia – their life force. The greeting they offer breaks in on us, focusing what we could not see so clearly otherwise and often disturbing the ‘realities’ we had taken for granted. Although art, Gadamer goes on to say, is intimate in its direct address to its viewer, it is also social, involved in the life-worlds in which it was produced, requiring hermeneutic methods of translation, and necessarily bringing historians and linguists into the picture.3 Beowulf repays aesthetic attention both for its intricate craftedness and for its testimony to the strange necessity for beauty in a world filled with dangers for the human community.4 1 Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 95. 2 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 3 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 96. 4 According to the New York Times, Science Times for 1 April 2008, a gold necklace was found in a four-thousand-year-old burial pit in Peru, the product of a society just emerging from its hunter-gatherer phase, rather than the highly organized social formation that

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Aesthetic greeting is ‘disinterested,’ in Kant’s special sense of that term. It pleases by bringing imagination and understanding into simultaneous play, not because we can use it to get something else or to prove ourselves right. The pleasure it gives, though, is not exclusively immediate (as ‘greeting’ might imply), because the high regard in which we hold a beautiful object like Beowulf, induces the desire for contemplation. It haunts thought. Part of its power to haunt is that it eludes conceptual fixities, continually slipping away from conclusions that at first blush seemed obvious. As a whole, the poem creates an image rather than a marshalling of concepts for argument. It unites the sensible and the intelligible. Art is shaped according to its own generative idea. Its pleasures arise from the way imagination and understanding circle around it, like the chieftain’s sons circling the barrow at the end of Beowulf. And like that scene at the barrow, it is both impressive and enigmatic. What entices us on first encountering Beowulf is not, at least not for most people today, the verbal surface of the poem, and the dangerous world of the poem does not induce a longing to be in it. What greets us is what Kant calls an aesthetic idea, a shaped image: in this case the overarching sense that civilized human life is worth the risks a strong, brave, wise man takes to protect it.5 The poem itself is shaped for us by the commentary it has invited over the years as well as by our own intuitions;6 just as the scop in the poem shapes events, old ones and those that have just occurred, in terms of his interpretive traditions. What induces further reflection is why the episodes that ultimately gesture towards that idea are

can afford to craft such items. This find ratifies my sense that very early history of civilizations desired and valued humanly produced beauty. 5 Kant’s aesthetic idea is not a theme; themes are stated as concepts. In attempting to establish a theme for the poem, John D. Niles dismisses previous attempts and proposes one of his own. Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 224–28. The difficulties he encounters with others’ attempts to arrive at a theme, and which I have with Niles’s own, involve the difference between theme (a conceptual statement about the poet’s ‘true interests’) and idea (suggestive centre for reflection). I agree with Gadamer’s proposition that a hermeneutic/aesthetic response is not bound to authorial intention, as well as Kant’s sense of the domain of ‘idea.’ 6 Allen Frantzen stresses the ‘supplement,’ edited, translated, footnoted, surrounded by intertext, that has of necessity replaced the ‘original’ poem of the manuscript, denying, however, that its usefulness produces a progress myth that gets us incrementally closer to the ‘true poem’; it is rather a ‘picture of ongoing disputes.’ Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 105 and 198. I read the poem with students in Seamus Heaney’s translation, with looks back to F. Klaeber’s edition, and will do so in this essay.

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presented as they are. The aesthetic pleasure it affords inheres in both the immediate enjoyment of a great adventure story and unfolding scholarly reflection.7 Beauty mediates between idea and appearance.8 In this essay, my interest is in the aesthetic effects of Beowulf as we might grasp them now. Gadamer’s ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ posits that, although we cannot fully inhabit the intellectual world of the original author, we can ‘regain the concepts of a historical past [so as to] include our own comprehension of them’ and fuse our horizon of understanding with his.9 Beowulf presents a hard test for Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, because we must build our image of the author’s horizon from relatively few contemporary artefacts external to the poem and many potentially contradictory hints internal to it – James Earl calls the poet ‘cagey,’ and I agree.10 On the other hand, Gadamer everywhere stresses the power and validity of our responses to textual art. Readers are capable of entering imaginatively into narrated worlds whose ‘real-world’ existence they would not necessarily credit, but whose coherence they would feel to be authentic and compelling. This may have been true for the ‘original’ listening audience of the poem as well. We do not know for sure that an oral poem preceded the manuscript we have, although that seems likely; nor do we know how much distance there was between the readers or listeners to ‘our’ text and the world of Beowulf and Hrothgar. Fusing horizons, therefore, has probably always marked readings of this poem. The unfolding aesthetic pleasure Beowulf affords must include a brand of historicism Gadamer calls Wirkungsgeschichte, ‘historically effected consciousness,’ the recognition of how an ongoing tradition has enabled our own thinking about a temporally distant object or situation.11 For Gadamer this is a matter of imaginative reach, not a grasp of the writer’s full presence, but a 7 Immediate pleasures of the adventure story in the translated Beowulf are sometimes (wrongly) thought of as too accessible. Looked at another way, the detailed study that would coax the poem’s nuance into the light is (also wrongly) regarded as too slow and difficult to provide aesthetic pleasure. 8 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York and London: Continuum Books, 2003), 481. 9 Truth and Method, 374. Frantzen is no doubt thinking of this formulation when he notes that today ‘Anglo-Saxonists do not see themselves in the work of their predecessors; they do not believe in a shared horizon, either with Anglo-Saxon texts or with Anglo-Saxon scholars’ (Desire for Origins, 26). 10 James Earl, ‘Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization,’ in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen Frantzen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 76. 11 Truth and Method, 340.

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reading of traces deposited in language. His formulation reminds me of the layers of tradition and thought ‘laid down’ in Beowulf and other Old English poems. In his version of the hermeneutic circle ‘meaning’ and aesthetic judgment are mutually implicated: we initially respond to a text by pre-judging its overarching gestalt and the hold it might exert over us and proceed by returning to initial predictions, altering them with each return. This essay will claim aesthetic power for Beowulf and attend to the particular relations between the whole and its parts that clarify that claim. Cultural Zeitgeists Although no interpretation of Beowulf and its horizons of thought can be regarded as complete – it seems like uncertain, endless work – a given reading of the poem can summon its purposive coherence, notwithstanding its apparent fracture between its Germanic/heroic spine and Christian evocativeness. This puzzle about its shape calls up Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect recognition: not just seeing an image, but seeing it as some particular thing, his celebrated example being that of the rabbit alternately seen as a duck.12 Even in experiencing the poem as an exciting adventure tale, we ask why we value Beowulf’s image so highly. Is it because his heroism preserves, for a while, a Germanic social ethos that impresses as mysteriously Other or because the hero’s courage and wisdom prefigure the courage and wisdom of Christ, whose victory is not fleeting? Our historical distance from the action of the created world (which may have been quite distant from the poet’s own) is conducive to aesthetic reflection because the poem is easily seen as hypothetical and disinterested and because its strangeness does not readily yield to a determinate concept. This strangeness, though, might be seen to hamper the hermeneutic work of providing an intellectual horizon for the composition of the poem. Scholarship has not yet agreed on its date or conditions of production. Some argue strongly for a fully oral model for the early eleventh-century manuscript with interpolations by a monkish hand; some for an old oral poem, gradually Christianized as it passed from generation to generation; some for a literate poet producing a Christian poem that treats the scop tradition and Germanic social values as relics of a past era. Then, too, the social and poetic practices that the poem refers to can be linked with sources as early

12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), 165–70.

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as Tacitus, as late as the Parry/Lord analogues for oral-formulaic poetry in the twentieth century, and from many parts of the medieval world. On the other hand, there is enough art and a full enough historical record for making informed hypotheses, especially in two related areas: surviving visual art, especially the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Nordic mythology considered broadly. A good deal of the art is strongly characterized by a pattern of interlace. John Leyerle’s masterful description of the technical qualities of the style has been widely credited and widely used to explore the unfamiliar structure of Beowulf. The interlace style provides an obvious contrast to chronological, mimetic representations, especially to the strongly causal aesthetic Aristotle proposed in The Poetics with its beginning from which the rest follows and its ending, which uses up those energies. Northern medieval style tends toward the abstract and formal, and its structure is not necessarily that of a causal chain.13 Although abstract frames and boundaries are carefully and ingeniously crafted, interlaced images by no means lack energy – the boundaries seem necessary to contain the impression of teeming movement within. I think of Boethius, who thinks of the seas as ‘gredy to flowen,’ constrained only by cosmic love.14 Interlace both creates patterns that tease the eye into following dizzying paths and in many cases represents the free ends of some strands as a stylized zoomorphic head, sometimes the body of a serpent, sometimes a serpent with legs. Dragons come to mind. Such interlaced images are found everywhere over a long period, in jewellery-making, the design of useful objects, and sculpture, and they provide an important element in our construction of a Gadamerian horizon of understanding. Those in manuscript illuminations provide the closest analogue to verbal designs. As John Leyerle writes, ‘Beowulf is a work of art consistent with the artistic culture that it reflects and from which it came, eightcentury England. It is a lacertine interlace, a complex structure of great technical skill, but it is woven with relatively few strands. When Beowulf is read in its own artistic context as an interlace structure, it can be recognized as a literary work parallel to the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, having a technical excellence in design and execution that makes

13 This has, of course, long been recognized, as in J.R.R. Tolkien’s founding essay on Beowulfian aesthetics, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95 and Joan Blomfield’s ‘The Style and Structure of Beowulf,’ in The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald Fry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 396–403. 14 Consolation of Philosophy, Book 2 Metrum 8, Chaucer’s translation.

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it the literary equivalent of that artistic masterpiece.’15 My reading of the artistic structure of Beowulf rests on a particular carpet page of the Lindisfarne Gospels: fol. 26v. This page figures the well-defined shape of a cross on a background of intricately detailed interlace that both tempts the onlooker’s gaze and denies, as interlace does, a clear path for its movement. That background is like the ‘digressions’ in Beowulf, which are interlaced with one another to produce an image of the social ideals and anxieties of the world of the poem. Siegmund is praised, Heremod blamed, and Thryth blamed for early and praised for later behaviour. Hygelac is praised for valour, and blamed for rashness. Their cameo mentions are not arranged causally or chronologically, nor is any one of them complete in itself. However familiar they may have been to their original audiences, to us they appear partial and puzzlingly entwined, most meaningful when connected with one another to illustrate the practices and values against which Beowulf’s more sequential story is told. The foregrounded cross on the carpet page stands out like the simple (even ‘trivial,’ according to William Paton Ker)16 three-part structure of the poem detailing Beowulf’s trials of courage and strength, but that cross is also filled with interlaced patterns. This analogy seems apt to the way the ‘digressions’ both echo and recede before Beowulf’s three great battles, producing a gestalt that seems ‘purposive without [final, conceptual] purpose’ (again Kant). Germanic codes and cultural memories are fully and literally present in both foreground and background, but Beowulf’s adventures are infused with Christian colorings, equally striking, like the cross on the Lindisfarne page, though less literal. The overall impression of the carpet page is that of almost unfathomably rich movement and complexity held in a formal order and balance that is not exactly symmetrical. No one would think it incomplete or haphazard. The poem answers that description equally well. Interlace is in one sense abstract patterning, but not, of course, pattern alone. The zoomorphic forms on the page are also suggestive images, baffling in their entwinements and scary in their energetic rhythms; they appear to be eating or biting each other or perhaps parts of themselves. The background tales in Beowulf are also puzzling (especially to us, but perhaps to some in their original audience as well), sinister and densely crowded with striving. The episodes of Beowulf’s career, though, are 15 Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,’ UTQ 37 (1967): 7. This often-reprinted essay appears in the Norton Critical Edition of Beowulf, quotation from 144–5. 16 Epic and Romance (1908) (rpt. New York: Dover, 1957), 165 and passim.

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enacted in linear narrative time, and the interlaced events of the tale need to be considered from another angle. Paul Bauschatz describes the deep structures embodied in myth and folklore that suggest the Germanic grasp of the way things happen. The world-ash tree Yggdrasil is watered by the Norns from Urth’s well, the source of ongoing renewal and growth. The tree grows, but also sheds the leaves and moisture that will sustain it in a cyclic ecology – yet not quite ‘cyclic’ because things don’t return to the starting point. ‘The past is experienced, known, laid down, accomplished, sure, realized,’ while the present is ‘a flux and confusion’ full of irrelevant detail that will leave little trace.17 Events in the human world (and even the world of the gods and monsters) are not, therefore, predictable in their specificity, though they are part of a world order. Events are neither utterly chaotic nor answerable to individual will; but they are not predestined either. The interlace of events is the mutual interpenetration of the past, that which is already ‘laid down,’ with the non-past, which is happening or about to happen. The influence and even control exerted by the past over the present is one way of describing wyrd.18 Narrative interlace in Beowulf involves things, especially the durable treasures that outlive the people who made them and made war with and on account of them. The ‘race’ of Grendel and his mother has nursed its grudge against their exile for countless generations, and the giants’ sword is entwined with their existence. Even older perhaps (or from an older psychic ordering) is the dragon. He seems particularly timeless, yet he is involved with treasures the Geats recognize, and he is time-bound in that he can die. Sometimes dragons ‘fly up [out of the past] and out upon the present,’ Bauschatz writes.19 When an event becomes the past, it is ‘laid down,’ ready to influence the new non-past, like the story of Beowulf’s exploits among the Danes, told in the meadhall immediately and back in Higelac’s court later. Pagan or Christian? The Rabbit/Duck Phenomenon Whoever he was, whenever he worked, the person who shaped Beowulf in the form of the manuscript we now have marked his poem with genius. By that I mean that it carries its own principle of coherence within it, ‘gives

17 Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 139. 18 Bauschatz, Well and Tree, 87. 19 Bauschatz, Well and Tree, 130.

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the rule to nature,’ as Kant puts it. Nowhere is that genius clearer than in his fusion of the pagan Germanic world of the action with the potentially Christian hero whose tragic destiny it recounts. On the one hand, I think that too much has been made of Alcuin’s Ingeld vs Christ pronouncement. The house of imagination is not as narrow as Alcuin made out. Bede’s beautiful tale of the conversion of Ethelbert suggests that Germanic kings could be moved by unfamiliar ideas, and many Christians look to Early Germanic behaviours as righteous although unenlightened by doctrine.20 Furthermore, neither world view should be regarded as either seamlessly incorporated into any person’s mentality or binding on whole populations. Both the cyclic well and tree and the workings of divine providence allow for moments of mystery, contradiction, and crisis, and much great art probes those moments. On the other hand, assessing the Christian author’s tone in appropriating an old pagan story for a Christian audience does puzzle current readers and has long commanded critical attention. To which domain do the ideals the poem underwrites belong, and how well does its hero live up to them? The genius of the Beowulf-poet is perhaps the best displayed by the aesthetically pleasing way he produces a coherent (purposive) tale that cannot be captured in an overarching concept. It will require two critical concepts for me to show why this is true. The first is Erich Auerbach’s ‘figuralism,’ which he distinguishes from ‘mere allegory,’ insisting on the ‘historical realism’ of both the literal and the prophetic figure.21 The second is Claude Levi-Strauss’s principle of mediation, in which opposed generalities are replaced by specific instances that exhibit characteristics of both. In Beowulf, the general terms are behavioural ideals – pagan/Germanic vs Christian – that look, and sometimes are, sharply opposed. What follows is how the poet manages these oppositions. Figure 1 diagrams my commentary on the mediating devices the Beowulf-poet finds for the conceptually (theologically) discordant features of his poem. The most basic mediation is the poet’s handling of time. Beowulf’s three foregrounded struggles with monsters are presented as both chronologically and causally ordered, but the background images of former heroic or 20 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Leo Shirley-Price (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 25. Larry Benson gives examples of the admiration of unbaptized pagans by such Christian stalwarts as Boniface; ‘The Pagan Coloring of Beowulf,’ in Robert P. Creed, Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1967), 205–8. 21 Auerbach, ‘Figura,’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, Six Essays (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 30.

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Figure 1 Germanic

Christian time

cyclic

linear dual time scheme of the poem Herot

meadhall

sanctuary beautiful, but doomed

gold precious gifts lay not up treasure Germanic ethics includes gifts, but they can remind one of vengeance the scop fight at Finnesburg

Caedmon’s hymn Beowulf defeats Grendel boasting

War boast

Christian humility ‘legal promise’ monsters

primeval monsters

kin of Cain ‘Others’ exiled by God Hrothgar’s speech

songs of deeds

sermon 1700 Hrothgar’s praise and warning the future

fatedness

providence wyrd Beowulf

ideal Germanic warrior

Christ-likeness historical (pre)-figuration

shameful deeds are not. The hero is young when he takes on the Grendels, still younger in the recounted story of the swimming match with Brecca, and for fifty years a king when he fights the dragon. Events unfold in this story in a more recognizable causal sequence as well. Beowulf’s handling of Unferth’s taunt leads to a truce that allows Unferth to lend his sword and frame Beowulf’s tact in returning it without describing its uselessness

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in the cave. His victories among the Danes buttress his successful kingship and lead to his boldness in facing the dragon alone. The tales of Sigemund, Heremod, and Thryth seem outside that sequential time frame, yet they bear on our sense of Beowulf’s duties and temptations as a champion in the Germanic social network. The poem as a whole serves as the mediating term by including both cyclic and linear accounts of time. Like the serpentine forms that seem to be biting their tails on the carpet page, the poem begins and ends with a hero’s funeral, but Beowulf’s death is also treated as the end of a linear sequence, a story framed and contained. Heorot, with its strong, artful construction, its meadhall camaraderie, and its plenitude of food, treasure, and song, epitomizes Germanic visions, the rewards of battle successes and victories over natural dangers. Its safety and intimacy for the retainers images the reciprocity at the foundation of this social formation,22 providing ‘refined pleasures,’ as John D. Niles calls them. It shines in the darkness, an apt image for Germanic civilization itself. But of course its excellence is fragile right from the beginning (not ‘a wonder of the world forever,’ as Hrothgar had intended), and although it resists being taken as a ‘mere allegory’ of a den of iniquity, as Niles argues,23 its doom is a figure for earthly transience. This is in keeping with the cyclic view of time, in which Yggdrasil’s leaves flourish and then fall, but can be appropriated by Christian thought: men build civilizations with huge beams and towering gables decorated with finely wrought gold, and their pride in accomplishment is the cause of their eventual fall. The golden roof, not typical of Anglo-Saxon building practices, signals the moral hazard of pride for its association with the palaces of the Germanic gods and the ‘ruthless’ Romans.24 Such buildings figure impermanent endeavours equally accessible from Germanic and Christian vantage points.25 Moreover, the predictions of its demise by fire (82–5, 780–1) take us deep into the world-understandings of both. Such predictions are not just

22 Reciprocity is a major theme of John M. Hill’s The Cultural World in Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 23 Niles, Poem and Its Traditions, 85–6. 24 Karl P. Wentersdorf, The Beowulf-poet’s Vision of Heorot.’ SP 104 (2007): 224. 25 Rosemary Cramp, ‘The Hall in Beowulf and in Archaeology,’ in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle, Studies in Medieval Culture 32 (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), for further critical statements about its ambiguity. Heorot is an artistic construct capable of evoking both an earthly, historical awe, and admiration for its (not unchristian) value as a social model (‘noble and fraught with deep significance,’ as Tolkien said).

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coincident; the oscillation between seeing the shape as a rabbit – the cycles will repeat – and the duck – destruction-inviting hubris – inheres in the very achievements of men like Hrothgar. It is possible that different medieval readers of and listeners to Beowulf saw either the rabbit or the duck exclusively, but we latecomers are positioned to attend to the alternations between them. The treasure, often gold, that Hrothgar and all good kings dispense to their retainers focus attention on basic patterns of the circulation of wealth and status in Germanic terms26 and at the same time on the bivalent meaning of treasure in Christian scripture. Like Heorot, ancient treasure, ennobled by the scop’s songs, is a figure for civilization, both for its beauty and its record of an ancestral past. Both the winning of it and the distributing of it are moral duties in the heroic tradition.27 The ongoing dispute about whether Beowulf himself is guilty of gold-lust in his final fight must also be seen in that light – he wants to win and bestow the dragon’s hoard, not to possess it. But any particular treasure may not be an unmixed blessing, since an ancient sword, which represents so much ‘cultural capital,’ can become the efficient cause of further violence and the barrier to sworn treaties. This is of course what happens in the scop’s song when Hengest receives ‘the best sword of all’ as an incitement to renew fighting against Finn (1143), in an episode that captures the social symbolism of swords and treasure generally. The massive sword in Grendel’s cave was made and wielded by giants in the distant past, but later available to Beowulf in his struggle with Grendel’s dam. This engraved sword represents the unpredictability of the influence of the past, but it also represents its durability. At first glance, Christian teaching would seem fully opposed to the whole system in the ‘lay not up for yourselves treasure on earth’ caveat of Christ, but less fully in the Old Testament terms the poem commonly alludes to. Symbolically, treasure made of precious metals and studded with gems suggests value and bestows it on temple buildings. In heaven, Revelations tells us, the very streets are paved with gold (21:21). The word gold, then, has a similar function in Germanic and Christian readings of the poem: grasping is wrong, dispensing right; hoarding metal as a 26 In Hrothgar’s ‘sermon,’ Heremod was not guilty for having treasure, but for hoarding it, keeping it from those who had helped him amass it. Hrothgar himself heaps treasure on Beowulf and Beowulf in turn loyally bestows much of it on Hygelac. 27 Hill asserts that ‘the giving of gifts is at the heart of the ethical life’ (The Cultural World in Beowulf, 86). Niles finds a useful analogy in the Homeric past: ‘a hero who does not win treasure does not deserve to be called a hero; a king who does not distributetreasure scarcely deserves the title of king’ (Beowulf: The Poem and Its Traditions, 213–14).

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personal acquisition is wrong, admiring it as a figure for worth is right. Augustine sanctioned the use of pagan (specifically Platonic) wisdom by analogy to God’s commanding the Jews to take gold and silver from Egypt as they fled.28 Perhaps the Beowulf-poet can be seen as reappraising the wisdom of Germanic code in a similar way. The scop’s role in shaping Germanic tradition may be seen as making that very point within the poem. Early, Hrothgar’s scop sings Caedmon’s hymn as a beginning for humans in cosmic terms (91). Later that same scop narrates the pattern of victory and reversal in his Finnesburg tale, a lament for Hildeburh, who ventured away from her home to bring peace and then returned, her son and husband both dead. This melancholy revenge cycle contrasts with Caedmon’s benign myth of origins, but between these songs, when Beowulf’s victory over Grendel is celebrated by the scop, the two perspectives are laced together. Beowulf is a monster-killer like Sigemund, who remains an inspiration beloved by ‘everyone alive’ (912) if he avoids the sins of Heremod. Beowulf’s shaper, like the shaper of Finn’s saga, acknowledges the revenge ethic (perhaps as a crude form of justice), and at the same time the defeat of the enemies of Caedmon’s God. The Germanic war boast (beot) exhibits a sharp contrast with Christian urgings to humility. In this case too, the poem allows a reading fully consistent with (and informative about) Germanic juridical custom, but also suggestive of New Testament steadfastness. There is a public, almost ritualistic tone to Beowulf’s boasts. His beot in Hrothgar’s meadhall amounts to a culturally sanctioned legal promise. As John M. Hill writes, it is not ‘a reflection of hubris or personal turbulence’ but a solemn vow to enact in battle the strength and courage being claimed.29 The ‘awesome strength’ he boasts of has been tested against various sea monsters associated with the night (niceras nihtes 420); Hrothgar needs to know about his powers.30 Beowulf’s claim, moreover, does not predict an assured victory over Grendel. He fully imagines the gruesome result of his being overcome and eaten, even making one of those grim jokes: that if he loses, Hrothgar will not be troubled with funeral arrangements (440–54). Answering Unferth’s challenge, he acknowledges the help of his armour (tradition, craft) and his being ‘granted’ the chance to use his strength. He claims his due as a killer of night-monsters, but does not fail to mention the unpredictable flow of

28 On Christian Doctrine 2.40.60, trans. D.W. Robertson (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 75. 29 Hill, Cultural World, 66. 30 My student Marshall Roy calls this ‘Beowulf submitting his resume.’

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time and event that connived in his victory (‘Wyrd oft nereth / unfaegne eorla þonne his ellen deah,’ 572–3).31 These boasts are easily given a Christian colouring: right action demands a willed confidence in the ‘whole armor of God’ (Ephesians 6:11) as well as full awareness of mortal risks. The ‘legal promise’ mediation has seemed less obvious in the final battle boast (2510) as he prepares to face the dragon. Many modern readers question his obligation and his motives, including Leyerle, who writes that the interlacing of episodes leading to the dragon fight display Beowulf’s pride and dilute his action as protective of his people (who are more seriously threatened by human depravity), linking it instead with a personal quest for glory that results in the dissolution of the tribe. ‘The hero follows a code that exalts indomitable will and valor in the individual, but society requires a king who acts for the common good, not for his own glory.’32 A good deal depends on how we see this final episode and particularly what it means that one man’s will results in suffering for many (3076–7). If we take Beowulf’s will to fight as impelled by greed for glory and/or gold, the shape of the whole poem becomes a Christian deconstruction of heroic society that places the Christian poet above the mysteries of wyrd through his enlightened concept of causality and providence. The mediating gestures I find so prominent in the poem undermine that reading. Nonetheless, there is throughout a sense of the futility of the whole system: the fragility of Heorot’s fortifications, the unlikeliness that Freawaru can weave a lasting peace, and the deaths of even the best of heroes. The cyclic rhythms deep in Germanic structures of feeling resist linear progress and permanent solutions, celebrating comings and goings, the rise of great leaders and their burials at sea or on pyres. The time-bound Germanic fable recounts the story of Middle Earth, and the Christian poet does not invite post-temporal conclusions. Grendel and the dragon are nothing alike, except in two important respects: they are real but not human, and they can be seen as figures for social monstrousness. The heroic code of courage, prowess, and loyalty is used in the digressions mainly to describe battles between clans, but Beowulf, though a powerful king, is only briefly glimpsed in tribal warfare – in the three central episodes he faces monsters who might threaten

31 T.A. Shippey notes that the impersonal wording of this passage ‘saves one from strange conflicts between Fate and Doom, or God and Fate’ ‘The Ironic Background,’ in Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 203. 32 Leyerle, ‘Interlace Structure,’ 8–9; Norton, 146.

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mankind itself. Germanic imagination might recognize them at first as denizens of an unfathomed nature; the sea teams with voracious serpents and so do the fens. But Grendel is no sooner mentioned than he is implicated as an outsider to the joys of human fellowship in a world made by a Christian God. Grendel is part of the sacred narrative; like the exiled Cain, he can neither join a clan nor be killed (at least not by a sword). Thus positioned as both an enemy of people generally and a divinely cursed alien, the image of Grendel evokes deep human fears. Yet another mediating action is introduced with the revenge exacted by Grendel’s mother, for at this point the poem announces its own symmetry: Grendel’s mother is ‘grief-racked and ravenous, desperate for revenge’ (1278) and Beowulf seeks her lair because it is better to ‘avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning’ as Hrothgar is doing over Aeschere’s death. The code of revenge is treated seriously in terms of both a Germanic sense of justice33 and God’s adoption of Beowulf as His instrument for the cleansing of His creation. Grendel and his dam become, then, figures for the fear that unfathomable forces threaten the protections of civilization: the warmth and light of Heorot tempt cosmic outsiders, and the need for revenge honoured in the meadhall predicts that revenge will be exacted on it as well. Violence is a necessity for defending the hallstead, and therefore, paradoxically, an instrument of peace as when Beowulf rules for fifty years because no tribe dares attack. The firedrake too presents (in an extreme example) the protection of one’s domain and treasure. Monsters are both absolutely unlike and remarkably like the human civilization they threaten, and this is true in both Germanic and Christian systems. Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ is often taken as an obvious interpolation of the Christian poet because its warning against a careless trust in the permanence of hard-won glory seems almost Boethian. Yet there is little in this eloquent discourse that does not point as well to the cyclic turnings of the great tree Yggdrasil that blooms and fades: joy in command, later powerlessness. Hrothgar himself had gleaned this wisdom from his knowledge of tradition and also from his fifty-year career as king of the Danes (another mark of symmetry in that Beowulf will also rule wisely for fifty years). He ponders the ancient runes on the sword of the giants without translating directly – it is not even clear that he can read the runes, although the poet discloses the lesson of the giants’ pride and fall. But Hrothgar ‘reads’ the message of this gift from Beowulf, in yet another scene of mediation between the Germanic life-world and the Christian; he 33 Hill, Cultural World, 63–84.

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literally reads the runes rather than hearing the message related, as Seth Lerer points out.34 Hrothgar’s speech is also a particularly good example of the appositive style. Nicholas Howe argues that ‘at the lexical level, apposition forces listeners to accept ambiguity’ and renders it difficult to ‘discard older, pagan meanings even as they appropriate a Christian colouring.35 If the giants destroyed by the flood come from Genesis, Hrothgar thinks of a Germanic analogue in the arrogance of Heremod. The lesson for Beowulf is clear, and he seems never to forget it. Wyrd seems the central mediating term that brings together a Germanic sense of time and action with a Christian sense of divine providence. Beowulf concludes his beot that he will risk the fight with Grendel: ‘Fate goes ever as fate must’ (455). It ‘sweeps away’ Hrothgar’s retainers ‘into Grendel’s clutches’ (477); it spares the unmarked man (572); it repays Hygelac’s presumption in feuding (1205); and so on. Sometimes wyrd seems merely to mark what has happened (related to weorthan); looked at from a future vantage point, what has happened is always what had to happen. As Stanley Greenfield writes, Beowulf’s is ‘an historic destiny, as are all the doom-laden movements of the poem. The Scylding dynasty will fall – because history records the loss.’36 Sometimes it seems to contrast with God’s overarching care for what happens. But before the event has unfolded, there is that eerie mix of personal agency and cosmic plan that has baffled theology and still does. The two faces are interlaced in a pattern as intricate as that of the carpet page, and the tension the poem produces by invoking wyrd contributes to the energeia of its current claim to aesthetic attention. The poem is bigger than Beowulf, but his story dominates it, and he is its key mediating figure. He embodies the heroic ideal remarkably well – brave, loyal, wise, unselfish, and persevering; one might say that his behaviour defines the Germanic code. But in one major way he surpasses it: he is shown winning treasure he shares by killing monsters, not (in the poem’s major episodes) by defeating human enemies. His strength and wisdom, therefore, can be seen as having been spent for mankind, rather than for personal or tribal ends. That alone would surround him with the

34 Lerer, ‘Hrothgar’s Hilt and the Reader in Beowulf,’ in The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook, ed. Eileen Joy and Mary K. Ramsey (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006), 601. 35 Howe, ‘Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland,’ in Joy and Ramsey, 78. 36 Greenfield, ‘Geatish History,’ in Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 125.

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aura of a Christian hero or suggest that he is a figure for Christ.37 In an allegorical system, the historical specifics of Beowulf’s career would fade as his prophetic status became clear, but the dense allusiveness of the ‘digressions’ prevents that fading. Auerbach’s approach, though, insists that figurality ‘preserves the historical event while interpreting it … and must preserve it in order to interpret it.’38 For the first audiences of the poem, Beowulf’s career may have been known before Christ’s, and the hero, like the Grendels and the dragon, can retain his ‘historical reality.’ For us, Beowulf’s actions can appear both grandly Germanic/heroic and deeply Christian. Certain details, including his understanding of wyrd, point to his dual function in the tale. I will discuss two of them. Exactly at the centre of the poem, Beowulf dives into the mysterious fire lake to confront Grendel’s dam. In this matter the literal surface carries the heroic tale, and at the same time figures a biblical one, but the first never fades into a ‘pure sign.’ Auerbach’s ‘figural realism’ here reaches its most impressive instantiation. Beowulf descends willingly into the lair of the enemy, emerges victorious, carries back a useful token, and cleanses the fire lake (1621) of its vermin. His loyal band of Geats never quite gives up hope of his return (although the Danes do), and the gift he brings enlightens Heorot. The structural outlines here map onto Christ’s Harrowing of Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus, available in Old English.39 In this episode, the path to the menacing, unsounded lake, the weird water creatures, and the actions of Danes and Geats have a solidity that imagination refuses to let go of. Beowulf is confronted with a landscape that threatens horror and death in a very real world. Yet the heroic Geat’s progress through this adventure figures Christ’s point by point, and a focus that cannot settle on a single concept – either Germanic heroism or likeness to Christ – establishes much of the aesthetic power of the episode. My second example is the description of Beowulf’s moment of selfdoubt (2427–71), the poem’s closest look into his inner life. When the dragon ravages his kingdom, Beowulf worries that he has contravened

37 Charles Donahue has suggested that the poet risked participating in the Pelagian heresy in his admiration of a pagan hero who behaves like a Christian without the benefit of revelation. ‘Beowulf, Ireland, and the Natural Good,’ Traditio 7 (1949–51): 263–77. 38 Auerbach, ‘Figura,’ 68. 39 M.B. McNamee, SJ, has discussed this episode in detail in ‘Beowulf – An Allegory of Salvation,’ in Fulk, Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology (original essay 1960), 88–102. In his account, the historical specificity of Beowulf’s story does fade into theology – the rabbit becomes a duck, period, but his account stresses the many details that make the connection work for the poem. The poet’s reluctance to make the analogy clearer McNamee attributes to the riddling style of much Anglo-Saxon imagery (96).

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some principle of rihte that brought this curse to his kingdom. Rihte brings up a whole serpentine tradition of communication.40 In the past, Beowulf has related the story of his Danish adventure to Hygelac with rihte: he had been careful to observe traditional styles of thought and action closely. Even so, Beowulf may be seen as fearing that he has offended a Christian God. In a long soliloquy, Beowulf reprises his earlier victories, as he had before facing Grendel, but this time his memories are darkened as his mind turns to the accidental killing of brother by brother, Herebeald shot with Haethcyn’s arrow, an infraction of rihte for which King Hrethel can exact no restitution, eventually ending his life as well. Beowulf sees this incident as tragic for the brothers, but also for the king, who lacks the judicial means to alleviate it, and ultimately for a social system inadequate for dealing with contingency. He interrupts his meditation on this legal impasse with an analogy to the horror story of the father whose son’s body on the gallows allows him no redress and drives him to a despair of life like the ubi sunt of ‘The Wanderer.’ Beowulf’s reverie in this passage reaches deep into his mind and heart, displaying the wisdom of his long experience of the Germanic code without suppressing its tragic potentialities. Before he resolves to use his sword and hand once again to end a monster’s incursions (2507–8), he registers something like the dark night of the soul. The stored energy of this passage is just barely contained by the fortress of its orderly formal structure. Energeia Aesthetic attention involves more than admiration for a relic from the past. The Beowulf that we currently have, with all its translations and footnotes, confronts us directly, in our own life-worlds, as works of art do. It awakes immediate pleasure and haunts reflection; its implications evolve and spread in circles outward from it. I want to focus on a few passages that have enticed me, not to argue that they ‘prove’ the artistic merit of the poem, but simply to bear witness that they have done so. I use the term ‘energeia’ as it was used in the Middle Ages, a blend of Aristotle’s ‘verbal force and animation,’ and Quintilian’s near synonym for sublimity.41 The term points to an energy both close to life itself and formally fixed to be available later (thus ‘stored energy’).

40 Lerer, ‘Hilt,’ 597 41 This is Madelon Doran’s account of the term in Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), 242–3.

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My first instance involves Grendel’s approach to Heorot. The three repetitions of com (702, 710, and 720) have a drum beat effect. Even in translation, the shadow stalker came, Grendel came loping, he journeyed. And in the midst of these three, the point of view shifts to Grendel, who sees the goldsele gumena, the golden hall of men, envied and hated, looming before him. That image of light, in 716 the shining gold of civilization, quickly morphs into the ‘baleful light’ given off by his own demonic glee, apparently the light by which he surveys the hall.42 This effect, combining auditory and visual incitements to imagination, needs no footnotes – it may even be more immediate to those of us accustomed to film and TV images of menace than to earlier generations.43 Grendel’s gleeful rage and implacable might appear in terms of their effects rather than as a blazon of his physical characteristics. He is, in a sense, monstrousness itself, visually undefined, the exiled Other we imagine as capable of hating, overpowering, and eating us. The passage does this by circling back, in interlace style, to the most attractive features of Heorot – its protective bulk and its luminousness – showing Grendel able to invade at will and light the fortified hall with his malevolent glee. Grendel’s approach to Heorot is here present to imagination and functional as a part of the whole poem, yet not quite graspable as a concept. Equally scary and mysterious is the fire lake, with its tangle of branches mirrored in the surface and the water teaming with reptilian sea monsters (1425–30, almost a poetic reference to the lacerine interlace). The night fires burn on the water (1365; Heaney’s ‘uncanny’ is perfect for nithwundor), another instance of light, the most consistent image of benign human satisfaction and civilization turning sinister. Beowulf faces dangers unfathomed (1367), dangers the hart would face certain death rather than evade by diving in. The runes on the sword hilt Beowulf brings back from the lake repeat the motif of impenetrability. Hrothgar gazes at the massive treasure, reflecting on the tangle of history, the mysteries of the past, not fully fathomed, but still rendered powerful through their traces in the non-past. Whatever it is that Hrothgar sees on the hilt, it leads him to address Beowulf in a grave ceremonial peroration entwining wisdom of Germanic traditions with those of Christian teaching. Listeners to

42 Alain Renoir, ‘Point of View and Design for Terror in Beowulf,’ The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Donald K. Fry (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 154–67. 43 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 473: ‘every appropriation of tradition is historically different,’ but each represents ‘an aspect’ of the thing itself.

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Hrothgar in the meadhall incorporate the runes into their own sense of a distant past; outside the poem (in the eleventh century and the twentyfirst) audiences connect the giants and the flood with scripture. The poem includes both understandings on its literal surface. But the hilt, raised in Beowulf’s hand as he emerges from the lake, must have looked like a cross (it does in the anime version of Gareth Hinds). There is both an insistent ‘realism’ in the whole incident – from the party having to walk single file on narrow ledges to the tears Hrothgar cannot keep back (1872–3) – and a general shape that figures Christ’s harrowing of hell. Another haunting image is that of Grendel’s glof. This detail is both striking and puzzling for several reasons: it comes up only in Beowulf’s second account of the struggle when he tells Hygelac about his adventure, it cannot be easily imagined in terms of size, it puns on the victim Hondscio’s name, and it seems to belong to the very category of crafted items that signify civilized attainment in the rest of the poem.44 It is this last point especially that disturbs our sense that the significance of Beowulf’s victory is the defeat of brute rejection of community and tradition. The intricate design, ‘a rare patchwork / of devilishly fitted dragonskins’ (2006–7), roomy and functional (like humanly crafted war-gear) resembles much of the treasure in the poem and the poem itself, but it lies beyond the traditions that bring understanding to other crafted items. What powers could and did make such a thing? It is more baffling than the sword hilt, and scarier. Although brief, its appearance – ‘hung at the ready’ as Grendel attacks – hints at the horrifying possibility of being swallowed up, as in Norse myths of giant gloves transformed into halls.45 The image in the poem is a patchwork, stitched together from various sources, but also stitched into the emotional weave of the fiction, supporting Beowulf’s steady refusal to be intimidated, but muting any overarching faith in artifice as the distinctively human resource. Finally, I want to visit briefly the ‘strange and somber majesty’ of Beowulf’s funeral rites. This last movement of the poem is deeply moving, evoking a strangeness different from that of Grendel or the fire lake. The lament of the Geatish woman that just precedes it undermines the sense that Beowulf has successfully freed his people from the firedrake’s incursions by predicting invasion, enslavement, and piles of bodies. Although Beowulf himself seems content that he has delivered a gift of treasure to his people (2797–8), the Geats bury it with him ‘useless to men’ (3168) as 44 Lerer, ‘Grendel’s Glove,’ ELH 64 (1994): 724. 45 Lerer, ‘Grendel’s Glove,’ 726.

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part of their tribute to his excellence. The burial, the slow circling of the horsemen, and the narrator’s tribute to his pre-eminence over ‘all the kings upon the earth’ balance the wildness of the woman’s nightmare with ritualized reflection. This final scene both displays the futility and impermanence of heroism on middle earth and enshrines the heroic sacrifice.46 Existentially, it honours a life well lived in terms of both Germanic and Christian codes. Formally, it echoes the ship burial of Shield with which the poem began. No one knows for certain whose hands received that ship. Nor does any single conceptual system control the energies of this haunting narrative, somewhat differently received by each reader’s imagination.

46 Fred C. Robinson even suggests that Beowulf’s earliest audiences would have seen the barrow and solemn procession as a pagan deification rite in The Tomb of Beowulf and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 3–19.

5 ‘Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’: Latin Prayer and Old English Liturgical Poetry sarah larratt keefer

When teaching poetry to first-year English students, instructors tell them that studying verse is like opening a special notebook, which records what the poets of that era or nation considered of aesthetic beauty and cultural importance. Poetry is the form that is used when something of significance needs to be created in a unique form that will endure; it tells us of the desires of the culture that produced it, and represents a snapshot of whatever was considered most aesthetically pleasing and intellectually satisfying. Thus we learn about any culture by reading its poetry mindfully, with an eye not only on what and how it was written but also on what its form and content reveal about the aesthetic values of the time. This is particularly apt when using source study to investigate the composition of verse within an historical period. We are able to identify the influences of original sources on the work in hand but are also able to isolate elements within those sources that most appealed to those using them, by noting language, structure, and other details common to both source and verse. This study asks what the AngloSaxons of the tenth and eleventh centuries found beautiful enough in the structure and language of conventional Church liturgy to carry over into their translations of familiar ritual prayers into vernacular metre. I recently prepared a classroom edition of ten Old English poems,1 all of them devotional meditations on commonly known liturgical sources, and 1 Sarah Larratt Keefer, Old English Liturgical Poems: A Student Edition (Calgary: Broadview Press, 2010). The poems, retitled for the edition, are as follows with their ASPR titles in parentheses: Exeter Lord’s Prayer (‘Lord’s Prayer I’), Corpus Lord’s Prayer (‘Lord’s Prayer II’), Junius Lord’s Prayer (‘Lord’s Prayer III’), Baptismal Creed (‘The Creed’), Old English Doxology (‘Gloria I’), Titus Alphabet Doxology (‘Gloria II’), Kentish Hymn of Praise (‘The Kentish Hymn’), Kentish Great Miserere (‘Psalm 50’), Ah, Beloved Lord (‘A Prayer’), Vision of the Rood (‘Dream of the Rood’).

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shaped self-consciously by their poets in the mother tongue of the AngloSaxon nation as metrical addresses to God and to their fellow sinners. Their impulse derives from the period during which we find the first appearance of vernacular translations in service-books, either by gloss or free-standing text. The fact that there are translations of certain texts is significant. Liturgical manuscripts from before the year 950 generally do not contain translations, and it may be that their sudden appearance in the last half of the tenth century is directly related to the Benedictine Revival. This is the same period when vernacular poetic explications of some of the basic articles of the faith – the ‘Pater Noster,’ ‘Gloria’ and ‘Creed’ – are first recorded; these texts are also translated and explained in a number of the homilies from the same period. The likelihood that these and other poetic texts were used within the liturgy to instruct the faithful in the vernacular is now generally acknowledged.2

I must disagree with Bernard Muir to some degree here. While the creation of vernacular metrical poetry almost certainly found its inspiration in the glossing activities resulting from the scholarly revival of the Benedictine Reform, it is by no means accepted by liturgical historians that vernacular metrical versions of fundamental prayers were ever used as part of formal Christian ritual. We have absolutely no evidence to indicate that these poems were ever used within the Mass or Opus Dei, or in any of the manual offices required of a parish priest. And the only other alternative offered to date – that they were ‘educational’ – is at best short-sighted. Instead, their function appears to have been devotional, intended as meditations on familiar themes to be shared with community, court, or parish, but outside of the daily Offices or regular Church ritual. They may have been intended for recitation in a monastic refectory, or to be sung – if they were sung – for special extra-synactic occasions to do with social or regnal celebration. Although these poems have been considered self-evident and therefore uninteresting by scholars for many decades, they can be read in a way to help us better understand those elements of Latin liturgical prayer which the Anglo-Saxons valued, found comforting, considered inspiring, and therefore preserved in the transfer from formal ritual text to personalized vernacular devotions. Although the canon of extant Old English poetry 2 Bernard J. Muir, A Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book (HBS CIII; Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), xxii–xxiii.

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preserves only a small number of poems occurring in more than one copy,3 two of that number are included among the ten liturgical poems of my edition.4 Two liturgical poems in more than one copy suggest that the genre was widely appreciated or at least widely read. The study of such a singular genre allows us to explore an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic concerning elements within reflective devotional thought that were prized, since poetry of this kind is inherently meditative but nevertheless constructed so as to retain valued aspects of the Latin Church ritual. The step of personalizing familiar liturgical prayers into vernacular metre, and thus wholly removing it from the public world of prose, still allows us to make comparisons to see what details were borrowed from ritual to meditation in this process. This is not to say that these poems were composed for private reading. Benedictinism countenanced communal thinking only, and while each poem was written by an individual, they were doubtless intended for use by his or her community.5 These pieces may therefore be considered as late cultural versions of the psalmus idioticus that gave rise to the first hymns of the Church half a millennium earlier,6 perhaps as a result of the introduction to England in the tenth century of the so-called New Hymnal that Helmut Gneuss, Gernat Wieland, and more recently Inge Milfull have

3 Excluding the two liturgical poems here under consideration, these are ‘Solomon and Saturn’; ‘Bede’s Death Song’; ‘Caedmon’s Hymn,’ whose multiple copies largely depend on its presence in the Historia Ecclesiastica; ‘Soul and Body I’ and ‘II,’ which share sections and appear to be variant versions of the same avatar; the six Chronicle poems; the Ruthwell Cross lapidary poem, which shares some lines with ‘Dream of the Rood’; the ‘Metrical Preface’ and ‘Epilogue to the Cura Pastoralis,’ which are once again multiple by virtue of being attached to an important work in prose; the two metrical LatinEnglish proverbs; and both lines 60–2 of the ‘Menologium’ and some of the fragments of the Junius 121 psalm antiphons that are echoed in psalms 50–150 of the Old English metrical psalter in Paris, BNF Fonds Latin 8824. 4 There are two complete versions of Old English Doxology (‘Gloria I’) in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 and Oxford, Bodleian Junius 121; additionally, the first fifteen lines of Ah, Beloved Lord (‘A Prayer’) are preserved in a space at page end between a partially glossed Confiteor and the beginning of the canticles in London, Lambeth 427, and the poem in its entirety appears in the twelfth-century London, British Library Cotton Julius A. ii. 5 See Henri Logeman, ed., The Rule of St Benet: Latin and Anglo-Saxon Interlinear Version, Early English Text Society 90 (London: Trübner, 1888), 63–4 6 Pierre Batiffol, History of the Roman Breviary, trans. A.M.Y. Baylay (London: Longmans, 1898), 109.

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examined.7 Elsewhere I have examined the use in these poems of ic and we, to appreciate the understanding brought by their poets and readers to the background of self or community at work in each piece.8 For all of these reasons, the study of such verse provides us with a valuable field of investigation not entered with any frequency by scholarship to date, which allows us an intriguing window through which to view aspects of what the Anglo-Saxon imagination valued – a comforting sense of timelessness, an array of ‘terms for God’ by which the Christian soul maintains communication with her Creator, and the balance and beauty of the responsorium – within the liturgy of tenth- and eleventh-century Western Christendom. Old English poetry is well known for its appositive syntactic constructions, layering the effect of multiple associations much as modern hypertext is able to do.9 Such appositions can be discerned in larger, extralinguistic patterns for longer poems, both epic and hagiographic, where narrative digressions create what John Leyerle called ‘interlace’ in an early study of Old English style in Beowulf.10 Yet, generally speaking, this does not seem be true for the later Anglo-Saxon imagination at work constructing vernacular verse meditations on the liturgy. The majority of these liturgical poems, preserved in late tenth- or eleventh-century manuscript witnesses and assignable without question to the Benedictine Reform and postReform period, have no interweaving narrative sequences or ‘storylines’ that comment on one another to set up dramatic resonance. Instead, they are ‘centred’ pieces of writing, locating their audience in the ‘now’ of devotional meditation. Some of them incorporate short excursions, almost homiletic in nature, which are based either on scripture or on an expansion of a pertinent liturgical source, but each poem invariably returns to the ‘centred’ moment of contemplation. All are presented without ‘timetable’ in leisurely fashion, open-ended enough to become a short or a long piece

7 See Helmut Gneuss, ed., Hymnar und Hymnen im englischen Mittelalter (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968); Gernot Wieland, ed., The Canterbury Hymnal (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1982); and Inge Milfull, ed., The Hymns of the Anglo-Saxon Church, CSASE 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 8 Sarah Larratt Keefer, ‘Ic and We in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse,’ in Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr., ed. Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 123–46. 9 See the definitive study of this matter, Fred C. Robinson, The Appositive Style in Beowulf (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 10 See John Leyerle’s seminal work, ‘Interlace Structure in Beowulf,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1967): 1–17.

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depending on the inspiration of the poet’s own mind. As such, they dwell reflectively and steadily on God as He was understood by the men and women of the period. In this, they preserve the setting aside of time into an anticipated ‘eternal present,’ found uniformly within the prayers and devotions of all liturgical language and to which all souls in prayer aspire. Such a sense of eternal present was not the result of abandoning time but of transcending it: Bede speaks of the Day of humanity’s resurrection, that ‘great and unique octave’ in the life to come, as perfecting the model of ‘this faltering age’ wherein every eighth day both follows a sabbath and is the first day of the coming week. Instead, the new Day of ‘eternal stability and stable eternity’ will have no time to follow it but ‘it alone will abide, one and unending in the eternal light.’11 Ritual Latin prayer within the ordines of Western Christendom has always been located in the present tense, enumerating past human actions only to account for them and past divine actions to glorify God in that moment of meditation, confession or intercession which is always ‘now.’ Private prayer-books that preserve the devotions of the individual are well attested from the ninth century on in Anglo-Saxon England, and in these we find once again that the prayers, both in Latin and Old English, are invariably centred in the present tense,12 most probably because the Old English seeks to translate its Latin as exactly as possible. What, however, of Old English prayers that have no Latin texts they translate verbatim? Here we must look again to the liturgical poetry with which this study is concerned, since there are no recorded vernacular texts in personal prayerbooks, and few in service-books, that can be considered ‘prayers’ with no Latin original.13 Again, it is this lovely paradox of an ‘eternal now,’ of the intensely comforting immeasurability of God’s presence that we find presented over and over in the vernacular liturgical verse of the tenth and 11 Faith Wallis, ed. and trans., Bede: The Reckoning of Time, Translated Texts for Historians 29 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 248–9. 12 See W. de Grey Birch, ed., An Ancient Manuscript of the 8th or 9th Century (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1889), and A.B. Kuypers, ed., The Prayer Book of Aedeluald the Bishop, Commonly Called the Book of Cerne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902) for evidence of early private prayer. Books from the post-Reform period include Beate Günzel, ed., Ælfwine’s Prayerbook (HBS CVIII; Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), Muir, ed., A Pre-Conquest English Prayer Book, and Anselm Hughes, ed., The Portiforium of St Wulstan, 2 vols (HBS 89–90; Woodbridge: Boydell, 1958–60). 13 I exclude the vernacular adjurations found in tenth- and eleventh-century pontificals and liturgical miscellanies, discussed in my ‘Ðonne se cirlisca man ordales weddigeð: The Anglo-Saxon Lay Ordeal,’ in Early Medieval Studies in Memory of Patrick Wormald, ed. Stephen Baxter et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 353–67.

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eleventh centuries, because we experience with each poet a centring and satisfying sense of meditation in an almost-continuous present tense that defies the boundaries of mortal existence: Ðyn mægen ys swa mære, mihtig drihten, swa þæt ænig ne wat eorðbuende þa deopnesse drihtnes mihta, ne þæt ænig ne wat engla hades þa heahnisse heofena kyninges

(‘Thy power is so glorious, mighty Lord, so that no earth-dweller knows the depth of the virtues of the Lord, nor does any of the rank of angels know the height of the King of heavens’).14 ece standeþ godes handgeweorc, groweð swa ðe hete. Ealle þe heriað halige dreamas clænre stefne and cristene bec, eall middaneard, and we men cweþað on grunde her, ‘Gode lof and ðanc, ece willa and ðin agen dom!’

(‘Eternal stands the handiwork of God, and grows as thou biddest it; all the holy choirs praise thee with pure voice and Christian books, all the earth, and we men here on the ground say “To God be praise and gratitude, eternal desire and thine own judgment”’).15 Clearly, for the Anglo-Saxons, a move from time with all of its deadlines into the ‘eternal stability’ of the Day of resurrection, emulated by the sustained present tense of ritual prayer and promised by devotional practice, was immensely desirable. It is therefore not surprising to find that Old English liturgical verse is constructed in this same present tense, the preterite used primarily to acknowledge transgressions or enumerate God’s generosity to humanity. ‘The Kentish Hymn’ and ‘A Prayer,’ preserved as complete poems in manuscripts almost two hundred years apart but with so much in common that their composition was not impossibly coeval, draw from a variety of liturgical sources, but share a predilection for epithets ascribed to 14 ‘A Prayer,’ ASPR VI, 96, lines 51–5. 15 ‘Gloria I,’ ASPR VI, 76, lines 34–40.

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the Persons of the Trinity. Nor are they unique in rehearsing a significant number of these ‘terms for God’ in their lines: ‘Lord’s Prayer II’ and ‘Gloria I’ at their earliest appear in a manuscript of perhaps the second quarter of the eleventh century, and also depend on many descriptive modes of address for God. The tenth-century ‘Kentish Hymn’s primary sources are the Te Deum and the Gloria in Excelsis, which include terms of glorification for God,16 but it moves well beyond its originals: we find a total of twenty-two epithets17 in forty-three lines (not including subject complement phrases). ‘Lord’s Prayer II’ is a sizeable expansion on the Pater noster, while the ‘Gloria I’ builds on the Doxology, and both contain a veritable battery of ‘terms for God’ – frofra fæder and feorhhyrde/ lifes latteow, leohtes wealdend by way of example, or ealra cyninga/ help and heafod, halig læce/ reðe and rihtwis, rumheort hlaford.18 What are we to understand by such a widely attested practice? The logical first response is that, when constructed correctly, these ‘terms for God’ make up very useful half-lines, which can ensure the success of a poem. The great majority of them are shared by at least two pieces among the disparate canon of this genre, with unusual noun phrases like tyreadig cyninge / kyning used by both ‘Lord’s Prayer II’ (lines 56b and 83b) and ‘A Prayer’ (lines 22b and 75b), and more common expressions (Crist/god nergend[e] or ece dryhten) to be found in virtually all of them. We should, however, posit neither a common author nor even a single scriptorium where these liturgical pieces were composed, but instead a shared lexicon of nouns, adjectives, and noun phrases, considered elegant, appropriate, and an essential tool of the craft. Such a cultural ‘fashion’ would have attracted interest and been spread most probably through libellus copies, and then would have been imitated, borrowed, revisited, and enlarged upon as time went by. Can we locate a model for them within liturgy itself, 16 From the Gloria in Excelsis: Domine deus rex caelestis. Deus pater omnipotens. Domine fili unigenite Iesu Christe. Domine deus Agnus dei Filius patris. Qui tollis peccata mundi miserere nobis (‘Lord God, king of heaven, God the almighty father. Lord the onlybegotten son Jesus Christ. Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father. Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us’); from the Te Deum: Tu rex gloriæ Criste Tu patris sempiternus es filius (‘Thou art the king of glory, Christ; thou art the everlasting Son of the Father’), in Kenneth and Celia Sisam, eds., The Salisbury Psalter, EETS 242 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 301–3; translation mine. 17 Including conventional expressions – weorada dryhten (line 1b), found throughout the canon of Old English liturgical verse, ece fĕder (line 14a) or soð hĕlend (line 16b) – and creative constructions, like Ðu eart heofonlic lioht and ðæt halige lamb (line 22), preserving a double alliteration and standing at the exact centre of the poem. 18 ASPR VI, ‘Gloria I,’ 75, lines 8–9 and ‘Lord’s Prayer II,’ 72, lines 61–3.

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to be able to point yet again to something that Anglo-Saxons considered beautiful and valuable enough to borrow into their vernacular writing? One might initially think of the litanies, listing names for the Trinity and then of the saints for intercession, which were used on many festal occasions, but the terms ascribed in Anglo-Saxon litanies to the Persons of the Trinity are virtually limited to four: Pater de caelis Deus … Filius redemptor mundi Deus … Spiritus sanctus Deus … Sancta trinitas unus Deus.19 It is to the materials within private prayer-books and service-books themselves that we must look for the inspiration behind the ‘terms for God.’ On folios 4v–6r of London, British Library Cotton Galba A. xiv, we find an Old English version of the Latin prayer, Domine deus omnipotens rex regum, which precedes it. The vernacular translation sounds considerably like the ‘terms for God’ in the poems under scrutiny: Æla þu drihten, æla þu ælmihtiga god, æla cing ealra cynynga. Hlaford ealra waldendra.20 Prayers themselves, whether public or private, contain within their very nature the desire of the petitioner to hold God’s attention, and continue to keep God’s eyes upon him. As such, prayers are constructed so as to retain the conversation, calling upon God again and again by different epithets during the course of the address: … tu es magist gentium, tu es creator aturarum, tu es amator omnis boni … quia tu es doctor meus … Domine Iesu Christe, rex virginum, integritatis amator … sed tu, misericors Deus, filius Dei, conditor et redemptor noster.21 So, although ‘terms for God’ construct a useful part of the metrical design of these poems, I suggest that the evidence of so many epithets, running through the Old English liturgical verse canon, serves to foreground the reassurance of ‘practice in the presence of God’ offered to a Christian petitioner who addresses God in many ways when at prayer. Of the ten liturgical poems in my edition, five (by my retitling, Corpus Lord’s Prayer, Junius Lord’s Prayer, Baptismal Creed, Old English Doxology, and Kentish Great Miserere) intercalate the sections that structure their Latin originals in between the Old English verse meditations focusing on them, probably inspired by interlinear glossing of psalters and hymnals that began in earnest in the later tenth century, in such a way that both languages contribute to the design of each whole poem. That the Latin is made part of the vernacular meditations based on them indicates a

19 Michael Lapidge, ed., Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints, HBS CVI (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), 138 and passim. 20 Muir, Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book, 30. 21 Muir, Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book, 83, 86; Günzel, Ælfwine’s Prayerbook, 137, 130.

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profound significance ascribed by these poets to the resonance, semantics, phonology, and rhythm of the ritual language with which they were familiar, and allows us to assume with a fair degree of certainty that the poets were professed men or women, or at least ordained men. However, the ways in which the Latin inclusions have been set out are also worth investigating, to see what they tell us about elements of value to the AngloSaxons within the liturgy. Christian liturgy owes some of its original energy to the rituals, language, and music of Judaism, as does the custom of a precentor chanting the import of sacred text and a choir answering with a repeated or progressive series of sentences or phrases, which derives in all likelihood from the synagogue. The Responsorium is understood within Christendom as a series of versicles and responses keyed to the liturgical year and used in varying ways in both the Mass and the Office; they were generally drawn from the Book of Psalms but incorporated other liturgical or scriptural material as well. This tradition appears very early on in the records of both Eastern and Western Christian practice,22 and it was widely known and used on the continent by the mid-tenth century.23 The third section of Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks at Eynsham consists of ‘an extensive supplement that outlines the readings and responsories used in the Night Office,’ so we know that the practice was well established in Anglo-Saxon England as well.24 The structure of the liturgical poem based on the Apostles,’ or baptismal Creed, is found in Oxford, Bodleian Junius 121, as part of what early scholars insisted on labelling the ‘Old English Benedictine Office,’ and shows us that the Responsorium was apparently considered a most influential and attractive model to emulate. Rather than including the complete text of its Latin liturgical original, the poem called ‘The Creed’ in ASPR VI leaves out the second half of each major Latin tenet of faith with the following lines of vernacular verse providing a reflection upon it instead. We see Credo in deum patrem omnipotentem, but the second half, creatorem caeli et terrae, is missing, and its import is supplied by the Old English lines which follow. In similar fashion, we read Et in Iesum Christum filium eius unicum, dominum nostrum but must rely on the 22 James McKinnon, The Advent Project: The Later-Seventh-Century Creation of the Roman Mass Proper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 65–71 and 117–18. See also Louis Duchesne, Origine du Culte Chrétien (Paris: Thorin et Fils, 1898), 107–12. 23 Batiffol, Roman Breviary, 105–6. 24 Christopher A. Jones, ed., Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks at Eynsham, CSASE 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.

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following Old English verse for qui conceptus est de spiritu sancto, natus ex Maria virgine; we see Passus sub Pontio Pilato in the manuscript but find crucifixus, mortuus et septultus amplified into Old English verse; and we are given Tertia die resurrexit a mortuis by the scribe but discover the import of Ascendit ad caelo sedit ad dexteram dei patris omnipotentis in the following lines of vernacular poetry. Interestingly, the last part of this fourth and final major tenet of faith, Inde venturus (est) iudicare vivos et mortuous, does not appear in either the Latin or the Old English of the poem; and thereafter the six remaining Latin tenets, all of them short clauses or phrases, stand complete in the piece. Scholars have not noticed this design before, perhaps because they never took the time to realize how much Latin was missing. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie confidently notes that its ‘Latin text is enlarged upon to the extent of fifty-eight lines’ but is ‘rather disjointed in style and logic, and in several places … it introduces homiletic and explanatory material for which there is no warrant in the original text.’25 He seems to have missed the structural singularity of this work entirely. Kenneth Sisam was primarily interested in proposing a common author for ‘The Creed’ and ‘The Seasons for Fasting’ on stanzaic grounds and claims of common readings, and James Ure seems to support this attempt, without either of them commenting on ‘Creed’s unusual construction.26 Once the poet’s deliberate division of Latin and Old English is recognized, we see that it creates exactly the right design by which to imagine a choir singing the abbreviated but well-known Latin tenets of faith, and a soloist responding with the Old English meditations on each missing section.27 But whether such a poem could ever have been performed is very hard to assess: the sole copy of it that we have is certainly not contained in a text conducive to performance,28 and the design of the so-called Old 25 ASPR VI, lxxvii. 26 ASPR VI, 98–104 and included in London, British Library Additional 43,703. Kenneth Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 47–8; and see James Ure, The Old English Benedictine Office (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), 55–6. 27 A second choir would have garbled or obscured the vernacular verse, so I see this construction as based on the responsorial model of choir (imagined as chanting the simple verse or, in this case, the abbreviated Latin tenet) and precentor (imagined as chanting the Old English meditation on it), and not on the later antiphonal model of two choirs singing back and forth to one another from two separate locations. 28 It is copied late, possibly even post-Conquest, and its scribe serves as rubricator as well, adding the Latin rubrics in red minium before the Old English verse in an unusual turn of events; some serious spatial errors in judgment are made, and two words (one

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English Benedictine Office, in its two recensions,29 suggests that it was never intended to be used that way. Apart from the three liturgical poems, the remainder of this ‘text’ is in Latin, comprised of collects, section headings, psalm-verses as sets of versicles and responses frequently preceding Old English counterparts, and incipits to indicate the singing of hymns and canticles, including the Gloria Patri (seven times), the Pater Noster (four times), and the baptismal Creed (once).30 As such, this was clearly not intended as a performative text, i.e., one that was translated for recitation in Old English. The Latin versions of the Gloria Patri, Pater Noster, and baptismal Creed stand where they ought to within their respective Offices, and their vernacular metrical counterparts, included between Prime and Terce, have no evident place within the Opus Dei to which they seem to belong. Since we find Old English psalm-verses following their Latin originals, reciting what is actually on the page would provide constant interruptions with something like ‘subtitles’ for much of this Office material, running entirely counter to the spirit of communal Benedictine devotions. Since we know only of the Opus Dei of the Benedictine rule being recited in Latin, we may rule out this ‘text’ as a whole as being intended for performance of any kind, and thus regard James Ure’s discussion of how it was ‘used’ with considerable scepticism.31 It is therefore far more likely that the baptismal Creed poem was designed intellectually and aesthetically on the lines of the Responsorium – ‘à la façon de’ – rather than being intended as an actual performative text. Let us consider the way in which its design was implemented in the first section of this unique responsory. The eight lines following Credo in deum patrem onmipotentem are not an expansion on that statement as Dobbie suggests, but an amplified recasting into Old English of the missing creatorem caeli et terrae. The vernacular ‘response’ section of the poem here Latin, one Old English) actually interfere with one another on their line (l. 11, folio 47r) as a result. 29 It is preserved in differing form in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, from the early to mid-eleventh century, which includes only a metrical vernacular Doxology poem and a lengthy Old English Lord’s Prayer standing between Prime and Terce in the ‘Office,’ and in Junius 121 from the later eleventh century, which includes the same Doxology poem but an entirely different metrical vernacular Lord’s Prayer and this Creed-poem, again included between the two ‘Little Hours.’ 30 Ure, Benedictine Office, 85, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, and 100. 31 Ure does discuss the problematic title, noting in one place that ‘this text as it stands could never have been used by anyone religious or secular, as an Office,’ 62. However his discussion of it is often misleading for non-liturgical specialists and is, for the most part, inconclusive.

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appears structured into three units: the first, verse lines 1–3, addresses the whole missing half of the credal statement. The second section, lines 4–6, restates the credo that governs the tenet of belief, and refocuses faith onto caelum and terra, with God the Creator of life as a point of intersection for angels and men. The last two verse lines, 7–8, not only recall many psalmverses for the audience but serve to restate the missing rubric half once again, only this time in reverse, with humanity raising its eyes in aspiration: they move from terra to caelum, from the deepest part of our world, namely the ocean bottoms, to the highest reaches of heaven, the numberless stars in the firmament. The poet has evidently sought a means to recreate the semantic properties, inherent in the liturgical language of the Creed, into Old English, and through refocus and parallel structuring has substituted many vernacular terms for each single Latin one in order to round out the ‘response.’ Once again we discover a multitude of ‘terms for God’: for creatorem we hear fæder, ecne god, lifes frea, engla ordfruma, and eorðan wealdend. The poet expands the canvas on which to paint his or her meditation on the source: for caeli we find up on rodore, sciran gesceaft, the engla that God has given life to, and the menegu mærra tungla that God knows. The simple terrae in turn is amplified to include eorðan wang ealne, a second reference to eorðan itself, and finally garsecges grundas, and running throughout this vernacular ‘response’ are the verbs of making, shaping, and creating, absent in the Latin but, in the Old English, setting into high relief the many nouns and adjectives that carry the semantic resonance of creatorem caeli et terrae. To construct a piece of contemplative vernacular poetry designed to replicate a feature of Latin liturgical music suggests a most sophisticated and creative mind. It also indicates a genuine attraction on the part of the poet to the balance and resonance, the harmony and communal support engendered by the act of singing responsories as part of daily worship. Today it is common for people to be aware of deadline pressures and the effects of stress on their lives: mindfulness meditation, which originated in Eastern traditions of philosophical thought, has many devotees in the industrialized West. But it seems evident that a centred and mindful practice of living was as much a desideratum for Anglo-Saxons of a millennium ago as it is for North Americans today, and may explain why monasticism was a desirable choice of life at that time for many men and women, especially those born into responsibility through court connection. The ‘eternal now’ that was articulated within the prayers of cloister and parish was as attractive a thousand years ago as it is today, and was incorporated into the liturgical verse of the time in the prevailing present tense of these pieces. In

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like manner, the reassurance of God’s presence, reinforced by constant terms of address, was incorporated into the Old English liturgical verse meditations so that men and women who read or recited them were able to retain a clear sense of being ‘within earshot’ of the Lord they loved. Finally, the baptismal Creed poem shows us without doubt that the Responsorium was held in high enough regard by monastic poets to warrant imitation. The balance of question and answer, verse and reply has ancient roots involving catechesis that pre-dates Christianity, but it was firmly rooted within the practice and doctrine of Western Christendom by the AngloSaxon period, where we find it emulated in gnostic dialogues or the structure of certain homilies.32 But as an integral part of monastic practice, we may see its influence on at least one Old English liturgical poem where an ingenious use of macaronic design enabled its poet to construct a piece of verse that stands out as singular within the Anglo-Saxon poetic canon.

32 In particular, the dialogues of Solomon and Saturn (ASPR VI, 31–48) or Adrian and Ritheus (James E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill, eds., The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982]) or the Latin homiletic catechesis on the Lord’s Prayer and Creed on folios 165r–166v of Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley 343.

6 Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection* michael d.c. drout

‘The Guthlac is perhaps the dullest of Old English poems, or at least of the longer ones, so that it cannot even sustain a comparison with Juliana. For this reason, one would be tempted to affirm that Cynewulf could have had nothing to do with it,’ wrote Albert S. Cook in the introduction to his opus, The Christ of Cynewulf.1 Precepts, wrote Daniel Calder over half a century later, ‘is an uninspired admonition’ in which ‘a father ten times delivers himself of platitudinous advice to his son.’2 Such evaluative judgment of poems used to be common in Anglo-Saxon studies, although, as the fuller contexts of these two quotations show, there was not much beyond bald assertion of aesthetic failure or success and no precise definition of how aesthetic success or failure was to be determined. In more recent years even such minimal evaluation of the aesthetic qualities of individual Anglo-Saxon poems has all but disappeared from the criticism. One tries in vain to find any agreed-upon set of articulated aesthetic criteria by which to judge Old English poetry. In fact, one tries in vain to find even any agreed-upon definition of ‘aesthetics.’ It is a very difficult epistemological situation. Our sense of the aesthetic is deeply interconnected with other elements of an artwork that we do not always define as aesthetic (politics, ideology, religion), and it is

* My title and overall argument owes a great debt to the work of Slavica Rankovic. I would also like to thank John Hill, Mercedes Salvador, Joel Relihan, Molly Easo Smith, Josh Stenger, and James Mulholland for encouragement, correction, and sharp questions. 1 Albert S. Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf: A Poem in Three Parts (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1900), lxii. 2 Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 202.

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exceedingly hard to tease out separate strands and identify their individual effects. The variables are too confounded, and contemporary critical tools, while very effective for discussing politics and ideology, are not particularly helpful for isolating specific aesthetic effects. We have a subjective and intuitive sense of what is aesthetically accomplished and what is not, but, in the case of Old English poetry, this may be a complete delusion. Our knowledge of poetry is based entirely on a documentary record with a very complex history that prevents us from taking it as either a random sample or a deliberate selection of what was considered the ‘best’: we know that many people liked Aldhelm’s Old English poetry, but we have, as far as we know, none of that poetry;3 we form the impression that ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ was considered good poetry, but we cannot be sure even if our versions of ‘Cædmon’s Hymn’ are remembered originals or a new translation back into Old English from Bede’s Latin translation of the Old English original. And when we try to translate our intuitive responses to poetry – that, for example, Beowulf is a better poem in aesthetic terms than Andreas, or that The Dream of the Rood is more aesthetically accomplished than Precepts – into some kind of aesthetic theory, we end up tangled in tradition, critical history and politics. The difficulties we have in analysing the interplay of aesthetic and other effects in our engagement with Old English poems is broadly analogous to the problems faced by evolutionary biologists who reason about the adaptive ‘fitness’ of organisms in specific environments. Such arguments have often been criticized for being tautological, because the ‘fittest’ are defined circularly as those who have survived; similarly, the most aesthetically pleasing poems could be defined as those that have been reproduced most frequently or have been in the canon the longest. Because we know how arbitrary and contingent the canonization of individual poems can be, we must hesitate to use a poem’s canonicity as evidence for its aesthetic superiority. Evolutionary biologists have solved their very similar problem in two ways. First, by looking at the design of the organism in terms of non-subjective physical principles, biologists can see how well 3 In book V of his Gesta pontificum Willaim of Malmesbury tells of Aldhelm reciting AngloSaxon verses; N.E.S.A. Hamilton, ed., Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi: ‘Gesta Pontificum Anglorum’ Rolls Series 52 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1870). Asser says that Aldhelm was King Alfred’s favourite Anglo-Saxon poet. W.H. Stephenson, ed. Asser’s Life of King Alfred, together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904, repr. 1959), 20; see also Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, eds. and trans. Alfred the Great. Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources (New York: Penguin 1983), 74.

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the organism fits its environment.4 For example, bird wing shapes can be analysed in terms of a particular species’ behaviour, given constraints of biomechanics and developmental biology. A sub-optimal feature, such as a ‘panda’s thumb,’ then suggests that historical or developmental constraints5 have prevented the organism from occupying a superior position in design space.6 Second, following Dawkins, evolutionary biologists have broken down the more nebulous quality of global ‘fitness’ into much finer-grained categories. The ‘extended phenotype’ of the organism is created by a host of ‘selfish genes’ forced to cooperate by the bottleneck of organismal reproduction: a gene will not be replicated, and hence will die out, if the organism in which it exists is not able to reproduce. Therefore, genes that contribute to the survival and reproduction of the organism will be differentially reproduced and will spread at the expense of those that do not contribute to the survival and reproduction of the organism in which they are housed.7 Read ‘aesthetic aspect of an artwork’ for gene and ‘aesthetically effective’ for fitness. As I have shown elsewhere, these approaches can be used to explain tradition and, by extension, culture, by replacing the biological focus on genes with an analysis of culture in terms of culturally replicating entities, or ‘memes.’8 Memetic theory allows us to see how traditions and cultures are constituted and change over time by selection pressure and its influence on the differential reproduction of replicating entities. In this paper I want to extend the meme-based poetics I developed in How Tradition

4 For detailed discussions of these problems, see Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 363–4; Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. There is a summary and additional discussion in Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the AngloSaxon Tenth Century, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 306 (Tempe: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2006), 7–8. 5 Pandas have a use for thumbs, to help them in stripping off bamboo leaves from stalks, but the ancestors of the panda did not have thumbs, so the panda did not inherit any. Instead, the radial sesimoid bone of the wrist in pandas has evolved to where pandas can use it as a crude thumb. A ‘panda’s thumb,’ is a sub-optimal feature determined by the evolutionary history of a species. 6 See Stephen J. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980); Gould, ‘The Panda’s Thumb of Technology,’ in Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 59–75. 7 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976); Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Freeman, 1982). 8 Drout, How Tradition Works, 1–43.

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Works to the problem of aesthetics. First, I expand the meme-based theory of tradition by modifying it to engage more directly with problems of aesthetics. I then augment the theory by incorporating research on the human perceptual and mnemonic systems. Finally, I test the theory against a small group of Anglo-Saxon poems (The Gifts of Men, The Fortunes of Men and Precepts), demonstrating how the theory can explain aesthetic differences between them. A complete meme-based theory of aesthetics is beyond the scope of any one article, but it is my hope that the sketch given here shows how such a theory could be developed. The Meme-Based Theory of Tradition Traditions begin with imitation. When one person imitates another person, whatever is imitated – a word, gesture, sentence, tune, or other behaviour – is a meme, an entity that has managed to replicate itself from one mind to another.9 There is an enormous number of possible memes and a limited number of minds to imitate them, and this combination leads to ‘universal Darwinism,’ a situation in which ‘the differential survival of replicating entities’ produces adaptation and thus design without a designer.10 Those memes that are more frequently imitated will come to replace those that are less frequently imitated, and through this process, memes will become more and more closely adapted to their environments. A culture can be seen as an ecosystem of competing and cooperating memes. Within this system, we can designate a particular subset of memes as traditions, unbroken chains of identical, non-instinctual behaviours that have

9 The classic example of a meme is a tune such as ‘Happy Birthday to You.’ The song is itself a meme (it replicates as a whole), but it can also be seen as an aggregation of memes. The individual words and notes of the song, which are meaningless outside the context of the English language and the conventions of Western music, are also individual memes. Thus ‘Happy Birthday to You’ could thus technically be called a ‘meme-plex,’ a complex of memes. D.L. Hull, ‘The Naked Meme,’ in Learning, Development and Culture: Essays in Evolutionary Epistemology, ed. H.C. Plotkin (Chichester: Wiley, 1982), 273–327. ‘Meme-plex’ is an abbreviation of Dawkins’s ‘co-adapted meme complex’ (The Selfish Gene, 212–13). The abbreviation was apparently developed by H. Speel; see Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19. ‘Meme-plex’and ‘meme’ are thus different names for the same sorts of entities. I will use ‘meme’ except where it is important to the argument to make a distinction between larger aggregations and smaller entities. 10 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 192; Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, passim.

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been repeated after the same antecedent conditions.11 In memetic terms, a tradition is a combination of several smaller memes.12 The traditional behaviour can be seen as one meme; which I have labelled actio. The response to the given antecedent condition that triggers the traditional behaviour is another meme: recognitio. The explanation of the behaviour, whether provided by others or supplied ex post facto by the individual enacting the behaviour, is justificatio. For example: Recognitio: when someone dies Actio: sing the funeral song Justificatio: because otherwise the dead person’s soul will not to go heaven. The complex of recognitio, actio, and justificatio is the kernel from which the tradition evolves. Each element of this kernel is subject to different sorts of selection pressure. For example, the recognitio component is greatly dependent upon the human perceptual and mnemonic systems. If the key antecedent condition cannot easily be perceived or remembered, the entire traditional kernel is at risk of not being enacted. The actio component is more closely tied to physical and cultural limits: an individual has to be physically capable of performing the actio, and the actio cannot be proscribed by the rest of the culture. The justificatio meme has even more flexibility because humans can invent an infinite variety of justifications for behaviour. However, one particular justificatio is evolutionarily stable. This ‘Universal Tradition Meme’ is the justificatio ‘because we have always done so.’ Repeated actions will tend to evolve towards this Universal Tradition Meme because fallible human memory allows for the impression that a repeated practice has always been repeated. Any tradition, therefore, can evolve relatively rapidly to the point where the Universal Tradition Meme is its justificatio. Even traditions that have evolved to where their justificatios are unconscious can nevertheless use the Universal Tradition Meme if a person for some reason thinks about the justificatio of a tradition. The ‘unconscious imperative’ is

11 This definition subsumes a host of philosophical problems that are beyond the scope of this paper. For additional discussion see Drout, How Tradition Works, 11–12 and 24–7. 12 What follows is a simplified discussion of the schema I elaborate in How Tradition Works, 9–22. I present the theory with specific application to oral tradition in Drout, ‘A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory,’ Oral Tradition 21, no. 2 (2006): 269–94. Available on line at http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/21ii/drout.

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not cognitively stable, because a person can always become conscious of the problem; the Universal Tradition Meme is stable because as long as a tradition has been enacted some reasonable number of times, it will be true. Thus a tradition can be defined as a complex of recognitio, actio, and justificatio in which the justificatio is evolving towards or has evolved to the Universal Tradition Meme. Traditions spread throughout a culture either have the Universal Tradition Meme as their justificatios or are evolving towards this stage. Therefore one-third of the elements of each tradition kernel are identical: the recognitios and actios of two different traditions are different, but because both are traditions, their justificatios are both the Universal Tradition Meme. This identity of justificatios encourages traditions to merge together. For example, if the recognitio of one tradition is slightly more mnemonically effective than that of a second, the second tradition benefits from merging with the first. We would therefore expect to, and do, see large complexes of aggregated traditions. The remaining component of this model of tradition is word-to-world fit,13 the relationship of the meme or meme-complex to both the physical and the cultural worlds in which it exists. A meme that reduces biological fitness runs afoul, to some degree, of world-to-world fit constraints, but so does a meme that finds itself in conflict with other elements of the culture. Fitness, in word-to-world terms, is thus relational rather than absolute. Because memes are subject to a great variety of word-to-world fitness constraints, they evolve multiple strategies for replication. Justificatios can shift along the range between specific and general. Specificity in the justificatio can make a meme-plex more fit by making the justificatio more convincing, but at the same time that specificity has the potential to create word-to-world conflict that could reduce the meme’s fitness. A justificatio of ‘if you don’t do actio X, you will die’ can certainly provide impetus for the individual to do actio X, but if a person does not perform X and then does not die, the justificatio and the meme it is a part of can fail to meet word-to-world fitness criteria. Vagueness, however, runs the risk of not generating enough urgency to enact the meme. Traditions negotiate a balancing act between extremes within a non-homogeneous design space just as the design of a bird’s wing must be balanced between generating lift with minimum effort, allowing manoeuvrability, not breaking under stress, and being easy to grow. 13 J.L. Austin, ‘How to Talk: Some Simple Ways,’ in Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 134–53; John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

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A tradition can undergo selection pressure as a whole, but one of the values of the theory outlined above is that it allows us to examine the ways aspects of traditions (recognitio, actio, justificatio) are differentially influenced by selection pressure. As long as the net fitness of the tradition remains positive, the tradition should continue to replicate, but within that net positive fitness value there may be a complicated set of smaller memes that are both positives and negatives. A meme-based analysis can tease out these relationships. Perceptual and Mnemonic Structure and Aesthetic Pleasure For a meme to enter into a mind, the perceptual system must first pick up that meme as sensory data and transmit it to the brain. The form of the meme is shaped by the requirements of the perceptual pipeline. Sound signals are not transmitted directly into the brain but are first converted into nerve impulses, and when a meme travels out of memory and back into the world, nerve impulses are converted to sounds. Although the meme undergoes these transformations, it retains its identity while doing so. But verbal memes, unless they are very short (less than fifty words) or additionally coded with rhyme, metre, or alliteration, are not transmitted verbatim between individuals.14 Rubin notes that in oral traditional contexts ‘A verbatim text is not being transmitted, but instead an organized set of rules or constraints that are set by the piece and its tradition. In literary terms, this claim makes the structure of the genre central to the production of the piece. In psychological terms, this claim is an argument for schemas that involve imagery and poetics as well as meaning.’15 When we talk about the transmission of the meme, we are not discussing the obvious copying and recopying of a template in exact, verbatim form. ‘All memories are suspect, at the neural level. Fidelity-stable recall and self-interpretation of the past is not a property of the human brain and mind.’16 We are instead analysing the transmission, encoding, storage, regeneration, re-encoding, and retransmission of certain subsets of the 14 I.M.L. Hunter, ‘Lengthy verbatim recall (LVR) and the mythical gift of tape-recorder memory,’ in Psychology in the 1990’s, ed. K.M.J. Lagerspetz and P. Niemi (Amsterdam: New Holland, 1984), 425–40; Hunter, ‘Lengthy Verbatim Recall: The Role of Text,’ in Progress in the Psychology of Language, ed. A. Ellis, vol. 1 (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1985), 207–35. 15 David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7. 16 Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, ‘The Neurology of Narrative,’ SubStance 94/95 (2001): 72–84.

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complete experience of the text or performance. What is encoded is not the surface-structure, verbatim form of the meme, but instead a pattern, interpreted through various other cognitive subsystems, and the cognitive machinery of the brain perceives and extracts patterns very well. For example, C. Trevarthen, T. Kokkinaki, and G. Fiamenghi demonstrated that in infant/mother interactions, individuals react to general patterns of information, abstracting these patterns from more specific behaviours. Thus ‘a mother’s upward head and eye-widening movements imitate the contour of her infant’s vocalization, or the baby’s arms and legs move faster as the parent’s vocalizations intensify.’17 The mother and the baby are able to extract information from one channel (vocalization) and reinterpret it in another (movement), indicating that the pattern is preserved through these different encodings, decodings, and retransmissions. David Rubin’s analysis of much more complex oral traditions is consistent with the more specific, lower-level psychological analysis of Trevarthen et al.18 It is here that aesthetics comes into play. We can conceptualize perception, encoding, decoding, transmission, perception, and re-encoding as a series of processes that selectively move some memes into memory and then out into the world. Furthermore, within individual minds, memes are copied and recopied from and to different cognitive subsystems. There may be orders of magnitude more copying, encoding, and decoding going on inside the brain than we may see in the external transmission history of each meme.19 Therefore there is selection pressure on memes to become easily taken up by the perceptual system and then to be able to be passed unchanged through the mnemonic and cognitive machinery of the mind. Two ‘good tricks’20 that would differentially replicate those memes that evolve to them are distinctiveness (so as to enter into the perceptual system) and the creation of pleasure. But there are some limits on these processes. Memes that may be pleasurable in one sense can be blocked from transmission or mnemonic encoding if they conflict with other memes in the mind. When it comes to the recording and transmission of texts, activities that have a substantial 17 Colwyn Trevarthen, Theano Kokkinaki, and Geraldo A. Fiamenghi, Jr. ‘What Infants’ Imitations Communicate: With Mothers, with Fathers, with Peers,’ in Imitation in Infancy, ed. Jacqueline Nadel and George Butterworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127–85. 18 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, in particular 65–89 and passim. 19 Discussed in more detail in Drout, How Tradition Works, 48–54; for an examination of the philosophical and psychological issues, see Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). 20 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 77–80.

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social and political component – materials and labour as well as the social desire for preservation – will serve as a set of filters that limit what material will be perceived as pleasurable or worthy of being transmitted. These filters are not merely passive: they would actively transmit memes that agreed with the dominant ideology of the individual. Likewise, filters relating to form, structure, or language would tend to pass along memes that were consistent with the predilections of the individual mind in these areas. There will be a balancing act between form and content, between novelty and tradition, between predictability and surprise, which can be analogized to Horace’s ancient suggestion that poets should make their work both ‘sweet’ and ‘useful.’ The filter of aesthetic form would select for ‘sweet’ and the social and political filters would select for ‘useful.’ Let us bracket the political and social filters and focus on those that are more related to form, those qualities of a work of art that generate emotion, particularly pleasure, in an individual experiencing that work of art that are not obviously connected to political, social, or ideological concerns. I know that this is a radically oversimplified approach, but for the purpose of this argument that is a virtue rather than a weakness. It is also consistent with current thinking in cognitivist and evolutionary approaches to culture, which locate at least some of the pleasure involved in a work of art as arising from the ‘decoupling’ of different cognitive subsystems that are normally interlinked.21 ‘Decoupling’ is the ‘separation of mental action from physical action.’22 John Tooby and Leda Cosmides note that ‘fictional worlds engage emotion systems while disengaging action systems (just as dreams do)’ Although they are discussing narrative, this insight can easily be extended to shorter, non-narrative, or semi-narrative poems or to works of art like many Old English poems. People in close proximity to a real, wild lion would feel fear and would end up taking some action, such as running away, as a result of that stimulus. People who hear a story about a lion could still feel a version of that fear but not engage the action

21 Ellen Dissanayake, ‘Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions,’ SubStance 94/95 (2001): 85–103; Dissanayake, ‘Antecedents of the Temporal Arts in Early Mother-Infant Interaction,’ in The Origins of Music, ed. Nils Wallin, Bjorn Merker & Steven Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 389–410; Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,’ SubStance 94/95 (2001): 6–27. 22 Young and Saver, ‘The Neurology of Narrative,’ 82.

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system and thus not run away.23 Music may engage the brain’s grammatical centres without generating any specific, consciously decoded meaning.24 Abstract art can likewise invoke emotion without specific visual referents. Artworks allow individuals to manipulate their own minds, and, perhaps, as Steven Pinker suggests, ‘pick the locks’ that safeguard the brain’s pleasure centres.25 If ‘decoupled cognition’ brings about pleasure,26 then we have managed to shift reasoning about the aesthetic from the abstract to the phenomenological, and we have partially broken out of the hermeneutic circle of reasoning about aesthetics. No one denies that what is pleasurable is memorable. For the purposes of this argument, I want to propose the converse: what is memorable is pleasurable. This statement may eventually be demonstrated empirically with further advances in cognitive psychology and brain imagery, but for now we will accept it as a postulate (although it does seem intuitively reasonable even before the empirical research has been performed); the idea of memory and feats of memory as generating pleasure for the rememberer as well as for his audience is a commonplace found throughout Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, for example.27 From this postulate we can then derive some other useful theories. Most significantly, if remembering is pleasurable, variants (groups of words, gestures, dances, etc.) that are easier to remember are likely to be experienced as being more pleasurable. Those memes that are more pleasing to the human mind are more likely to be perceived, received, copied into memory, and retransmitted. Therefore mnemonically superior memes would also be aesthetically superior memes. The pleasure of memory then creates a self-reinforcing cycle, a positive feedback loop. What is easier to remember is going to be differentially replicated at the expense of what is less easy to remember due to the usual dynamics of ‘Universal Darwinism,’ and humans will also seek out the pleasure that comes from mnemonically effective artforms. If we now plug in our previously developed understanding of tradition as a tripartite meme-complex with recognitio, actio, and justificatio elements into our 23 24 25 26

Tooby and Cosmides, ‘Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?’ 8. See Wallin et al., The Origins of Music. Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 541–43. See also Jan van Hoof, ‘Laughter and Humor, and the ‘duo-in-uno’ of Nature and Culture,’ in Walter Koch, ed. The Nature of Culture (Bochum: N. Brockmeyer, 1989): 120–49. 27 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982), esp. 31–6.

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understanding of this engine of memetic evolution, we can see some of the specific ways that the set of aesthetic filters in the mind combine with the nature of tradition to drive aesthetic evolution. The recognitio component of a tradition determines when that meme will be enacted and thus how many opportunities for transmission it will have. Recognitio components that are most easily perceived by human minds are more likely to be effective at calling a meme to mind and thus creating conditions in which it can be imitated. In a trivial sense, this means that memes cannot escape the constraints of the perceptual system (no ultraviolet or infrared memes, no ultrasonic memes, etc.). But the more interesting aspect of this constraint is the very strong and constant selection pressure on recognitio memes to evolve to fit the perceptual system like a key to a lock. However, there is also simultaneous selection pressure on the perceptual system to avoid being hijacked by individual memes, otherwise the individual mind risks being the slave of any meme that comes along. Memes that can garner attention are more likely to be reproduced; however, perceptual and cognitive systems that can selectively filter memes, so that only those reproduce that are most beneficial to the organism of which the perceptual system is a part, are more likely to be themselves reproduced. We can therefore hypothesize an ‘arms race’ scenario, like that between cheetahs and Thomson’s gazelles, between recognitio memes and the perceptual system, with both entities adapting, via co-evolution, to each other. Closely linked to the recognitio component is the tradition’s actio, which will be what about the meme causes the actual pleasure. If the actio of the tradition is pleasurable, the individual is more likely to enact that actio again than if it is not – although great complexity can arise from the dynamics of the different sorts of pleasure: an individual can enact a meme that was physically unpleasurable or painful in order to receive social pleasure. Recognitio components will be characterized by easy-to-perceive environmental triggers and other qualities such as vividness or emotional power. The signal must be distinct from environmental noise, and it must be frequent enough to build up associative memory links to the actio component of the meme (and the justificatio component as well if the meme has not yet evolved into a tradition). Signals themselves do not have to be pleasurable (although being pleasurable would certainly fit Dennett’s description of an evolutionary ‘good trick’), but we have postulated that the process of matching signals to memes, the pattern recognition done by the human mind, is to a certain degree pleasurable. If this is the case, memecomplexes with recognitios that engage the brain’s pattern-recognition

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machinery will be perceived as more pleasurable than those that do not. I hypothesize that the brain may get the most pleasure from the recognition of patterns that require some effort (i.e., that are not immediately obvious) but are not too obscure; but further research is needed to determine the exact parameters of these criteria. The structure of human memory will also shape the recognitio components of meme-complexes. Ong wrote that if you are part of an oral society and want to recall important pieces of your thoughts, you should ‘think memorable thoughts.’28 ‘Memorable’ thoughts, forms that are more easily encoded in human memory, should be differentially selected over forms that are less well-encoded (i.e., if there is even random variation around original forms, those variants that are so constructed to be more resistant to error will end up replacing those that are more tolerant of error).29 Cognitive psychological research supports this hypothesis and suggests that, in terms of verbal art, formal features like rhyme, alliteration, and metre aid substantially in recall.30 Of particular interest for AngloSaxonists is the finding that alliteration is ‘roughly as effective as rhyme’ in generating accurate recall and that ‘first-letter cues are more effective than last-letter cues.’31 If our postulate linking memory and aesthetic pleasure is correct, then we would expect to find that texts with formal characteristics which make them easier to remember (perhaps by reducing search space or limiting possible variability) would generally be considered aesthetically superior to those that did not have such features. Furthermore, we would expect aesthetically successful artforms to cast abstract ideas and principles as agents. As Eric Havelock notes, ‘actions and their agents are in fact always easy to visualize. What you cannot visualize is a cause, a principle, a category, a relationship or the like … To be effectively part of

28 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 34. 29 When researchers deliberately removed some rhyme and alliteration from a text to be learned, subjects created rhyme and alliteration even though they had not seen the original text; W.T. Wallace and David C. Rubin, ‘“The Wreck of the Old 97”: A Real Event Remembered in Song,’ in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, ed. U. Neisser and E. Winograd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 283–310. Undergraduate students being asked to remember Beatles songs not only preserved the rhyme and alliteration, but introduced new rhymes different from those in the original songs; I.E. Hyman, Jr, and David C. Rubin, ‘Memorobeatlia: A Naturalistic Study of Long-Term Memory,’ Memory and Cognition 18 (1990): 205–14. 30 Rubin, Memory and Oral Tradition, 72–88. 31 Rubin, Memory and Oral Tradition, 74.

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the record, they [concepts] have to be represented as agents or as doings particular to their context and sharply visualized.’32 Because recognitio elements retrieve an entire meme from memory pars pro toto via the process of traditional referentiality,33 selection pressure on this element of a traditional meme favours distinctiveness and a tight link to the rest of the meme complex. Traditional referentiality also associates any subset of a meme-complex with that larger complex. Because political and ideological aesthetics play a filtering role that to an unknown but likely substantial degree balances with aesthetics of form, and because traditional referentiality tends to bring the whole along with the part, the political and ideological filters come into play even for smaller meme-complexes. We can thus see a complex and multidimensional balancing act playing out in aesthetic selection. An aesthetically effective meme is one that can get noticed by the perceptual machinery but is not tuned out by whatever error-trapping routines have evolved to prevent the entire mind from being hijacked by one meme. There is simultaneously a balancing act between novelty (that which is distinctive) and tradition (that which can more easily be communicated pars pro toto), and a balancing act between aesthetics of form and aesthetics of content, although these are not mutually exclusive. Memes can thus evolve to occupy many different local optima in a very complex adapted landscape. Memetic evolution via aesthetic selection works to produce memes that are adapted for their local circumstances, but those circumstances are always changing. Application: Three Exeter Book ‘Wisdom’ Poems To move from the theoretical to the empirical, it is necessary to test theory against data, and therefore I will now apply the theory sketched above to some poems from Anglo-Saxon England to see if the theory can explain the subjective, intuitive response I and others have had to the poems. That subjective judgment is shaped and enriched by my experiences creating Anglo-Saxon Aloud (http://anglosaxonaloud.com), a daily podcast of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon poetry read in Old English. Reading the poems orally has given me a different perception of the poetry, one that is perhaps more closely aligned with an original audience, which, although it

32 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, vol 1, A History of the Greek Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). 33 For a memetic explanation of traditional referentiality, see Drout, ‘A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory,’ 276–83.

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might not have encountered the poems as purely oral artefacts, would have been closer to an oral culture than a twenty-first-century reader. Having read the poems aloud and then edited those readings, I am much more aware of the poems’ rhythm, metre, alliteration, and overall ease and distinctiveness of articulation than I was as a reader who encountered the texts by reading them silently. The Exeter Book poems The Gifts of Men, The Fortunes of Men, and Precepts have not ever been identified as being among the great aesthetic achievements of Anglo-Saxon poetry.34 This turns out to be a fortunate judgment (or lack of judgment), because our analysis of these poems will not be clouded by the aesthetic pronouncements of previous critics. In a way that is not possible for monuments like the Wanderer and the Seafarer, we can come to the three ‘wisdom’ poems I am discussing without very much pre-judgment. Not one critic, as far as I am aware, has asserted that The Gifts of Men is better or worse than The Fortunes of Men, and although a few critics have bothered to criticize Precepts, they have compared it (albeit implicitly) to the major, canonized poems of the Old English corpus, not, in aesthetic terms, to other ‘wisdom poems’ like Gifts and Fortunes. Therefore we can to a reasonable degree eliminate from our analysis of these three poems the variables of prejudgment caused by previous estimations and critical inertia, and if we judge one to be aesthetically superior to another, we do not have to attribute any part of that decision to the critics who have come before us. This reduction in the number of variables is helpful in our testing of the theory. But we do need some data about the perceived degree of aesthetic success of the poems, and, since at this time we lack the original audience’s response, previous critical consensus, and any statistical data about audience response in the present day, I propose to use as data (flawed as it may be) my intuitive, subjective judgment that Fortunes is more aesthetically successful than Gifts, which is in turn more aesthetically successful than Precepts. If the theory, which was not developed with this particular comparison in mind, can convincingly explain this judgment, we will have some evidence that the theory is not invalid.

34 Old English text is from George P. Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Exeter Book, vol. 3, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). Translations are my own.

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All three poems in question are found in the Exeter Book,35 in the section identified by Patrick Conner as Booklet II, the first of the three booklets to be copied. Thus all three poems have an identical manuscript context and copying date of 950–75.36 The three poems have generally been included in the putative ‘wisdom’ genre in Old English poetry (although there is little evidence, beyond the grouping of these poems in Booklet II of the Exeter Book, that such a genre was recognized by the AngloSaxons), but that genre placement does not tell us very much beyond the fact that the poems are similar to each other.37 This similarity is, however, valuable for our analysis, because we can be at least relatively confident that we are making comparisons of like to like. Of the three poems, Precepts has the most obvious structure.38 A wise father gives to his son ten admonitions about proper behaviour, each of which is elaborated in some detail in between four and eighteen lines. The poem does not really have a separate introduction or conclusion, although the initial and final sections, merely by their presence in these locations, 35 MS Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501; number 257 in Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of AngloSaxon Manuscripts. A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001); number 116 in N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; reissued with Appendix, 1990). 36 Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), 1–20. 37 Gifts, Precepts, Fortunes are considered to be part of the wisdom genre in the major studies: Tom Shippey, Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1976); Elaine T. Hansen, The Solomon Complex: Reading Wisdom in Old English Poetry, McMaster Old English Studies and Texts 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). Carolynne Larrington does not discuss The Gifts of Men, but her study does not attempt to develop a complete canon of wisdom literature; A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). The Fortunes of Men has sometimes been called The Fates of Men in the criticism. This alternate name is unfortunate because it invites abbreviation as ‘Fates’ and thus confusion with The Fates of the Apostles. Only The Fortunes of Men and the abbreviation Fortunes should be used. 38 The most well-developed argument about the link between structure and aesthetics in Old English poetry (apart from essays in this volume) is Bernard F. Huppé’s The Web of Words: Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems Vainglory, The Wonder of Creation, The Dream of the Rood, and Judith, with texts and translations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970). Huppé’s argument would have been much strengthened had his subtle and insightful analyses been augmented with an explanation of mechanism, like the meme-based approach I argue for in this essay.

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work to open and conclude the poem. The father and son do not interact beyond the father consistently teaching his son, and there is no story arc within the poem, the advice (mostly of a rather timeless, Christian moral  sort) is configured in terms of active agents rather than abstract principles. Gifts and Fortunes have a different structure, an envelope pattern, with a central catalogue passage being surrounded by an introduction and conclusion. Both poems begin with a preamble (in Gifts lines 1–29, in Fortunes lines 1–9) that states succinctly the theme of each poem (in Gifts, that God gives gifts to all men diversely; in Fortunes, that after individuals are born into the world, God alone knows what their fortunes will be). Both poems end with a concluding passage (Gifts lines 91–113; Fortunes lines 93–8). The structure of Gifts is complicated by a doubling of the envelope pattern within the larger structure. Lines 1–7 are a more general introduction, with lines 8–29 a more detailed description of the main theme in which agents (individuals who receive or do not receive gifts from God) are used to illustrate the abstract ideas of the earlier lines. Likewise the end of the poem has a passage (97–109) that gives more detail for the conclusion, which is summed up in more abstract terms in lines 110–33. Precepts Sections 1–10, each numbered Minor introduction in section 1 Conclusion in section 10. The Gifts of Men A: 1–7 – General Introduction B: 8–29 – More detailed introduction (with agents) C: 30–96 – Catalogue B’: 97–109 – More detailed conclusion A’: 110–13 – General Conclusion The Fortunes of Men A: 1–9 – General Introduction (but with agents) C: 10–84 – Catalogue A’ ’: 85–92 – Concluding Example (with agents) A’: 93–8 – General Conclusion (without agents) In Fortunes the envelope pattern is complicated in a different way. The introductory passage introduces agents immediately (a man and woman

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bring a child into the world by means of birth, clothe him, and train him), thus illustrating the main point of the poem, that ‘God ana wat / hwæt him weaxendum winter bringað’ (God alone knows what the winters will bring for the growing one) in terms of agents. The abstract and the agentive are mixed in this opening, but they are separate in the conclusion, with lines 85–92 giving an example, also in terms of agents, of a parallel situation to that depicted in lines 1–7 before being followed by the more abstract conclusion in lines 93–8. The child in the opening passage is paralleled to the hawk in the conclusion: both are tamed by the parents, marked by the bestowal of garments and brought from nature or wildness into culture.39 Although the structure of Precepts is the simplest of the three poems, it is also the least mnemonically stable because any subunit could easily be deleted (even the conclusion, and probably even the introduction) without doing violence to the entirety of the poem. It is perhaps the case that the ten instructions are meant to imitate the Decalogue, but if so this is a very weak parallel, because the actual content of the ten sections does not match up with each of the Commandments, and thus the number ten is not particularly mnemonically significant in this context. Because there is no introductory framework in which the father says he will be giving ten admonitions, mutations to any other number would not obviously affect the structure of the poem. On the other hand, the structure of Gifts and Fortunes works against the deletion of introductory and concluding material. Once the mind has apprehended the structure of the poem as an envelope pattern (i.e., the recognitio component of the tradition triggers memory of the structure), both the beginning and the ending are conserved. However, the middle catalogue passages of Gifts and Fortunes would be subject to mnemonic degradation, as both deletion and augmentation of any given catalogue passage would not visibly change the structure of the poems. The catalogue passages exhibit traditional anaphora, which preserves at least the repeated parts of lines (‘sum sceal’ in this case),40 and thus the catalogues are potentially quite susceptible to addition or deletion. Were Precepts to be degraded through transmission, much of 39 This argument is not dependent upon emending ‘tennaþ and tætaþ’ in line four to ‘temiaþ’ and ‘tæcaþ,’ but these emendations would make the parallel between the introduction and conclusion more explicit: ‘temiaþ,’ in the introductory passage about the child, would be referenced by ‘atemian’ in line 85. For more discussion, see Drout, ‘The Fortunes of Men 4a: Reasons for Adopting a Very Old Emendation,’ Modern Philology 96 (1998): 184–7 and see also Drout, How Tradition Works, 268–86. 40 Drout, ‘A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory,’ 283–6.

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the poem could be lost without it becoming obvious to the transmitter or receiver that this had happened. However, only the catalogue passages of Gifts and Fortunes are subject to similar degradation: any given catalogue item could be deleted, but as long as some remained, the structure of the poem would remain intact. We can conclude, then, that the structures of Gifts and Fortunes is superior in mnemonic terms (which, at least at some level, we are equating with aesthetic terms) to that of Precepts. Comparing the structure of Gifts to Fortunes is more complicated. The double envelope pattern of Gifts is in some ways a more symmetrical structure, and symmetry is, as noted above, mnemonically stable (because the beginning, through traditional referentiality, suggests the ending), but the double envelope is also subject to degradation, because the overall envelope pattern would still be preserved if both of the inner portions or both of the outer portions (but not one of each) were lost, and Gifts as a whole would still make sense as a poem if 8–29 and 97–109 were deleted (although it would be less easy to remember, because the casting of abstract ideas into the form of agents occurs in lines 8–29). The envelope structure of Fortunes, however, is more mnemonically stable because both lines 85–92 (the concluding example, with agents) and 93–8 (the general, abstract conclusion) are linked to the opening paragraph. If the meme-complex of the structure of Fortunes is perceived as this more complex envelope pattern, then the interlinking of sections would be more likely to preserve the poem as a whole than would the structure of Gifts, making Fortunes mnemonically superior in terms of structure, a conclusion consistent with my subjective evaluation that Fortunes is the best of the three poems and that Gifts and Fortunes are both superior to Precepts in aesthetic effectiveness. At a lower level of structure, both Gifts and Fortunes have additional links between sections and individual lines of the poem. For example, in addition to the regular metre and alliteration of the lines of all three poems (all three are equally metrically consistent, and there are no obvious failures in alliteration), there are areas in which the poems appear to be ornamented beyond the requirements of metre and alliteration. For example, lines 8–11 in Gifts end respectively in ‘earfoðsælig,’ ‘medspedig,’ and ‘lytelhydig,’ linking the ends of three lines with near-rhyme. Note that this passage is the start of the second introductory section, which illustrates the abstract ideas in terms of agents. In Fortunes there is much more of this cross-line linking. For example, ‘mid godes meahtum’ appears in line 1b and is repeated in line 58b, which could be interpreted as concluding a first section of the catalogue (it is a more general statement than those that have

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come before). There are also at least two places in Fortunes where the consonant sound of a non-alliterating word in one line (usually in terminal position) is used in the subsequent line, creating a cross-line alliteration. gegæð gearrimum, þæt þa geongan leomu liffæstan leoþu, geloden weorþað Swa missenlice meahtig dryhten geond eorþan sceat eallum dæleð

(5–6)

(64–5)

In line 88 the initial word ‘fedeþ’ is a near-rhyme for ‘lepeþ,’ which is the initial word in line 89, and immediately thereafter, in line 90, the B-verse includes a rhyming collocation, ‘wædum ond dædum.’ Note that all these ornamentations are at key points in the introductory or explanatory material, the parts of the poems that are more mnemonically significant than the central catalogue passages. This is not a consistent, complex, and interlinked structure, but even a small amount of additional encoding (beyond metre and alliteration) can improve the mnemonic stability of a text. Therefore in this area also Fortunes is mnemonically superior to Gifts. Precepts has none of these features. Now we turn very briefly to the political and ideological shape of the poems. All three, as I have argued, are likely products of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform.41 Texts strongly influenced by the Reform illustrate an ideological interest in understanding secular life in monastic terms and even recasting important secular relationships into monastic forms.42 Each of the three poems does this to some degree. Precepts describes a father teaching his son, but the teaching, particularly the advice to avoid the love of women in the fifth stanza (lines 32–42), is consistently monastic. The influence of Benedictine ideology is less obvious in Gifts and Fortunes. The catalogue passages of both of those poems have many clear references to secular, aristocratic activities (such as riding horses, playing dice, performing with the harp, making precious jewellery), but

41 Drout, ‘Possible Instructional Effects of the Exeter Book “Wisdom Poems”: A Benedictine Reform Context,’ in Form and Content in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maila Amalia D’Aronco,Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 39 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 447–66. 42 Drout, How Tradition Works, 238–86.

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pride of place is given to the activities performed by monks.43 Thus the ideology of the Reform is thoroughly wound through Gifts and Fortunes. Although this ideology has completely taken over the social interaction in Precepts, this total usurpation actually sets up an aesthetic problem. Because the poem takes over an interaction that, in the vast majority of the time, would be non-monastic (fathers instructing their sons), the poem has less word-to-world fit than the other two and thus is less mnemonically stable. In a balancing-act situation, where the poem needs to be both consistent in ideology with the audience of its creators, Benedictine monks, but cannot be at cross-purposes with its other potential audience of secular people (or at least monks who had been secular), Precepts errs too far to one side, whereas Gifts and Fortunes are more balanced. Finally, all three poems use agents to illustrate their abstract ideas, but Precepts is far less effective at this than the other two poems. The father and son are the only major agents in Precepts; though a few additional hypothetical friends, family members, and women make an appearance, the weight of the poem is towards abstract advice rather than agentive illustrations. In Gifts and Fortunes, the major catalogue passages are constructed all in terms of agents and the things that they do. We see people riding horses, swimming, climbing trees, falling out of trees, and performing church duties. This approach is far more mnemonically effective than abstraction. And Fortunes takes things even further. Even the introduction of the poem is cast not in the abstract, but the agentive, where a child is born into the world and then represents the many possible fortunes of men. When the hawk at the penultimate section of the poem is analogized to the child, the envelope pattern has been completed using agents even for this more abstract set of relationships. Therefore Fortunes would be even more mnemonically effective than Gifts. My own experience bears out this analysis, in that I can remember easily the entire structure and recite from memory several passages from Fortunes; I can remember the structure and recite a few lines from Gifts, and, although I know that Precepts has a ten-part structure, I can not recall without recourse to the text which admonitions belong to which section. In memetic terms, Fortunes is the meme that is most effective at getting itself reproduced. It is therefore, following the argument made above, the most aesthetically effective of the poems. We can thus see, therefore, that formal features, ornamentation, and subtle fitting of the poem to the world 43 Geoffrey R. Russom, ‘A Germanic Concept of Nobility in The Gifts of Men and Beowulf,’ Speculum 53 (1978): 1–15.

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are all key elements of aesthetic success. Memes (poems) whose recognitio components can get them perceived and entered into memory and whose actio components work to reinforce mnemonic stability and pleasure will replace those that do not. In the ecosystem of the mind, they are the most aesthetically fit and therefore more likely to survive and reproduce. Conclusion Meme theory provides an avenue for aesthetic approaches to criticism to escape the spectrum of views bounded by solipsism on one end and the appeal to universal religious truths on the other. This paper, I hope, shows a way to break out of the hermeneutic circle that weakens many other approaches to aesthetic selection. We have linked aesthetic appeal to memetic reproduction and then defined as aesthetically appealing that which is memorable and thus likely able to be reproduced in its own form. Because we have configured this problem in memetic terms, we can approach the poetic entity as both a whole and a set of parts. Therefore we can analyse the poem in terms of various attributes (formal and culturally contextual) and determine which of these are likely to be contributing most to the poem’s creation, reception, and reproduction (both in the Anglo-Saxon period and in our contemporary anthologies). By accounting for both history and formalism within the context of the perceptual and mnemonic tendencies of the human mind, we may come a few steps closer to understanding both aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic evolution, and these steps move us a little closer to being able to investigate how entire cultures evolve.

7 Hunting the Anglo-Saxon Aesthetic in Large Forms: A Möbian Quest robert d. stevick

Long Preamble I will begin with a bit of commentary on John Hill’s proposal to potential contributors to this volume, before coming round to joining the enterprise of understanding what makes the best of Old English poetry best. His lead line encouraged us to think about ‘the aesthetic and Old English literature’ and the ‘aesthetic principles or preoccupations’ the Anglo-Saxons may have had ‘in terms of which they might have judged one poem better than another (in something of the way, perhaps, that Aristotle picks Oedipus Rex as the best realization of tragic form).’ The parenthesized comparison carries with it a model of philosophical aesthetics – verbalized and rationalized judgments of better and not better – for aspects of Anglo-Saxon literary arts. Whether there ever was a philosopher of the beautiful, writing or otherwise discoursing in Anglo-Saxon England, we simply do not know. A good guess is that there was not, and that the medium of communication of aesthetic matters lay in demonstration and in comment on constructing specific objects at hand, just as technology was ostensive and anecdotal. If Aristotle had not explained to us why Oedipus Rex is so good, we could still value it pretty much as he did and, in the course of time, probably develop a dialogue concerning its aesthetic excellence. This is worth doing systematically for the earliest English literary texts as well, as John’s proposal challenges us to undertake – so long as we never arrogate our simultaneous monologues as the authentic aesthetics of AngloSaxons. The best we can hope for is that, without a living tradition of transmission of how to achieve aesthetic excellence, and without contemporary reports of the artists’ methods, we can isolate and explicate aspects of an aesthetic that are consonant with the values held by Anglo-Saxons.

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Something to make us chary in an undertaking like this: just suppose the text of Beowulf had fallen into the great maw of time. In the surviving material it is sui generis, whether in form and matter, or in its aesthetic excellence. Without it, the standards of Anglo-Saxon poetic metre would appear less rigorous and assured. Without it the high art of ‘variation’ could not be as clearly grasped or as fully appreciated. It sets the standards for the fine use of kennings and compounding. Take away this one text and the endeavour of recovering an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic would lose a fair measure of its appeal and eventuate in a differing set of values. And then: there may never have been another Anglo-Saxon poem like it in aesthetic merit, and just maybe in some of its fundamental features of composition. It is a product of literacy brought to England by Christianity, yet it is the only long vernacular verse text we know without a Christian subject and source when literacy was still new to Anglo-Saxons. It has no literary genealogy in English – no ancestors, no progeny – and no witnesses beyond the one surviving manuscript text. With the fortunate survival of Beowulf in what looks to be a very close approximation to its author’s creation, our aesthetic treasure hunt will be well motivated. Our findings, however, should acknowledge the narrowness of their base, the possible atypical qualities of the central exhibit, and the dilution our pronouncements may need with the broad attribution ‘Anglo-Saxon.’ With a literacy maintained and employed almost exclusively to serve the purposes of Christianity making its way in new territory, it is not surprising that so many of the poems consist of biblical narrative or paraphrase, or Englishing of Christianized allegory, saints’ legends, and hymnal and homiletic materials. (Stories of Ingeld and others didn’t get equal allocation of resources.) Their production – surviving in fair copy, always – proceeds from fervour and faith, and some kind of desire to express these things in vernacular form. Their unevenness in ostensive aesthetic aspects makes it clear, though, that aesthetic merit was not a consistent factor in their selection and preservation. Main Topic Let me now address the topic John recruited me to assay: the overall forms in the long poems as they have been found to embody accurate and comprehensive networks of proportion of quantities. Those quantities are the ones measured in metrical line counts. This aspect of literary form has been anything but familiar and customary, initial reports of the findings occasioning variously the astonishment, the indifference, the enthusiasm,

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or the oppugnancy of a handful of readers. Reactions to early publications of the unmistakable patterns in the layout of long poems commonly used the term ‘numerology’ for what Thomas E.  Hart was saying about Beowulf 1 or what I was saying about other texts.2 By any definition in the various one-volume dictionaries I consult steadily, British and American, use of this term reflects either ignorance of its standard meaning or absence of understanding of the analyses being offered. (The problem persists at time of this writing, in 2008.) Subsequently, ‘geometry’ became the catchword in referring to my own further publications on forms of various artefacts, whether Anglo-Saxon poems, then page illumination in the famous Gospels codices English and Irish.3 It continued to be used as a catchword in reference to similar, subsequent studies of form in sculptured stone crosses, mainly Irish, of the same era and area of cultural interchange, then metalwork of Ireland and its cultural ancestors in the seventh, then second, centuries AD, then fifth/fourth century BC.4 Often it was a vague label, but sometimes it was handy shorthand for those who had followed the analysis, which required only the rudiments of practical geometry, or merely replication with compass and straight-edge in hand. In the event, a goodly and expanding collection of artistic creations in England

1 Beginning with ‘Beowulf: A Study of the Tectonic Structures and Patterns,’ PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1966; ‘A Tectonic Consideration of eotenas in Beowulf,’ Thoth, Festschrift for Sanford B. Meech, 10 (1969): 4–17; ‘Ellen: Some Tectonic Relationships in Beowulf and Their Formal Resemblance to Anglo-Saxon Art,’ PLL 6 (1970): 263–90; ‘Tectonic Design, Formulaic Craft, and Literary Execution; the Episodes of Finn and Ingeld in Beowulf,’ Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik, 2 (1972): 1–61. 2 Various essays, beginning with ‘Geometrical Design of the Old English Andreas,’ Poetica 9 (1978): 73–106, reworked (and supplemented) for inclusion in The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms before A.D. 1000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 3 Various essays, beginning with ‘The Design of Lindisfarne Gospels Folio 138v,’ Gesta 22 (1983): 3–12, reworked (and supplemented) for inclusion in The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts. 4 Stevick, ‘Shapes of Early Sculptured Crosses of Ireland,’ Gesta 38 (1999): 3–21; ‘The Shape of the Durrow Cross,’ Peritia 13 (1999): 142–53; ‘The Coherent Geometry of Two Irish High Crosses,’ Peritia 14 (2000): 297–322; ‘The Form of the Tara Brooch, JRSAI 128 (1998): 5–16; ‘The Form of the Hunterston Brooch,’ Medieval Archaeology 47 (2003): 21–39; ‘The Ancestry of “Coherent Geometry” in Insular Designing,’ JRSAI 134 (2004): 5–32; ‘The Forms of the Monasterevin-type Discs,’ JRSAI 136 (for 2006): 112–40. ‘The Art of Radically Coherent Geometry,’ in Villard’s Legacy: Studies in Medieval Technology, Science, and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel, ed. Marie-Thèrése Zenner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 211–28, embraces forms for metalwork, sculptural, and ‘carpetpage’ art, all of which develop with the same geometrical constant.

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and Ireland and on the Continent were found to embody formal features, both extensive and comprehensive, crafted from management of quantities, whether in two-dimensional designs or in linear compositions. So the main topic can be encapsulated as, Can we – and should we – imagine the crafty forms of their long poems to manifest one aspect of the Anglo-Saxons’ aesthetic? Let this question define a quest that may come to resemble travel along the surface of a Möbius strip. On the way, we can have a sense that we are exploring one side, then the inverse side of the topic, only to find that they are the same; and that when we have traversed its full length we are back exactly where we began. (Sisyphus had it simple.) But allow the observations of the traveller to authorize the quest: what can we discover as we travel this closed loop of evidence? Or, shifting metaphor: just maybe, in traversing this old archaeological site with a different slant of light, we will spot some neglected artefacts beautifully preserved and only briefly surprising. The view of a long tradition of scholars and editors was (and still is) epitomized in Krapp’s concluding remark after describing sectional division in the Junius manuscript: ‘The sectional divisions in the manuscript are not always happily made, but this may be partly due to the accidents of transmission, though it must be acknowledged also that structure in its larger aspects was never a strong point with Anglo-Saxon poets.’5 I have italicized the two parts of this statement that are modern aesthetic judgments embedded in an editor’s description of a codex of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The view was shared as well by literary critics. And by other editors: Klaeber hedged on this, declaring the fitt divisions of Beowulf to be not ‘merely a matter of choice or caprice,’6 but only after waffling and some special pleading. Fulk, one of the ‘Klaeber 4’ editors, has recently argued that sectional divisions in all the long poems ‘are unlikely to be authorial’; those in the second scribe’s copy of Beowulf make ‘little narrative sense’ though in the first scribe’s segment they are ‘sufficiently rational’ (again my italics).7 Yet when sectional divisions are attended to in quantitative relational terms, independently of our modern expectations in thematic and interpretive terms, it turns out that they are (probably all of them) ‘happily’ disposed, and that ‘structure in its larger aspects’ was masterfully managed in the composition of the long poems which are

5 George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. 1 (New York, 1931), xix. 6 Fr. Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3d ed. (Boston, 1950), c–ci. 7 Robert D. Fulk, ‘The Origin of the Numbered Sections in Beowulf and in Other Old English Poems,’ Anglo-Saxon England 35 (2006): 91–109.

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complete enough to analyse in this way. This is explained and illustrated in detail in The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts (1994), for the long poems other than Beowulf. Hart demonstrated similar findings for that poem in his doctoral dissertation several years before that, and has pursued this topic, and related topics, in the years following. Quantitative is the key word in all this. For the most part, we have had very little experience with it in assessing literary arts beyond the smallscale and repeating patterns of metrical lines and stanza forms, or occasionally in recognizing devices such as envelope patterns, ring structures, and such. When we discover that it is the key to a prominent feature for whole texts – their sectional divisions in the manuscripts made by autochthonous Anglo-Saxons – we have a challenge indeed. The forms are clear, and precise, and comprehensive. We can understand the elementary relations among the constituent quantitative measures of any of the texts: they embody a system of proportions readily computed by arithmetic or accurately replicated in graphic models by basic manoeuvers with compass and straight-edge, often by both means. For those who consider quantity to be alien or at best irrelevant to literary composition, a brief reminder. A conventional English sonnet consists of one hundred and forty syllables. Those syllables are grouped in tens by the recurrence of stressed syllables containing identical vowels together with any consonant(s) that may follow within the syllable (‘rhyme’). Those ten-syllable groups (‘lines’) then are linked in fours (‘quatrains’) by two pairs of rhymes, and after three such fours a pair of lines linked by rhyme, completing the form of the composition. Of course, a sonnet’s quantitive formal scheme can be comprehended intuitively rather than analytically, as it has just been described. That does not put aside the quantitative nature of the form, which in a form such as the English sonnet becomes a key to so many aesthetic effects in the fine sonnets in the literary history of English, celebrated in profusion by literary critics in the latter half of the past century. Poets are not limited, however, to using immediately intuitive quantitative patterns. There is no defence for a notion that if you and I and somebody we know can’t sing a song, it’s not a song anyway. The large patterns are there in the Anglo-Saxon poems (and in the Insular arts all around them), precise and comprehensive, whether generally noticed or not. They are there in less rigorous form in the later world of the Gawain- or Pearlpoet.8 They are there in contemporary and earlier texts as well. The 8 Edward I. Condren, The Numerical Universe of the Gawain-Pearl Poet: Beyond Phi (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

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distinction by Boethius between a musicus and performers (and general audience) may be helpful in grasping the matter in hand. But what to make of these clear and elegant systems of proportions among measures (quantities) of the sections of the manuscript texts? We like to look these days for meanings, for significations, for symbolic import and such in any kind of formal patterning. It is a natural motivation, the kind that eventuated in one major scholar detecting cosmic rhythms in the basic four-stress alliterative line of Beowulf  and other Anglo-Saxon poetic texts. Others have sensed deep significations in mythic matters and cultural atavisms. Or found psychological profundities in patterns of variant formulas in narrow context. Some of these strike me as being as solid and convincing as would be a paper purporting to explicate the ineffable essence of a poem. On the other hand, there is one text in which there is unmistakable signification in its formal scheme, lying there in plain sight. In The Phoenix, the number of sections, the common factors of their lengths, the interconnections of the proportions among lengths of section groups, the subject matter of the text as it is disposed among the sections – all these aspects resonate among themselves, so to speak; that is, they form a harmony of relations among themselves. The eight sections of the manuscript text divide as seven plus one by topic and symbolic meaning both, figuring the seven ages of man to be succeeded by the eighth era, eternity. They also divide as seven plus one by formal properties of measure. Table 1 displays the line count of the separate sections in boldface type. Above and below that line are the groupings of line counts, which are all multiples of 84: this is the length of one section of the manuscript text (the first one), twice that is the length of two adjoining pairs of sections (hence four contiguous sections), six times that number is the combined length of six sections, and seven times that number is the total length of the first seven sections. The eighth section lies beyond this scheme. It is linked to them nonetheless: length of the eight sections together, which is 677, is equal to the measure between 7×84 and 4×84 set at a right angle: the eighth section is the first of its kind, it is the last, it proceeds from the seven combined (geometrically) with its distinctive block of four central segments; the latter, though all of unequal length, combine as a multiple (4) of the modular 84. More meshings of quantities appear when we recall commonplace sets of numbers well known then (and from Antiquity), illustrated in table 2. Observe the relations among the seventh of the natural numbers (7), the seventh of the triangular numbers (28), and the seventh of the solid numbers (84): the last of these is three times the second, which in turn is four

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Table 1 [4×

84

97

84 [

[

84] [2×

84]

83

85 6× 7×

[2×

84]

74

94

71

84 84

 89 ] ]

Table 2 Natural

1

2

3

4

Triangular

1

3

6

10

Solid

1

4

10

20

5

6

7

8

9

15

21

28

36

…

35

56

84

…

…

times the first, these multiples adding up to another seven. The first seven sections total 588 lines, expressible as 7×(4×3)(4+3), among other ways. Length of the first three sections (264) is expressible as ((7+4+7+4):7)×84, a transparent version of 84›, a ratio also implicit in perimeter and long side of a 7×4 rectangle, most likely used in computing the internal divisions of the first seven sections of the poem. In short, all the key divisions of the text of The Phoenix – as they define its quantitative form – express over and again the numerical interrelations among 1, 3, 4, 7, and their commonplace numerological overtones. Such seeming wizardry need not surprise us if we keep in mind that the Old English Phoenix is a reworking of a learned Latin text ascribed to Lactantius, and that Anglo-Saxons were quite intelligent people, capable of understanding the number interpretations (and arguments based on them) of Rabanus, Augustine, and Bede.9 On the other hand, most sets of key quantities in the plans of poems, page illuminations, cross-designs include one which is expressible only as an irrational number. Motivation for employing quantitative patterns in the design of most of the long verse texts, then, cannot be expected in

9 For an extended (but early) analysis, see Stevick, ‘Mathematical Proportions and Symbolism in “The Phoenix,”’ Viator 11 (1980): 95–121, and The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 151–7. The geometric derivation of the section lengths of this poem that I proposed in The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts needs revision. It works, but it ‘jitters,’ as a good friend pointed out. A more stable model (in hand) uses simpler methods of dividing the clusters of two, four, and six multiples of 84.

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simple number symbolism of the kind found in The Phoenix. It could, of course, be in number symbolism covertly built into the formal scheme of a poem whose section lengths are linked by proportions involving an irrational number such as ƴ, the so-called golden ratio. The best candidate for a structure devised in this way is the Old English text Elene. The full plan – a graphic model of all the manuscript’s groupings of metrical lines – can be constructed in simple and cumulative steps in a rectangular figure, if the given measure for the model – the source and determiner of all other measures – is 1,000. That number, though, does not occur in any line-sum of successive sections of the text. So we look further: The status of 1,000 can be explicated in this way. It is the one given number from which everything in the plan derives, just as there is only God who created all that exists. Even so, that number does not appear anywhere in the plan itself, as God is not found in any part of His creation, but is nonetheless implicit in the entire design and all its parts, as God is immanent in all things. The measure of the poem’s number (its full line count 1,236) is 618, which occurs both twice and once, in a trinity that is nonetheless a unity inasmuch as its one occurrence conjoins the other two, betokening the Holy Trinity in which et cetera; and the indwelling number in relation to this 618 figures forth the golden ratio [ƴ] by which an endless array of equivalent proportions can proceed, signifying God who ever continues unending and undiminished et cetera. Such a plan, just as a spiritual mystery, is hidden yet knowable, and as the soul is mistress to the body it rules the corporeal creation, the written text.10

That was my improvised explanation many years ago, a pastiche as much as anything else. I also invoked the doctrine of chiliasm to bond it further to the subject matter of Elene and its disposition within the poem as a ‘may be’ association. For present purposes of trying to recover the aesthetics of Anglo-Saxons’ vernacular verse forms, the explanation of 1,000 in the text and its symbolic import may be stipulated or not. Those considerations come in response to asking what the forms may mean. We can also ask, what can they do? Employing a quantity-based form for serious (and laborious) compositions is a way of ensuring as best one can the integrity of any copies of it: if I succeed in producing a masterful creation, I should like it to survive unchanged. When any parts of the 10 Stevick, The Earlist Irish and English Bookarts, 116–31.

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plan are discerned, the whole plan can be conceived, so that any aberrations – gaps or embellishments or substitutions – can be detected. Any of those ‘errors’ can be corrected, or at least allowed for, in reading, appreciating, interpreting, and assessing the composition. The technique has a history in Christian writings beginning with the Gospels texts, where doctrinal concerns, in the Judaeo-Christian continuum, required accurate transmission of text. This motivation seems to me to be entirely plausible (and it can easily complement symbolism of integers of the kind found in The Phoenix, or Elene, or other Old English texts as well). It could readily carry over to vernacular texts in Old English poetry, especially when their subjects and sources came from Christian writings. It would not compel a mode of composition for a poem with secular subject and sources, such as Beowulf, but there is no a priori reason to believe that it could not operate in compositions of non-religious poems from the same motivation and with equal effect. Quantity-based forms can be rediscovered in all of the long poems that are sufficiently intact to allow analysis. Some of them may carry symbolic meaning, though it does not appear to be a regular function of the overall plans. Any or all of them, though, may have been employed to provide a means of testing the integrity of copies of the author’s composition, implying authorial pride in his textual creation. Or for that matter, we could imagine that forms of this kind were employed regularly as rules for compositional games thought by Anglo-Saxons to enable their best verbal arts. That the forms would express, or reflect, such pride is allowed, even implied, by the fact that no two forms are identical. None seems to be an off-the-shelf kind of thing. That is, each poem’s plan appears to have been a fresh creation, as much as was the verbal text that filled out the form. At the same time, while every form is unique, all appear to have been created by the same principles, using the same methods and procedures, and meeting the same criteria, implying a well-articulated tradition. This may be our most promising pry-point for trying to open up the aesthetic of these formal layouts of Anglo-Saxon poems: every form unique, built by the same principles, meeting the same criteria. These are the traits also found consistently in the other artistic media mentioned earlier: fullpage manuscript illumination, stone sculpture, fine decorative metalwork. It may well be that within Christian Insular art we have evidence here of ‘a desire to explore and create anew, in each creation, the divine principles of harmony, measurement and geometry which were believed to order God’s Creation’; it must be remembered at the same time that the same principles

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of designing are found equally active in ‘British, Pictish and Celtic tradition which stretched back to the Iron Age.’11 When analysed for proportioning within the overall forms, we discover for example seven early Insular bronze discs, all alike but no two identical, all pre-Christian in date, their purpose only to be guessed at, but all sharing geometrically knit proportions of line and area, including some identical components.12 Attending to relations among the dimensions of forms of a large number of sculptured ringed-crosses, we find a great many of them to be alike but none identical, though all are Christian in date, affiliation, and purpose, and they all share geometrically knit proportions of line and area, and again including some identical components. Or we can see plainly that decorative metalwork of extraordinary excellence of design and workmanship, such as the Tara Brooch, with its classical simplicity of proportional layout of its many, many divisions of areas of both its main body and its pin, obey the same kind of rules of form – this one without any undisputable symbolic elements. Full-page illuminations in Gospels texts serve Christian purposes, all the best ones demonstrably sharing technique and procedures of creation, yet no two are alike. On this latter point, these variations: in one manuscript the shape of every evangelist portrait is different; in another the outer shapes of pairs of frames for the evangelists are identical but inner structures are developed with differences; in others the governing ratio of the plan is different for each evangelist; from codex to codex a single governing ratio is associated with different evangelists. And so on. Some examples of this aesthetic of form cited above are variously from Ireland and from pre-Christian times, raising the question whether these objects may have only typological similarities without being relevant as influences, models, analogues, or sources of any kind for Anglo-Saxon arts. If we suppose the Beowulf text was created in the late seventh or early eighth century, maybe in Mercia, maybe Northumbria, we must remember that the graphic analogues of form were already there, attested in magnificently mature form by the illuminations in the Lindisfarne Gospels – precise, elegant, notable – in pages that preserve construction marks showing the mathematical origin of their forms. The analogues remained there in these pages and in those of other codices in both England and Ireland throughout the period in which that poem could have been composed, that is, up to the date of the Beowulf manuscript. Where did any of 11 Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels: Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 297, 296. 12 Stevick, ‘The Forms of the Monasterevin-type Discs,’ n. 4.

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the artists learn their principles of design, unless in the cultural continuum into which they were born? The texts of the long poems on Christian themes originated in the ninth or tenth century, as scholarship argues in general, after the time when the design principles had been set in bookart and metalwork and were being continued in stone sculpture. In short, the typological similarities are neither abstract nor remote in time or place: they belong within a larger cultural context within which Anglo-Saxon England evolved. Exactly because the large forms of the poetry and of the manuscript and the plastic arts share in all their essential aspects, our quest must pay attention to these other arts. Almost too obvious to catch our attention is that they all have to do with the full forms of the entire piece – the joining and accommodating each to all, for all of the parts. How it was done ceased to be obvious when the tradition was superseded. But clearly there was a deliberate, rule-based means of creating – a means of giving form to – whole works, even as counterpoint functioned as that means for Bach, Palestrina, Lotti, and as modulus and proportion had served a similar purpose in architectural tradition. To put it another way, there was a cosmic agency, which is to say, a conceptual and tactile method of creating form where it had not existed, and where it could not exist until it was embodied in the created thing, by composition. In Anglo-Saxon poetry just as in the other arts of the Insular community, this cosmic agency was pervasive and remarkably versatile. How are we to understand this agency, this method of creating large forms? In operational terms, it begins by choosing a fundamental geometrical shape appropriate to creating the intended design. Typically it will be a circle for a mount, a brooch, a medallion, and such. Or it will be a rectangle, equal-sided for a cross-head, a plaque, and the like. Or it will be an unequal rectangle to be devised, for a folio shape, a cross-slab, a carpetpage illumination, text-space dimensions, and others. (Triangles and ngons of five or more are rare.) Or it will be the full line count for a poem with a stipulated number of divisions. It then sets the terms for the disposition of elements of the design within the containing shape, terms which will govern the proportional relations – the harmony – among all the key dimensions. And that is achieved by constructing divisions that embody one or two key ratios, either ‘arithmetical’ or ‘geometrical,’ or both. Arithmetical ratio at its simplest is 1:1, implicit in any plan having bilateral symmetry, for example. The ratio 3:2 sometimes occurs in rectanglarshaped plans, whether in text-space (as in the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry), or framed illustration, or in larger divisions of running text with

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countable units – metrical lines – of composition (as in Andreas). Less often will be found 4:3 (as in the surviving cross-page in the Lichfield Gospels) and 4:7 (as in the scheme of divisions of The Phoenix, described above, or the man page [fol.  21v] in the Book of Durrow. All of these ratios can be expressed in integers. Many Anglo-Saxon texts and designs further share the general traits of Insular art that normally will also employ ‘geometrical’ ratio in creating form and order for these artefacts. By ‘geometrical’ in this context is meant a ratio involving quantities not expressible as relations among integers, being expressible only as irrational numbers representing measures produced by simple geometrical constructions: √2, √3, √5 are nearly the only ones of these ever found in the forms within this tradition (√4 is equivalent to 2). While the ratios in these forms can be approximated in ratios of integer numerals, they are created and experienced as lineal extensions together with the areas enclosed by them. I will illustrate derivation of one of these ‘geometric’ ratios and how it can be employed in developing the form of one poem, selecting ‘extreme and mean ratio,’ commonly called ‘golden (section) ratio.’ The form for its model will be rectangular, and will develop the same ratio as that used in shaping some of the finest carpet pages in Gospels manuscripts: the eagle page (fol.  176v) of the Echternach Gospels, or two cross-pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels (fol. 2v and fol. 138v). The ratio is also used in designing a ringed-cross cut from stone, in the case of the Durrow Cross or the Rossie Priory cross-slab. It permeates every detail of design of the Tara Brooch. The form can also be manifest in a lineal scheme as in the case of Cynewulf’s poem on the Ascension, Christ II, to be described here. My earlier analysis of this text was done under the rubric ‘commodular structure’;13 the description to follow reaches identical results from the same textual record and from the same assumptions, but casts the analysis of its coherent form specifically as a consistent development exploiting a single geometrical ratio, the one set by the golden section of a modular measure within the three-module measure for total length. (A procedure for setting this ratio and developing a full form from it for a circular object is illustrated at the following website: www.washington .edu/cartah/projects/insular/insular.html – selecting Demonstration and then Tara Brooch.) The harmonic form of this poem is embedded in the relations among numbers of metrical lines constituting the six sections of the text. Table 3 13 The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 78–84.

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Table 3 Lengths of the sections of Christ II, restored Section [I]

Number of lines in section groups 77 144

[II]

a

67

228 151

[III]

84

a

314 237

170 [IIII]

86

330 263

179 [V]

407

93

495 418

351 267

181 [VI] a

88

Lacuna of 67+ verse lines

is a display of those numbers,14 the count of lines in each manuscript section in the leftmost column, the combined counts in sequences of sections shown in the array to the right. All of these numbers do not need to be generated separately to define the form: deriving only the ones shown in bold type will establish the coherent scheme which the textual divisions comprise. (The others are entailed.) Now a procedure for setting those quantities in relational terms: the quantities of magnitude in the geometrical derivation will correspond to (nearest) integer quantities of multitude in the numerical display of line counts, with no gaps, no orphans. Constructing the graphic analogue starts with a general length that will accommodate the narrative, and then selects a specific number. The choice of 495 verse lines is anything but haphazard or merely ‘intuitive.’ If the fundamental divisions of the text are to be in the pervasive tradition of designing, they will have the foundation of their harmony of

14 The line counts are based on reconstruction of the length of the one lacuna, resulting from the loss of a single leaf, first recognized by John C. Pope in ‘The Lacuna in the Text of Cynewulf’s Ascension (Christ II), 556b,’ in Studies in Language, Literature and Culture of the Middle Ages and Later, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Archibald A. Hill (Austin: University of Texas, 1969), 210–19. The methods of reconstruction are described in the citation in n. 11.

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Table 4 Natural

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Triangular

1

3

6

10

15

21

28

36

45

55

… …

Solid

1

4

10

20

35

56

84

120

165

220

…

4th order

1

5

15

35

70

126

210

330

495

… 1,001

proportion in a simple set of quantities. Table 4 displays in boldface type the repeating collocations of numbers in the ratio 1:2:3 in commonplace number patterns. In the first line it is in the initial three numerals. Then in stair-step patterns there are 5:10:15, then 28:56:84, then 165:330:495. The geometrical model of the divisions of Christ II will be laid out on a grid of squares with these numerical relations: length three modules (495), width two modules (330), inner divisions one module (165 verse lines). Now to introduce the golden section ratio – that is, to introduce a proportion more complex than arithmetical 3:2 (and yet of the simplest kind derivationally and perceptually). See fig. 1. In its solid-line configurations, fig. 1A shows one possible set-up (1, 2), and then provides the means (3) to cut the length 495 (three modules) into golden section ƴ and 3-ƴ of the modulus, which will be a line count of 267 for the latter three fitts, 228 for the first three. With this, as with the Tara Brooch plan, the first cut is where the individuating process begins, and all remaining cuts build upon this first one. Suppose for a moment that the poet-designer wished to leave an unmistakable sign pointing to formal properties of his composition. There is an ideal place for it, set by a corollary of the initial and defining cut of the text into two unequal but proportionally linked halves. Fig. 1B shows a simple manoeuvre (4) to mark a distance 194 from the end of the text. Straddling that location is the sentence Sum m[ae]g searolice wordcwide writan ‘One is able to write formal text with cunning skills.’ This is one item within a catalogue of ‘gifts’ (talents) of mankind, a pious though inessential passage that concludes with a modesty formula. The locus of that key signature is another function of ƴ: it is at a line count that is the measure of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides 1 and ƴ-1, as drawn in the figure. It is equivalent to √(3-ƴ). The exact steps (though not the method) by which the designer-planner proceeded through the entire process of setting out his large form cannot be certain. For example, the dominant ratio of the golden section can be

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Figure 1 A

I

228 165

267 φ

(1)

I

B

165

I

(2) (3)

(3)

3-φ 0

495

228

C

0

(4) 495

194

D 3-φ

φ 1 φ 0

144

495

0

314

495

F

E 3-φ

2 1 φ 0

407

495

0

77

407

495

set in other ways, two of them shown by dotted and dashed lines in fig. 1A. The procedure illustrated throughout fig. 1 represents, therefore, a narrow path, or route, rather than the planner’s precise footsteps. In fig. 1C the two ‘half’ measures 267 and 228 are set at a right angle, and the measure 351 from end to end – the hypotenuse of the right triangle – sets the place for a second cut to be made complementing measure 144 from

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the beginning. Fig. 1D sets the module measure 165 and the larger ‘half’ measure 267 at a right angle, and uses the measure from end to end (another hypotenuse) for the third cut after line 314. The next cut will not be narrated, but it is easy enough to follow in the construction shown in fig. 1E: it uses the long ‘half’ measureƴ and the module measure 1 in a different combination, ƴ being the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle, yielding measure √ƴ for the other side; it then transfers the proportional relation they entail to the short ‘half’ measure 3-ƴ to generate 179, which is added to the earlier-set 228 for the total length 407 for the fourth cut. The fifth cut, fig. 1F, is made simply by subtracting (graphically) two modules, or 330, from the last-made cut, to be made after line 77. With the overall length given, these five cuts divide the text into six parts with extensions accurately matching all the line counts in the (restored) text. The model also illustrates a point made earlier, that when main portions of this kind of formal plan are intact, a gap (the one-leaf lacuna, in this case), detected by independent analysis, can be confirmed and its line count ascertained in quantitative terms. While the ‘as built’ coherent geometry can be followed by tracing the operations in fig. 1, the ‘at rest’ coherence of the plan may not be apparent without practice in understanding the web of proportional relations that inhere in such designs. The initial cut in fig. 1A yielded ƴ of the module, or in numeral measure 267 of the last three sections combined, as noted above; length of the remaining (first) three is 3-ƴ of the module, or 228. Thus the line count of the latter three sections in relation to the whole poem length is 267:495. That same ratio is then repeated in the relation between line counts of the first two sections and the latter three, 144:267. Put together, with 267 as the mean term, 144:267::267:495. In modular expression, 1:(3/ƴ)::(3/ƴ):(3/ƴ)2. The line count 194 (from the end of the poem) for the sentence Sum m[ae]g searolice wordcwide writan is another mean between the two fundamental measures in the plan, the modular measure and the measure to the initial (and governing) cut: 165:194::194:228, or in modular expression, 1:√(3-ƴ)::√(3-ƴ):3-ƴ. Further, in fig.  1E the measure 179, which is added to 228 to locate the cut at 407, is 1:√ƴapplied to the measure 228. Or, applying the ratio 4√(3-ƴ) to the module 165 also produces 179. The ratio between line counts of the last two sections and the second-third-fourth sections (181:237) is 2:(ƴ+1). And so on. This ‘at rest’ cohesion among the segments of the verbal text is basically different from the cohesion in the two-dimensional plans in manuscript illumination, sculptured crosses, and others only in this respect: quantity for poetic forms is expressed in line counts for a lineal composition – ‘how many’

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– while for the other forms it is expessed in extensions – a relative ‘how much’ – in lineal measure and area. Quantity is understood as either multitude or magnitude, but proportion operates identically with both. There is the reconstructed form manifest in sectional divisions of Christ II in operational terms and in analytical terms. Another way to grasp the elegance – the essence, really – of this kind of formal plan is to note that the sectional dimensions can all be expressed in terms of the module by combinations of 1, 2, 3, ƴ. All key measures of the form can be computed from this simple set of quantities. In our quest thus far we have seen examples of how meaning may be conveyed in the large form of a poem, and have enquired into what these formal schemes can do, and how they can be devised. Finally, what may have been the goal of utilizing this agency for creating them? In any of the Insular art forms, using any of the common mathematical schemes, that goal appears to have been a formula by which a given measure and an underlying relational ‘given’ will generate a plan that has not simply ‘just proportion,’ but perfect mathematical coherence. Unpack that principle thus: for coherence there must be a binding of the parts, the binding effected by a fully linked and articulated set of relations that are mathematical in nature, and to be perfect the plan must have no remainders (no parts left over), no fractions (no need for trimming or shimming), no gaps (what is missing?), and no anomalies (what is this part doing here?). By ‘mathematical’ is meant plans or forms answering to a small, rigorously defined set of operations and measures. At the highest level of mastery, the formula is usually very simple, and the form that is achieved comprises a perfect coherence in a complete equilibrium. That goal answers to aesthetics, I believe, and to nothing else that I can imagine. It represents, I think, an aesthetic imperative within that culture. This is something different from imposing form and order on facts or assertions or things. That kind of formalizing can be done through rigorous schemes of hypotaxis or taxonomy (with a highpoint in Scholasticism), which nonetheless seem always to have embarrassing leftovers. (No platypus need apply.) Such form and order can proceed from arithmetical schemes as well, typically in managing series of numerals by understanding the various kinds of means between numbers. They also inhere in tiling patterns, where repetition of shape is the principle. Recursive, closed-set form is also found in the construction of, say, an eight-tone musical scale: start with a fundamental pitch, double it, and divide the result by three. Treat the result as one, double it, and divide the result by three. Continue this recursive process until the scale is complete (halving the result every

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time it exceeds the initial doubling). Closed, cohesive form is the basis as well of so-called magic squares – any of those patterns of numbers in which the sum of any column, the sum of any row, and the sum of any diagonal set is always the same. One such square is shown below (it is the one forming part of Dürer’s Melancolia I). ‘Magic’ in this name is the wrong word, except for those who do not comprehend the syntax of these mathematical games. Grasp the rules of construction, and there is no magic or mystery, but only a sense of the harmony of numbers, the inevitability of order and intelligibility, in any well formed construction. And so with the forms of early Insular art: grasp the rules for operating with both measure and ratio, and the harmony of forms is intelligible; in fact, it is hardly understandable except in terms of the rules, procedures, and criteria by which it is created. In any case, the ostensible goal of these distinctive art forms is a coherence – a harmony – of quantities expressible in both rational and irrational numbers, something quite different from harmony of numbers (integers), as in music, or harmony of these numbers of any other kind. 16

3

2

13

5

10

11

8

9

6

7

12

4

15

14

1

Recognition of this aspect of an Anglo-Saxon aesthetic – the mathematical meshes among the measures in the layout of poetic texts – has been slow in coming. A notable exchange in the ANSAX-L forum beginning in February 2008 is clear documentation of the still controversial nature of the topic. (Unfortunately, that discussion centred almost exclusively on the Beowulf text, without allowance that it may be exceptional in form, as well as in topic and degree of excellence.) One reason is that a good many who study history, literary history, art history get glassy-eyed in the presence of numbers, some becoming virtually comatose at mere mention of ratios, thereby confirming and reconfirming the rule of thumb, that every time you slip a mathematical expression into a paper in arts or humanities, you will probably lose half your audience. Another reason. Careful and responsible scholars often put aside analyses of proportional or numerical properties of many forms, because, they

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say, the history of the methodology of creating forms in this way is wanting. That may be so. Yet a methodology without its history being on record is not necessarily a methodology that doesn’t exist, didn’t exist, and wasn’t employed in creating forms of solid objects and fixed texts at some time in our cultural past – or that can’t be reconstructed. I believe that absence of a continuous history of the methodology reflects little more than the state of our knowledge that has been dependent primarily upon written sources. There has not been an Otto von Simson or an Erwin Panofsky to bring together the counterparts to Scholasticism and Gothic architecture, for the Insular arts. Further, the creation of forms for static objects – this includes texts, of course: the creation of the large forms by means of accumulated geometry, or number games, or other strict rule-based methods of managing quantities, has become outmoded in the past two centuries, when modern historical methods and modern notions of creative method have displaced earlier traditions, leaving them behind, out of memory, and almost out of mind. And there is this argument sometimes adduced: an audience hearing a poem, or a person viewing a manuscript carpet-page or a stone cross, may not grasp the putative formal scheme, and therefore understanding of such a scheme may be neglected for not being comprehensible through common or ready observation. This line of reasoning doesn’t make allowance for counterparts to the colourblind viewing a painting or a fresco, or to the tone-deaf listening to a melody, much less a madrigal. In any case, the categorical negative here is risky; even if accurate, though, as a premise it does not guarantee the inference from it. It is also true that anyone walking around a Gothic cathedral, then walking inside it, would probably not observe most of the geometrical and numerical harmony of its design, either; but that is not to say that it isn’t there, put there by its builders, and is in fact its essence. If understanding of this cosmic agency has been slow to develop, some things about it are now known. One is that it informs the St Cuthbert Gospel binding, the finest illuminated pages in the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, the Echternach Gospels, and more; it informs such metalwork treasures as the Hunterston Brooch and the Tara Brooch; it informs the best (and best-known) sculptured crosses of early Ireland; it even worked itself into some Pictish cross-slabs; it has an ancestry traceable back as far as the Iron Age in northwestern Europe; and it informs the long religious poems in the Anglo-Saxon period of the English language. This last locus of coherent geometry of form – in literary composition – is the one that seems to remain incomprehensible to many, for reasons already

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mentioned. It need not exceed one’s grasp if one can begin to imagine the poems having been conceived as literary space to be given form and order, just as customary ‘spatial space’ is given form and order in crosses, crosspages, codex formats and other material compositions (or as musical space can be ordered). The vernacular verse narratives were composed within a culture already saturated with this kind of designing. Harmonious form, as explained, is not specific to any one or another of the art forms of that time and that region. Once we recognize this pervasive mathematical harmony of form in Anglo-Saxon long poems and in other early Insular arts, what more needs to be noticed? Crucial to all the Insular art forms is this: recursion involving not only elements such as motifs and measures, but involving ratio as well. (Perspective in the planal arts has nothing to do with this, and in fact contradicts it; perspective belongs to a later era of artistic devices.) That is to say, the repetition, or recursion, is not achieved by iteration of measures and shapes, as in grilles and other grid-based forms, nor by iteration of shape, like tiling, or stanzas or cantos in verse, but only with iteration of ratio interacting with a few key measures, and to the exclusion of any others. All this can be rephrased in terminology parallel to accumulated counterpoint (which for J.S. Bach was the basis of harmony). Whether in music or in the Insular material and verbal arts, counterpoint is a scheme of continuous, thorough, and regulated simple relations from start to finish. Recursion needs to be extensive enough to engage interest, but then it must be controlled so as to avoid dissonance, and also to avoid noise (sounds that don’t belong to the scheme); when successful, it produces pure harmony. Even as with the widely understood principles of counterpoint, there are crude compositions, compositions that are competent but not very interesting, some that are competent and quite good, and some that have a balance and perfection that we like to feel is an inevitable achievement in that kind of human endeavour. The Book of Durrow evangelist symbol pages are crude, in the sense that each frame is governed by a simple ratio inside and out, while nothing else on the page answers to it in any way. Crude examples include the back cover of the Lindau Gospels, or the St Matthew portrait page (p. 2) in the St Gall Gospels. There are a great many competent creations among the crosses, pages, and poems. By competent I mean that their outlines and areas derive in an orderly way from the governing ratio operating with the bounds set for the piece. They make up so many objects – and a large enough proportion of the surviving objects – to leave no doubt that accumulating geometry was a dominant, widely understood method of design for various arts in Insular tradition. The

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very best pieces are few, and it cannot be otherwise. They do not differ from the crude and the competent pieces except in their degree of mastery of the art of composition, recognizable in the elegance (the simplicity of full development) of the recoverable set of formulae of their generation. Let us step back for a moment to contemplate the look and feel of the formal plans of the poems (and the visual and plastic art objects in this historical context), as they generate their mathematical coherence. The principal segments of the verse texts – the prominent textual division into fitts – do not obey rules of recursion of equal-size units. Two fitts of equal length are so scarce as to be found only in the very long texts of Beowulf and Andreas. Similarly, and symptomatically I believe, pragmatic segments of discourse also avoid rules of recursion at equal measures. Modern paragraphing in edited texts is based on (linguistic) pragmatic construing of texts, and there is anything in their lengths but regular recurrence (matching stanza lengths, for example). The same observation proceeds from attending to placement of ‘small caps’ and pointing in the manuscripts. A consistent observation can be made about sentence divisions: they often lie athwart the metrical divisions – stichic metre having no regular match-up with sentence or clausal divisions. With use of ‘variation’ there are further mismatches between the lineal sequence of sentence constituents and the syntactical structure of the basic sentence containing them. Now play back the preceding paragraph in reverse. In doing so, try out these expressions and rank them for aesthetic merit; all have the same information content: The sun rose. God’s candle rose. God’s candle, the sun, rose. The sun, God’s candle, rose. The sun rose, God’s candle. God’s candle rose, the sun.

The first two are simple assertions in simplest syntax, differing only as literal and figurative in expression of the subject. The other four are also simple assertions (single predication ‘rose’), but embody recursion of the nominal element. The management of that recursion differs, though, among them. In the middle two the recursion is immediate, in the last two it is delayed. In the middle two the aesthetically interesting element occurs first, the recursion, with its literal-figurative conjunction, leaving a routine predication in the prominent position of terminating the sentence. In the

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last two, that final position is filled by a figurative variant of the literal noun in one, and by the literal variant of the figurative expression in the other. This simple exercise illustrates two or three things that AngloSaxons exploited in their poetic texts (and elsewhere) with aesthetic intention, it would appear. With addition of a single variant – a recursion in reference – the expression takes on interest beyond that of the informational content it conveys. If the variant terms are unequal in mode – here one literal, one figurative – the order of their occurrence takes on interest, too. If they are juxtaposed (as literal appositives) the interest they generate will be different from when another sentence constituent intervenes. Then for verse passages add the interplay of sentence boundaries and metrical line boundaries into the mix, like this: … siðþan sunne up on morgentid, mære tungol, glad ofer grundas, Godes condel beorht, eces Drihtnes, oððæt …

(Brunanburh 13b–16a)

And proceed through ‘pragmatic’ divisions, and on to fitt-divisions. All of a piece, for aesthetic manipulation. We have, in other words, various levels of formal divisions which are ‘at odds’ – syntactical, metrical, modular – yet they come out harmonious within the larger patterns. The effects achieved in this way cannot be produced in sequences of couplets, quatrains, five- or seven- or nine-line stanzas (or six- or eight- or ten- or twelve-). The engagement of interest is totally unlike that for stanzas and such, where metre and syntax ‘come out even’ frequently and predictably. A fitt-end does coincide with a sentence-end as a rule, but a fitt-end cannot be predicted as ‘here comes another one of those’ when any particular line-group or sentence or speech or episode comes to an end. It often coincides with the end of a speech or episode, but speeches and episodes end sometimes just before fitt-divisions, and sometimes just after fitt-divisions. Many transitions in Beowulf – at lines 99 or 2397, for example – are not coincidental with fitt-divisions. The problem of getting segments of texts to harmonize is thus quite different, the means of achieving harmony are quite different, and the effects of perceiving that harmony are different accordingly. At the level of the sentence, the hierarchy of its constituents in anything but the simplest structure enters into contrapuntal play with the unhierarchical sequence of metrical lines. As we listen and construe, we have to decode two systems simultaneously, one of syntax, one of metre, which

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are at odds. Not difficult to do, and well worth doing for aesthetic reasons. With variation another ‘voice’ is added to the counterpoint, with its own rules of sequencing, the system adding play with lexical-semantic elements usually differing in directness of reference. Potential aesthetic effects multiply. Consider the intellectual game of construing that very simple, recurrent construction Beowulf maþelode, bearn Ecgþeowes. The diagram of this sentence, fig. 2, is an attempt to represent the fundamental terms of this game. The linguistic text – the utterance – is represented in a conventional way, the alphabetic analog of spoken text transcribed as a string. The metre is sketchily represented by printing each metrical ‘line’ on a separate line of text, and by breaking the string at the middle for ‘half-line’ segments. The syntax is represented in the labeling and grouping of the sentence constituents. Built into that level of representation is the next one, for variation. The sentence begins with subject and predicate (one word each) in a most transparent way, and could terminate there as a well formed commonplace factual assertion. The conventional formula for introducing direct speech in poetry, though, continues to the end of a metrical line, with commonly the speaker identified further by other than name: so sentence-end intonation is postponed to coincide with line-end. With this, the game requires the hearer to connect the second (variant) constituent for the subject to the overall sentence structure. It is recursion, it is non-adjacent – a different main constituent of the sentence intervening. To fit the hierarchical system, this sentence-final constituent, in line-final position, has to feed back to the sentence-initial and line-initial position, as a variant of the first expression of the subject. (The symbol means ‘similar or equal to.’) The predication then gets tacit replay (its recursion) without variation. The subject expressed with variation, the predicate expressed without variation is in fact a kind of variation in itself, also with aesthetic implications. Even in the simplest of sentences like this one, with simplest variation, the contrapuntal play of syntax, metre, and alternate lexical expressions is there.15 It is the same game we saw with The sun rose etc., except that it adds metre. The ‘voices’ are at odds, so to speak – not parallel, not sequential – yet they are made to harmonize (in counterpoint) before the next stretch of text begins. The management of quantities ‘at odds’ in their various modes of organization, and the contrapuntal play of syntax, metre, and placement of variants, with resolution (‘closure’) before a new such construction begins: 15 Less simple examples – including the unsurpassed final sentence of Beowulf – are included in http://faculty.washington.edu/stevickr/graphotactics/studies.html.

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Figure 2 S.

Indic

Past

TENSE

PERS/NUM

MOOD

-COMPL nom

MAÞELIAN

NP Name [3/Sg] Be-owulf

maþelode

bearn

Ecgþe-owes N

N

NPgen

NP

this trait of small-unit composition may in fact help us appreciate better the disposition of the various ‘matters’ of Beowulf, as well. Long debated and oft lamented has been the unstraightforward telling of the hero’s story, unlike the steady progress of the religious poems and familiar stories. Hence the notions of main narrative interrupted by episodes and digressions, and the debates following therefrom, which continue today. These non-Beowulf-biography materials are sometimes apologized for, sometimes rationalized, sometimes transmuted by declaring ‘there are no digressions in Beowulf,’ but only ‘foreground’ and ‘background,’ for instance. The notions arise from topical matters, which gave rise to a debate that has seen increasing ingenuity (and attentiveness to important matters in some instances), but without clear resolution or a way yet of reaching it. View the assorted ‘matters’ of the text in formal terms analogous to the contrapuntal schemes of syntax, metre, speech, episode, and then fitt-schemes, and there is an entirely different mode of understanding. It just may be that the author of Beowulf exploited the essence of Anglo-Saxon and Insular aesthetics of form in a way that no other AngloSaxon poet (whose text survives) was able to do. He was not bound to a literary source with a form and progress like that of a saint’s life, allegory, or homily – typically expository in nature, whether a narrative of events or a program of instruction. These things strive for steady progress from start to finish; one corollary of this is their avoidance of matters that may

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interfere with that steady progress. One voice, one line, from outset to end. Without this constraint, he could compose with an entirely different method, bringing together different matters, the three famous episodes in the hero’s life being only the dominant set. Against the chronological connections among episodes of Beowulf’s combats, the other matters are thematic and not connected by chronology. These matters that appear to be at odds with straightforward narrative of the hero’s most praiseworthy actions nonetheless all find their place within the whole poem by the time it concludes. Further, to remove any of them would modify the aesthetic completeness and patterns of resolution within the poem. Even to move any of them would have a similar effect. And it is difficult to imagine still other matters being worked into the text. Any such modifications, I believe, would reduce the aesthetic excellence of this poem. In short, the author may not have been composing a narrative poem at all, in our accustomed understanding of that genre, but a poem informed by an aesthetic that is reflected in the verbal art of variation as well as in the formal schemes that shaped material and graphic arts all around him.16 I introduced counterpoint at sentence, metre, and paragraph level as a potential analogue for appreciating the putative mix of episodes and digressions into the composition which features Beowulf’s famous deeds. That in turn was introduced to clarify the specific nature of recursions found regularly in distinctively Insular aesthetics. In turn that was introduced to clarify the inferred goal of the agency of creating the large (the overall) forms for poems, cross-pages, brooch designs, stone crosses, and the rest. The agency was described as a management of quantities that eventuates in perfect mathematical coherences of large forms, specifically in the fitt-lengths of Anglo-Saxon poems. Which brings us to wonder whether quantitative principles obvious in the large forms may have operated as well on topical and lexical and formula matters within those forms? This is an area I have not entered, except incidentally in the observation (above) about the location of a key clause in Christ II, and in discussing elsewhere a set of recurring collocations and the location of the first lacuna in the text of Andreas.17 16 Using a different aspect of Insular art, that of layout and filling in of cross carpet-pages (in the Lindisfarne Gospels as the key example), I have discussed the aesthetic implications of the complementary functions of the ‘narrative’ and ‘digression’ segments in ‘Representing for Form of Beowulf,’ in Old English and New: Essays in Language and Literature in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy, ed. A.N. Doane, Joan Hall, and Richard Ringler (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 3–13. 17 Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 48–9.

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But consider the example of the ‘main narrative’ suspensions in Beowulf to tell of the political marriages of Hildeburh and Finn, Freawaru and Ingeld. These two inset passages have striking similarities of theme and action, which have had extensive and sensitive commentary. Some several years ago it was first pointed out that they are ‘symmetrically contraposed’ by count of metrical lines within the whole text, and that the two are equal in length, that is, having the same count of metrical lines.18 From this precise and conspicuous quantitative feature of the text proceed many considerations bearing on the aesthetics of its composition, when fully grasped. But first it must be acknowledged as part of the art of the poem. And then it may be that we can begin to acknowledge quantitive principles in another aspect of composition, the disposition of lexical and formula recursions. Time to end this hunt along a Möbian pathway for the Anglo-Saxon aesthetic in large forms of the poems, and to epitomize our observations. What makes the best of Old English poetry best is not to be equated with the management of quantity described here to provide coherent and engaging large forms for the texts.19 The diction also has to be best, as does the metre, as does the dialogue, as does control of the ‘matter,’ as does control of formulas in collocation, and more. That kind of management is nonetheless a consistent part of the package, inherent in all the principal texts, and can not be neglected in our hunt for the Anglo-Saxon’s aesthetic in the poetry; this concept of form is both immanent and indicative. At the highest level of mastery, large forms of this kind employ a kind of counterpoint to achieve development and resolution, in ways that are conceptually simple, and that comprise a perfect coherence in a complete equilibrium. That I believe shows best this one aspect of aesthetic excellence which Anglo-Saxons would not have achieved without knowing it, and without valuing it.

18 Those are only the large, most obvious quantitative features of the part of the design. See Hart, ‘Tectonic Design,’ n. 1. 19 The scheme of the one surviving cross-page in the Harburg Gospels is as fine mathematically as one could hope to find. The aesthetic success of the page design is at some remove from that ideal. See The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 200–10.

8 Structural and Affective Relations in The Dream of the Rood: Harmonic Proportion and a Fibonacci-Type Commodulation john m. hill

I Many have noticed literary and doctrinal coherence in The Dream of the Rood. Yet, surprisingly, little has been said about its overall structure, something different from and deeper than a division by topics or by narrative and voiced sections and apart again from claims of a stylistic falling off after line 78. The Vercelli book, the poem’s only manuscript source, contains, among others, two poems deeply organized by geometric ratios in their section divisions and line counts, as Robert D. Stevick has shown. Andreas and Elene have ‘commodular’ underlying forms based on simple ratios: the golden ratio and the square root of two for Andreas and two golden rectangles in the case of Elene. Stevick uses ‘commodular’ when the structural measures of a form, whether for an illuminated page or for groupings of verse lines in numbered sections, relate to each other by a quantitative constant. The aesthetic of Anglo-Saxon geometric art produces something Derek Hull calls transparent complexity,1 whereas that of a geometrically determined literary form, as Robert Stevick would have it, produces an abstract, unobtrusive complexity based on either a number module, established in uneven or else asymmetrical groupings set into some kind of proportional or even ‘harmonic’ relation with each other (as he demonstrates for The Phoenix and Christ I), or else on an inventive employment of some root, but usually the commodular-inducing two true measures – the root, 1 Derek Hull, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Art: Geometric Aspects (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 139–69.

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or, further roots of two and the golden ratio.2 One of the former can be found initially, and exactly, by taking the diagonal of a square – the square root of two; for the golden ratio, one notes, as perhaps did the Pythagoreans, that the side and the diagonal of a regular pentagon are incommensurable (the ratio of their lengths is phi);3 and to find a golden rectangle one can take the diagonal of a rectangle that is half a square, then map it onto the original square’s side at the midpoint. A poet working in this tradition establishes either a geometrical or a modular frame translated into a total line count on one of its dimensions (so he needs to decide that end count in some ‘harmonious’ or else commodular way). That in turn makes possible, given further employment of compass and straight-edge, a number of divisions, a way of proportioning lines within and across sections from the first line to the last given the initial module or else the choice of a ratio, usually a true measure as a constant. This level of formal design, of the proportional sectioning of verse lines across a long narrative, is sophisticated. But Stevick relies notably on section divisions set by fitt numbers. What does one do when such numbers do not exist and when the poem is not a large form? Could quantitative measures of text matter for The Dream of the Rood? While it lacks section numbers, it does have Elene (sections governed by two golden rectangles) as an immediate companion. And it has attracted some attention to possible, underlying proportional form, especially in David Howlett’s studies. Unfortunately, Howlett weakens his case for golden-section proportioning when he speculatively adjusts the poem too much: he would eliminate lines 39b and 40a, creating an ‘original reading (more nearly identical with that of the Ruthwell text) and a symmetrical block of four hypermetric, two normal, and four hypermetric lines.’4 He

2 Robert D. Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms Before A.D. 1000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Analysis of The Phoenix begins in chapter 10, for which 2n.261, tells us that numbers ‘are in a harmonic sequence when the middle number in their reciprocals is the arithmetical mean of the other two. Thus the reciprocals 1/12, 1/21, 1/84, when given a common denominator, are 7/84, 4/84, 1/84; the arithmetical mean of 7 and 1 is 4. The other harmonic sequences in this range are 4, 7, 28 and 8, 14, 56, but neither of them includes the modular number (84)’ – the poem’s key module. 3 As discussed in Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s Most Astonishing Number (New York: Random House, 2003), 34–6. 4 David Howlett, ‘The Golden Section in “The Dream of the Rood”,’ Studia neophilologica 50 (1978): 171–3, at 171.

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also proposes adding a line between 17 and 18, keeping the total 156 – altogether desperate recourse for what may be a sound intuition. The surface reality of the poem offers a clue for better estimating underlying, proportional form. While not marked off in sections, the poem is expansive and has strongly expressed dramatic and developmental moments, divisions that may repay analysis as well as be keyed to something like rhetorical or developmental moments or both, as, say, is the turn from octave to sestet in many Shakespearean sonnets. The dreamer’s opening, hallucinatory vision of a phenomenally alternating gory and then bejewelled cross covers 26 lines with a one-line transition; the tree narrates its story for the next 93 lines in two sections of 50 and 43 respectively, with the first being narrative, the second direct address to the dreamer. The dreamer then finds his own joyful voice in the final 35 lines, including lines 144 and following in praise of Christ. The final line count suggests a possible module – 26 – based on the poem’s full line count (156 divided by 6). However, if simply applied additively, no significant correlation with either rhetorical or structural development appears, aside from coincidental points at lines 26 and 78, with 78 reading thus: ‘Nu ðu miht gehyran … / þæt ic bealuwara weorc gebidden hæbbe.’5 That module is too large to organize interesting moments in a repetitive way, unless it or some other module arranges numbers of lines in proportional groupings. A module inside 26 gives better results in terms of groupings of line counts to which the poet can compose. Taking half of 26, we can set off groupings of 13 lines, looking for ways in which they might cluster given standard editorial punctuation. Line 13 marks an important, emotional contrast: ‘Syllic wæs se sigebeam, ond ic synnum fah.’ Line 26 marks the end of the dreamer’s initial perplexity, along with notice that the cross began to speak. Lines 39, 52, 65, and 78 present interesting possibilities: line 39 announces that ‘the young hero,’ Almighty God, disrobed himself (to mount or ascend the high gallows, perhaps even to ‘leap’ upon it, as James Marchand argues);6 line 52 does not mark a clean break syntactically, falling, as it were, across independent clauses noting God’s suffering and the darkening of the skies. Line 65 likewise straddles clauses, while

5 All word and line citations are to Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood (Manchester: The University Press, 1970). 6 James W. Marchand, ‘The Leaps of Christ and The Dream of the Rood,’ in Source of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies in Honour of Thomas D. Hill, ed. Charles D. Wright, Frederick M. Biggs, and Thomas N. Hall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 80–9.

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line 78 marks a strong turn in the cross’s discourse: ‘Nu ðu miht gehyran, hæleð min se leofa.’ Perhaps the run from 39 to 78 should count as a gathering, which by editorial, end-stop reckoning would give us three units of 13, that section in turn followed by three more thirteen-line units before we have a clear, syntactical beginning in line 117, ‘Ne þearf ðær þonne ænig unforht wesan,’ with the poem’s final turn giving us three units without notable, syntactic demarcation to the end (156). What could that pattern mean or else reflect? If we combine the first three units, we have, overall, a poem of four sections with three units each, the sections identical in length, as of course are the units, with the first three, thirteen-line units being either partially end-stopped or beginning a new sentence. If we like, we can call this a ‘sesquitertian,’ that is, 4 to 3 ratio, which is commonly known as one that ‘in musical sounds produced one of the simplest and “best” intervals, one that was harmonious.’7 This looks like a good, structural framework for and in the poem. Moreover, the poet has by way of clear, rhetorical phrasing and spaced repetition further proportioned each of the sections within the long run of 93, his major gathering of lines preceded by the dreamer’s perplexity and followed by the dreamer’s joy. For the 43 lines of direct address the key repetition is an entire line, almost verbatim in both halves: ‘Nu ðu miht gehyran, hæleð min se leofa’ (l. 78) and ‘Nu ic þe hate, hæleð min se leofa’ (l. 95). The overall ratio of line 78 to line 121 is equivalent to the ratio marked by the ‘nu’ clauses and the repeating b half-lines: as 17 is to 26. That suggests very careful proportional composition within the poem’s second run of lines and where those lines are set in relation to the poem’s first line. For the 50 lines of narrative a similar although different proportioning appears once we see that line 33 rhetorically is absolutely pivotal even if its number is not symbolic. That line brings together the most powerfully repeated phrases and collocations in the cross’s opening account: phrases with feond, with expressions of the cross’s witnessing and of its being handled and fastened. Furthermore, it is in the third block of hypermetrical lines – all the blocks of which I accept as set out in Swanton’s edition, alliterative pattern being decisive – and has the first epithet for Christ: ‘gefæstnodon me þær feondas genoge. Geseah ic þa frean mancynnes.’ The lines in good, although not perfect, proportion around this one would be as 26 is to 33 and 56 to 77 (off only six hundredths of a point by decimal calculation). By this analysis, while the poet has not used

7 Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 13.

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the same proportioning within his rhetorically marked sections, his formal, ordering craftsmanship shows.8 Although what I have so far discussed has nothing in common with number symbolism or else ‘numerology,’ some medievals and ancients do employ such concepts. Indeed, seven has value as a symbolic number, according to E.R. Curtius.9 Cicero makes seven a perfect number; seven is important in the Old Testament and for some can betoken the Holy Ghost. Six has associations with grades of being and seven, again, suggests the ages of man. Twelve is a heavenly number, indicating the signs of the zodiac, the months of the year and the apostles. Perhaps that is why the poet chooses 156 as his end count (12×12 plus 12). Yet number symbolism is fairly promiscuous in the Middle Ages – a floating currency, so to speak, varying idiosyncratically with different authorities and poets. It is an unreliable foundation for formal composition, unless the poem’s themes provide the numbers that organize the composition. However, and this is a major claim for medieval culture in general, numbers can provide an outer framework and be ‘a symbol of the cosmic ordo.’ Curtius reminds us that in medieval Latin texts few Bible verses ‘are so often quoted and alluded to as the phrase from the Wisdom of Solomon, 11:21 – “omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti.”’ Then Curtius sums up: ‘Through this verse, number was sanctified as a form-bestowing factor in the divine work of creation. It acquired metaphysical dignity. This is the imposing background of numerical composition in literature.’10 So the end lines of large section groupings, based on 13, suggest a plausible module and a pleasing ratio. However, while modules suggested by the end line count yield an overall sense of order corresponding to syntactical as well as completed developments, and strongly marked sections of the poem have internal, rhetorically keyed proportionalities, one can still wonder if some kind of incommensurable ratio overall governs expanding stretches of text, especially of emotional drama – the latter not strongly picked out by groupings of 13, which mainly mark turns in the poem’s discursive development.

8 I am indebted to detailed conversations with Thomas Hart for inspiration in these matters. His penetrating contribution in this volume approaches Beowulf from an elaborate, precise word patterning perspective, inspired by Boethian ideas of beauty. However, Thom is not responsible for any deficiencies in my account above. 9 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963), 503–4. 10 Curtius, European Literature, 509, 504.

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My hunch is that it does; and while the ensuing argument is speculative, the affective and dramatic moments in the poem, along with some manuscript markings, may give it some substance. I will argue that The Dream of the Rood poet had both modular and golden inspiration in expanding, line count terms: running through his sesquitertian form, with its secondary proportionings, repeated, approximate golden section ratios appear in line counts through 144, the final twelve lines forming a coda. The approximate golden ratios progressively oscillate around the target in terms we can understand as the Fibonacci sequence, where adjacent numbers form ratios closing in on 1 to .618, effectively constricting around that ratio after line 21. That sequence serially generates by adding adjacent numbers together: beginning with 1, then 1, then 2, then 3, then 5, then 8, then 13, then 21, then 34, then 55, 89, 144, and so on (34/21 produces 1.619084, while 55/34 produces 1.617647). When we set those numbers against the poem’s line count, good matches appear at key moments in the rhetorical and emotional development of the poem. Those matches in turn, after 144, set off the last twelve lines defining Christ and His relationship to all believers. The Fibonacci numbers sometimes correspond to conventional editing for the poem and sometimes do not, while setting up emphases that play with and against conventional climaxes. For example, ‘Crist wæs on rode’ has long been taken as a syntactical and rhetorical high point, yet it is line 56b, not 55 (a Fibonacci number), followed by a conjunction. Line 55b is the emphatic ‘all Creation wept,’ arguably a more affective point than Christ on the Rood.11 The poem’s affective nature is also highlighted powerfully and dramatically by its groups of hypermetric

11 Éamonn Ó Carragáin essentially notes as much when discussing how manuscript punctuation ‘allows the narrative to be read in various mutually-enriching ways: … When “wealdendes hræw” (53b) and “scirne sciman” (54a) are taken together, we get the following interpretation: “darkness had wrapped in clouds the ruler’s body, the bright shining one.” This reading subordinates the manuscript punctuation to the manuscript word division between “forð” and “eode.” When these are taken as two separate words, line 54b comes to mean “the shadow went forth.” In the next verse (55a), “wann” can be read both as an adjective (“dark, black”) and as a verb (the past tense of “winnan,” to “struggle” … By the time a ruminative reader, who is pronouncing the words as he goes and getting them by heart, comes to “all creation wept,” he has seen that the shadow which envelops the shining body of Christ embodies a cosmic battle in which the “aereas potestates” of darkness go forth to battle against the light.’ Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London and Toronto: The British Library and the University of Toronto Press, 2005), 318. He also emphasizes the ‘fair sight’ of 21a and Christ’s great valour (34a) when discussing the Cross as a symbol of Christ (325–7).

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lines – key images, emotional responses, and perceptions forming therein at Fibonacci numbers 8, 21, and 34 before the block of gory pathos and the entombing of Christ in lines 59 to 69, His body cooling in line 72, which is the halfway point between the Fibonacci line numbers 55 and 89, 89 in turn marking the way of life’s opening, by way of the cross, for men, those voice-bearing souls. Around line eight we have the resonant five jewels (five wounds of Christ no doubt and the five senses) as well as angels and the cry that this is no criminal’s gallows. At line 21 the dreamer is sorrowful, fearful, and confused. At line 34 the cross amazingly realizes that the Lord of mankind would ascend or rise up upon him. Lines 39 to 43 hypermetrically assert what the cross dare not do given God Almighty upon it; in 46 to 49 the cross is sorely pierced by dark, bloody nails, yet it says that it dared not bow or fall to earth; line 75 expresses the awful fear of burial in a deep pit; and the last hypermetrical line, 133, inverts an exilic lament by proclaiming the dreamer’s earthly friendlessness. His friends have all departed to seek the King of Glory or Glory’s King. Emotionally, the hypermetrical blocks and lines compellingly underline intense, awful moments in what is eventually a drama of triumph and joy. At this point we should expand upon these observations by reading the poem at Fibonacci moments up to line 21, a key generational moment for the turned on proportioning, and then to lines 34 and 55. In doing so I will be tracking the affective and dramatic moments in the poem, testing their cadences against that number pattern. The first three lines complete an opening statement: when the ‘choicest of dreams was dreamed.’ That is, when reordberend lay at rest (that key word appearing only once more, in line 89, a Fibonnaci number). In line 5 the dreamer thinks, that is, it seems to him that a most wondrous tree rises aloft wound round in light (‘on lyft lædan, leohte bewunden,’ with the latter phrase used of ‘the Savior himself in Christ 1642. In Elene 733 it is the noblest of angels who geond lyft farað leohte bewundene’ [Swanton ed. 100–1]). Clearly this would be an important line to mark proportionally, even given its syntactic stop in most editions with the variant ‘beama beorhtost’ of 6a. However, Bernard Huppé punctuates this section with a semicolon, thus marking a kind of movement towards equilibrium between clauses rather than full stops.12 So one could treat 6a as a suspended variation for the preceding line, 12 Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words: Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems Vainglory, The Wonder of Creation, The Dream of the Rood, and Judith, with texts and translations (New York: State University of New York Press, 1970), 64.

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‘brightest of beams,’ pausing for a moment, before perhaps implying the still partly heard phrase as a new head note, ‘Brightest of beams … all of that beacon was covered with gold’; jewels stood at the corners of the earth, likewise there were five high on the cross. Line 8 marks the number of jewels in a suspended phrase before bringing the parallel with earth’s bejewelled expanse home to the beacon’s crossbeam. Reading in this way, cued to the Fibonacci numbers, an interesting cadence, almost a chant cadence across and along enjambed lines, develops. Thus line 8 parallels the cross with the corners of the earth – the entire dominion for salvation. Between lines 8 and 13 we have angelic stagecraft as those ‘fair creations’ behold the scene, which does not include a criminal’s gallows. That note anticipates the first powerful contrast between the dreamer and his glorious vision: ‘Syllic wæs se sigebeam, ond ic synnum fah,’ line 13, closing in 14a on the idea of being wounded with stains. If we accelerate from here we have the poem’s next powerful contrast in lines 20 and 21: ‘swætan on þa swiðran healfe. Eall ic wæs mid s[o]rgum gedrefed. / Forht ic wæs for þære fægran gesyhðe. Geseah ic þæt fuse beacen [medial point in the manuscript] / wendan wædum ond bleom’ [medial point]. It is as though a scribe responds strongly to this section by lifting the clauses up into mutual relation and suspension, the changing vision bracketing the dreamer’s strongly doubled emotions of sorrow and fear – his first such beyond the shame of sin. He becomes full of fear because of that strangely glamorous, golden, and then bloody sight. Now the fantastical object begins to alternate violently as the dreamer lies there for a long time, unable to comprehend what he sees. Needing psychological and cognitive rescue, he must feel amazement when ‘the best of woods’ first addresses him, relating how it was hewn down and carried by strong enemies, then set up on a hill where it could see mankind’s Lord hastening boldly such that He would ascend it! This point probably needs an exclamation mark in that the unassuming tree is about to be embraced by the Lord of all mankind – a relational or else social moment of great confusion, line 34 (a Fibonacci number). For he dare not in the face of the Lord’s word either bow down or break (as surely a loyal retainer would). The Lord’s hastening zeal is as a command that inverts customary behaviour deeply engrained: the tree could, he says, strike down the enemies but nevertheless he stood firm, in effect suffering the inverted dignity of both his Lord’s ascending embrace and the freedom of those enemies who would punish his Lord on the high gallows. He must stand fast because he has been erected as a cross (44a). Moreover, the torment of nails wounds both of them just as both endure great suffering. The cross certainly does and bears witness to the Lord’s violent racking as

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well. This leads to the weeping of all creation in line 55b, lament for the Lord’s death – Christ was on the cross (added information, rather than a full stop, in Huppé’s editing of the line).13 The poem is notoriously difficult to punctuate and section definitively because of its suspensions, long lines, and, in some cases, manuscript spacing and medial pointing. There is, for example, a notable space between 55a and 55b, although not more notable than other half-line spacing and less so than some end-line spacing, especially if including medial pointing. But to continue, one can argue that the affective high point of the crucifixion scene comes in 55a, lament for the dead king. The arresting second half of the next line, ‘Crist wæs on rode,’ could be suspended as well, with a quick movement of voice then taking up the eager, nevertheless coming of men to that noble one. After all, Christ on the Cross is the point, as we will learn, of victory, despite the darkening of the earth and the weeping of all creation. Read this way, the Fibonacci moment, so to speak, is the affective heart of this passage (line 55). If then we emphasize the emotion of line 55, line 56b begins to float, becoming readable as a moment of crucifixion immediately rescued by the coming forward of men to the noble Christ. Those lines together can form a suspended syntax of independent clauses. Other lines, 21 for example, are set apart in the manuscript by medial points or by small capitals or both. Further, consider line 144b. If punctuated with a colon given the subjunctive beginning, the notion of being the ‘Lord’s friend … He who’ – that construction syntactically and rhythmically organizes movement into what I consider the poem’s coda. Several readers have sensed some of this proportioning whenever focusing on affective drama. In a study of patterns of transformation, Louis H. Leiter argues for several highly dramatic moments as ones of metaphorical transformation. ‘The first of these dramatic metaphors’ reaches for pathos at 55b–56a, when the prince, tortured and executed, dies.14 ‘Weop eal gesceaft’ stands out emotionally, one could say, and corresponds for my purposes to a Fibonacci number: aligning with line 55 and in ratio with line 34 – ‘þæt he me wolde on gestigan,’ a formidably tense moment for the retainer-cross, whose deep, cultural impulse is to bow rather than stand as his lord hastens towards him. For Leiter, the drama of the dreamer begins notably in lines 20b–21a as he lies ‘mid sorgum gedrefed, / forht …

13 Huppé, The Web of Words, 68. 14 Louis H. Leiter, ‘The Dream of the Rood: Patterns of Transformation,’ in Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays, ed. Robert P. Creed (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1967), 93–127, at 94–5.

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wæs for þære fære gesyhðe.’15 This corresponds at line 21 with another Fibonacci moment, in ratio with line 13. Also, lines 20b–23 are for Leiter ‘a graphic demonstration of the central transformational process in the poem, its moments appearing in several places, as in line 5a’s ‘on lyft læden’ where the Cross prefigures a kind of ship,’16 a vehicle of redemption for Leiter. However, Leiter overlooks line 13 because it is neither implicitly nor explicitly transformational. Rather, it marks a stark, affectively deep contrast as a precondition in need of redress or transformation: ‘Syllic wæs sigebeam, on ic synnum fah.’ Indeed, if we emphasize the poem’s affective dimensions, which are of course also transformational or else pretransformational, a strong correspondence with Fibonacci points appears. Edward B. Irving, Jr’s study of dramatic interaction in the poem also highlights a number of lines that match Fibonacci moments, notably beginning with lines 13 and 14a, then lines 21a, 34, and 84–9. The tree’s ‘uncomfortable strangeness’ affects the Dreamer, whose ‘intuition forces him to confront himself’ in the course of glimpsing the Cross’s ‘blood and agony. He is now, as he must be, paradoxically terrified of the beautiful sight’ (l. 21a).17 Eventually the exertion of heroic will largely passes ‘from the passive rood to Christ (l. 34) … as Rood comes to understand the incredible situation in which it has been placed.’18 By line 89 the ‘wounded and bewildered Rood has now become, despite and because of his own suffering, a healer and a guide for all men who seek him,’ thus quite triumphant in a passage of powerful reversal narrated: Iu ic wæs geworden wita heardost, leodum laðost, ærþan ic him lifes weg rihtne gerymede, reordberendum.19

The indirect object of this climax, this ultimate role, the voice or speechbearing ones, appears only twice in the poem, here closing line 89, and elsewhere early in line 3. Both lines are Fibonacci numbers, with 89 marking the clarification of a riddle-like exposition: Michael Swanton would 15 Leiter, ‘The Dream,’ 107. 16 Leiter, ‘The Dream,’ 110–13. 17 Edward B. Irving, Jr, ‘Crucifixion Witnessed, or Dramatic Interaction in the Dream of the Rood, in Essays in Honor of Stanley B. Greenfield, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, and Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 101–13, at 103–4. 18 Irving, ‘Crucifixion Witnessed,’ 106. 19 Irving, ‘Crucifixion Witnessed,’ 111.

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have us compare these lines (88b–89a – ‘ærþan ic him lifes weg / rihtne gerymde’) to Riddle 62, lines 3–4, ‘ond me weg sylfa ryhtne geryme.’20 The leap from line 34 to 89 and beyond, as I have selected it in Irving’s commentary, may seem self-serving, as in some measure it is. But more is gained than not by looking at the most expansive sections of the poem in this way. Barbara C. Raw notes that ‘the enigma of the opening lines of the poem is only finally solved through the address by the cross to the dreamer (ll. 95–131) and, finally, the dreamer’s own reflection on what he has seen and heard (ll. 122–56).’21 She adds that we should, because of that definitive clarification, study the poem in ‘reverse order, starting with its third and fourth sections.’ The cross’s address (ll. 95–121) interprets its role in Christ’s death ‘in relation to the Last Judgment, when Christ will ask where the man is who is willing to taste death as he did on the cross.’22 Whether martyrdom is necessary or not, the way of the cross is ‘Ac ðurh ða rode sceal rice gesecan … seo þe mid Wealdende wunian þenceð’ (ll. 119–21). At this point the cross stops addressing the dreamer. We are 32 lines from line 89 and 23 lines before the coda; and of course we are, after line 89, 55 lines from 144. Those line counts tempt one to see a kind of chiasmus within the stretch from 89 to 144 (32 and 23). That may be merely adventitious or it may undergird the switch a double transformation celebrates: from glory to gore; from sinfulness to glory for both the visionary cross and the envisioning dreamer. Only one other expanse can accommodate such a secondary pattern: from 55 to 88. There 12 lines and 21 lines respectively would mark setting the victorious Ruler into His stone or marble tomb, line 67, and the ‘lifes weg’ riddle of line 88. While this is quite alluring, one comes up short by a line – too much so even given the approximations of golden ratios varying around the target by several thousandths. What, then, about line 144 and following? Most commentators sense a tail-end, so to speak, to the poem. In his 1970 translation Huppé sets off line 144, noting the power of what he calls a closing prayer.23 J.A. Burrow also emphasizes the closing lines, 144 and following, by discussing their tropological significance in relation to the dreamer’s moral and personal hiht (‘joy’ or ‘hope’). They are not an addition to the poem, as Cook once suggested. By the by, Burrow also sees an absolute gap between the

20 Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood, 128. 21 Barbara C. Raw, ‘The Cross in The Dream of the Rood: Martyr, Patron and Image of Christ,’ Leeds Studies in English n.s. 38 (2007): 1–12, at 1. 22 Raw, ‘The Cross,’ 1–2. 23 Huppé, The Web of Words, 144.

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dreamer and the Cross at lines 13 and 21 (adjacent Fibonacci numbers).24 Following Constance Hieatt, Carol Pasternack focuses on stylistic disjunctions after having divided the poem topically: lines 1–27; 28–77; 78–94; 95–121; 122–56 – the last forming an epilogue. However, lines 144b to 146 end a section by breaking a syntactical pattern while ‘inserting the prayer itself’ in ‘a brief, comparatively straightforward sentence: “Si me dryhten freond … for guman synnum.”25 So, while not noted structurally, line 144 stands out as the syntactical impetus for that nearly closing prayer, even as the lines following stand apart for Huppé, forming an integrated, tropological point for the Dreamer in Burrow’s account. If what I have called the Fibonacci moments matter, they do so within several overlapping designs: they appear recursively within emotional dramas of transformation and rhetorical turns, within topical divisions, exposition that ends a riddlinglike articulation, and even in moments of syntactical disjunction. Clearly not everything depends upon them. However, within hypermetric groupings and elsewhere they basically map the poem’s ever-increasing affective intensity and sweep, while retaining a recursive apportioning of the poem’s material in a way no topical divisions can. Such divisions are in some sense arbitrary. They can be added to and subtracted from, whereas dramatic divisions, while expandable, have an internal coherence only in terms of stages. In contrast a proportioned, affective line of development has an integrity that is hardly changeable at will. Only with great difficulty can one violate it without creating an obvious intrusion or rupture. Besides marking affective developments, one should add, the Fibonacci sequence usually emphasizes either a closing or opening moment syntactically. When an underlying ratio marks important developments across expanding stretches of text, and produces a previously underestimated coda, we have an aesthetically clarified and enhanced poem. Thus appreciated, and along with its modular deployments and various proportioning within major sections, The Dream of the Rood joins its manuscript companions, Andreas and Elene, in a geometric aesthetic. By emphasizing Fibonacci moments, we also can conceive the poem as it may have evolved, sometimes even chant-like, in ways modern punctuation obscures, while

24 J.A. Burrow, ‘An Approach to The Dream of the Rood,’ in Old English Literature: Twenty-two Analytical Essays, ed. Martin Stevens and Jerome Mandel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 253–67, at 257, 266–7. 25 Carol Braun Pasternack, ‘Stylistic Disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood,’ in Old English Literature, ed. R.M. Liuzza (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 404–24, at 419.

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speculating about the poet’s spiritual motives for resting his expansive text upon an underlying, but by no means transparent, complexity. He may be suggesting that God, the divine geometer, has in fact harmoniously and geometrically generated and thus created his poem. That God, who is everywhere and nowhere, circumference and the uncircumscribed, thus is everywhere present in the shaping of the composition, His presence therein discoverable by inspired cognoscenti. II How might an Anglo-Saxon poet come up with this scheme, especially the commodular part? While Boethius notes the golden ratio in his De Geometrica,26 nothing like the Fibonacci sequence appears there, nor would Anglo-Saxons know it by that name. Fibonacci is the nickname for a famous thirteenth-century mathematician, Leonardi Bigoli Pisan. His Liber abaci contains the sequence in a word problem about the monthly reproduction of rabbits.27 The Anglo-Saxons could have produced the sequence by a continued fraction – such arithmetic being well known to Boethius and perhaps also derivable from Egyptian, that is, Alexandrian mathematics, where reciprocals are formed and fractions added and divided.28 A continued fraction is a way of reducing decimals to integers, using only 1’s. It generates by successively adding 1 to a preceding reciprocal: e.g., add 1 to 1/1=2/1, the reciprocal being ½; add 1 to get 3/2, the reciprocal being 2/3 and so on (2/3 is an important Egyptian unit fraction with its own hieratic sign, a fraction northern monks could easily manipulate by adding 1, taking the reciprocal, and then adding 1 again, and so on). Moreover, Anglo-Saxons could easily find golden rectangles geometrically (take the diagonal of half a square; use the mid-point of the original square’s side to extend that side by the measure of the diagonal). Successive powers of the golden ratio can be reduced to sums of an integer and an integer multiple of the golden ratio; those integers turn out to be the 26 Michael Masi, Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 33, cites the edition edited by Godofredus Friedlein, Boetii De Institutione Arithmetica Libri Duo (Leipzig, Teubner, 1867; rpt. 1966), 386. 27 Beginning with one pair, that pair producing another, then in a month another as the young pair matures; then the next month two pairs produce a pair each as the second young pair matures and so on. 28 See Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, 2nd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1991), 12–14.

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Fibonacci sequence, something Anglo-Saxons could have noted if they could do squares and higher powers of the golden ratio, thus seeing beforehand, as it were, an intimate connection between the golden ratio and that series (as shown on www.friesen.com/golden.htm). And they could have noted small Fibonacci numbers as two sides of two Pythagorean triads: the 3,4,5 triangle and the 5,12,13 triangle (Fibonacci numbers cannot form all three sides of a right-angle triangle). Historically an intellectual culture taking in Greek geometry, Roman continuation and Egyptian developments was available to learned AngloSaxons. Euclid knew the square root of 2 and other irrational numbers, as well as the golden ratio (Books 10 and 13 in his Geometry). In turn Euclid is known in Alexandria, newly translated there in the fourth century CE as well as into Arabic in the ninth century. Boethius for his part of course knows Plato, who knows Thaetetus, from whom Euclid may have got his knowledge of irrational numbers.29 It is even possible that Irish monks may have got their knowledge of proportioning and ratios from Egyptian monks escaping Arabic incursions. While one does not need this intriguing avenue of influence, the topic arises beguilingly in various histories of early medieval Ireland and Coptic art. Klaus Wessel finds an ‘astonishing relationship between many Christian works in Ireland and Egypt.’ Some are linked by ‘the decorative and stylized manner … of showing the robes in parallel stripes … Further, the singular depiction of the faces is very similar to what we find, for example, in the Book of Kells.’ He notes Egyptian names among saints in Irish missals and cites P. Paulson on Coptic and Irish art.30 Michelle P. Brown finds an image of Crucifixion in the Durham Gospels ‘stylistically indebted to Coptic or Syriac sources, whilst the Book of Kells includes a number of full-page miniatures amongst its baroque wealth of decoration, including an image of the Virgin and Child (plate 11) derived from Coptic depictions.’31 If so, in one sense that line of influence may be nearing an end. By analysing the geometrical construction of that page along with others, Stevick finds ‘the repertory of the ratios and the construction methods’ repetitious. For him, ‘the absence of innovation in the creation of shapes and in the commodulation of their elements … [is what] one

29 Livio, The Golden Ratio, 67, 76–7. 30 Klauss Wessel, Coptic Art in Early Christian Egypt (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), 232–3. 31 Michelle P. Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 10–11.

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could expect to encounter at the end of a brilliant tradition of formal design, when it had lapsed into a collection of formulae learned without full understanding of their intellectual or esthetic potential.’32 Even part of the Irish color palette may have debts to Mediterranean sources. Brown explains: ‘Earlier Insular manuscripts, and those of Merovingian Gaul and Coptic Egypt, tended to employ a tricolour of red (toasted lead), green (verdigris from copper) and yellow (orpiment, tri-sulphide of arsenic), which set up a chemical chain-reaction that causes the green to corrode through the page (as in the Book of Durrow). This problem was solved in the making and color stabilizing of The Lindesfarne Gospels (which brought purples and blue into play as well).’33 Thomas Cahill notes that the Ulster monastery of Bangor claims ‘in its litany to be “ex Aegypto transducta,”’ and that ‘the convention of using red dots to adorn Irish mss. had first been glimpsed by the Irish in books the fleeing Copts brought with them.’34 So while Egyptian mathematical influence is not directly discoverable, despite Alcuin’s complaint about ‘Irish teachers and their “Egyptian boys,” whose teaching on computus differed from his own,’35 direct, geometrical influence in page design, along with stylistic motifs, colour schemes, and traditions of abstracted representation may well have been part of the amazing efflorescence of Anglo-Irish geometrical art in the early middle ages (the sixth to ninth centuries).36

32 Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts, 233. 33 Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age, 17. 34 Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization (New York: Bantam Boubleday Dell, 1995), 180. 35 Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, Early Medieval Ireland: 400–1200 (London: Longman), 221. 36 I am indebted to Robert Stevick for many suggestions and a few corrections given an earlier draft of this essay.

9 Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth* thomas e. hart

I. Introduction Title and a set of questions. My title includes allusion to two phrases in Beowulf: 871a soðe gebunden (literally: ‘bound in/by truth’) 1531b wrættum gebunden (literally: ‘bound by artifices/writings’)

The first refers to something ‘true’ about the way (oral) poetry is composed: Hwilum cyninges þegn, [… . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . ] worn gemunde, word oþer fand soðe gebunden; secg eft ongan [… . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . ] wordum wrixlan;1

* From its inception this paper has benefited from the excellent criticism and suggestions for revision most generously given by Robert Stevick and John Hill. I am also grateful to two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press for their helpful comments. 1 Beowulf (700[?] – 1000 AD), Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Lexington/Boston: Heath, 1950); R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th ed., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), here ll. 867b, 870–71, 874a. Roughly: ‘At times the king’s thegn […] recalled a great number [of old tales], found other words [or: word found word, etc.], in/by truth [or truly] bound; the man began again […] to interchange words’). ‘Beowulf-poet/ author’ = ‘he’ for ‘he/she/they’ throughout. Unless otherwise indicated, English equivalents for words and phrases are mine, favouring standard glossary-entry understandings.

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The second refers to ‘artful patterns’ beautifying a sword, i.e., ‘engravings’ in metalwork, literally ‘writings’ in some sense (wræt[t]) ‘work of art,’ derived from writan ‘engrave, write, draw a figure’). Much discussed, and much esteemed, these finely combined words celebrate the artistry of ancient oral poets and the art of ancient Germanic (gold)smiths in a manner often described as ‘loving.’ This is artistry – as the poet has his first verse line tell us – that was valued in geardagum ‘in days of yore.’ And if only that, then the familiar glossings of ‘word finding word,’ ‘word being bound to word,’ ‘words interchanging,’ might seem to suffice. Say, apposition, alliteration, metre: the ancient verities and beauties of prosody and diction. But what, in sooth, is ‘truth’? What if the poet wanted his soðe gebunden and wrættum gebunden to express (also) some larger, more contemporaneous, more intensely personal truth about his ideals for the artistry of his poem as written? As ‘bound’ by ‘writing’? Artistry he valued also in the tradition of a Virgil, a Boethius, an Aldhelm? Poetry, that is, that was preserved from still more ancient days of yore, because ‘bound’ in books, ‘bound’ by ‘writing’ in ‘writings’? A hypothesis for such questions. I hypothesize (a) that the author of the text which the unique manuscript preserves for us in writing viewed these two contexts of ‘binding’ as themselves ‘bound,’ one to the other, soðe to wrættum, and wrættum to soðe; (b) that he expected future readers (us) to notice that and ponder what this ‘binding’ can mean; and (c) that both phrases embody poetic theory, describing something he viewed as important about the way he composed and combined his poem’s words, even words far removed from one another, even, like soðe gebunden and wrættum gebunden, repeated words that are fully 660 (i.e., 1531 – 871) verse lines apart. And that this poetic theory – unlike those we privilege in our time – viewed the 871, the 1531, and the 660 (in this case) as an essential part of the artistry of such ‘binding.’ And that this, among other reasons, is why the numbered fitts into which he divided his text also include

Translations cited passim are Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf (London: Faber and Faber, 1999) and R.M. Liuzza, trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Toronto: Broadview, 2000). The received text, as critically edited, totals 3182 verse lines. Their sequence is divided into 44 sections called ‘fitts,’ one unnumbered followed by 43 consecutively numbered. The unique manuscript has blemishes affecting confidence about the totals 3182 and 44. Those totals are stipulated here, as a point of departure. The findings confirm the numbers stipulated. My procedures of hypothesis are indebted throughout to improvements on the traditional hypothetico-deductive model proposed by Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 207–10 and passim.

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precisely these parameters. Consider, for example, that the last eleven fitts in the Dragon story, numbered xxxiii to xliii in the manuscript, span precisely 871 verse lines (ll. 2312–3182): xxxiii 2312 Ða se gæst ongan gledum spiwan 871 3182 … lofgeornost.

(‘Then the Dragon began to spew flames’; ‘most desirous of fame’; this is the only sequence of fitts with 871 verse lines), and that the nine fitts numbered xv to xxiii in the manuscript span 660 verse lines (ll. 991–1650): xv 991–2a Ða waes haten hreþe Heort innanweard / folmum gefrætwod; 660 1650 wliteseon wrætlic; weras on sawon.

(‘Then it was quickly commanded that Heorot / be adorned by hands inside’ [Liuzza]; ‘They stared in awe. It was an astonishing sight’ [Heaney], literally a ‘sight of beauty,’ something that is ‘adorned, like writing, like patterns in two- and three-dimensional art’; this is the only sequence of fitts with 660 verse lines). I have stared with astonishment, and with ingrained and intrained ‘critical’ doubts and disbelief, at such ‘coincidences.’ Now I find the evidence supporting the three-part hypothesis they invite overwhelming, in many senses: not only from historical interest, though that too, but, like so much Anglo-Hibernian manuscript painting, also variously and uniquely beautiful. And I hope, in a few pages of word and ‘picture,’ to at least begin to show you why I do. I propose to do so by asking you to entertain two possibilities: first, let us take the poet’s soð and wræt(t) as both denoting and connoting as much as we can imagine them meaning over a millennium ago, literally, and second, let us reach beyond the tradition of oral poetry to the tradition of ‘binding’ that Anglo-Saxon England inherited from antique and early medieval aesthetic writings, a concept of ‘binding’ that is celebrated repeatedly in the poetic and curricular texts by Boethius (with acknowledged deep debts to St Augustine’s copious writings on aesthetics), especially in the following passage in his best known poem, ‘O qui perpetua’: […] tu cuncta superno ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse mundum mente gerens similique in imagine formans

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[… . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . ] Tu numeris elementa ligas […].2

Quality and quantity: initial visualizations in the Appendix. This paper is thus devoted to one aspect of literary aesthetics, bindan / ligare, that may be observed independently in two consensus masterpieces of early medieval poetry, Beowulf and De consolatione philosophiae. Like other aspects of poetry this one derives its aesthetic impact from give and take between values of quality (associated with words, ‘content,’ etc.) and values of quantity (associated with numbers, ‘form,’ etc.). Its quantitative dimension, though largely unremarked or not yet well known for either Beowulf or the Consolatio, expresses itself in both texts in three important types of design features, each with its own characteristic domain and properties: type A: patterned division of the text into formal units (books, fitts, component units like Boethius’s poems and proses), typically marked in the manuscripts, often with explicit numbering; 2 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae (circa 480/485 – 524/526 A.D.; final composition shortly before his death), ed. Claudio Moreschini (Munich and Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2000), here 3m9.6–10: ‘You, most beautiful yourself, draw all from a sublime pattern, bearing in mind this beautiful world and forming it in accordance with that image […] You bind the elements with numbers.’ Boethius’s Consolatio is composed in Latin, half in verse (39 metra ‘poems’), half in prose (39 proses). This prosimetric sequence – alternating: poem / prose / poem / … prose – is divided into five books. The text is considered reliably preserved. The 39 poems are metrically diverse and total 890 verse lines. In addition to the conventional lineation for the Consolatio (e.g., ‘1m1.1’ = book I, metre 1, line 1), I indicate each verse-line’s ordinal location within the 890 verse lines of the 39 poems, viewing these, by hypothesis, as continuous sequence, with the intervening prose sections not counted. This hypothesis is supported by the various corroborations below (e.g., in fig. 1). Independent of those corroborations, it is also supported by its consistency (a) with what the intervening prose sections say and imply about the independence of the sections in verse (e.g., 1p1.1), and (b) with the testimony of the earliest manuscripts, e.g., Vatican MS lat. 3363, France, mid-ninth century (imported to the British Isles shortly thereafter; its verse sections are in display-script-like uncials and its proses in minuscule); see M.B. Parkes, ‘A Note on MS Vatican, Bibl. Apost., lat. 3363,’ in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 425–7. For Boethius’s mathematics see his De institutione arithmetica, ed. Henricus Oosthout and Johannes Schilling, CCLS 94A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999); cf. Institution Arithmétique, ed. and trans. Jean-Yves Guillaumin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995) and Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the De Institutione Arithmetica, trans. Michael Masi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983). For his theory of musical consonance in De institutione arithmetica libri duo, De institutione musica libri quinque, ed. Gottfried Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867); cf. Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. Calvin M. Bower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).

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type B: large-scale patterned disposition of topical units that may coincide with such formal divisions or exist in counterpoint to them or independently; type C: large-scale disposition of repeated words in patterns (henceforth ‘word patterns’). We might think of these features also in binary terms, like ‘aesthetics of design and surface patterning’ (John Hill’s initiary challenge to contributors), which appears to echo Robert Stevick’s aesthetically compelling cross-media analogy for the structure of Beowulf.3 To help illustrate the extraordinary artistry of this lexical binding, efficiently and sufficiently, and in both poems, I rely on the graphic summaries in the appendix and on readers’ willingness to ponder these figures in a shared effort to see whatever truth and beauty they can help reveal, however unfamiliar this may seem at first. Let us begin by stipulating that what figures 1–5 show is representative for these three types: for type A: figs. 1 (book divisions in the Consolatio) and 3 and 4 (certain fitt divisions in Beowulf); for type B: fig. 5 (the Hildeburh-Finn and Freawaru-Ingeld insets in Beowulf, the example Stevick emphasizes near the end of his essay in this collection); for type C: figs. 2a-b (word patterns with pulcher ‘beautiful’ in the Consolatio) and 3 (word patterns with the number-word feower ‘four’ in Beowulf, here in conjunction also with patterns in fitt divisions). Heuristic range: from palpability (formal divisions) to richness of meaning (word patterns). The figures may remind us immediately of something so obvious that we may look right past it: the three types of design features

3 Stevick, ‘Representing the Form of Beowulf,’ in Old English and New: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honor of Frederic G. Cassidy, ed. Joan H. Hall, Nick Doane, and Dick Ringler (New York/London: Garland, 1992), 3–14, proposes conceptualizing the poem’s ‘lengths of fitt-groups and disposition of verbal and topical elements’ (12n.8) as comparable, mutatis mutandis, to designer tasks faced in drafting cross-pages like those in the Lindisfarne Gospels. Here types B and C may be thought to be subsumed, in effect, in ‘disposition of verbal and topical elements.’ I take up evidence in the poem’s vocabulary for the poet’s having had such a cross-media conception of its structure in ‘Measuring Beowulf: The Bookarts Analogy,’ Essays in Honor of Robert D. Stevick, Philological Review 34 (2008): 111–221, esp. the tabulations assembled in the appendix and figures there, 165–207.

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they illustrate touch and overlap one another in the artefact (e.g., in the senses illustrated in figs. 3 and 5). Of course they do. But that is something that can be exploited for aesthetic purposes, much as tone and tone (and tone …) touch and overlap one another in a musical chord like C-E-G. But the converse is also true: categorization into types A, B, and C is not merely an analytical convenience; each of the three domains invites its characteristic understanding and appreciation. It is easy to overlook their distinctiveness because of what they so obviously and importantly share: their quantitative properties invite abstraction from the text (making it possible, for example, to juxtapose and superimpose them in the same figure, as in figs. 3 and 5). For word patterns (type C) specially, the qualitative properties invite being ‘thought back,’ as it were, into the text. This is because word patterns foreground what is qualitative: they start with meaning, i.e., with what their components denote and connote, as discrete words. Formal divisions (type A) foreground what is quantitative: they start with numbers. That is, formal divisions need not ‘mean’ something a priori. Their primary aesthetic claim may be focused on some achievement with form, as such. At what point, for example, does the ‘meaning’ of the regularities in the fitt divisions summarized in fig. 4 begin to emerge? Or in those in fig. 3? In fact, sometimes their raison d’être appears largely deictic: using something more palpable (formal divisions) to help reveal the existence and logic of something less palpable (e.g., what the fitt divisions in fig. 3, including the 660-line fitt sequence 991–1650 at the right there, suggest for the word pattern feower juxtaposed with them, at the left). Or this might work in reverse, as when more palpable word patterns like ‘envelopes,’ ‘ringsymmetries’ and other familiar framing devices signal or support formal and topical divisions, as in the Hildeburh-Finn and Freawaru-Ingeld insets (fig. 5). Readers of this book may find word patterns the most interesting of the three types. I do, increasingly, and my figures and comments here are oriented primarily toward understanding them. Prodesse et delectare: Boethius and the Beowulf-poet conscious of contributing to a past and future ‘tradition’? Allow me an immediate personal generalization about ‘aesthetic impact’ before considering the figures further. Clearly both poets must have had a sense of what it means to compose an ambitious poem in the Western tradition of letters (each did). Each presumably wished his poem to stand proudly and durably in that tradition (both do). And each poet must have viewed his efforts to shape his text as contributing to its aesthetic impact, conscious or subliminal (why else be there?). Clearly, schematic representation in such figures can hope only to approximate design intent. But I believe their approximations are

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close enough in essentials to what both poets thought they were designing so that neither of them would be puzzled or offended by them. I have been studying design features like these in a number of classical and medieval poetic texts for several decades. Poets whose works we have long valued for many other reasons – from Virgil and Horace to Dante and Chaucer – used design principles and techniques very similar to those that these figures attempt to summarize for the Consolatio and Beowulf. As with each of those other works, studying these design techniques in the Consolatio and Beowulf has given me considerable pleasure over the years and allowed me to appreciate things about both poems that I am sure I would not otherwise have seen. For me the ‘beauty’ of the patterns of all three types is palpable, their striving for poetic ‘truth’ everywhere implied. And I hope that will come through in my prose, graphics, and formulas. But my hope is for historical appreciation, not persuasion to any one taste. That is, what is at issue for me here is the aesthetic motivation observable here for these two poets, as elsewhere in this tradition: namely, the desire to use all available tools of language, qualitative and quantitative – and, it seems, the willingness to spare no effort and time – to create some new ‘truth’ and some new ‘beauty’ by ‘binding words.’ The few patterns that can be considered here seem to me representative of the two poets’ successes. And if my figures succeed in conveying some reasons why they are successful – and extraordinarily so, I believe – perhaps that will allow us, as modern readers, to begin to experience anew something of the delight and satisfaction both these poets must have derived from each of these successes, as for many others that have long been more familiar to us. Two-tiered format. The discussion to follow is thus intended to be ancillary to the figures, and this in two ways: (a) making it easier for the graphic summaries to ‘speak for themselves,’ as it were, and (b) providing, succinctly, just enough textual and numerical documentation – chiefly in radical reduction in figures, captions, and notes – to show why I believe what the figures show bears importantly ‘On the Aesthetics of Beowulf.’ Cross-referencing is a necessary feature of this format, making up in efficiency, I hope, for what it may lack in elegance. Section headings and expedients of markup are also meant to help with balancing uncustomary constraints of efficiency and sufficiency, outline and transition. Pulcher and feower as representative examples. As hypothesized, Boethius’s decision to create a pattern with recursions of pulcher required decisions about what makes anything ‘beautiful.’ Some of that should be recoverable from the ways he repeated pulcher and integrated it into its various contexts. Similarly, the Beowulf-poet’s decision to create the pattern for

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feower required decisions about what makes elementary mathematical relationships implicit in a number like ‘4’ timelessly ‘true.’ And how did those decisions come out? For the quantitative features of pulcher Boethius selected not one, but two analogues of beauty (and truth) and designed his pattern for its iterations to embody both analogues simultaneously (polyvalently): (a) the proportionality now known as the golden ratio or golden section (ƴ), a geometric constant widely considered the most beautiful proportion in nature, then as now (fig. 2a); and (b) the three fundamental musical consonances (diapason ‘octave,’ C-c, diatessaron ‘fourth’, C-F, and diapente ‘fifth,’ C-G; fig. 2b). The Beowulf-poet too seems to have selected more than one analogue of truth (and beauty) for feower. Four of these are suggested in fig. 3. (a) The most elementary is implied in his collocating his first feower (l. 59) with a mathematically suggestive – and in context famously puzzling – phrase: forð gerimed ‘counted forth’ (compare: riman ‘to count,’ rim ‘number,’ rhythmus ‘rhythm,’ rimcræft = ars arithmetica, rimere ‘mathematician, computist’). In his pattern the four feowers and the intervals separating them are themselves ‘counted forth,’ embodying rudimentary arithmetic procedures implicit in the properties of feower itself: 4 × 1 = 4; 3 + 1 = 4, etc. (b) Another analogue moves beyond arithmetic into geometric equality, the equality of ratio, i.e., proportionality (of the type A is to B as C is to D, e.g., 3 is to 4 as 6 is to 8): the implied ratio of 3 to 4 in 526 × 3 (= 1578) and 526 × 4 (= 2104); do not look past the poet’s attention to detail here: the same 3-on-4 rhythm is repeated also in the ‘consonant’ ordinal |3rd feower |4th feower. (c) Another positions selected: |1st feower available analogue draws on theoretical and practical geometry, the 3-4-5 triangle and all that that celebrated figure implies (Pythagorean Theorem a2 + b2 = c2, here 32 + 42 = 52, triangulation, etc.). If the ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ of the 3-4-5 triangle seem all too abstract, consider how Anglo-Hibernian artists and book designers used these ratios, and in fact this geometric figure itself, in creating designs for the Book of Kells (fol. 33v), the Book of Durrow (fol. 2r, inner panel), and the St Gall Gospels (St Mark and St John), among others.4 And (d) the same values correspond to the fundamental musical consonances (e.g., here, appropriately for feower, diatessaron/ fourth = 4 : 3 = 2104 : 1578). Each and all such formulaic relationships are of course timelessly ‘true.’ The Beowulf-poet might say of any and all, and

4 Facsimiles and analysis in Stevick, The Earliest Irish and English Bookarts: Visual and Poetic Forms before A.D.1000 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 281, Index of proportions, for ‘1.333.’

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with as much surety as anything in life allows: this aspect of his text is truly soðe gebunden. elaboration reticulation. Perhaps the most Property 1: fine-tuning consequential insight to be gained from pulcher and feower for my hypothesis is this: Boethius and the Beowulf-poet did not stop where figs. 2a–b and 3 stop.5 What we see there is, in a sense, only the beginning, for poet and, by implication, for us as readers. Boethius had then to integrate his pattern with pulcher into its five contexts, and the Beowulf-poet had to integrate his pattern with feower into its four contexts. And that process, if successful, can lead them and us far beyond the ‘binding’ achieved by simply repeating words and repeating numbers. The roughly two-part process of designing and integrating implies anticipation of a roughly two-part process of aesthetic apprection: (a) recognizing and enjoying what figs. 2a–b and 3 can summarize about the patterns’ verbal and numerical regularities; and (b), more importantly, exploring what those regularities seem designed to signal: i.e., that those contexts are bound in other ways and will be most pleasing and most enlightening if read as a set. Property 2: ‘positional syntax,’ reading in sets. If so, pulcher and feower imply an invitation to ‘read’ them as sets, comparing context with context, attending to their fine-tuning and to any elaboration and reticulation extending beyond them. Feower’s invitation, for example, might raise questions leading us to see the lexical and numerical regularities summarized in fig. 6 (note that the numerals in parentheses, e.g., 1011(2172), indicate ordinal position counting back from the end). (a) Fine-tuning? Yes. And remarkably so: the poet inserted his narrator-persona into three of the four contexts: l. 62a hyrde ic þæt ‘I heard that,’ l. 1027a Ne gefrægn ic ‘Never have I learned about’ and l. 2163a Hyrde ic þæt ‘I heard that.’ (b) Elaboration? Yes. And perhaps even more suggestively so (though grammatically less explicit): the initial feower has not only the poet’s narratorpersona (l. 62a, hyrde ic, collocated with the fourth of the four children, the unnamed daughter, Hrothgar’s sister), but also, it seems, his ‘mathematician’-persona. Who was the rimere who made the pattern forð gerimed? An adept in the quadrivial artes (Boethius’s ‘four ways’ through quantity to sapientia ‘philosophy, wisdom’)? (c) Reticulation? Are there, for example, other occurrences of the narrator-persona’s gefrægn ic like l. 1027a? Yes, but only one comparable (anaphoric, etc.): 16 lines earlier in l. 1011. Anything else? Well, yes, the poet begins narrating his poem with Hwæt we […] gefrunon (ll. 1a–2b), including implied hearers and readers, 5 See for feower: Hart, ‘Measuring Beowulf,’ 133–4 and 176–9.

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and of course himself as narrator and poet. What about for the hyrde ic þæt of l. 2163a (and l. 62a)? Yes, but again only one comparable (anaphoric, etc.): 9 lines later in l. 2172 (the 1011th line from the end, introducing the first of the three þreo/þridda, l. 2174b). Quantitative patterning? Yes, notably bilateral/axial symmetry: 1011 + 1160 + 1011 = 3182.6 Quality + quantity? Yes, weaving words with the numbers, as poet designing and narrating his text, for readers ‘learning about them by inquiring’: we gefrunon, hyrde ic, gefrægen ic, gefrægn ic, hyrde ic, hyrde ic. Larger harmony of design? Yes. The pattern for feower is radically harmonious with its poem’s structure, micro and macro: (a) the structure of the oral-traditional verse line that the poet chose for his magnum opus has, nominally, 4 metrical stresses, the first 3 of the 4 typically bearing alliteration, with alliteration required for the 3rd of the 4. (b) Healfdene’s four children in l. 59 (three named sons plus a daughter whose name the manuscript lacks) correspond, in Beowulf’s family, to the four children of Hrethel (also three named sons plus an unnamed daughter, the hero’s mother). (c) The consensus narrative divisions at ll. 1250, 1887, and 2199 divide the three great agons into four sections (1250 + 637 + 312 + 983 = 3182; more on this below). The Beowulf-poet’s narrator-persona and mathematicianpersona unite at each of these levels. Reading word patterns. The more I contemplate this patterned insertion of the poet’s narrator + mathematician persona into the text, the more it seems to me something quite extraordinary. I see two immediate heuristic implications. First, if competently designed and integrated, each word pattern like we gefrunon, hyrde ic, gefrægen ic, gefrægn ic, hyrde ic, hyrde ic and feower … feower … feower … feower becomes, as it were, a teacher of the art that created it, signalling its own logic and contours. As teachers, we appreciate that. And as cultural historians we observe, with no little surprise, that this is something very new, a heuristic benefit largely unfamiliar in our disciplines. Second, this heuristic benefit follows initially from a word pattern’s quantitative features (like those in figs. 2a–b and 3). But it appears increasingly also in the more qualitative requirements of the roughly two-stage compositional process mentioned above: the requirement to introduce collocated repetitions and other fine-tuning to integrate pattern to context and context to pattern. This task was presumably

6 The oblique arrows in fig. 6 indicate a rudimentary entailed property of the two 8(or 9-) line offsets: the fact that 1019 is a close approximation to the proportional mean between 1027 and 1011 (as say 2 is the mean between 1 and 4). It may be noted here only as prolegomenal for examples that are not thus entailed (e.g., figs. 11 and 12 below).

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the most challenging that the decision to create such a pattern posed. Accordingly, we may reasonably expect its results to be among the most rewarding and entertaining to discover and pursue. Poetic words for poetic patterning? Especially for word patterns? I believe both poets gave us analogies and homologies signalling how they imagined their ideal readers could derive understanding and enjoyment from word patterns. The most comprehensive such analogy, the imagery of ‘binding’ we began with above (bindan / ligare), is used homologously by both poets. Boethius indicates one way he sees beauty being created in nature when he observes, in that striking (Timaean) passage: tu [pulcherrimus ipse] numeris elementa ligas ‘you [most beautiful yourself] bind the [four] elements with numbers.’ Let us take word oþer fand / soðe gebunden and wrættum gebunden and their 871, 1531, and 660 in this (Timaean, Augustinian, Boethian) sense and ask: Are these phrases, in effect, deliberately suggestive poetic circumlocutions for word patterns? Quasi-definitions even? Both poets must have pondered – perhaps much as I am doing now – what kinds of aesthetic effects such patterning can have, even when, and perhaps especially when, a given pattern requires one word to ‘find’ another word – one feower to find another, one pulcher to find another – that is ‘counted forward’ some hundreds, or in the case of Beowulf, even thousands of verse lines. ‘Pondered’ in which direction(s)? The patterns we can now observe suggest to me that both poets saw aesthetic potential in word patterns as (at least) twofold: (a) being one way to ‘bind’ pieces of text so that they cohere in a larger patterned whole (i.e., weighting their more rhythmic, quantitative dimension), and (b) being one way to make complexities of meaning among passages thus linked both come into being and become accessible, at least for an imagined ‘ideal reader’ expecting their existence and seeking them out (i.e., weighting their more semantic, qualitative dimension). Polysemy, recursivity, homology, poet comment, etc. in soðe gebunden and wrættum gebunden, etc.? Gebunden as ‘poetological’? Pulcher and feower are good examples of a tendency of word patterns to be (a) polysemous (operating on at least two levels, i.e., in local contexts in the dialogue or story in progress and in a pattern transcending those local contexts, e.g., the feower in l. 59a referring simultaneously to ‘four children,’ to itself as number-word, to its being a set-of-4, to the 3-on-4 ‘counting forth’ of verse-line totals, perhaps also to fitt divisions, to narrative divisions, and the rest), (b) recursive (each iteration referring forward and backward to the others in the set), (c) homologous (pulcher being ‘beautifully’ patterned, feower being ‘quadrivially’ patterned), and (d) ‘poetological’ (pulcher and

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feower implying comment by their authors on how a text is made beautiful, fourfold, quantitatively governed, and the like). Is the soðe gebunden in l. 871a one component in a pulcher- or feowerlike word pattern? Consider figs. 7, 8, and 9, and the following few observations about them. The gebunden in l. 871a is the first of the four iterations of the form gebunden in the poem (ll. 871a, 1531b, 1743a and 2111b). The connotations of gebunden, like those of feower and forð gerimed, invite homology: here some kind of textual ‘binding.’ 871a soðe gebunden; … eft ongan 1531b wrættum gebunden 1743a bisgum gebunden 2111b … eft ongan eldo gebunden

‘bound by/in truth; [the scop] began again’ ‘bound with ornamentation’ ‘bound with labors’ ‘[Hrothgar] began again, bound by age.’

Do these four contexts show signs of having been thought of as a set? Here’s a briefly sketched exercise projecting ‘Yes’ to such questions. (a) Polyvalence? Yes, its component terms can be read (at least) doubly (e.g., wrættum for ‘incisings’ ornamenting a sword in some way and for ‘writing’ and ornamenting a text in some way; or similarly: soðe as relevant for the improvising scop in the story and for the literary poet creating designs like types A, B, and C for his text). (b) Recursivity? Yes (e.g., the first and last iterations quote one another, gebunden + eft ongan, then chiastically eft ongan + gebunden [eft ongon otherwise only in l. 2790b]). (c) Homology? Yes (see fig. 7; e.g., as noted below, all four iterations are ‘bound’ not only by being repeated and recursive, in topic no less than lexis, but also, it turns out, in the parameters of their relative placement). (d) Poet comment? Yes (see fig. 9; e.g., the combination of qualitative and quantitative ‘boundness’ embodies an aesthetic judgment about the theory and techniques of that combination). Qualitative and quantitative ‘boundness’ for gebunden? The contexts of the first and last iterations are elaborately fine-tuned. Most striking, beyond the eft ongan in both, is their repeated collocation with the word soð (ll. 871a and 2109a). In both passages the poet depicts singers composing songs orally.7 In both passages the more obvious collocations of gebunden

7 Both passages, long read as chiefly implying an oral (oral-formulaic, oral-traditional, oral-derived) aesthetic, have recently been seen as self-consciously artful. See especially, for the passage at l. 871a, the translation, bibliography, and detailed analysis by Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 105–14, here his illustrations for ways the entire passage is ‘extremely artfully arranged’ (107).

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+ eft ongan + soð(e) are embedded in others. One gets the impression, especially when comparing them side by side (per fig. 7), that these two topically and verbally related passages are, in effect, ‘finding’ (and recalling) one another across the expanse of text separating them. Conspicuous in both is the clustered repetition of hwilum. In the one with soðe gebunden, as often elsewhere in Beowulf, such recursion appears also as frame or ‘envelope pattern.’8 Conspicuous too, within the clustering of the repeated words, is the parallel repetition of cyning + (ge)cweðan/cwiðan in both, appearing to frame the (soð +) gebunden + eft ongan in each passage.9 The means constituting the frames are minimal (two words, twice paired), but the effect can be large. For example, the pair can be repeated, more globally, to frame the entire poem. And that is what we might hypothesize, and then in fact observe (fig. 8): one word ‘finding’ and bonding with counterparts, qualitatively and quantitatively (ll. 2 and 3180). ‘Binding’ the four iterations of gebunden by relative spacing. The first sign of quantitative regularity for gebunden draws on the most rudimentary arithmetic procedure: cutting a sequence into two halves (again the musical relationship of the diapason/octave; per fig. 9). And hypothesizing the same for (the poet’s four iterations of) wræt(t), we readily observe a similar cutting of its greatest extension from the start, again at the midpoint, pairing its first and last occurrences in diapason ratio (also in fig. 9). As with feower (forð gerimed), the ‘binding’ techniques the poet used for (soðe) gebunden and wræt(t) are gradually found to be ambitious, in word and number.10 How he elaborated on these two sequences, 871 + 871 and

8 Discussion and literature in Orchard, A Critical Companion, 78–82 and passim (per index, 392). Thought-provoking fine-tuning in details of sound in the poem’s first and last few verse lines has been observed by Calvin B. Kendall, The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 4–12, e.g., the curling back (and forward) of ll. 1 and 3182b: gar-dena in geardagum … lofgeornost, as if to bring the text subtly full circle. If understood as a deliberate, overarching, framing, or envelope pattern, such a circle binding the collocations we ‘we[/I]’ + lof- ‘fame’ in we gar- and lofgeornost seems suggestively ‘autobiographical,’ especially when viewed in conjunction with the patterned insertion of the poet’s narrator-mathematician persona summarized in fig. 6. 9 The poet may or may not have known that nearly homonymous cweðan ‘speak’ and cwiðan ‘speak in grief, lament’ are not etymologically connected. He uses cwiðan only here and near the end of poem (l. 3171a). Cf. l. 3171 cwiðan + cyning and l. 3180 cwædon + -cyning[a]. 10 For gebunden see Hart, ‘Measuring Beowulf,’ 195–7, for wræt(t), 187–8. Cf. also 186–7 for writan and forwritan. Like pulcher in fig. 2b, one dimension of gebunden is governed by the basic musical consonances as follows (using ‘|’ to mark ‘best math’ limits):

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1530 + 1530, has further probative consequences for the hypothesis proposed at the start. I return to them in retrospect shortly (at fig. 12). II. The Beowulf-poet as theorist? ‘Writing’ a poem soðe + wrættum + bisgum + eldo gebunden? Un-beauty: monsters in Beowulf and the Consolatio? The concept of ‘binding’ expressed by Old English bindan and Latin ligare is associated with particularly strong biblical imagery, the binding of the great dragon of Apocalypse 20:2: adprehendit draconem serpentem antiquum […] et ligavit eum per annos mille ‘he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent […] and bound him for a thousand years.’ The Dragon in Beowulf too is associated with a millennium (l. 3050a þusend wintra). And earlier in the poem the poet uses the perfective gebinden (uniquely) and the numberword fif ‘five’ for Beowulf’s ‘binding five giants’ kin’: þær ic fife geband, l. 420b. To associate ‘binding’ (ligare / bindan), ‘dragon/serpent’ (draco / draca / wyrm) and ‘millennium’ (mille annos / þusend wintra) in that age was to risk suggesting such imagery. The Beowulf-poet could have avoided it. For present purposes I wish to focus less on Apocalypse 20:2 than on its earlier analogues in Wisdom 8:111 and 11:21,12 both of which make

Diapason (octave): 2 : 1 = 1742 : 871.

1742 = lines 1–1742|bisgum gebunden. 871 = lines 1–871soðe gebunden| Diapente (fifth): 3 : 2 = 870 : 580. 870 = lines 1–870|soðe gebunden 580 = lines 1531 wrættum gebunden| – 2111 eldo gebunden| Diatessaron (fourth): 4 : 3 = 1652 : 1239. 1652 = lines |1531 wrættum gebunden – 3182| 1239 = lines soðe gebunden|872 – 2110|eldo gebunden With the limits construed thus, all three ratios are precise; i.e., like 1742 and 871, 870, and 580 have a (large) common denominator, here 290. Similarly, 1652 and 1239 have the large common denominator 413. Such precision is not conveniently achieved in word patterns spanning long intervals of text in a narrative poem. See also at n. 23 below. 11 Sapientia, Book of Wisdom 7:30–8:1, 8:2: Illi enim succedit nox / sapientiam autem non vincit malitia / adtingit enim a fine usque ad finem fortiter / et disponit omnia suaviter / hanc amavi […] / et amator factus sum formae illius; Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. B. Fischer et al., 4th ed. by Roger Gryson (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994). Douay-Rheims trans.: ‘For after this cometh night; but no evil can overcome wisdom. She reacheth therefore from end to end mightily and ordereth all things sweetly. Her have I loved […] and I became a lover of her beauty.’ 12 Sapientia, Wisdom 11:18–19, 21: Non enim inpossibilis erat omnipotens manus tua, / Quae creavit orbem terrarum ex materia invisa, / Inmittere illis [ …] / Aut novi generis

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available imagery for using ‘measure, number and weight’ to ‘bind’ the text of a poem about quelling monsters, and in that sense binding the text’s monsters themselves. In this regard I believe special attention should be given to the context the poet creates for his Song of Creation and its image of a divine Scyppen[d] ‘Shaper’ (l. 106a) and Metod ‘Measurer’ (l. 110a) beautifying the earth. This is because the Consolatio and Beowulf share not only the concept of a shaping and measuring Designer-Creator, but also, crucially, the perennial problem of evil in what He created. In both poems evil is associated with monsters and monstrosity, in Beowulf notably the Grendel-kin as progeny of Cain and hence related to giants, in the Consolatio the mythological Gigantas traditionally described (e.g., by Horace, Ovid, Fulgentius) as warring against heaven.13 Readers who consult the contexts of Wisdom 8:1 and 11:21 may be struck by their shared emphasis on forces of darkness and destruction. What the immediate verses 8:1 and 11:21 assert, emphatically, is the power of the all-disposing, all-measuring (numbering, weighing) Creator to turn night to day, evil to good, chaos to order: God ‘disposes all things,’ including ignotas bestias; evil too is part of His grand design. Boethius’s and the Beowulf-poet’s biblical allusions. Readers who then consult the passage in which Boethius embeds his reference to those ‘Gigantas vying with heaven’ may be similarly struck by his use there of the only phrase in the Consolatio that most scholars agree is a verbatim quote from the Bible, his words cuncta fortiter suaviterque disponit (3.12.22) read as miming the fortiter et disponit omnia suaviter of Wisdom

ira plenas ignotas bestias, / Aut vaporem ignium spirantes, / Aut fumi odorem proferentes, / Aut horrendas ab oculis scintillas emittentes, / […] / Et [poterant] dispersi per spiritum virtutis tuae; / Sed omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti. ‘For thy almighty hand, which made the world of matter without form, was not unable to send upon them […] unknown beasts of a new kind, full of rage: either breathing out a fiery vapour, or sending forth a stinking smoke, or shooting horrible sparks out of their eyes; […] And [they were able] to be scattered by the breath of thy power: but thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight.’ 13 ‘Accepisti,’ inquit, ‘in fabulis lacessentes caelum Gigantas; sed illos quoque […] benigna fortitudo disposuit. […] Forsitan ex huiusmodi conflictatione pulchra quaedam ueritatis scintilla dissiliat’ (3.12.24–5). ‘She [Lady Philosophy] said: “You have heard in fables/poems about Giants attacking heaven, but them too […] this benign fortitude disposes/puts in their place […]. Perhaps by such clash [of argument] some beautiful spark of truth may fly out.”’ The imagery is ancient: compare Boethius’s lacessentes caelum Gigantas with the Beowulf-poet’s gi[ga]ntas þa wið Gode wunnon ‘the giants that battled with God,’ l. 113, and both with Genesis 6:4: gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis ‘Now giants were upon the earth in those days.’

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8:1.14 Similarly, relevance of the various ignotas bestias of Wisdom 11:16–19 to the Grendel-kin has been observed.15 Recently an even closer parallel has been noted between the ignotas bestias that ‘emit horrendous sparks from their eyes’ (horrendas ab oculis scintillas emittentes, Wisdom 11:19) and Grendel: him of eagum stod / ligge gelicost leoht unfæger ‘from his eyes stood out, most like fire, an ugly light’ (ll. 726b–7).16 And more broadly, we now know much more about the ability of Insular authors like Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, and Alfred to ‘synthesize and build imaginatively’ on a range of classical and biblical traditions concerning the kinds of monsters the Beowulf-poet lists in such detail (ll. 100b–14) following his scop’s Song of Creation.17 Similarly, and suggestively, it is precisely in contexts stressing the all-disposing, all-beautifying Creator’s dominion over evil (Cain) that the Beowulf-poet has his scop introduce the ‘Measurer’ and ‘Shaper’ (ll. 110a and 106a) in his Song of Creation inset. And this too is the consolation so famously proclaimed by Wisdom 8:1 and 11:21. So we might wonder: Is this not also part of the motivation for the elaborate designing that both poets lavished on their texts? Specifically, is it the cultural heritage of a Wisdom 8:1 (arguably alluded to by Boethius) and of a Wisdom 11:21 (arguably alluded to in Beowulf) that we are seeing reflexes of in Boethius’s pulcher and the Beowulf-poet’s feower, soðe gebunden, wrættum gebunden, etc.? And more largely: Is it not the consolation of many poets and artists who set achieving the least form to be sure of it against the larger excruciations? The macro/micro analogy poem = verse line. The fundamental principles of time and space which this image of God as Designer and Measurer

14 Quoted in n. 11 above. The passage is among the most discussed in the Consolatio; see Joachim Gruber, Kommentar zu Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006), ad loc. Suggestive for Boethius’s use of Wisdom 8.1 in 3.12.22 is Augustine’s use of the same passage in De civitate Dei xii,26,19–20 (CCSL 48 [Turnhout: Brepols, 1960]), a context in which he compares ways artists and craftsmen (opifices, xii,26,3) give shape to objects of art with the ways God does. 15 Charles W. Jones, ‘Toward a Medieval Aesthetic 1: Carolingian Aesthetics: Why Modular Verse?’ Viator 6 (1975): 309–40, here 316. 16 Daniel Anlezark, ‘Grendel and the Book of Wisdom,’ Notes & Queries 53 (2006): 262–9. 17 See Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), paperback edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), esp. 58–85, here 84 and 81–2; one telling illustration of this ability: the substantial Alfredian expansion on Boethius’s Gigantas in ‘translating’ Consolatio 3.12.24. See now also Malcolm Godden and Susan Irvine, eds., The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), here 1:333,120 ff., 2:64 and 2:408 ff.

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implies are simple, conceptually. Operationally their applications in art can be as complex as an artist’s medium, ingenuity, and patience permit, in large and in small. This is true similarly for the ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ of binding achievable by linking words with metre, alliteration, and apposition. Did either or both poets imagine their poem-spanning patterns as one embodiment of a related analogy long familiar in Western letters: a poem as a whole is like a verse line writ large?18 The analogy seems particularly apt for word patterns, point for point: patterned sequences like feower … feower … feower … feower (and their contexts) may be thought of as combining large-scale ‘metre’ (in their quantitative, ‘rhythmic’ dimension), large-scale ‘alliteration’ (in their qualitative, ‘melodic’ dimension), largescale ‘apposition’ (‘syntax’ of word to word, scene to scene, etc.).19 Hildeburh-Finn and Freawaru-Ingeld insets and the poem’s principal narrative division at l. 2199: symmetry, asymmetry, proportion? Like these two symmetrical 46-line insets (fig. 5), the narrative structure of the poem seems, by many readings, fundamentally symmetrical: either in three parts (by focus on the three monster fights) or in two parts (Grendel-kin/ Dragon, Danes/Geats, youth/age). Best known is Tolkien’s two-part analogy from the prosodic structure of the verse line: ‘rising and falling,’ like hemistich + caesura + hemistich. But in terms of numerical weighting, we find Part 1 (ll. 1–2199) having more than twice the verse-line total of Part 2 (ll. 2200–3182, i.e., 983 lines). More than twice, but not simply or even nearly twice. And the asymmetry appears puzzling: 2199 (Part 1) + 983 (Part 2) = 3182. Where asymmetry appeared in figs. 5 and 6, we found the poet’s patterning privileging proportionality. Hypothesizing proportionality, we find that the ratio 2199 : 983 corresponds to a notable geometric constant, √5. Fig. 10 shows one simple derivation, from the diagonal of a 1–2 rectangle (= two abutted squares): if one cuts a linear extension 3182 in two ‘parts’ in ratio √5 : 1, the longer part has 2199 and the shorter part has 983 (equivalent to our decimal approximation 2198.7 + 983.3 = 3182).20

18 Popularized for Beowulf by J.R.R. Tolkien, most fully in his ‘Prefatory Remarks,’ Beowulf and the Finnsburg Fragment, trans. John R. Clark Hall (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), vii–xli, esp. xxviii, xxxv and xl–xli; cf. ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95, esp. 271–2; adopted as fundamental framework and developed by Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), most explicitly 24–5. 19 On large-scale ‘apposition’ see Robinson, Appositive Style, 21; cf. 13, 49–50, 55. 20 By the Pythagorean Theorem a2 + b2 = c2 (per the 3-4-5 triangle), the diagonal of a 1–2 rectangle is the square root of (22 + 12) or √5. Tolkien acknowledged the difficulty of his seeing Parts 1 and 2 as analogous to hemistichs in the verse line (‘Monsters,’ 271–2), and grappled privately with it; see now Michael D.C. Drout, ed., Beowulf and the Critics by

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Hildeburh-Finn and Freawaru-Ingeld insets and the three principal narrative divisions at ll. 1250, 1887 and 2199: complementarity? geometric proportionality? Again, unlike the Beowulf-poet’s symmetrical 46-line insets, the major narrative divisions at ll. 1250, 1887 and 2199 exhibit no obvious arithmetic regularity, symmetry, etc. (rather: 1250 + 637 + 312 + 983 = 3182).21 Investigation of their relative properties, on the other hand – hypothesizing modularity and/or proportionality – reveals the following (using ‘N’ = Narrative unit for each unit or sequence of units). (a) For modularity: 1250N (voyage to Heorot + Grendel fight) and 312N (voyage from Heorot + report on Grendel-kin fights) are in 4 : 1 ratio, i.e., 1250 ÷ 4 = 312½ (presumably computed by adding 1250 and 312 and dividing by 5, yielding 1249.6 + 312.4, i.e., to the nearest integers, 1250 : 312; note: 5 : 4 = 1250 : 1000). (b) For proportionality: see the graphic summary in fig. 11. That is, 1295N is to 1250N as 983N is to 949N (= solid arrows; direct corollary = dash arrows). The 4-term proportion spans the text, binding 4 blocks and 3 ‘cuts.’ Is there some ‘Tolkienian’ aesthetic ‘rightness’ governing division of the poem’s narrative with these ‘cuts’ (wrættum)?22

J.R.R. Tolkien, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 52–3, 107, 194n.139. Was Tolkien’s insistence on the aesthetic ‘rightness’ of the cut at l. 2199 in part due to the fact that one result of the √ 5 division is to cut the text’s second 1591–line half at the earlier of its two golden section points? That is, the ratio 1591 : 983 approximates ƴ. See Roger HerzFischler, A Mathematical History of the Golden Number (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 3182 as 2 see Stevick, Bookarts, 52 (for the Durham 77–120. On the ratio 2199 (1+[2−ƴ]) Cassiodorus David page) and 281, Index of Proportions, for ‘1.4472.’ 21 On the three divisions as ‘narrative’ see Klaeber 2008, xxiii–xxv; similarly, Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, eds., Beowulf, An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 45, 90, 111. On ‘visualizing’ these narrative ‘blocks’ as a proportional ‘pattern’ – in something like Boethius’s sense of exemplum for the Creator’s ‘patterns’ in mente (3m9.7; text at n. 2) – note that Boethius’s textbooks represent proportionality in four terms schematically (De inst. arith. 1.32.1–20, 2.44.2–4, 24–32, and 94–6, esp. Oosthout and Schilling 186 and Guillaumin 149–50). 22 The poet’s pervasive quadrivial technicalities have evidently not got in the way of the ‘love’ that so many readers of the Old English text have felt for its ‘peculiar beauty.’ See Liuzza (translation), 9–10, and Heaney (translation), ix and xxvii. My views on ‘aesthetic response’ to word patterns, consciously perceived or not, have changed only incrementally in the thirty or so years since my exchange with R.G. Peterson, PMLA 92 (1977): 126–9, in response to his ‘Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature,’ PMLA 91 (1976): 367–75, and with John D. Niles in response to his ‘Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,’ PMLA 94 (1979): 924–35 in PMLA 95 (1980): 870–3. Do the quantitative features (types A, B and C) work unseen? Here is an authoritative aesthetic judgment, expressed independently of acknowledged reference to the poet’s technical procedures: ‘all being expressed through the masterly control of a

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Soðe gebunden for ‘truth,’ wrættum gebunden for ‘beauty’? Did the Beowulf-poet anticipate that some future readers in the tradition for which he and Boethius composed poetry would suspect what my hypothesis at the start suspected? If yes, he might have composed a pattern binding his phrases soðe gebunden and wrættum gebunden something like what we see in fig. 12. ‘Bound’ here, in a bravura performance, are: (i) start of text, first and 3rd iterations of gebunden by 871 + 871 (diapason = 2 : 1); first and 4th iterations of gebunden by 1240 (or 1241) (ii) start of text, first and 4th iterations of wræt(t) by 1530 + 1530 (diapason); first and 3rd iterations of wræt(t) by 1240 (or 1241). Moreover, these three pairs of modular 871, 1240 (1241 or 1239), and 1530 are further elaborated by both geometric proportionality and musical consonance.23

craftsman’s intellect. All in the poem is measured and carefully weighed, from the grandest speech or action to the smallest syllable’; Robinson, ‘Beowulf,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 142–59, here 156. On ‘aesthetic impact,’ with other examples, see my ‘Calculated Casualties in Beowulf: Geometrical Scaffolding and Verbal Symbol,’ Studia Neophilologica 53 (1981): 3–35, here 27–32. 23 Displayed only partially in fig. 12. How did the poet achieve this? Here’s one conjecture, in three steps: (a) best math for the three gebunden loci (1st, 3rd, and 4th) is 1530 = 1072 . (b) He then applied this same proportionality to wræt(t). See the 1241 870 wræt(t) in l. 2413a (as the 2nd in the set of four, not displayed), which is 358 verse lines 1530 = 358 from l. 2771, which is 290 verse lines from l. 3060 (inclusively): . This 1241 290 proportion links all four iterations internally (within the 1530 verse lines from 1st to 4th) and with the start of the text (the earlier 1530). (c) Building on his paired diapasonal harmony of 871 + 871 and 1530 + 1530, he then ‘binds’ the two sets with further consonance, and in a particularly unifying way: recall, in n. 10 above, the 4/3 pattern component (diatessaron/fourth) for the gebunden set; now, because (i) the design has two equal intervals of 1240 (or 1241 or 1239) verse lines, one for gebunden and another for wræt(t), and because (ii) the two sets of four intersect in the phrase wrættum gebunden in the 1652nd verse line from the end of the text, the same diatessaron consonance harmonizes both within each set of four and from set to set: Diatessaron/fourth: 4 : 3 = 1652 : 1239. 1652 = lines |1531 wrættum gebunden – 3182| 1239 = lines wrættum gebunden|1532 – 2770|wrætte

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The ‘Beauty and Truth’ hypothesis in retrospect. The hypothesis projected the following. (a) That the author of the poem viewed the contexts of l. 871a (soðe gebunden) and l. 1531b (wrættum gebunden) as ‘bound together’; they are bound, by lexical recursion and numerical recursion (three matched 2 : 1 diapasonal pairs). (b) That the poet expected future readers to notice that ‘boundness’ and ponder what it can mean; we have noticed, with his help, and some may feel inclined to ponder. And (c) that both phrases describe something important about the way he composed his poem’s material text; they do: he has shown us (i) means of such ‘binding’ (by ‘engraving’ and ‘cutting’ his text with these design techniques); and (ii) one poetic excellence he expected such ‘binding’ to achieve: to make whatever it is that we enjoy about his poem something – by his criteria – pervasively and radically soð and wrætlic.24 Cultural context. Beyond their intrinsic aesthetic interest, word patterns in these two poems may also hope to make a second contribution to this colloquium: helping to situate appreciation of the ‘aesthetics of Beowulf’ within the broader context of early medieval aesthetic thought that it evidently shares in this regard with the Consolatio. Especially when viewed in conjunction with Wisdom 8:1 and 11:21 and their widespread early medieval valorization for aesthetics, the contexts here considered for the Beowulf-poet’s soðe gebunden and Boethius’s tu numeris […] ligas seem to me best understood as reflecting – and in fact embodying – representative commonplaces of that age concerning the ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ of all art, divine and human.25 It is important for appreciating the philosophical

The repeated emphasis on 3rd and 4th iterations here is the same as seen for feower (fig. 3; proportion: 2104 : 1578 as 4 : 3; sequence: |1st feower |3rd feower |4th feower). 24 Pervasively and radically wrætlic? Much discussed is what the ‘writing’ on the wondrous sword hilt denotes and connotes (l. 1688b writen ‘engraved, written’) and how whatever it means relates to the only other iteration of (-)writan, l. 2705a forwrat […] wyrm on middan ‘he cut […] the serpent in the middle.’ (For commentary and bibliography see Orchard, Companion, 99–100.) Here’s one poetological ‘reading’ from the perspective of wrættum gebunden, as here understood: ‘writing’ a text means also designing it to be variously writen ‘cut’ on middan ‘in its midst,’ by formal divisions, topical cuts, and word patterns, including the musical ‘cuts’ like the diapason, literally on middan, 1530 + 1530 = 3060; such writan makes the text wrættum gebunden and hence a wliteseon wrætlic (‘something beautiful to behold in its dazzling patterning,’ l. 1650a); but achieving this writan by this bindan must be striven for; the task is literally ‘draconic’: to create, measure, beautify and bind one’s own personal wrætlicne wyrm (l. 891a). 25 Overview and literature: Umberto Eco, ‘The Aesthetics of Proportion,’ in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 28–33 . The body of aesthetic theory most likely to have been available to

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depth and allusive subtlety of the Consolatio that we have Boethius’s other writings. We are not so fortunate for the anonymous author of Beowulf. Perhaps Boethius’s writings, curricular and poetic, can help. Increased knowledge about the formal divisions, topical units, and word patterns in both poems should open new paths to aesthetic appreciation for both, which in turn may shed new light on the familiar quandaries of Beowulf scholarship (authorship, date, historical circumstances, etc.). If these quandaries have made Beowulf especially ‘defenceless’ against the scholarly constructs we erect to deal with them, increased attention to aesthetic issues may help here as well.26 To that end too I hope that readers less interested in the evidence for quantity-based design techniques per se, perhaps in either poem, will still wish to consider two questions raised by evidence for their existence in both: What does that evidence imply about what these two poets thought they were investing effort in? And what was it about their time and culture that encouraged them to think so? Boethius and the Beowulf-poet. The emergence of Boethius’s word patterns deepens the truth of two truisms of the scholarship on the man and his great philosophical poem: (a) ‘the poetry of the Consolation exemplifies what Boethius saw as the musical structure of the universe’; and (b) ‘Boethius writes with such artistry and ‘artificiality’ that we may be confident he does nothing accidentally.’27 How the Beowulf-poet acquired considerable practical competence in management of quantity is perhaps unknowable. Nor are we presently in a position to either claim or disclaim direct influence on him from Boethius’s works – poetic, philosophical, or

the Beowulf-poet – as it had been to Boethius – is in the copious writings on the subject by Augustine. Wisdom 11:21 was pivotal for his thought. He cites it verbatim thirtyone times and adapts it frequently using alternative triads for mensura, numerus and pondus like modus, species and ordo. Overview and literature: Lewis Ayres, ‘Measure, Number and Weight,’ in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1999), 550–2. Most relevant for Boethius (and the Beowulf-poet?): C. Harrison, ‘Measure, Number and Weight in Saint Augustine’s Aesthetics,’ Augustinianum 28 (1988): 591–601. For Augustine’s influence on Boethius generally see Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981), passim (per index), esp. 249–52. 26 On ‘defenceless’ Beowulf see T.A. Shippey, Beowulf (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 7. On quandaries, and hopes for ‘new facts,’ see Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier, ‘Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences,’ in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 13–34 (here 33). 27 (a) Gerard O’Daly, The Poetry of Boethius (London: Duckworth, 1991), 236. (b) Chadwick, Consolations, 251.

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mathematical. But the comparison reveals why future truisms for Beowulf should also include the aesthetic principles which Augustine thought so profound in Wisdom 8:1 and 11:21 and which Boethius utilized so creatively in his Consolatio. That may then make it seem less surprising to visualize the ‘positional syntax’ of the ‘sentence’ ‘soðe gebunden + wrættum gebunden + bisgum gebunden + eldo gebunden’ as a large-scale 4-beat ‘verse line,’ ‘bound’ by a kind of large-scale metre, alliteration, and apposition. A kind of word-oþer-fand-soðe-ond-wrættumgebunden in which words are thought to be ‘finding’ and ‘binding’ one another. And as binding their collocated attributes in a ‘sentence’ whose syntax may have a still more self-referential, more autobiographical sense: ‘soðe gebunden + wrættum gebunden + bisgum gebunden + eldo gebunden.’ And if so, what would the ‘syntax’ of that set of collocations lead us to discern about its author’s commitment to poetic soð and poetic wræt(t)/writan? And about the labor and maturity – and time – required to achieve it?

Start of 39 metra = 890 verses 178 350

350

582

582 778 890

712

428

__End Book I: 7 metra = 178 verses 172

404 600

712

__End Book II: 8 metra = 172 verses 232

428 540

__End Book III: 12 metra = 232 verses 196

308

__End Book IV: 7 metra = 196 verses 112 End Book V: 5 metra = 112 verses

One of several patterns of proportional shaping in the distribution of metra ‘poems’ among the five books. This pattern ‘binds’ all four book junctures and spans all 890 verse lines. Others use the following verse-line totals shown in the array of available intervals, governed proportionally as follows:

778 = 582 ; 350 308 . They too = 540 404 196 172

bind all four book junctures and span all 890 verse lines. These and other features of Boethius’s design for his book divisions reveal it to be a bravura performance in use of these techniques.

Thomas E. Hart

Array of the 15 available intervals (sequences of verses) in the five books:

198

Proportion in four terms: 712 is to 582 as 428 is to 350

APPENDIX

Figure 1 Consolatio

Figure 2a Consolatio Proportional series in extreme and mean ratio (golden section): 890/550 = 550/340 = 256/158 = 158/98 = 30/19 = 19/11

Array of the 21 intervals (sequences of verses) generated by the placement of the six iterations of pulcher (five loci): Start of 39 metra = 890 verses 340

340 19

360−

30

370− 11

469− 626 890−

98

30± 129

±

286± 550+

550

__360(531) pulchra dies [3m1.10] 10

±

__370(521) pulchra [3m2.7] uincula [3m2.8]

109± 266±

530+

99± __469(422) pulchrum pulcherrimus [3m9.7] mundum [3m9.8]

256± 520+

256

__340(551) pulchris motibus [2m8.20] 20±

157± +

421 158

__626(265) pulchra…dea [4m3.4] 264+ End of 39 metra = 890 verses

199

Proportionality in the relative placement of the five loci with pulcher (six iterations, two in 3m9.7): the governing proportionality in these pattern-components is a close integer approximation to the extreme and mean or golden (section) ratio. (See also fig. 2b and n. 20.)

Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth

−

890

−

200

Figure 2b Consolatio Diapente (fifth): 3/2 = 30/20

Array of the 21 intervals (sequences of verses) generated by the placement of the six iterations of pulcher (five loci): Start of 39 metra = 890 verses −

340 360− 370−

20 469−

30

469

−

890− 265

30± 129

286± 550+

10

266±

__370(521) pulchra [3m2.7] uincula [3m2.8] 99± __469(422) pulchrum pulcherrimus [3m9.7] mundum [3m9.8]

256± 520+

157± 421

265

±

109±

530+

530

__360(531) pulchra dies [3m1.10]

±

626

625

__340(551) pulchris motibus [2m8.20] 20±

+

__626(265) pulchra…dea [4m3.4] 264+ End of 39 metra = 890 verses

Polyvalence in the relative placement of the six iterations of pulcher (five loci): musical ratios 4 : 3 (diatessaron/fourth, e.g., C-F) = 625 : 469 (equivalent to 468.75), 2 : 1 (diapason/octave, e.g., C-c), and 3 : 2 (diapente/fifth, e.g., C-G). Another bravura performance.

Thomas E. Hart

Diatessaron Diapason (fourth): 4/3 (octave): 2/1 = 625/469 = 530/265

Figure 3 Beowulf. 1(3182) [Start of text] Hwæt we ... 2(3181) þeodcyninga … gefrunon, [verb’s1st occurrence]

990

[persons, Danes] 59(3124) feower bearn forð gerimed [62 hyrde ic…]

[3 × 330]

1320 1650

[4 × 330]

990 991 992

[5 × 330]

1578 2104

[persons, Geats] 1637(1546) felamodigra; feower…

[4 × 526]

3182 2630 [5 × 526]

526

[gifts, horses] 2163(1020) hyrde ic…frætwum feower mearas

330 1320 End Fitt xviiii 1321 Start Fitt xx 330 wrætlic 1650 End Fitt xxii 1651 Start Fitt xxiiii

526 __ 2688(495) Þa wæs þeodsceaða þriddan siðe 3180(3) cwædon þæt … wyruldcyning[a] 3181(2) … 3182(1) [End of text]

201

At the left: the relative placement of three (of the four) occurrences of the number-word feower and the last of the three occurrences of þreo/þrio/þridda. At the right: the proportionally equivalent placement of the three fitt-divisions at ll. 990, 1320, and 1650. Proportionality of the 3-4-5 triangle (Pythagorean Theorem)? Musical consonance (diapason ‘octave,’ diatessaron ‘fourth,’ diapente ‘fifth’)?

Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth

[3 × 526]

[gifts, treasure] 1027(2156) gefrægn ic…feower madmas [verb’s 4th occurrence]

End Fitt xiiii Start Fitt xv gefrætwod

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Figure 4 Beowulf

370 lines

370 lines

3182

1832

2381

lines

lines

lines

430 lines

430 [+ 1] lines

Exordium I II III IIII V VI VII VIII VIIII

[1st] [2nd] [3rd] [4th] [5th] [6th] [7th] [8th] [9th] [10th]

End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End:

52 114 188 257 319 370 455 498 558 661

[intervening: 24 fitts X-XXXII, 662–2311] XXXIII XXXIIII XXXV XXXVI XXXVII XXXVIII [XXXVIIII] XL XLI XLII XLIII

[34th] [35th] [36th] [37th] [38th] [39th] [40th] [41st] [42nd] [43rd] [44th]

End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End: End:

2390 2459 2601 2693 2751 2820 2891 2945 3057 3136 3182

Puzzling parameters: a mathematician’s love of patterns? analogue of visualarts design? defence against feared trouble from scribes? window to a sense of beauty? code to an enigma not yet suspected? Of the 43 fitt-divisions (producing 44 fitts), the six after verse lines 188, 370, 558, 2390, 2751, and 2820 exhibit remarkable regularities. (a) These reflect, as if to confirm, the text’s verse-line total 3182: (a) 3182 = 37 × 43 × 2 (prime numbers); overlapping pairs of fitt sequences (‘fitt groups’) with 370 and 430 (430 + 1) lines, respectively, begin and end the text. (b) They are dovetailed such that the intervening fitt groups span 1832 and 2381 lines, chiastically reflecting one another and (by interweaving of digits/counters on a counting board) the verse-line total 3182. This could only be achieved by making the design treat line 3182 as ‘supernumerary,’ i.e., counted strictly in ‘3182,’ etc., but at the same time counting as something else in that final ‘430’ = ‘431’ (end marker? celebrating the special status of unitas in early number theory? cf. Boethius, De instit. arith. 2.4.37–41 and 2.5.2–6). The fitt division at line 1382 marks the (diapasonal) midpoint of the 22 + 22 = 44 fitts. L. 370 is the 2813th from the end, this parameter’s 1000s [2], 100s [8], 10s [1] and units [3] reversing those of 3182.

Figure 5 Beowulf Hildeburh-Finn: 1 Dena

1113

1114 Het

Freawaru-Ingeld:

46– 1158 Driht-…Denum

1115 sunu…-fœstan

1159a leodum

864

2024 gehaten

46– 2068 dryht-…Denum

2025 suna

1113

3182 leodum

2069a fœstne

Beowulf: 3182 verse lines

Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth

Bilateral/axial symmetry in the placement of the last half of the Hildeburh-Finn inset (ll. 1114–1159a) and the FreawaruIngeld inset (ll. 2024–2069a). Arithmetic equality: 1113 = 1113, 46 = 46. Perhaps imagined, for these two thematically similar song-like units, as reflecting the 2 : 1 ratio of the musical consonance diapason ‘octave’: (1113 + 1113) : 1113 = (46 + 46) : 46 = 2 : 1. Except for poem-symmetrical –fæstan (l. 1115b) and fæstne (l. 2069a), the framing repetitions in wording are (a) discretely asymmetrical and (b) symmetrical in chiastic pairs.

203

204

Figure 6 we gefrunon, ic gefrægen, gefrægn ic; hyrde ic, hyrde ic, hyrde ic:

3-4-5 proportionality/geometry; musical consonance (diatessaron)?

1(3182) Hwæt we [Start of text] 2(3181) gefrunon 1011 1027

59 forð gerimed 62 Hyrde ic þæt

feower

1011(2172) Ne gefrœgen ic 1027 Ne gefrægn ic […] feower

1578 [526 × 3]

2104 [526 × 4]

1637

1160

feower 526

2163 Hyrde ic þæt […] feower 2164(1019) gelice [Heaney: ‘all alike’] 2172(1011) Hyrde ic pœt 1019 1011 3182(1) [End of text]

Thomas E. Hart

Proportionality Bilateral/axial symmetry: in 3 terms:

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Figure 7 864 867 871 916

Hwilum… [open envelope] …Hwilum… soðe gebunden…eft ongan Hwilum… [close envelope]

2107 2108 2109   2111

hwilum… …hwilum… soð…hwilum hwilum eft ongan…gebunden

867 868 870 871 871 873 873 874

…cyninges …gidda… worn gemunde… soðe… …gebunden…eft ongan …wrecan… …spel… …gecwæð

2110 2105 2114 2109 2111 2108 2109 2112

…cyning …gidd… …worn gemunde soð… eft ongan…gebunden …awræc …spell …cwiðan

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Figure 8 B. Beowulf’s report on song:

The poem we call Beowulf: 1 [Start of text]

867 …cyninges

2110 …cyning

871 …gebunden…eft ongan

2111 eft ongan…gebunden

874 …gecwæð

2112 …cwiðan

2 -cyninga 871 gebunden [eft ongan] 1531 gebunden 1743 gebunden 2111 gebunden [eft ongan] 3180 cwædon…cyning[a] 3182 [End of text].

Thomas E. Hart

A. Scop’s song on sið Beowulfes:

Figure 9

1

871

soðe 871 gebunden

wrœttum 1531 gebunden

1

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1530 Beowulf: 3182 verse lines

√5 + 1 = 3182

1 = 983

3182

1440

MS wræce 3060 wræt(t)e

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3182

Beowulf and Boethius on Beauty and Truth

Figure 10 √5 = 2199

871 Beowulf: 3182 verse lines

bisgum 1743 gebunden

207

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Figure 11

1250N 1250N

1250

1887

637N

312N

2199

949N 1887N

3182

983N 983N 1295N

Beowulf: 3182 verse lines

Figure 12

1

871 1

871

soðe 871 gebunden soðe 871 gebunden

1

1530

871

bisgum 1743 gebunden

1240 wrœttum 1531 gebunden

eldo 2111 gebunden

1530

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1071 MS wræce 2771 wræt(t)e

1240

3182

412

wrœttum 1531 gebunden

1

3182

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Beowulf: 3182 verse lines

MS wræce 3060 wræt(t)e

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3182

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1

10 The Subject of Language: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry janet thormann

The basic principle of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory that ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ indicates the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to literary analysis and to aesthetic evaluation and judgment. The unconscious, like literary language, is organized by the structures of rhetoric. The tropes of classical rhetoric operate on signifiers, that is, words, letters, and phonemes, give form to unconscious discourse: metaphor, or the substitution of signifiers; metonymy, or the contiguity of signifiers; and irony, or the compatibility of contradictory signifieds or meanings for a single signifier.1 If the unconscious is structured like a discourse, then psychoanalytic practice, like literary analysis, must attend to the condensations, displacements, and contradictions of language use and mark the repetitions of signifiers. Lacanian theory thus allows for a recognition of the congruence between the processes of literary writing and those constructing human subjectivity. Language, as well as the social world language creates and reproduces, constitutes and forms the human subject, as it does literary texts. Thus the unconscious may be read as a text

1 Jacques Lacan’s most cogent discussion of metaphor and metonymy as the structures of unconscious discourse is ‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,’ Écrits, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: 1977, W.W. Norton), 146–78. Irony, which however Lacan does not treat directly but only as it organizes disavowal and negation, is defined by Aristole as the third major rhetorical trope to describe the simultaneity of two contradictory signifying operations; disavowal is treated in Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’ (S.E., XIX, 141) and ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (S.E. XXIII, 273), and negation in ‘A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s Verneinung, by Jean Hyppolite,’ in Jacques Lacan, Seminar I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–54, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 289–97.

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and, conversely, literary texts read as the conscious elaborations of unconscious psychic processes. Psychoanalytic criticism is especially appropriate to the evaluation of Old English poetry, whose conventions depend upon the immediacy of a voice speaking for and to a community, on repeated formulas that convey in concrete and referential diction the environments and values of a culture, and on the work of memory perpetuating communal history and ideology. These features – immediacy of voice, materialism of language, and the functioning of cultural memory – give Old English poetry its characteristic value. As well, these same features show that the poetic language of Old English poetry is close to the language and the dynamics of primary, unconscious processes because the insistence of the voice as object, the materiality of the letter, and the signifiers of memory function within unconscious operations. This is not to claim a primitivism or primordial essence for the poetry but, rather, to value its direct emotional impact and its revelation of what it means to be a human subject in a social world. The statement that ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’ is to be taken literally. Metaphor, the substitution of one signifier for another, is both repression and the creation of new meaning. For example, when in Beowulf, Hengest broods in Finnsburh, troubled by the return of the memory of Finn’s slaughter of his Danish troops, his inner turmoil, both the repression of his memory and the motivating force of memory, is indexed in a metaphor: ‘holm storme weol,/ won wið winde, winter yþe beleac/ isgebinde’ (1131–3)2 [the sea whelmed up with storm, struggled with the wind, winter locked the sea bound in ice]. The icy sea water paralyzing his ship and perpetuating his stay among enemies is a trope for the repression of the urgent pulsion of a paralysed desire to act and simultaneously a recognition and recovery of repressed desire, a recognition that will motivate future action. Likewise, desire is metonymy, a current that runs through the gaps between contiguous signifiers. When an old Danish warrior places a sword in Hengest’s lap, Hengest reacts directly to the object, since it signals and stands for a motivation to action. The material object is a synecdoche, a part object that both calls up a history inspiring a duty to revenge and serves as the metonymic instrument of revenge, a tool that works directly to motivate the character, while at the same time it represents his inner processes, the emergence of his desire for vengeance. 2 Quotation from Beowulf is from Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. with first and second supplements (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1950). Translations throughout are my own.

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Finally, irony is the simultaneity of contradictory meanings, expressed in negation and denial.3 For example, when the Beowulf narrator claims, when Grendel attacks Heorot, that ‘Ne wæs þæt wyrd þa gen,/ þæt he ma moste manna cynnes/ ðicgean ofer þa niht’ (734–6) [it was no longer fated that he could partake of more men during the night], the language calls up both the restraint on and the enjoyment of Grendel’s feasting on human flesh. Prohibition and its violation are expressed together by the irony. The contradictory signifieds of irony point to a split between the enunciated statement and the enunciation, that is, to the gap between what is said and the position of the speaker in the dramatic context. Lacan distinguishes three registers, something like psychic agencies or kinds of activity, whose mutual imbrecation or knotting structures the human subject. While these registers are interdependent and interactive in any human production or subject, they may be separated for heuristic purposes. The Real is what cannot be spoken, what resists entry into and escapes from language as enjoyment: the excess of subject construction, the impasse of sexual division and non-relation, and the trauma of violence and death. The Imaginary has to do with the ego, autobiography, and the body form, with the meanings of ideology, and with visual images. The Symbolic is social exchange and social existence, produced in the first place by language. In language, real enjoyment is diminished and thereby pacified as desire, and that desire emerges to mark subjectivity. Traditional psychoanalytic approaches to literature have applied a model of transference to the relation between the reader and the text. However, the assumption of a transferential method for textual analysis ignores the living situation of a psychoanalysis, in which the analysand speaks in a free association of signifiers and, hence, relinquishes conscious control over the material produced. As well, the analysand’s speech may be interrupted by the analyst’s interventions, and the analysand may manipulate the discourse in response to serve unconscious motives. The analysand is in a very different position from the poet, whether an oral singer before an audience or a solitary writer, both of whom consciously control and shape material; for the poet, the text is the object of production, and it may be revised and worked over in the course of time. Another traditional psychoanalytic approach to literature follows a kind of hermeneutic interpretation, diagnosing the text or identifying predetermined symbols and complexes, thereby treating the 3 While Lacan emphasizes the operations of metaphor and metonymy, the appendix to Seminar I, ‘A spoken commentary on Freud’s Verneinung, by Jean Hyppolite,’ indicates that negation may be identified with irony. See Lacan, Seminar I, 289–97.

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aesthetic object as if it were the unconscious of the human being who created it. Psychoanalytic hermeneutics is essentially allegorical, drawing a correspondence between an assumed person who must be reconstructed and the literary product and coming up with static, fixed meanings. For Old English poetry, for which authors and even dates are almost universally absent, such an approach is especially unproductive. In contrast, Lacanian theory is directed at uncovering dynamic unconscious processes, emphasizing the repetitions and relations of specific signifiers, mapping the interplay of psychic registers, and respecting the particular social conditions that invest signifiers with historical and ideological meanings. I Aesthetic value is created in the process of sublimation, which touches on the Real, because sublimation aims at a real object that causes desire. Desire, according to Freud, is an attempt to find again an object that was lost in earliest childhood; in sublimation, the libido, or psychic energy, is redirected from a sexual object to a non-sexual, ‘higher,’ or culturally validated object. Lacan extends and unsettles Freud’s account: we never had the absent object of desire in the first place. The lacking object causing desire is located at the place of an original lack that it covers over, the lack of the Thing, or the goal of prohibited, incestuous enjoyment. Desire is the pursuit of an object standing in for the original, lacking object we treat as lost. Sublimation in Lacan’s formulation is ‘the elevation of an object to the dignity of the Thing.’4 The object of sublimation gives form and substance to a lacking object that is constitutive of desire. The material aesthetic object, the literary text, for instance, gives body to an absent object at the source of desire and at its goal. The aesthetic object that substitutes for the impossible, lacking object is created in and worked on by language, and so, in this effort of ‘elevation,’ reduces a fantasmatic, excessive enjoyment attached to an object by transforming enjoyment into an aesthetic pleasure that emerges within language. Sublimation undoes repression when it brings back a relation to the absent, lost object and touches on unconscious drive, and so it reconnects affects with signifiers, that is, words, sounds, and letters, and arouses emotion. The elegiac impulse in ‘The Wife’s Lament,’ ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘The Seafarer,’ ‘Deor,’ ‘The Ruin,’ and Beowulf creates objects of aesthetic value 4 Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 112.

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that show sublimation at work when the lyric voice evokes loss and desire. In each of these poems, melancholy and yearning become palpable as a voice circles about a lost object of desire and reproduces it as a memory. The lost object remembered in several elegiac poems is a past self, called up in a nostalgia that refuses to abandon an object imagined as possessed in the past. These poems do not accept loss as irrevocable, and their effort is to regain and reconstitute a past ego. ‘Deor’ voices nostalgia for the good fortune of the court singer, for the successful self. Rehearsing the success and fame of the past, in the poem’s repeated refrain, ‘Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg’5 [that ended, so may this], the speaker tries to pass beyond misfortune in the present by holding to an imaged self of social service and recognition. In contrast, in ‘Widsith’ the speaker frames the recitation of the singer’s past by praising him and thereby consolidates the self as impermeable to loss by means of the promise of fame, the perpetuation of an idealized ego in language; praise insures the projection of an intact self into the future, a promise as old as epic poetry. The Wanderer in his isolation imagines an idealized fullness of a past to which he remains attached with a hallucinatory force. In the most intense moment of his memorial reconstruction, the past is experienced in the present tense, fully reconstituted: ‘Þinceð him on mode þæt he his mondryhten/ clyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecge/ honda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ær/ in geardagum giefstolas breac’ (41–4)6 [It seems to him in his mind that he holds and kisses his lord, and lays hands and head on the lord’s knees, as once long ago in the past he enjoyed the gift throne]. In the face of a conviction of transience in Old English poetry that James Earl has so sensitively discussed,7 these poems memorialize and carry on a coherent lost ego and the relation of that ego to social others, particularly to the recognition of lords whose speech and acts establish worthiness. Each of these poems recuperates a lost past, and its loss is compensated in the memory of an ideal of the self. Because the speakers of these poems cannot let go of the lost ego ideal, they induce melancholy. In ‘Deor,’ ‘Widsith,’ and ‘The Wanderer,’ the imaginary ideal self is represented to be immersed in a social world; as Peter Clemoes argues,

5 Quotation from ‘Deor’ is from The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 6 Quotation from ‘The Wanderer’ is from The Exeter Book, ASPR, 3. 7 James Earl, Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 49–78.

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personhood in the heroic Anglo-Saxon period was conceived as communal, ‘a coordination of individual thinking and feeling with collective experience,’8 and only gradually did the separation of individuality emerge in a relation to the divine. ‘The Seafarer’ anticipates such development when it transforms an attachment for what is lacking to a mobile and active desire for God, beyond the change that induces loss. In ‘The Seafarer’ the speaking subject is not reflected in a lost ego nor reported by a narrator but rather represents itself as a voice, the voice as object made concrete in sound and expressed in mourning. The speaking voice is imaged by the voice of the bird that impels the speaker’s desire: ‘Swylce geac monað geomran reorde,/ singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð/ bitter in breosthord’ (53–5)9 [So also the cuckoo with a mournful voice urges on, summer’s messenger sings, announcing sorrow]. The bird’s voice sings sorrowfully as the Seafarer’s voice speaks, ‘bitter in spirit,’ its song analogous to the speaker’s speech, but at the same time the voice is the material object of his desire, the motivation for moving on: ‘min modsefa mid mereflode/ ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide/ eorþan sceatas, cymeð eft to me/ gifre ond grædig’ (59–62) [my spirit soars wide/ over the sea, the whale’s home, the earth’s surfaces; it comes to me again, eager and desiring]. The voice of the bird, like the Seafarer’s desire, pulses in sound; the voice is the immaterial object urging on the speaker’s movement and restlessness and expressing, in its palpable urgency and rhythms, the force of unconscious drive. Formulaic expression of lost social good haunts Beowulf, as it does ‘The Wanderer,’ ‘The Seafarer,’ and ‘The Ruin.’ In the speech of the Last Survivor, Hrethel’s lament, and Wiglaf’s address to the cowardly thanes, the lists of metonyms – the harp, gold rings, armour, weapons, goblets, hawk, horse, riders, kinsmen – evoke in their absence the material objects standing for the values of a culture as a whole. The insistent repetition of the Wanderer’s cry mourns an absent social world: ‘Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala þeodnes þrym!’ (92–5)

8 Peter Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176. 9 Quotation from ‘The Seafarer’ is from The Exeter Book, ASPR 3.

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[Where has the horse gone? Where has the warrior gone? Where has the giving of treasure gone? Where did the seats of feasting go? Where are the hall joys? Alas the bright cup! Alas the warrior! Alas the leader’s glory].

The closed vowels and the long lines stretch out the sound of sadness, while the syntactically parallel structures – ‘Hwær cwom’ + noun; ‘Eala’ + noun/noun phrase – imitate the parallelism of biblical style, building emotional conviction through concrete reference and repetition. So too the mourning of the Sole Survivor’s lament – Næs hearpan wyn, gomen gleobeames, ne god hafoc geond sæl swingeð, ne se swifta mearh burhstede beateð’

(2262–5)

[There is none of the harp’s joy, pleasure in the harp, no good hawk sweeps through the hall, no quick horse stamps on the courtyard]

– where the repeated negative ‘ne’ and the steady beat of the repeated initial ‘A’ verse insists on the absence of objects and sounds, the language working like an echo itself in repeatedly referring to absent sound, to call up objects and sound in their lack of presence. Beowulf, I think, refuses nostalgia because it refuses identification with what is lost, and instead accepts mortality and limitation; recognizing the inevitability of loss, even while it mourns what is lost, the poem recreates the past as the irretrievable past of a history, as cultural memory. A good part of the second half of the poem is composed of several narrators’ memories of their people’s history, as they face personal or communal annihilation. In Beowulf’s case, personal memory becomes historical insofar as Beowulf is king, so that his past is a political past, and insofar as, in an encounter with death, he recalls it as irretrievable. For Wiglaf, the Geatish messenger, and the narrator, the retellings of past feuds grasp and reproduce memories as history in the face of the anticipated death of their culture. The poem’s recognition that the past can be recovered only as lost, and hence only in language, leads, in part, to its stoicism. History may be put to work to enhance the present by casting it as historical. ‘The Chronicle Poems’ and ‘The Battle of Brunanburh,’ most successfully, rehearse the formulas of traditional heroic poetry to celebrate, enhance, and justify power in the present by establishing it as a

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continuation of an ideal past, embodied in those very traditional formulas. These poems manipulate the lost past for ideological purposes. At their worst, the traditional formulas are out of place in a changed context. For example, in the poem celebrating Edgar’s consecration in 973, heroic diction serves propaganda: ‘Þær wæs preosta heap,/ micel muneca ðreat, mine gefrege,/ gleawra gegaderod’ (8–10)10 [There was a band of priests, a great troop of monks, eagerly gathered, as I have heard]. The passage demonstrates the poem’s characteristic limitations: the rhythms are mechanical and lifeless; the formula are inappropriate, since priests don’t come in troops; the signal of oral transmission of legend conveyed by ‘mine gefrege’ cannot refer to the contemporary witness of 973, who could not have heard of the event from afar. Their inappropriate use turns the metonyms of tradition into archaisms of a moribund sort, dead in the present they are supposed to exalt. In contrast, ‘Brunanburh’ casts the present as an exuberant repetition of the past. The battle of 938 in fact did extend West Saxon domination over the whole territory of England and allowed the king to consolidate his territory as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. According to the poem, Athelstan embodies and exemplifies his genealogy by performing in traditional terms as a heroic warrior: Æþelstan cyning, eorla dryhten, beorna beahgifa, and his broþor eac, Eadmund æþeling, ealdorlangne tir geslogon æt sæcce sweorda ecgum

(1–4)

[King Athelstan, lord of nobles, ring giver of warriors, and his brother as well, the noble Edmund, to their everlasting glory, killed at battle with the edges of swords].

The rhythms created by the type A verses and the regular alliteration are pounding and insistent, so that the victory is asserted with a fresh energy. The past is condensed into a single original battle that won the island for Anglo-Saxon settlement, and the present is a repetition of a past origin that occurred

10 Quotation from the ‘Chronicle Poems’ is from The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vol. 6 (New York: Columbia University, 1968).

A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Aesthetics of Old English Poetry siþþan eastan hider Engle and Seaxe up becoman, ofer brad brimu Brytene sohtan, wlance wigsmiþas Wealas ofercoman, eorlas arhwate eard begeatan.

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(69–74)

[since Angles and Saxons came up here from the east over the broad sea to seek Britian; proud warriors overcame the Welsh, honour-ready nobles took the land].

The victory of a battle in the past is supposed to be repeated in the present battle, and the repetition acts to assure a continued right to rule. The exuberance of the poem’s diction and the pulsion of its rhythms underscore the lifeless, prosaic quality of the other ‘Chronicle Poems,’ even while ‘Brunanburh’ also performs an ideological purpose. In ‘Brunanburh’ West Saxon violence is aestheticized to become legitimate Anglo-Saxon domination as the contemporary victory in battle is framed to be a repetition of the past. Ideology here composes history to express a kind of nostalgia for the present, a present in which the past is represented to continue into the present, for the purpose of justifying the interests of power. These poems thereby appeal to fixed meanings and identifications in the Imaginary register. In contrast to those poems that raise a past ego or historical moment of social reality to the status of the lost object, ‘The Wife’s Lament’ makes an object of loss itself, and for this reason makes the operation of sublimation clearly apparent. The memory of the absent lover and of a lost love is the goal of the speaker’s desire, and her voice ceaselessly circles about their loss: ‘eft is þæt onhworfen,/ is nu swa hit no wære/ freondscipe uncer’ (23–5)11 [that is now changed, it is as it was not, our love]. The object of desire, however, what causes desire and makes desire persist, is the voice. The voice is what Lacan treats as an ‘extimate’ object, a piece of the Real that, according to Lacanian theorist Mladen Dolar, ‘introduces a rupture at the core of self presence.’12 It gives the illusion of the presence of the speaker, substituting, as it does in lyrical poetry generally, for the immediacy of an absent speaker. At the same time, the voice, as a material object, cannot be grasped; in its absence, it replaces an absent subject. Paradoxically 11 Quotation from ‘The Wife’s Lament’ is from The Exeter Book, ASPR, 3. 12 Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice,’ in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 15.

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absent, in ‘The Wife’s Lament’ the voice conjures the absent goal of desire as it continually calls up what is lacking in the present. The voice resounds as ‘a stand-in for an impossible presence, enveloping a central void’13 and acts as a material substratum of speech, supporting longing: ‘forþon ic æfre ne mæg/ þære modceare minre gerestan,/ ne ealles þæs longaþes’ (39– 41) [thus I may never lay to rest my sorrow, nor all of the longing]. The voice is the substance of desire in the poem. The poem then is an object substituting for the lacking voice that calls up the absence of desire’s lost object as it constantly reproduces that absence in longing. II While sublimation reveals a real lack at the heart of subjectivity, imaginary processes make up for that lack by filling out an ego with identifications and act to produce meanings. Every culture provides models for identification and produces ideologies that construct a stable social reality that covers over contradictions and fix the movement of desire by excluding alternative ego roles and ideological meanings. Much of Beowulf scholarship, and John M. Hill’s in particular, shows that the poem offers models of ceremonial behaviour and social relations in exemplary scenes of giftexchange and public address, and that it narrates action defining proper conduct and perpetuating the values of warrior culture.14 At the same time, the poem voices the painful conflicts of personal relations caught up in a feud regime, in, for example, Hildburh’s mourning of son and brother after the battle in Finnsburh; it indicates the tragic limitations of revenge as a mode of justice, for instance, when the messenger anticipates the destruction of the Geats after Beowulf’s death; and it everywhere underlines the ambivalent effects of repetitive violence that both protects and destroys culture. Beowulf’s celebration of the rivalries and identifications within warrior culture does not foreclose on the culture’s deadlocks and failures, and this is one measure of the poem’s complex truth. By this criterion, that is, the refusal to close up contradictions or to fix desire in static identifications, a poem like Juliana is a lesser work. Juliana follows the model of a saint’s life, and its heroine never deviates from the generic part. She acts according to the script in a model performance. The female saint is expected to reject an imposed marriage: Juliana forcibly, in 13 Dolor, ‘The Object Voice,’ 26. 14 John. M. Hill, The Cultural World in Beowulf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

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spite of threat and punishment, will not accept her father’s choice and preserves her virginity as she should. The female saint acts through words, rather than deeds: Juliana challenges the devil in repeated, unvarying debate and always wins, her commitment and resolution uncomplicated by doubt or weakness. She performs steadfastly to type as ‘seo þe forht ne wæs’ (258)15 [she who was not afraid]. The female saint is a martyr, and Juliana willingly accepts death. As a character, she offers a point of identification that allows no questioning, doubt, or complexity. The devil is himself a stereotypical version of the heroic warrior, engaged in spiritual battle and described by traditional diction. He serves a perverse lord, ‘min fæder’ (321) [my father], who is ‘hellwarena cyning’ (322, 437) [king of a hell hall],; he fights among a perverse troop, ‘þegnas of þystrum’ (333) [thegns of darkness]. He is consistently characterized as ‘se aglæca’ (319) [the monster], , ‘earm aglæca’ (430) [the miserable monster], ‘feond moncynnes’ (317) [the enemy of mankind], and he is ‘nyde gebæded’ (343) [sorely pressed]. Cynewylf, of course, adopts conventional heroic formulas to devout purposes. But the diction of Juliana is often flat, and the encounters in debate are predictable. What is a moving and weighted formula in ‘The Wife’s Lament,’ for example, ‘Þær ic sittan mot sumorlangne dæg’ (37) [There I must sit the summerlong day] conveying the speaker’s seemingly endless isolation, lacks emotional resonance in the devil’s complaint: Ic asecgan ne mæg þeah ic gesitte sumerlongne dæg, eal þa earfeþu þe ic ær ond siþ gefremede to facne

(494–7)

[I may not tell, even if I sit the summer-long day, all the misery which I always inflicted in deceit].

The formula ironically picks up on the poem’s contrast between dark and light and on the association of the sunlight with Juliana, but because it functions simply as a synonym for ‘a long time,’ it is without affective force. Rosemary Woolf describes the poem as ‘sensational’ when she examines its ‘didactic and spectacular’16 (45) features. The sensationalism has, as well, 15 Quotation from Juliana is from The Exeter Book, ASPR 3. 16 Rosemary Woolf, ‘Saints’ Lives,’ in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E.G. Stanley (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1966), 45.

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an erotic charge. The punishments that lead to Juliana’s martyrdom are extended indulgences in torment and suggest an enjoyment of a spectacular pain, inflicted by the poem’s author on the body of the female victim: He bi feaxe het ahon ond ahebban on heanne beam, þær seo sunsciene slege þrowade, sace singrimme, siex tida dæges

(227–30)

[He ordered that she be seized and lifted up by the hair on to the high column where the sunshine threw beams in very fierce persecution for the time of six days].

Since she has been called ‘se swetesta sunnan scima’ (166) [the sweetest shimmering of the sun]by her intended spouse, the torture is particularly perverse, shaming the woman for the sexual attraction that is the unwitting consequence of her spiritual beauty. Immersed in a clay vessel filled with burning lead, Juliana maintains what Sarah Kay terms ‘the sublime body of the martyr,’17 enduring and continuing to speak even in a burning bath ‘Bæð hate weol’ (581) [wells with heat], through ‘bælfira mæst’ (579) [the greatest of bonfires]. Juliana’s body is the piece of the Real that composes and conveys an excessive enjoyment to the poem’s author and internal and external audiences – all spectators of imaginary pain – and to the suffering saint herself. The saint’s enjoyment of her torture, which the audience enjoys through her, is, as Kay points out, the support of an authorial project that intends to inspire the faith and constancy of the believer. The tormented feminine body of the saint, subjected to malicious violence and cruelty, exudes a covert erotic appeal, but the eroticism remains covert because Juliana’s continual refusal to acknowledge her suffering disavows its operation; since the saint’s repeated denial of suffering is endorsed in the poem as the virtue of a heroic spirituality, it becomes the poem’s disavowal as well. Put differently, the text acknowledges neither the enjoyment of the saint’s suffering nor its erotic appeal, but at the same time it depends upon the appeal of erotic suffering as a hook for the attachment of the audience’s imaginary identification and hence for the inculcation of faith. The poem therefore sponsors an identification based on repression, on a refusal to bring unconscious signifiers and enjoyments 17 Sarah Kay, ‘The Sublime Body of the Martyr,’ in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper (Wodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 3–20.

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into conscious awareness. Sublimation, in contrast, counters repression when it uncovers unconscious material and touches on the object of desire. If aesthetic value is created in sublimation, if the pleasure and work of art derive, in part, from lifting repression, the process of sublimation in Juliana remains incomplete. III The Imaginary is based on opposition – between the ego and the other, between one meaning rather than another – while the Symbolic, the register of language and hence of social exchange, is based on difference, the differences between signifiers that structure language. For Lacan, who is said to have read Freud through the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, the discovery of psychoanalysis is that the subject is motivated and determined by a knowledge structured like a language unknown and autonomous to that subject, in other words, by the unconscious. The Symbolic, the laws of language, produce the work of the unconscious. In his Second Seminar, Lacan analyses Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection in The Interpretation of Dreams, what Lacan calls ‘the dream of dream, the inaugurally deciphered dream’18 to claim that what Freud discovers, when the dream comes up with the formula for trimethylamine, manifests the ‘very nature of the symbolic’:19 ‘the formula gives no reply whatsoever to anything. But the very manner in which it is spelt out … is in fact the answer to the meaning of the dream … There is no other word, no other solution to your problem, than the word.’20 Lacan finds this to be the ‘inaugurally deciphered dream’ because in it Freud discovers the Symbolic order: the formula in the dream, the symbolic construction, Lacan claims, is the meaning of the dream for Freud. As Lacan finds the value of Freud’s dream in its revelation of the Symbolic, I want to argue that one criterion for the aesthetic value of poetry is the textual work, a production that has no meaning in itself but gives the possibility of meaning. Poetry calls attention to the operation of the Symbolic and therefore reminds us of the value of language and of the social tie language creates. The psychoanalyst Moustapha Safouan defines

18 Jacques Lacan, Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 147. 19 Lacan, Seminar II, 160. 20 Lacan, Seminar II, 158.

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human possibility as a choice between ‘speech or death’: society is ‘only possible insofar as each of its members is unknowingly caught, barring accidents, in a “solitary alliance” with the symbolic order. Were it not for this order setting a limit to rivalry, rivalry itself would result in universal death, since it is not rivalry over any object, but over nothing or, what comes to the same thing, over being.’21 Poetry, like the unconscious, the work of symbolic structure, is a witness to Safouan’s conviction that the being of the subject and the community of social exchange in which the subject is embedded are dependent on language. The structure of Beowulf calls attention to its making. John D. Niles shows the complex design of Beowulf to be a ‘ring composition’ whose intricate symmetry shapes the poem, moving inward from beginning and end.22 Edward Irving points out the numerous contrasts across the length of the poem between youth and age, light and dark, human and monster halls.23 The many studies of formulaic theme, scene, and diction, building on the work of Francis P. Magoun,24 demonstrate that repeated structural elements function at every level of composition; aesthetic pleasure and satisfaction derive from a recognition of the reappearance of a structure in its variations. The structure of the language has aesthetic value. Analogously, I think, a great poem calls attention to itself as a work of language. A great poem is self-referential. For example, from its opening words, ‘The Wife’s Lament’ describes itself as a spoken artifice: ‘Ic þis giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre,/ minre sylfre sið. Ic þæt secgan mæg’ (2) [I utter this song about myself, utterly sorrowful, my own experience. I may say it]. Verbs of speaking, ‘wrece’ and ‘secgan,’ foreground the voice that composes and delivers the poem. As well, a poem may image its creation in scenes of poetic composition. Such reflexivity is perhaps more readily grasped in painting, when, for example, Velazquez in Las Meninas shows himself painting the painting the audience stands before (and that audience is itself reflected in the mirror reflecting the king and queen who watch Velazquez paint). Courbet paints himself painting a nude in his studio that is already filled with his completed works; Titian’s nude inspects herself in a mirror as the viewer inspects her in the painting; Jasper Johns 21 Moustapha Safouan, Speech or Death? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 68. 22 John D. Niles, ‘Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf,’ PMLA 94, no. 5 (October 1979): 924–35. 23 Edward B. Irving, Jr, Rereading Beowulf (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 24 Francis P. Magoun, Jr, ‘Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,’ Speculum 28 (1953): 446–67.

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paints paintbrushes in coffee cans, representing the instruments that have made the work as they might appear in his studio and reflecting in the work the tools of the labour that made the representation. Beowulf too is self-referential in its scenes of poetic composition.25 Standing out at the start of the poem is the type-scene of joys in the hall, a scene in which the scop sings the creation of the world: dream gehyrde hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes. Sægde se þe cuðe frumsceaft fira feorran reccan

(88–91)

[he listened to joy loud in the hall; there was the sound of harps, the sweet song of the scop. He who knew told the first creation from long ago].

Hrothgar’s company ‘dreamum lifdon’ (99) [lived in bliss], the especially human joy of sharing language, heard from the point of view of the monster who is cut off from speech, outside the social symbolic he envies. Any audience sharing in the language of the poem becomes then identified with the group from which the monster is excluded. Whether Beowulf is itself an oral composition, created under the conditions imaged at Heorot, or whether the poem’s audience would look back on an oral past it remembers, the scene links the external audience of the poem to the audience in the poem when it describes the scop performing for an audience in the hall. Whatever the audience of the poem was and is, whether a group that is listening to the poem or an individual reader, it is imaged in the audience within the poem that receives the scop’s song with pleasure.26 The scene of the making of poetry thus inscribes across time a community of shared speech. Future audiences cannot escape implication in that social link, and the audience in the present enters into a continuity with the audience in the past as the poem creates a relation to future audiences, anticipating its own future.

25 Robert Creed, ‘The Singer Looks at His Sources,’ in Studies in Old English Literature in Honor of Arthur G. Brodeur, ed. Stanley B. Greenfield (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1963), 44–52, is the original study of the scenes of poetic composition in Beowulf. 26 R.M. Lumiansky, ‘The Dramatic Audience in Beowulf,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 545–50, identifies the listening thanes as the internal audience, represented within the poem, for the scenes of composition.

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Scenes of composition are, in effect, scenes with the scene of the poem. The scene of the scop singing within Heorot thematizes both the process of the creation of oral poetry and the audience’s reception of poetry. Other scenes of poetic composition reflect the work Beowulf is in the process of accomplishing: the scene of the scop on horseback, singing of Sigemund’s adventures (867–96),27 implicitly compares the hero of Germanic legend to the figure the poem is engaged in elevating to the stature of legendary hero: Hwilum cyninges þegn, guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig, se ðe ealfela ealdgesegena worn gemunde, word oþer fand soðe gebunden

(867–71)

[At times the king’s thegn, a man with a repertoire of songs, remembering lays, he who completely remembered many old songs, found other words, bound truly].

If the passage may be taken to refer to the alliterative technique of Beowulf’s language – words find matching words and are bound truly in similar initial sounds – the self-reference to the sounds of language foregrounds the material making of the poem. The audience, in other words, is compelled to attend to and bring to consciousness the poem’s language as language. Likewise, since the song of Sigemund indirectly refers to Beowulf, the performance within Hrothgar’s court of ‘The Fight at Finnsburh’ (1063–167) obliquely expands on the tensions in Heorot between Horthgar’s son, Hrethric, and his nephew, Hrothulf (tensions the queen tries to negotiate with her assertions of family peace), and perhaps anticipates the destruction Heorot will suffer from warfare between kin that Beowulf foresees (2026–31). The creation of poetry within the poem thereby invokes implicit knowledge of traditional material for both its intra- and extra-diegetic audience and at the same time elevates its own content to the status of traditional legend. In such self-conscious scenes, the poem repeats the self-referential scenes of composition in Homeric epic and in Virgil’s Aeneid.

27 Jeff Opland treats this scene of ‘the thane on horseback’ as an example of a formulaic scene of oral performance in ‘From Horseback to Monastic Cell: The Impact on English Literature of the Introduction of Writing,’ in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 30–43.

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In a final self-reference to poetic making, Beowulf, on his return to Hygelac’s court, describes to the Geat’s king Hrothgar’s composition of poetry: Þær wæs gidd ond gleo; gomela Scilding, felafricgende feorran rehte; hwilum hildedeor hearpan wynne, gomenwudu grette, hwilum gyd awræc soð ond sarlic, hwilum syllic spell rehte æfter rihte rumheort cyning

(2105–10)

[There was poetry and song; the old, wise Scielding told old lore; at times the bold in battle touched the joyful instrument, the harp’s pleasure, at times he told a true and sorrowful lay, at times the great-hearted king correctly narrated a marvellous story].

Beowulf’s report of his experience among the Danes is primarily a repetition of all that the poem has previously narrated, although it adds new information, such as Hrothgar’s recitations, and anticipates the Danish future, which may well have been tradition for Beowulf’s audience, and so a future that was a familiar past. The repetition is sometimes explained as stemming from the demands of oral poems, which need to remind audiences of essential information or, when delivered over several sessions, recapitulate material before starting anew. But in his long delivery preceding the presentation to Hygelac of the gifts Hrothgar bestowed on him, ll.  1999–2150, Beowulf becomes a poet, reciting before the court of the Geats the tale of his adventures, the tale narrated to the poem’s audience in the first part of the poem. Beowulf thus makes itself a work of language that refers to (its own) language and represents itself to be a representation. IV Psychoanalysis is not a normative practice; it may, however, contribute to aesthetic evaluation by making available, exposing, and describing the operations of the unconscious within language. The methods of literary analysis can judge how successfully a poem articulates, uses, and reveals such operations. Aesthetic evaluation would take account of the degree to which a poem’s language encounters and controls primary, unconscious processes. A poem brings pleasure by arousing and containing desire, the emotions attached to the signifiers of language, and the enjoyment embedded in

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language; it presses language onto the Real, relieving repression and making absence present. Its effect is to touch on and at the same time distance the absent, unattainable object motivating desire, thereby perpetuating desire. A poem’s value then would lie in the capacity of its language simultaneously to open up and to veil the unconscious and hence to reveal subjectivity. Beowulf and many of the Old English elegies demonstrate and exemplify such value. These poems lay bare the symbolic relation to the enjoyment of a lost object. A poem’s value is in the Imaginary as well, to the degree that the poem exposes the contradictions and complexities of the social relations from which it emerges and to the extent to which it serves culture by providing fluid models of identification and memorializing social values. The traditional practices of literary analysis, in particular the examination of a poem’s tropes, form, and structure, the pressure of voice, its management of rhythm and its richness of language, reveal the success with which a poem exposes, articulates, and renews in the Symbolic the fixed, imaginary meanings and investments of social being. This is to say that aesthetic value measures the way a work makes conscious repressed, prohibited, and distorted unconscious material. Both ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’ and ‘The Battle of Malden’ articulate and clarify, in other words, they make conscious, the imaginary commitments of their cultures. Good poems are products of aesthetic judgment. In scenes and moments of reflexivity, poetry calls attention to the ways in which, and to the reality that, it is produced by work on language and works to act on language: in such moments a poem figures its own making. When they show how a good poem works, figures of poetic reflexivity locate their audiences as participants in the exchanges of language. Their value is to remind us that we are in debt to social existence.

11 The Aesthetics of Beowulf: Structure, Perception, and Desire yvette kisor

From the very beginning of Beowulf scholarship there has been a perceived difficulty about the ordering of the text. Confronted with the disparate elements of the poem, many readers (and scholars) are initially overcome by a sense of disorder. As one critic put it, ‘It is probable that there are few readers of Beowulf who have not felt – and there are many who after repeated perusal continue to feel – that the general impression produced by it is that of a bewildering chaos.’1 Early on F.J. Mone complained of the poem’s abrupt Sprünge (leaps),2 and Walter A. Berendsohn called it a Stilwirrwarr (stylish mishmash),3 while Alois Brandl commented on the poem’s Sprunghaftigkeit (erratic abruptness).4 In the introduction to his classic edition Frederick Klaeber devoted a whole section of his discussion of the poem’s structure to what he termed its ‘Lack of Steady Advance.’5 Among more recent critics, Kenneth Sisam called it a poem ‘which is not elegant in the co-ordination and proportion of all its parts,’6 while Gwyn Jones noted that ‘structurally, to a modern eye, it is less than

1 Henry Bradley, ‘Beowulf,’ Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th and 14th eds., vol. 3 (London and New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910, 1929), 758–61 at 758; 424–46 at 425. 2 F.J. Mone, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der teutschen Heldensage (Quedlinburg & Leipzig: G. Basse, 1836), 130. 3 Walter A. Berendsohn, ‘Altgermanische Heldendichtung,’ Neue Jahrbücher 18 (1915): 633–48 at 640. 4 Alois Brandl, ‘Die Angelsächsische Literatur,’ Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, ed. Hermann Paul, vol. 2, pt. A, 2nd ed. (Strassburg: Trübner, 1908), 980–1024 at 1005. 5 Frederick Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Boston and New York: D.C. Heath, 1922), lvii. 6 Kenneth Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 16.

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perfect,’7 and Allen J. Frantzen refers to ‘the poem’s incompleteness, manifest in fragmentary episodes … gaps or defects in the manuscript and silences in the narrative.’8 As this selection of critical observations demonstrates, the structure of the poem has been a critical concern since Beowulf was rediscovered in modern times. Generally, scholars have found themselves dissatisfied with that structure, and have either condemned that feature of the poem or sought to ‘rectify’ it by determining a different way of describing or considering it. Sources of this critical discomfort are the poem’s many digressions, often abruptly and awkwardly introduced, moments of narrative discontinuity, and the ‘fifty-year jump’ in chronology that occurs at lines 2208b–9a. More recent critics have tended to ‘solve’ these problems by locating the difficulty not in the poem itself, but in its perception. This critical turn has focused attention on the reader and the way readers construct the text, and as such allows for a re-examination of the poem and the ‘problem’ of its structure. Much of the dissatisfaction with the poem’s form, its structure, is ultimately a problem of aesthetics, more particularly the aesthetic categories critics and readers (not always the same thing) bring to bear on the poem. Jacob Bronowski has suggested that the creation and appreciation of beauty are essentially the same act, that ‘the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them.’9 This interest in the role of the reader in the determination of literary meaning is the primary concern of readerresponse criticism. One of its foremost practitioners, Wolfgang Iser, has also explored the concept of perception as an act of co-creation, observing that ‘literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is written. The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents.’10 As American philosopher John Dewey notes, ‘to perceive, a beholder must create his

7 Gwyn Jones, Kings, Beasts and Heroes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 4. 8 Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 172, 179. 9 Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: J. Messner, 1956; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), 29. 10 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,’ The Implied Reader: Patterns in Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 274–94; first appeared in New Literary History 3 (1972): 279–99, rpt. in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 50–69 at 54.

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own experience … with the perceiver, as with the artist, there must be an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form, although not in details, the same process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced.’11 As readers of a text become, in the act of perception, cocreators, their co-creation is directed by the aesthetic categories they hold as is their resulting aesthetic judgment of what they perceive. Beowulf scholarship has often focused on identifying and describing patterns of structure and inferring a mode of composition from that; therefore critics have naturally concentrated on sequences of continuity and narrative consistency. From this critical standpoint, moments when these sequences fail and continuity breaks down need to be explained, and theories as diverse as Liedertheorie, interlace, and balance can all be seen as attempts to do just that, whether they censor the poet for his perceived ineptness or praise him for his unique sense of narrative style. Readerresponse critics, on the other hand, have embraced what have traditionally been seen as the poem’s ‘faults,’ focusing on just these moments of discontinuity that so troubled earlier critics.12 According to reader-response critics like Iser, it is out of these ‘gaps’ that readers become co-creators of the text: ‘It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism. Thus whenever the flow is interrupted … the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections – for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.’13 As readers perceive the text and recreate it, Iser suggests that they ‘strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern.’14 Iser’s suggestion here is crucial, for he points to the inherent desire within readers to create structure, to form an aesthetic whole, ‘to form the consistency that the reader will always be in search of.’15 Yet as readers endeavour to fill in gaps and create a consistent structure, they do not create ex nihilo. They engage with a text in which patterns of structure already exist, and as they encounter these patterns, they work to integrate them into something they can perceive as whole. That action is guided by the aesthetic categories they hold, and the 11 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958), 54. 12 In recent years a few Beowulf critics have also focused on the poem’s gaps or silences, urging against acts of critical closure; see Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins; Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990); and James Earl, Thinking about ‘Beowulf’ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 13 Iser, ‘The Reading Process,’ 55. 14 Ibid., 58. 15 Ibid.

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accord, or lack thereof, between those categories and the patterns they find in the text guide their judgment of it. Furthermore, the process suggests that a desire for wholeness, however perceived, is basic to an aesthetic appreciation. The Nineteenth Century: Desire for Wholeness The earliest criticism of Beowulf was characterized by incomplete understanding and a tendency to view the work as a historical document – with the exception of the Danish scholar, Nikolai Grundtvig. In his review of Thorkelín’s 1815 edition, the first edition of the poem, Grundtvig, ‘the only early critic to consider the poem primarily as a work of art,’16 initially embraced the poem as ‘a beautiful, tastefully arranged and ornamented whole.’17 He quickly modified his position, however, condemning the poem two years later for being ‘without that which Angles and Englishmen have always been without, that is: taste.’18 As Andreas Haarder states, ‘There seems to be no doubt that, more than anything else, it is the structure of Beowulf that leaves Grundtvig dissatisfied.’19 Again in 1817, Grundtvig asserts that ‘The eye saw rightly, but the hand makes mistakes. –The poem is a spiritual whole, only not rightly arranged artistically,’20 and by 1820 he could only praise it ‘as a work of art, half miscarried [due to] a loss of internal unity [and] a lack of external unity.’21 This sense of dissatisfaction with the poem’s structure and perceived lack of unity characterizes the work of early critics and indicates the degree to which aesthetic appreciation of the poem is directed by Aristotelian standards.22 The desire to explain this perceived disunity sets the stage for 16 Marijane Osborn, Beowulf: A Guide to Study (Los Angeles: Pentangle Press, 1986), 73. 17 N.F.S. Grundtvig, ‘Et Par Ord om det nys udkomne angelsaksiske Digt,’ Nyeste Skilderie af Kjøbenhavn no. 65 (1815): col. 1027. Translation from Andreas Haarder, Beowulf: The Appeal of a Poem (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1975), 25. 18 Grundtvig, ‘Om Bjovulfs Drape eller det af Hr. Etatsraad Thorkelin 1815 udgivne angelsachsiske Digt,’ Danne-Virke 2 (1817): 207–81 at 271. Translation from Haarder, 59. 19 Haarder, Beowulf, 65. 20 Grundtvig, ‘Om Bjovulfs Drape,’ 271. Translation from Haarder, 68. 21 Grundtvig, Bjowulfs Drape: Et Gothisk Helte-Digt fra forrige Aar-tusinde af Angel-Saxisk paa Danske Riim (København, 1820), li. English title: The Heroic Poem of Beowulf: a Gothic hero-poem from the previous millennium from Anglo-Saxon into Danish verse. 22 See John J. Conybeare, ‘Beowulf: Analysis and Metrical Versions of,’ in Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. William D. Conybeare (New York: Haskell House, 1826), 30–81; Wilhelm Grimm, Die deutsche Heldensage (Göttingen: Dieterichschen Buchhandlung 1829), and Mone, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der teutschen Heldensage.

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Liedertheorie, which was to dominate Beowulf criticism for the next fifty years.23 Between the dying out of Liedertheorie and the turning point in scholarship marked by Tolkien’s 1936 address, the critical attitude was characterized by acceptance of the poem’s unity and a belief in single authorship, but the sense that the structure was in some way deficient persisted. In 1896 W.P. Ker acknowledged that the poem possessed ‘at least an apparent and external unity,’ but he condemned ‘the faults of structure in the English poem,’24 criticizing the poem in 1904 for what he calls a ‘radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevancies in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges.’25 By 1912, he felt that the poem ‘was preserved by an accident; it has no right to the place of the most illustrious Anglo-Saxon epic poems.’26 Brandl too acknowledged the poem’s unity, but felt uncomfortable with its structure, asserting that the poem was ‘the work of a single poet, who, however, wavered between two styles, that of the artful epic, to which he aspired, and that of the minstrel lay.’27 In his authoritative edition of the poem, Frederick Klaeber too accepted the 23 Anticipated by John M. Kemble’s insistence in 1836 that the poem was an amalgamation of myth and history concerning a god, Beow, and a hero, Beowulf (John Mitchell Kemble, Über die Stammtafel der Westsachsen [Munich, 1836], and ‘Postscript to the Preface,’ A Translation of the Anglo-Saxon Poem of Beowulf, vol. 2 of Kemble’s 1835 edition [London: Wm. Pickering, 1837] i–iv), Ludwig Ettmüller established his Liedertheorie, the theory that Beowulf is in reality a composite of different lays. He asserted that ‘the Beowulf poem was not organically constructed by one poet but was put together from separate folk poems’ (Ludwig Ettmüller, ed., Engla and Seaxna Scôpas and Bôceras [Quedlinburg: G. Basse, 1840]). Karl Müllenhoff quickly became the leader of the Liedertheorie camp, asserting that the poem was the work of six different authors based on two old lays (Karl Müllenhoff, ‘Der Mythus von Beovulf,’ Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterum und deutsche Literatur 7 [1849]: 419–41, ‘Sceaf und seine Nachkommen,’ Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterum und deutsche Literatur 7 [1849]: 410–19, ‘Die innere Geschichte des Beowulfs,’ Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterum und deutsche Literatur 14 [1869]: 193–244). In spite of some variations on Müllenhoff’s theories, and some dissenting voices, the Liedertheorie position dominated the critical climate for nearly half a century; the sense of the disjointedness of the poem that gave rise to Liedertheorie persists even into modern criticism; as recently as 1981 Kevin Kiernan, in his detailed examination of the manuscript, suggests that the poem as it exists in the manuscript is ‘an amalgamation of two originally distinct poems’: Kevin Kiernan, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981; rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 249. 24 W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (London: Macmillan & Co., 1896; rpt. 1922), 158, 160. 25 W.P. Ker, The Dark Ages (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1904, rpt. 1955), 253. 26 W.P. Ker, English Literature: Medieval (New York: Holt, 1912), 19. 27 Brandl, Geschichte der altenglischen Literatur (Strassburg: Trübner, 1908), 1008–9.

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poem’s unity, but denied a superior structure,28 while William W. Lawrence tried to solve the problem of the poem’s structure by asserting that the disparate elements are united by the poet’s deliberate use of ironic juxtaposition.29 Like Ker, R.W. Chambers found fault with the poet for allowing the folktale to drive the more weighty concerns of the poem into digressions.30 It is just this point that J.R.R. Tolkien takes up in his landmark address in 1936. The Twentieth Century: Unity in Disparity Tolkien took issue with Ker and Chambers, insisting that the monsters belong right where they are, at the semantic centre of the poem. He praised the ‘cosmic’ dimension created by foregrounding the monsters and the sense of perspective created by the digressions. In terms of structure, he argued for balance rather than progression, emphasizing the contrast between Beowulf’s youth and age, and using the image of the Old English metrical line as a symbol for his ideas of balance and contrast. Above all, he urged that Beowulf be viewed as a poem and not a historical document,31 and his work was quickly taken up by the critical community, most notably by Adrien Bonjour and Arthur Brodeur.32 Tolkien did have his detractors,33 yet in spite of these few dissenting voices, Tolkien’s important

28 Klaeber, Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, li–lviii. 29 William W. Lawrence, Beowulf and Epic Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928). 30 R.W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn, 3rd ed. with a supplement by C.L. Wrenn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921, rpt. 1959) and foreword, Beowulf Translated into Modern English Rhyming Verse, tr. Archibald Strong (London: Constable, 1925), xii–xxxii. 31 J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936): 245–95. 32 Bonjour examined all the poem’s digressions, arguing for their deliberateness and artistic effect, and Brodeur, who embraced Tolkien’s idea of balance, suggested that the poem presented the hero’s progression from ideal retainer to ideal king. See Adrien Bonjour, The Digressions in Beowulf (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950) and Arthur G. Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 33 T.M. Gang took issue with Tolkien’s idea of balance and questioned the symbolism of the monsters (‘Approaches to Beowulf,’ Review of English Studies 33 [1952]: 1–12), while John A. Nist argued that the hero’s life was told ‘in a pointillist manner’ in a five-part structure (The Structure and Texture of Beowulf [São Paulo: University of São Paulo,

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lecture had clearly pointed scholarship in a new direction. In terms of appreciation of the poem’s structure, Tolkien’s lecture stands as a watershed moment precisely because he calls on readers to question the aesthetic categories that had hitherto dominated critics’ judgment of the poem. By inviting critics to adjust those categories to terms other than linearity and unity, he opened up potential ways to view, and judge, the poem. Finding inspiration in Tolkien, criticism has moved in several different directions over the last three decades; ‘the dominant theory in recent years has, however, been that of interlace, though this approach is still not fully accepted.’34 This approach was introduced by John Leyerle, who saw the poem as presenting a successful hero who becomes a failed (as opposed to Brodeur’s ideal) king,35 and Leyerle saw this progression as presented in a manner represented by the ‘interlace patterns’ of early English art.36 In this way the ‘break’ with prior aesthetic categories based on Aristotelian unity can be seen as a move forward chronologically that has its basis in a renewed appreciation of earlier artistic categories. The trend towards viewing the poem’s structure as more flexible and less linear, and seeing this as a positive attribute, is demonstrated by Kathryn Hume, who maintained that the poem contained a simultaneous bipartite and tripartite structure,37 and by Martin Stevens, who saw the poem as a unified progression towards entropy.38 Also important in this regard is Fred Robinson’s work on the poem’s appositive style, which sees both the smaller and larger structures of the poem as built on apposed segments,39 a view that expands Tolkien’s ideas of a structure based on balance and contrast.40 What all

34 35 36 37 38 39 40

1959; Folcraft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1970], 22), and Sisam criticized several digressions for their manner of narration, concluding that the poem had no ‘claim to structural elegance’ (Sisam, The Structure of Beowulf, 66). Thomas A. Shippey, ‘Structure and Unity,’ chap. 8 in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 149. John Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King,’ Medium Ævum 34 (1965): 89–102. Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967): 1–17. Kathryn Hume, ‘The Theme and Structure of Beowulf,’ Studies in Philology 72 (1975): 1–27. Martin Stevens, ‘The Structure of Beowulf: From Gold-Hoard to Word-Hoard,’ Modern Language Quarterly 39 (1978): 219–38. Fred C. Robinson, Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). Other critics see some of the disparate elements of the poem as revealing underlying structures, for example, T.A. Shippey and Daniel R. Barnes, who both applied Vladimir

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these critical views have in common is a view of the poem’s structure as essentially non-linear and a willingness to value it for that very feature. The break with classical aesthetics is not univeral, however. Recent criticism has also seen a group of scholars who view the poem as highly structured, and who hold to a hyperliterary mode of composition, one based on its connection to mathematics and on classical aesthetics, especially Plato.41 Looking at the forty-three sections into which the manuscript is divided (forty-two fitts plus an unnumbered prologue), Eamonn Carrigan found a complex and symmetrical thirteen/seventeen/thirteen pattern, a scheme that places the fight with Grendel’s mother in the centre.42 Thomas E. Hart also noted many symmetries in the arithmetical distribution of the manuscript,43 and David Howlett suggested a five-part structure with division according to the Golden Section.44 Whitney Bolton stressed the importance of the manuscript’s numbered fitts, relating the structure of the poem to that of Alfred’s translation of Boethius (also a prologue followed by forty-two numbered sections),45 as did B.F. Huppé, who claimed that ‘the rhetorical interlace of narrative design and verbal ambiguity is supported by a clear mathematical structure.’46 Constance Hieatt demonstrated

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Propp’s views on the morphology of the folktale to Beowulf. They perceive the poem’s structure as essentially tripartite, and in their analysis they focus on elements of discontinuity in the poem as places where the underlying folktale shows through. Thus they see Unferth, for example, as a character from an earlier folktale tradition not entirely integrated into the poem. See T.A. Shippey, ‘The Fairy-Tale Structure of Beowulf,’ Notes & Queries 214 (1969): 2–11 and Daniel R. Barnes, ‘Folktale Morphology and the Structure of Beowulf,’ Speculum 45 (1970): 416–34. J. Michael Stitt also sees an archaic structure behind the poem, but his analysis is not based on Propp’s system. Rather, he sees a Norse ‘two-troll tradition’ lying behind Beowulf’s encounters with Grendel and his mother, and thus he sees the structure of the poem as endemic and based on the progression of monster encounters. See his Beowulf and the Bear’s Son: Epic, Saga, and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1992). In particular, the Timaeus. Eomann Carrigan, ‘Structure and Thematic Development in Beowulf,’ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 66 section c, no. 1 (1967): 1–51. Thomas E. Hart, ‘Beowulf: A Study of the Tectonic Structures and Patterns,’ PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1966. Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International 28 (1967): 631A. David Howlett, ‘Form and Genre in Beowulf,’ Studia Neophilologica 46, no. 2 (1974): 309–25. Whitney Bolton, Alcuin and Beowulf: An Eighth-Century View (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978). B.F. Huppé, The Hero and the Earthly City: A Reading of Beowulf, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 33 (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1984), 89.

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many ‘envelope patterns’ in the text, but pointed out that very few of them corresponded to the numbered sections of the manuscript,47 while Brian Shaw focused on the fifteen unanswered speeches in the poem, seeing Beowulf’s imperatives to Hrothgar, flanked by two paired sets of seven unanswered speeches, as the pivotal moment in the poem, marking Beowulf’s transition from retainer to king.48 While many critics were (and are) sceptical of structural theories based on mathematical correspondences, recent scholars have continued to look for patterns in the text.49 The vast majority of these studies that focus on elucidating patterns in the text take for granted that the patterns are there because the author’s aesthetic categories dic-

47 Constance Hieatt, ‘Envelope Patterns and the Structure of Beowulf,’ English Studies in Canada 1 (1975): 249–65. 48 Brian A. Shaw, ‘The Speeches in Beowulf: A Structural Study,’ Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 86–92; see also Robert E. Bjork, ‘Speech as Gift in Beowulf,’ Speculum 69 (1994): 993–1022. 49 Theodore Andersson found an oscillating pattern of disasters and recoveries, while Joseph Harris focused on the many genres present or alluded to in the poem, seeing the work as a whole as a kind of ‘compendium’ of different poetic modes; see Theodore Andersson, ‘Tradition and Design in Beowulf,’ in Old English Literature in Context, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980), 90–106, rpt. in Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. R.D. Fulk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 219–34; and Joseph Harris, ‘Beowulf in Literary History,’ Pacific Coast Philology 17 (1982): 16–23, rpt. in Interpretations of Beowulf, 235–41. Eric G. Stanley examined earlier scholars’ criticisms of the poem’s loose structure, finding their dissatisfaction to be based on a failure to correctly appreciate the function of the poem’s narrative links, which he sees as establishing mood rather than driving the action; see his ‘The Narrative Art of Beowulf,’ in Medieval Narrative: A Symposium, ed. Hans Bekker-Nielsen et al. (Odense: Odense University Press, 1980), 58–81 rpt. in A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 170–91. John D. Niles saw the structure of the poem as ‘a series of major and minor pairs’ (Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983], 159), utilizing the concept of ring composition (chiastic patterning), an idea H. Ward Tonsfeldt had imported from Homeric scholarship some years earlier; see his ‘Ring Structure in Beowulf,’ Neophilologus 61 (1977): 443–52. Ward Parks explored this idea further, noting that ring structures integrate digressions with main narrative by acting as links and frames, while Paul Sorrell indicated the appropriateness of such ring structures in oral epic. Most recently, Gale Owen-Crocker has asserted that the poem is structured around the four funerals in Beowulf, positing the Lay of the Last Survivor and the funeral pyre in the Finnsburh digression as funerals along with the funerals of Scyld and Beowulf that begin and end the poem. See Ward Parks, ‘Ring Structure and Narrative Embedding in Homer and Beowulf,’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 237–51; Paul Sorrell, ‘Oral Poetry and the World of Beowulf,’ Oral Tradition 7 (1992): 28–65; and Gale Owen-Crocker, The Four Funerals in Beowulf and the Structure of the Poem (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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tated them. In other words, the poem’s author is conceived of as working within an aesthetic tradition that valued such structures, and part of the difficulty modern readers have with the poem’s structure is that they have lost touch with that tradition. Though it is rarely explicitly stated, the underlying assumption is often that by uncovering this lost tradition scholars can restore an aesthetic appreciation of the poem. Not all of the most recent scholarship has focused on discovering patterns in the text, however. In fact, some scholars have cautioned against just such a search. Rather than viewing the poem’s structure as ‘a problem to be solved,’50 critics like Gillian Overing, James Earl, and Allen Frantzen have embraced the poem’s moments of narrative discontinuity, viewing the very gaps and silences that so troubled earlier critics as the precise places where meaning is created. According to Gillian Overing, the poem’s structure ‘is essentially nonlinear, describing arcs and circles where persons, events, histories, and stories continually intersect … [this structure] questions the notion of textual boundaries as a form of resolution.’51 She uses Pierce’s theory of semeiotics52 to examine the way linguistic signs in the poem interact and form networks of association as a means of tracing some of the ‘arcs and circles’ she sees operating in the poem. In another approach, James Earl brings a psychoanalytic stance to work on the poem, focusing on the moments of silence in the text as places where meaning is produced, and these ‘gaps’ in the narrative are a point of focus also for Allen Frantzen. According to Frantzen, ‘Beowulf is an incomplete text.’53 It contains gaps of two kinds: textual gaps, places in the manuscript where letters and words are literally missing, and narrative gaps, places where the manuscript is intact, but the meaning or the metre is felt to be somehow deficient. This last kind, narrative gaps, are places where editors frequently make changes in the text in order to better make sense of the poem, and it is this action, this attempt ‘to voice its silences,’54 that Frantzen examines, and ultimately condemns, in his chapter. Besides their focus on the poem’s moments of discontinuity, and their espousal of these moments, these three critics have something else in common as well. All three examine the text from the standpoint of the reader. 50 Gillian Overing, ‘Swords and Signs: Dynamic Semeiosis in Beowulf,’ chap. 2 in Language, Sign and Gender in Beowulf, 33. 51 Ibid., 35. 52 ‘Semeiotics’ is Pierce’s spelling and Overing uses the term to refer specifically to Pierce’s theoretical concepts (see Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, 38). 53 Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Writing the Unreadable Beowulf,’ chap. 6 in Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition, 171. 54 Ibid., 183.

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Rather than attempting to uncover the author’s intent, or considering the text in isolation, they focus on the interaction between text and reader. Frantzen notes that ‘Beowulf generates meaning through the interplay of individual textual voices generated by its external and internal readers.’55 He focuses on the gaps in the narrative and observes that they are ‘sites for reading and writing,’56 places where readers of the poem create meaning as they construct ‘their’ Beowulf. The perspective of the reader is key to Earl’s psychoanalytic approach to the poem, as he sees the poem’s moments of silence in the narrative as places where readers ‘read [them]selves.’57 Earl does not attempt to psychoanalyse the poem itself, but rather the readers’ responses to the poem, viewing the silences in the narrative as akin to ‘the  silence of the analyst’ and likening the poem to ‘a screen for our projections.’58 Thus in Earl’s analysis, moments of narrative discontinuity function as places where readers can project their own desires onto the text. The desire of the reader is a concern for Overing as well. She notes that it can be ‘difficult to separate text from reader, to disentangle the workings of desire within the reader from those operating within the narrative.’59 Overing addresses the role readers’ desires play in their interaction with the text, and she suggests that the critical anxiety regarding the poem’s unity may be a function of that desire, noting a tendency among critics like Klaeber to put ‘the burden of responsibility on the reader for discovering a whole out of [the poem’s] unruly parts, but … not … [considering] the possibility that the desire for unity originates and terminates within the reader.’60 Overing praises the poem’s structure for its ‘unruliness,’ and when she asks ‘how is the reading subject involved in either the marking out or dissolution of textual boundaries?’61 she implies that critics are far too concerned with delineating certain textual boundaries, and far too concerned with making others disappear. As Overing considers the reader’s role in constructing the poem’s meaning, she considers the effect of its poetic language on readers. In her discussion of the metonymic mode of Old English poetic language62 she

55 Ibid., 181. 56 Ibid., 182. 57 James W. Earl, ‘Beowulf and the Origins of Civilization,’ chap. 6 of Thinking about Beowulf, 168. 58 Ibid., 173. 59 Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, xxii. 60 Ibid., 33. 61 Ibid., 57. 62 See Overing, ‘Language: An Overview in Process,’ chap. 1 in Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, 1–32.

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emphasizes the reader’s role in meaning construction. As she states in her introduction: ‘My primary concern will be the production of meaning within the text … and the reader’s role in this process.’63 Reader-response criticism, as Overing observes, ‘has rarely been a focus for AngloSaxonists.’64 The few Anglo-Saxon scholars who view the process of perceiving a literary work from the standpoint of the perceiver have tended to come from the field of oral-formulaic theory and have considered the audience-participatory role.65 Some very recent work has considered the poem from the standpoint of the reader,66 but not all scholars are entirely clear about which readers they are considering (actual readers or hypothetical readers? readers contemporary with the provenance of the poem or modern readers?), nor do they uniformly apply reader-response theories to their reading of the poem.67 In order to be helpful for a study of Beowulf, however, such criticism must deal with the identity of the reader as well as Beowulf’s canonized status.

63 Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, xiii. 64 Ibid., 3. 65 See, for instance, John Miles Foley, ‘Tradition and the Collective Talent: Oral Epic, Textual Meaning, and Receptionalist Theory,’ Cultural Anthropology 1, no. 2 (1986): 203– 22; John D. Niles, ‘The Listening Audience,’ chap. 11 in Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, 205–12; and Alain Renoir, ‘Beowulf: A Contextual Introduction to Its Contents and Techniques,’ in Heroic Epic and Saga: An Introduction to the World’s Great Folk Epics, ed. Felix J. Oinas and Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 99–119. 66 Besides the work of Allen Frantzen, James Earl, and Gillian Overing already mentioned, see Gale R. Owen-Crocker, The Four Funerals in Beowulf, 1 and passim. 67 While the reader-response movement could be said to have begun in the late 1960s with the turn away from New Criticism and its emphasis on the text, it has its roots many years earlier with the theories of I.A. Richards and his work on the emotional response to art. Richards called for a shift in focus away from the work of art itself and towards the observers and their emotional responses: ‘we continually talk as though things possess certain qualities, when what we ought to say is that they cause effects in us of one kind or another [and] the fallacy of “projecting” the effect and making it a quality of its cause tends to recur’ (Principles of Literary Criticism [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924], 20–1). His work included an attempt to apply the theory, including a protocols experiment in which Cambridge students were asked to comment freely on unidentified poems, and their resulting readings were analysed. While his work demonstrates the basic premise of reader-response theory (a shift away from the text to the reader) as well as an attempt at practical application with actual readers, the prominence of New Criticism kept his ideas from gaining sway until several decades later. See Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1929).

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Reader-Response Theories and Beowulf Reader-response theories focus on readers and how their responses to the text create meaning. If the fault past critics found with the poem’s structure can be seen to lie less with the poem itself and more with the aesthetic expectations such critics brought to bear on the poem, then approaching the poem from the standpoint of the reader has the potential to be fruitful. Wolfgang Iser offers a model of reading that emphasizes readers’ engagement with moments of incompleteness in a text, asserting that ‘the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence.’68 Thus in the experience of reading, readers respond to structures present in the text and act as co-creators of the work69 through a process of ‘concretization’ whereby the reader’s imagination is required as each reader fills in ‘gaps’ and areas of ‘indeterminacy’ present in the text.70 The range of interpretations

68 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process,’ 274–5. 69 Eco develops a similar idea with his distinction between open texts and closed texts. According to his classification, open texts are those that invite the reader’s structural collaboration in the production of meaning, whereas closed texts are those that are structured to predetermine the reader’s response. Eco’s concept of the ‘openness’ of the literary work, and its allowance for a creative role for the reader in the construction of meaning, is very much in the same vein as Iser’s theories. See Eco, The Open Work, tr. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), originally published in Italian as Opera aperta (Milano: Bompiani, 1962). Another theorist to anticipate Iser’s concept of readers as ‘co-creators’ of the work is John Dewey, already mentioned (see note 11). Dewey emphasized the role of the observer as a creator of the artistic experience, making a distinction between recognition (bare identification, a passive act) and perception (reconstructive doing, an active act). See John Dewey, Art as Experience, 52–3. A third theorist to anticipate Iser’s emphasis on the reader as creator is Mikhail Bakhtin, who focuses on the act of perception as one of creation, referring to the process as aesthetic consummation: ‘one must make what is seen or heard or pronounced an expression of one’s own active, axiological relationship, one must enter as a creator into what is seen, heard, or pronounced … thus, form is the expression of the active, axiological relationship of the author-creator and of the recipient (who co-creates the form) to content.’ From ‘Supplement: The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art’ (1924), found in Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, tr. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 305–6. 70 In this model of reading Iser is drawing on the ideas of Roman Ingarden, who first developed the notion of ‘concretization,’ theorizing that a work of literature is a schematized structure whose ‘indeterminate places’ must be completed by the reader; see Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic and the Theory of Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). First published in Polish, 1931.

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possible in this model of reading is seen not as a problem, but rather as proof of the text’s inexhaustibility: ‘the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations.’71 In Iser’s view of the reading process, both the text and the reader are endowed with power in the creation of meaning, as meaning ‘must clearly be the product of an interaction between the textual signals and the reader’s acts of comprehension.’72 Thus readers respond to structural patterns in the text, and Iser uses the metaphor of the journey to describe the experience of reading, observing how the reader’s wandering viewpoint establishes a variety of perspectives on the text. He uses the terms ‘foreground-and-background’ or ‘theme-and-horizon’ to describe the way different aspects of the text move in and out of range as readers move through the text. In this way, readers are constantly integrating and reintegrating different features of the text as they concretize the literary work. But perhaps the most appealing aspect of Iser’s theory of reading for studies of Beowulf is the distinction he makes between a literary work’s original and later readers, a distinction that acknowledges that texts (and authors) presuppose readers with the necessary competence to read them. For a text like Beowulf, such readers long ago disappeared, and a theory of reading that can be applied to the poem must take account of this fact. Considering the relation of earlier readers to the poem is not an easy matter, for as John D. Niles puts it, ‘matters are complicated by the possibility that the poem had different audiences at different times.’73 Niles is speaking of the poem’s ‘original’ audience, and the difficulty of reconstructing that audience; one could also add to the equation the poem’s problematic literary history, for there is the difficulty of the poem’s ‘disappearance’ and the long silence between the poem’s original life and its rediscovery hundreds of years later with the recovery of the manuscript and its translation in the nineteenth century, leading to the responses reviewed earlier in this essay. Some studies have attempted to reconstruct the poem’s original audience and consider that audience’s response to the poem.74 Studies such as Niles’s view the poem primarily as an oral performance and see that reconstruction as crucial to an appreciation of the poem, even for modern readers. Niles acknowledges the many difficulties involved in determining

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Iser, ‘The Reading Process,’ 280. Iser, The Act of Reading, 9. Niles, ‘The Listening Audience,’ 205. For instance, Niles, ‘The Listening Audience,’ Foley, ‘Tradition and the Collective Talent,’ and Renoir, ‘Beowulf: A Contextual Introduction to Its Contents and Techniques.’ See note 65.

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what a contemporary performance of the poem might have been like, and recognizes that ultimately such a reconstruction is not really possible. However, he finds an opportunity for appreciating the poem as a listening audience might have appreciated it through the audience within the poem. Niles notes the many times the action of the poem has an interior audience, whether it is the collected warriors in the hall witnessing the encounter of Beowulf and Unferth or listening to the scop perform (an especially resonant model for the listeners of another scop performing the poem Beowulf), or the massed Danes and/or Geats waiting for Beowulf to emerge from one of his monster encounters. These interior audiences, through their responses to the action of the poem or sometimes simply through the direction of their gaze, guide the reactions of the exterior audience. In these moments, according to Niles, ‘the listeners are encouraged to use their own powers of imagination to visualize the scene just as it would appear to the Danes and the Geats.’75 In this way, Niles sees the audience within the poem as a functional model for the audience listening to the poem: ‘A complex interplay is established between the audience in the poem – the chorus, as it were – and the audience of the poem.’76 Niles is drawing on Iser when he speaks of perceiving the poem as ‘enter[ing] an arena in which speaker and audience participated in a game of the imagination.’77 Niles is aware that the correspondence between the interior and exterior audiences of the poem is not exact, as the exterior audience has knowledge that the interior audience does not, but he sees this as a desirable disparity: ‘By establishing a distance between the two points of view the poet is able to put his listeners into a slightly superior and more detached position than that held by any of the actors in the narrative.’78 Much of the superiority of that position, however, is lost for the modern audience, as the situation is ironically reversed – it is the interior audience who has the superior knowledge now, for they know who Scyld was, and why Hama stole the Brosinga mene. Niles acknowledges this irony when he speaks of the poem’s narrator as assuming that his audience shares with him certain values and knowledge (linguistic and cultural),79 knowledge that the modern audience of the poem lacks. Yet in spite of these acknowledged dispar-

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Niles, ‘The Listening Audience,’ 211. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 206. Niles acknowledges this debt; see note 2, page 299. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 207–8. Niles seems to be drawing on many reader-response critics’ constructs of the hypothetical reader when he makes this observation.

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ities between modern and original audiences, the interior audience still offers a way into the poem for the reader, as Niles calls on readers to bring to mind the oral performance of the poem as they read. What is important for critics like Niles, who examine the poem’s original life as oral performance, is the way in which the poem ‘seems to call upon its audience to take an active part in the composition of the narrative.’80 While studies like that of Niles focus on the original audience and its interaction with the poem, others have looked at the modern audience and its response to the text. Inseparable from the modern reader’s encounter with the text is the poem’s canonized status. Allen Frantzen discusses the way modern readers experience the poem as ‘a classic of English literature,’ and the difficulty of divorcing the individual reader’s experience of the text from the traditional and institutionalized view of the poem. According to Frantzen, the key to dislodging such received ideas is through ‘discussion of the text’s reception.’81 Such a discussion ‘asks readers to use their own experience as a point of entry into the text: in other words, to identify a shared horizon and work from it.’82 Frantzen’s reference to readers’ ‘shared horizon’ evokes the ideas of the leading proponent of reception theory, Hans Robert Jauss.83 Jauss examines the ‘specific communicational situation that we call reading,’84 emphasizing the importance of recognizing that the reader is fully cognizant of ‘the tradition that has given rise to the object of his/her reading.’85 The key term for Jauss is ‘horizon of expectations,’ which refers to ‘the sum total of reactions, prejudgments, verbal and other behavior that greet a work upon its appearance,’86 or put another way, ‘that necessary sociohistorical perspective that enables one to perceive, understand, and represent both the social world, and, as critic or reader, the world of the text.’87 When a 80 81 82 83

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Renoir, ‘A Contextual Introduction,’ 114. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 175. Ibid. See Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,’ in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 3–45). Originally delivered in German at Konstanz as an inaugural address in April 1967. Wlad Godzich, introduction to Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, by Hans Robert Jauss, tr. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), x. Originally published in German as Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (München: W. Fink, 1977; Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). Ibid. Ibid., xii. Michael Hays, foreword to Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding, by Hans Robert Jauss, ed. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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work does not fulfil the reader’s expectations, it creates an ‘aesthetic distance’ and remains rejected until ‘a horizon for it is forged.’88 The modern history of readers’ dissatisfaction with Beowulf’s structure, evidenced by the critical review in the opening pages of this essay, can be seen in these terms. As modern readers first encountered the poem in the nineteenth century, they tried to understand the poem’s structure in terms of expected aesthetic categories, and when it could not be contained by known definitions, they did not find it aesthetically pleasing. Critical attempts to come to terms with the poem’s unexpected structure can be seen as attempts to forge a new horizon for it, as new ways of describing and experiencing it are developed. With his concept of ‘horizons,’ Jauss focuses on the sociocritical function of literature, seeing ‘in this ability of literary texts to alter horizons of expectation a strong liberating force which works both upon the recipient, for it frees him/her of the views s/he held without necessarily being aware of them, and upon literature, and especially classical literature, for it permits us to recover its initial impact which had been eroded by centuries of veneration and monumentalization.’89 Frantzen utilizes Jauss’s ideas and terminology in an attempt to elucidate the reception history of Beowulf. His study of the poem’s reception is part of a general project to ‘recover, in the history of [its] reception, [its] cultural significance for earlier ages, and to suggest [its] cultural implications for our own.’90 He examines the scholarly reception of Beowulf upon its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, observing that scholars ‘seem to have decided what it meant by situating it in a horizon of texts constituted by the Iliad and the Aeneid, two texts often mentioned by early scholars of Beowulf.’91 The impulse to canonize the poem appears to have been part of Beowulf ’s reception from the beginning of its modern history, and as nineteenth-century scholarship reveals, this impulse is associated with the movement towards nationalism. For modern readers, it is as an item within the canon of English literature that they encounter the poem, and Frantzen suggests that in order to approach Beowulf at all, modern readers must examine the poem’s reception history and the editorial practices that are a part of it as ‘activities exterior to the origin they desire’ but which at the same time ‘constitute th[at] origin.’92

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1989), vii. Selections from Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (München: W. Fink, 1977; Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). Godzich, introduction to Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, xii. Ibid. Frantzen, preface to Desire for Origins, xiv. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 191. Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 200.

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The distinction, then, between modern readers and the original audience is an essential one for Beowulf studies, and as Frantzen points out, any examination of modern readers’ encounter with the poem must acknowledge the poem’s status as a ‘classic’ and its modern reception history. Most examinations of the reading process by reader-response critics fail to take such questions into account, with the important exception of Jauss’s colleague, Wolfgang Iser. Both Frantzen and Niles, with their differing orientations on the modern and original audiences of Beowulf respectively, draw on Iser’s theories, particularly his key notion of the reader’s active role as co-creator of the text.93 Iser is one of the few readerresponse critics to make the important distinction between readers contemporary with the generation of a text, whom he terms ‘participants,’ and later readers, whom he designates ‘observers.’ According to his view, the reading experience of observers and participants is quite different. For the observer, the later reader, the text will ‘re-create that very social and cultural context that brought about the problems which the text itself is concerned with.’ That is to say, while the participant will see ‘what he would not have seen in the course of his everyday life,’ the later reader will ‘grasp something which has hitherto never been real for him.’94 That distinction is key for readers of Beowulf, and it is certainly true that the modern reader’s encounter with the poem ‘brings to life’ a very different world. It is also true that for the vast majority of modern readers, their encounter with the poem takes place not as an oral performance or as casual reading, but through a translation and within the classroom, and that much of what takes place in the classroom involves familiarizing students with that foreign world. No responsible modern translation or edition of the poem exists without accompanying material – prefaces and appendices, introductions and notes, frequently longer than the poem itself and all designed to ‘explain’ the poem. Such introductions to the poem inevitably include explanations as to the nature of Germanic culture, history, and society in order to enable readers to ‘understand’ the poem and ‘appreciate’ its oddities. Yet the impulse to explain away differences and produce a familiar, coherent text is one that critics like Frantzen and Overing urge readers to resist, or at least be cognizant of. The reception history of Beowulf reveals a sense of discomfort with the poem as scholars struggled to assimilate it into their known purview. Early attempts to situate the poem as romance or epic, Christian or pagan, poetry 93 See Niles, Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition, 206, and Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 179–84 and passim. 94 Iser, The Act of Reading, 78–9.

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or history, reveal this scholarly sense of unease and demonstrate the urge to define the poem according to known categories. Commentaries and editorial practices95 exhibit this same anxiety concerning the text, as editors have attempted to smooth out the poem’s rough spots and create a coherent, consistent text. This has been Beowulf ’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception history; however, the critical climate is changing, as evidenced by such critics as Frantzen and Overing. Their work demonstrates a resistance to such moves of ‘smoothing out,’ and represents a call to preserve the text’s difficulties and celebrate its moments of discontinuity. There is evidence that their call is being heeded by the larger critical community, as the teaching of Beowulf now frequently involves the examining of problems of translation, for instance. In his work, Frantzen urges scholars to make such issues a central part of their teaching of the poem, stating that one can even ‘raise the questions of translation, historical reception, and incompleteness when teaching Beowulf in translation in a survey course.’96 Modern scholarship has shown an awareness of the kinds of issues Frantzen and Overing raise, and an increasing likelihood of accepting, rather than glossing over, the poem’s complexities, including structural ones. For instance, in a review of the 2001 translation of Beowulf, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe praises the poem’s translator, Roy M. Liuzza, for preserving traditionally ‘difficult’ readings and resisting the urge to emend for the sake of better sense: ‘Liuzza’s translation respects points of difficulty in the text.’97 She gives the example of the ‘vexed passage’ in which Grendel’s mother is referred to by a masculine pronoun, which Liuzza preserves (line 1392). While most translators silently ‘correct’ the presumed error, Liuzza does not, a move O’Keeffe praises, feeling that in doing so Liuzza preserves ‘the Old English text’s repeated manifestations of discomfort at this female combatant.’98 Liuzza’s decision as translator, and O’Keeffe’s praising of it, demonstrates a new awareness of the issues of reading and writing that critics such as Frantzen have called attention to. Unexpected pronouns are not the only ‘difficulties’ readers encounter in Beowulf. The structure of the poem is another such perceived difficulty, and the vagaries of critical opinion demonstrate readers’ sense of dissatisfaction with the poem’s structure and attempts to deal with it. Early readers objected to the poem’s abruptness, among other things, and their discomfort

95 According to Frantzen, part of the poem’s reception; see Frantzen, Desire for Origins, xii. 96 Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 177. 97 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, review of Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, by Roy M. Liuzza, The Medieval Review 13 July 2001. 98 Ibid.

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can be seen to arise from the moments of discontinuity in the text. Their difficulty in resolving such ‘gaps’ into a unified and cohesive literary work of a familiar type was manifested in their negative judgments of the poem, and their desire to find an explanation for what they perceived as structural defects.99 Such sources of dissatisfaction can be seen as discontinuous moments in the text, and their critical rewriting, whether editorial emendation or scholarly criticism, can be seen as efforts to make the discontinuous continuous, and create a smooth, whole text. The more recent critics considered here, like Frantzen and Overing, urge readers, rather, to embrace such moments of discontinuity and read with greater awareness, being conscious that reading is at the same time writing – writing the gaps in the text. It is in this critical spirit that I wish to ‘read’ Beowulf, to re-examine questions specifically of the poem’s structure. Iser’s theories of reading prove especially fruitful for such an examination, both for the distinction he makes between earlier readers (participants) and modern ones (observers), and for the emphasis he places on moments of discontinuity in texts as places where readers co-create the literary work. His theory of the act of reading seems custom-made for a poem with as many ‘gaps’ as Beowulf, and readers must not only ‘write’ the gaps they encounter but ‘re-write’ some of the gaps that have been obliterated by acts of critical closure. Such an awareness of the reception history of the poem, and all the editorial practices that are a part of it, is an essential part of a modern reading of the poem. In the evaluating of structure that is a part of the process of reading, it is important to be aware of the reader’s own desire for coherence and, as Overing suggests, ‘the possibility that the desire for unity originates and terminates within the reader.’100 This desire for a unified literary work so evident in this survey of criticism suggests that desire for wholeness is based on prior aesthetic categories. The re-evaluation of the poem, and the critical response to its structure, can be seen as the result of new aesthetic categories, as can reader-response theory itself. In this view aesthetic responses to the poem represent an interplay between elements present in the text and the desires of readers. 99 Some of the moments of discontinuity often fixated on were the fifty-year jump in time that takes place in just ten lines (2200–9), the frequently abrupt transitions between digressions and the main narrative, as well as the frequency and length of those digressions, the regular retelling of events, with differences in detail, the untold parts of the narrative, and the relation of the poem’s numbered sections (fitts) to its narrative structure; Shippey offers a brief discussion of these sources of dissatisfaction in ‘Structure and Unity,’ 169–70. 100 Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf, 33.

12 ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn’: Or, Mimesis 4a, the Chapter Auerbach Never Wrote tom shippey

In the spring of 1963 my university career reached a very low ebb. I was then a second-year undergraduate reading English at Cambridge. In the Easter vacation, for complex personal reasons, I found myself living in a boarding house in a small town in North Central Scotland, the other inhabitants of which were members of the Close Brethren, a religious sect forbidden to have social contact with non-members. I knew almost no one in the town, my board cost me five pounds a week, and I had no money other than my State Scholarship, which was supposed to support me during term time only. Worse than all this, though, was a strong sense of taedium vitae created by the Cambridge English course. At that time the Department of AngloSaxon, Norse and Celtic did not exist, and Old English was a very minority interest. The English Tripos was dominated by F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. The most prestigious optional paper offered was the one on ‘English Moralists’ (cynics added, ‘from Plato to Sartre’), and the general ethos has been perfectly described by Leonard Jackson, who must have been there very shortly before my own time. Literary criticism was presented as ‘a peculiarly honest and self-analytical version of the pursuit of personal truth,’ a ‘training in emotional honesty.’ But Jackson goes on to comment, ‘The sad thing was, it was also a training in conformism; in emotional dependence; in literary snobbery; in political apathy; and in self-deceit.’1 My feelings, in the spring of 1963, were less focused and organized than that, and my main sense was that the literary world had shrunk. Only certain authors were approved. Only certain works by certain authors were approved. Only certain passages in certain works by certain authors were approved. 1 Leonard Jackson, The Dematerialisation of Karl Marx: Literature and Marxist Theory (London and New York: Longman, 1994), 16.

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Unerringly detecting these passages, these touchstones of literary worth, was what picked you out as a first-class sensibility: but how often could you read those over and over again? I really had got tired of D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster and ‘the great tradition.’ In this depressing set of circumstances, my dying enthusiasm was revived and rescued by one book, which must have come into my hands by chance. It was Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, translated by Willard Trask, with its twenty chapters on works and authors from the Bible and Homer through Ammianus Marcellinus and Dante and on to Schiller, Stendhal, and beyond, every chapter except the first preceded by a long quotation in the original language, with Trask’s English translation.2 Most of the authors discussed I had never read, and half of them I had never heard of. I was, however, a good enough linguist already – language study was regarded in the Cambridge English department with something like contempt – to read most of the passages and follow most of the discussions. It was like having an oxygen mask clapped on suddenly as one was perishing from emphysema. I read the book over and over again, with fascination and delight, and have continued to do so ever since. Many years later I realized something else about the book. Auerbach was a native German speaker, and a professor of Romance languages. He was not, however, very interested in or knowledgeable about English literature: the chapters on Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf were perhaps the weakest of the twenty. And he never said anything at all about medieval English literature, which I had taken to at Cambridge partly as a refuge from the cult of monoglot sensibility, and also as a result of the inspirational teaching of my college supervisor A.C. Spearing, an exception to all the strictures made above. The thought occurred, what would Auerbach have said if he had turned his attention to Old English? And specifically to Beowulf, which seemed to fit so well into his overall schema, despite being so very different indeed from anything else he considered? With this thought in mind, and with deep respect and even deeper gratitude, I have ventured to add my thoughts on Beowulf, in as Auerbachian a style as I can manage, to Auerbach’s schema, where they would fit very naturally between the chapter on Gregory of Tours, ‘Sicharius and Chramnesindus,’ and the one on the Chanson de Roland, ‘Roland and Ganelon.’ 2 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), first German publication 1946.

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Near the end of the poem an unnamed messenger reports the death of Beowulf, and prophesies a future of defeat and disaster for his people. The 72 lines below form rather more than half of his long speech, and recall an old victory snatched from defeat, but certain to provoke future revenge: ‘Nu ys leodum wen orleghwile, syððan underne Froncum ond Frysum fyll cyninges wide weorðeð. Wæs sio wroht scepen heard wið Hugas, syððan Higelac cwom faran flotherge on Fresna land, þær hyne Hetware hilde genægdon, elne geeodon mid ofermægene, þæt se byrnwiga bugan sceolde; feoll on feðan, nalles frætwe geaf ealdor dugoðe. Us wæs a syððan Merewigingas milts ungyfeðe. Ne ic te Sweoðeode sibbe oððe treowe wihte ne wene; ac wæs wide cuð þætte Ongenðio ealdre besnyðede Hæðcen Hreþling wið Hrefnawudu, þa for onmedlan ærest gesohton Geata leode Guð-Scilfingas. Sona him se froda fæder Ohtheres, eald ond egesfull, ondslyht ageaf, abreot brimwisan, bryd ahredde gomela iomeowlan golde berofene, Onelan modor ond Ohtheres; ond ða folgode feorhgeniðlan, oððæt hi oðeodon earfoðlice in Hrefnesholt hlafordlease. Besæt ða sinherge sweorda lafe, wundum werge; wean oft gehet earmre teohhe ondlonge niht, cwæð he on mergenne meces ecgum getan wolde, sume on galgtreowum fuglum to gamene. Frofor eft gelamp sarigmodum somod ærdæge, syððan hie Hygelaces horn ond byman

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gealdor ongeaton, þa se goda com leoda dugoðe on last faran. Wæs sio swatswaðu Sweona ond Geata, wælræs weora wide gesyne, hu ða folc mid him fæhðe towehton. Gewat him ða se goda mid his gædelingum, frod felageomor fæsten secean; eorl Ongenþio ufor oncirde. Hæfde Higelaces hilde gefrunen, wlonces wigcræft; wiðres ne truwode, þæt he sæmannum onsacan mihte, heaðoliðendum, hord forstandan, bearn ond bryde; beah eft þonan eald under eorðweall. Þa wæs æht boden Sweona leodum, segn Higelaces freoðowong þone forð ofereodon, syððan Hreðlingas to hagan þrungon. Þær wearð Ongenðiow ecgum sweorda, blondenfexa, ond bid wrecen, þæt se þeodcyning ðafian sceolde Eofores anne dom. Hyne yrringa Wulf Wonreding wæpne geræhte, þæt him for swenge swat ædrum sprong forð under fexe. Næs he forht swa ðeh, gomela Scilfing, ac forgeald hraðe wyrsan wrixle wælhlem þone, syððan ðeodcyning þyder oncirde. Ne meahte se snella sunu Wonredes ealdum ceorle ondslyht giofan, ac he him on heafde helm ær gescer, þæt he blode fah bugan sceolde, feoll on foldan. Næs he fæge þa git, ac he hyne gewyrpte, þeah ðe him wund hrine. Let se hearda Higelaces þegn bradne mece, þa his broðor læg, eald sweord eotonisc, entiscne helm brecan ofer bordweal; ða gebeah cyning, folces hyrde wæs in feorh dropen.’

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[‘Now the people can expect a period of conflict, once the fall of the king becomes openly known among Franks and Frisians. The bitter grievance against the Hugas was brought about when Hygelac came journeying with a sea-borne army into the land of the Frisians, where the Hetware subdued him in battle, with greater forces brought it about that the mailed fighter had to bow in death; the chieftain fell in the troop, in no way gave adornments to tried warriors. The favour of the Merovingian has been denied to us ever since. Nor do I expect the least friendship or loyalty from the Swedish nation; for it was widely known that Ongentheow took the life of Hæthcyn Hrethling near Ravenswood when the men of the Geats in their arrogance first went looking for the War-Scylfings. Straight away Ohthere’s wise father, old and terrible, struck a return blow, cut down the sea-king; he rescued the aged woman, his wife of former years, the mother of Onela and Ohthere, stripped of gold; and then he pursued his mortal enemies until with difficulty they escaped into Ravenswood without their lord. Then with a great army he besieged those whom the swords had left, exhausted with wounds; frequently through the night he promised miseries to the wretched band, said that in the morning he would cut them to pieces with the blade’s edge – some on gallows-trees as sport for the birds. Together with daybreak comfort returned to their grieving minds when they heard Hygelac’s battle-cry, horn and trumpet, as the great man came following their track with the tried warriors of the people. The bloody trail of Swedes and Geats, the deadly onslaught of men, was widely visible – how these peoples had awaked the feud between them. Then old, mourning much, the great man went with his kinsmen to seek his stronghold; the warrior Ongentheow turned aside to higher ground. He had heard of Hygelac’s warfare, the proud man’s skill in battle; he did not trust in resistance, that he could fight off the seamen, defend hoard, women and children from the war-voyagers; thence the old man drew back beneath an earthen rampart. Then pursuit was given to the people of the Swedes, Hygelac’s banners over-ran the place of refuge once the Hrethlings pressed forward to the enclosure. There the white-haired Ongentheow was brought to bay by the edges of swords, so that the nation’s king had to consent to the sole decree of Eofor. Wulf Wonreding had struck him angrily with his weapon so that as a result of the blow, blood spurted forth from the veins beneath his hair. However, he was not afraid, the aged Scylfing, but once he turned towards him, the nation’s king swiftly repaid the blow with a worse exchange. Wonred’s brave son could not give the old fellow a return blow, for he had first sheared through the helmet on his head, so that he had to sink down, stained

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with blood – fell to the ground. He was not yet doomed, for he recovered, though the wound hurt him. As his brother lay there, the stern thane of Hygelac let his broad blade, an ancient sword made by ogres, break the gigantic helmet behind the shield-wall; then the king sank down, the people’s guardian was mortally stricken.’]3

The first thought that is likely to strike a classically educated reader of the poem Beowulf is that here, after a lapse of some 1500 years, we are once again in the world of Homer. The point was made again and again by British scholars of the last century, still embedded (as German scholars were not) in the Oxbridge traditions of Latin and Greek. An anonymous reviewer for the Athenaeum commented in 1892 that if one wished to draw parallels with Virgil, those with Homer were far more numerous, closer to hand, and ‘really startling,’4 a claim echoed in 1897 by W.P. Ker and in 1912 by H.M. Chadwick. And indeed the resemblances are evident. Here, as in Homer, we have the bards singing of ‘the great deeds of men’ before their chieftains; as in Homer, there is in the world of the poem no trace of writing, or more accurately, only such traces as suggest that the feat has been heard of, but is not yet practised or familiar. The signs of a fairy-tale origin for Beowulf are much the same as those for Odysseus: great strength, skill in wrestling and swimming, names which hint at ursine nature. Most of all, just as in Homer, there is the utter rejection of suspense as an adornment of narrative. The incident a little before the passage quoted in which Wiglaf draws his sword to go to the help of his leader in the dragon’s jaws – only for the poet to stop and to tell us, in leisurely style, where the sword came from and who were its previous two owners – this parallels in almost every way the account of the scar of Odysseus, given at a similarly critical moment and at similarly distracting length, in Book 19 of the Odyssey. But if we look more closely a different picture emerges. Where, in the passage I cite, is the extreme clarity of detail, the determined externalization of all thoughts and emotions, so characteristic of Homer? The passage is filled with unanswered questions, to such an extent that one may at times 3 Text and translation are taken from Beowulf, ed. and trans. M.J. Swanton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 172–7. In view of the comments made below, I should state that I use his work precisely because he is an exacting scholar translating carefully from his own edition of the text, in a manner entirely representative of general scholarly practice then and since. 4 The reviewer may have been Henry Bradley; see T.A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, eds., Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 475–7.

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wonder whether the poet meant what he said, or knew (or cared) what he was saying. Here the Messenger goes to announce the death of Beowulf to his retainers, left behind. They are described in line 2 of his speech, just before the passage quoted, as the eorlwerod – the warband of nobles. Eorl (it would eventually become a rank) is in the vocabulary of Beowulf a highly honorific word, announcing at once nobility of birth and of behaviour. Wiglaf, Beowulf’s most loyal relative and retainer, has just previously declared, in the gnomic manner of one who states self-evident truth, that ‘Death is better than a life of shame, for every earl (eorla gehwylcum).’ So what, then, is this band of ‘earls’ doing, sitting passively while their leader fights and dies? Even the cowards whom Wiglaf has just berated and threatened did at least go as far as the dragon’s mound; and yet there is no sign that the poet means any criticism of these men, or their social class, or their social structure. Perhaps the stay-at-homes were merely obeying orders, and that is why their earl-status is not really in doubt. But they sit there, we are also told, ‘the morning-long day’ (morgenlongne dæg). Surely this is a mistake. A day is longer than a morning. Elsewhere in Old English poetry we find the expression ‘summer-long day’ (sumorlangne dæg), and the point of this is immediately clear: it is a day as long as a summer’s day, the 17–18 hours of the high Northern latitudes. Our translator, I note, has attempted to save the poet’s face by suggesting the phrasing ‘all morning long,’ but we will soon come to see that saving the face of the poet has long been a major activity of the poem’s editors, glossators, and translators. The very line after ‘morning-long day’ – and so far we have found something to balk at in three lines out of four – announces that the waiting men were ‘in expectation of both, the day’s end and the return of the dear man’ (bega on wenum, endedogores ond eftcymes leofes monnes). If they were really expecting both these things to happen, that is, that their lord Beowulf would come home like a ploughman at the end of the day, then they were grievously deceived – and also strangely optimistic, for they must have known (and indeed we are told later that the feeling was so strong that the retainers as a body tried to dissuade their leader from proceeding) that the chance of surviving a single-handed encounter with a dragon was not high. Our translator has worked hard to reassure us once more, saying that these men were not expecting two things, but one or the other: either death (‘the last day’) or return, that is to say, either failure or success, a much more sensible attitude. But that is not what the words say. One can go through collecting these local failures, often signalled by desperate evasions on the part of the poem’s friends. The Geats, in the account that the Messenger gives of an incident in their wars with the Swedes,

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quoted at length above, sweep forward over the freoðowong, that is, the ‘peace-plain.’ But of course it is not a peace-plain, it is just the opposite, a battle-field across which one can see the ‘bloody swathe’ (swatswaðu) of war – the latter an excellent image, at once connecting hand-to-hand fighting with, and distancing it from, the peaceful task of mowing hay. The translator suggests, trying to make phrase fit context, ‘place of refuge.’ The Swedes are retreating to a strong-point across a plain that was peaceful because – they thought that in it they could never be challenged? Because it was in some way or other holy ground? But if the latter were the case, we would surely expect some comment on the Geats’ bold or rash or sacrilegious violation. The fact is, we do not know how to fit the plain meaning of the phrase to its context. The experience is too common in Beowulf to be ignored. A classically educated critic might say that this is merely the result of poetic ineptitude. Unlike the poems of Homer, admired and preserved from as far as we know their inception, there is no sign that anyone in the Anglo-Saxon world thought anything of Beowulf, whether poem or hero. Perhaps it was a botched job from the beginning. But once again, if we continue to make the comparison with Homer, other points arise, much more to the poem’s credit. It was said by Auerbach that Homer knows no depth, knows ‘only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.’5 How different is the Old English poem, how very much in possession of a historical and political perspective that he deploys without the slightest hesitation or contradiction! From the start of the poem we become accustomed both to flashbacks to the past, as with Wiglaf’s sword, and also to proleptic comment, on the fate of Heorot or of Wealhtheow’s torque. Here the Messenger is concerned, after he has announced his main news, Beowulf’s death, to say immediately, and in an entirely un-Homeric way, what all this is going to mean. His account is furthermore clearly and neatly chiastic. First he says that he expects trouble from the Franks and Frisians, explains why, and sums up with the grim understatement that ‘ever since then the favour of the Merovingian has not been given us’; this is immediately balanced by saying that the same can be expected from the Swedes, and this too is expanded by saying why. This second explanation turns into a long and detailed account of a particular incident, but the thread is not lost, for at the end the Messenger will say again that ‘That is the feud and enmity … I expect’ from the Swedes, and will round off his long survey, extending over hundreds of miles in space 5 Auerbach, Mimesis, 5.

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and many years in time, by saying that all this will come about once the Swedes hear of Beowulf’s fall, the statement about the Swedes in lines 3002–3 exactly balancing that in lines 2911–13 about the Franks. The speech is clear, pointed, relevant, well-informed, and possessed once again of historical perspective and political, even geopolitical, awareness. It is very far removed from Homer’s bright but shallow eternal present. Only at one point does it seem to get out of hand – for the Messenger’s intention is clearly to motivate Swedish vengeance and set a tone of foreboding, whereas by the end of his story of the Fall of King Ongentheow he seems to have become possessed by a sense of immediate triumph, of duty richly rewarded, which is not apposite to the immediate situation. How should we explain this seeming paradox of local ineptitude, of a kind which Homer would never have tolerated, combined with a wideranging vision which Homer never aspired to, and which Tacitus would have been compelled to admire? An explanation of sorts is provided by the ‘oral-formulaic theory’ (of course first applied and most convincingly demonstrated with regard to Homer). According to this, one should note how several of the most marked and obvious features of the style of a poem such as Beowulf fit the requirements of a poet composing extemporaneously. The constant epic ‘variations,’ by which the same referent is mentioned again and again without advancing the progress of the sentence, have the functions of gaining time, and allowing transit to the next semantically vital word while maintaining alliteration. The advanced vocabulary of synonyms gives the bard something to fit a variety of alliterative slots. A system of repeated formulae matches grammar to metre. None of these features is itself intrinsically inartistic, though the Romanticizing bias of literary studies has often created a feeling that they must be so. Nevertheless, one result of ‘oral-formulaic composition’ in the alliterative mode must be this: words that carry alliteration (words of high alliterative ‘rank’)6 are likely to carry relatively little meaning, to be only generally appropriate. In Beowulf the Danes – the same Danes – are described as North-, South-, East-, and West-Danes, ‘Danes from all quarters of heaven,’ as an irritated German scholar once remarked.7 None of the points of the compass (in every case they carry alliteration, as the word

6 As defined by Marie Borroff, with regard however to Middle English, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 52–3. The concept originated from the work of August Brink forty years before. 7 It was the great Karl Müllenhoff, writing as a young man in 1844; see Shippey and Haarder, Beowulf: The Critical Heritage, 252.

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‘Danes’ does not) means anything in these contexts. But if they mean nothing, is it not the case that the words objected to above, eorl-, morgen-, freoðu-, likewise do not mean very much? As long as they were familiar, and fitted the general tone of the passage, they could be carried without too much disturbance to the listening, rather than the reading, still less studying audience. It was only when the keen editors of the poem turned their Scharfsinnigkeit on to it that evasive and imaginative glosses, sharp and decisive interpretations, had to be created. Yet this brings us only back to a variant of the question already asked above. It must be a corollary of what has just been said that Beowulf lacks the poetic qualities that we have been taught to admire. Does it not also possess poetic qualities that we have not been taught to admire? Which we sense only dimly, or may indeed miss altogether? Is this not a variant of the contradiction noted above, that of sub-Homeric local failures combined with supra-Homeric extended excellences? Further analysis of our passage shows some strange features both in the grammar of its sentences and in its manner of narration. An early sign is at line 2923. The Messenger says that he does not at all expect faith or friendship from the Swedes, ‘but (ac) it was widely known that …’ The adversative ‘but’ does not seem the right word here. One would expect instead a causal conjunction, a ‘because.’ The ‘but’ does make a sort of sense if one assumes that what is in the Messenger’s mind is something like, ‘we might have hoped for friendship from the Swedes, under some circumstances, but (unfortunately) it is now all too well-known that …’ This is not what is said, however, and in any case there is a certain failure of immediate logic in the Messenger’s example. The killing of Hæthcyn son of Hrethel by Ongentheow after all takes us back three kings on the Geatish side, and two at least on the Swedish side, and of the intermediate kings at least one on each side has been killed by the rival dynasty. Furthermore, there has been at least one change of sides, of which the poet is well aware, in that the present Swedish king Eadgils owes his throne to Geatish help, and might be expected not to ally himself with the policy of his uncle (whom he killed) or his grandfather. What the Messenger says fits the mood of foreboding, and is in no way contradicted by anything else in the poem, but it is not a full explanation: Homer would have told us much more, personally, if much less politically. This uncertainty is then repeated both narratively and grammatically. Narratively, we have in lines 2928–32 one of the most mysterious episodes of the poem, an episode at which moreover there was no reason even to hint. The ‘old father of Ohthere … rescued the bride, the old woman stripped of gold, the mother of Onela and Ohthere.’ We have of course been given no previous indication that Ongentheow’s wife (for such she

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must be) had ever been captured in the first place, nor how this came about, nor why. This personal insult might be the motivation for Ongentheow’s fury, as he kills the king of the Geats and pursues and surrounds the beaten survivors, shouting at them all through the night that he will take no prisoners. What we still know little or nothing about is what motivated the Geats to embark on the expedition in the first place. Was it for onmedlan, ‘in arrogance,’ as the messenger says in the speech cited? Or had it been provoked by the Swedes, as Beowulf himself says some five hundred lines earlier, declaring with satisfaction that ‘my kinsmen [i.e., his uncles Hæthcyn and Hygelac] avenged that feud … although one of them bought it with his life’? One could make a list of the questions aroused by this passage, all the way from ‘who started it?’ to ‘what had Ongentheow’s queen to do with it all?’ and ‘why is Eadgils not even expected to remember his alliance?’ Meanwhile, the grammar of the passage strongly echoes this mixture of clear information and spreading uncertainty. It has been remarked before how powerful and how frequent in Beowulf is the device of ‘essential hypotaxis,’8 never better exemplified than in lines 2941–5. The defeated Geats have nothing to expect but death by torture, to be hung on gallows as ‘sport for the birds. Comfort then came to the sorry-hearted with the dawn …’ What in the world could bring them comfort? It is there in the subordinate clause, ‘once they heard the horns and trumpets of Hygelac,’ bringing a second army to their rescue. What we must imagine really happened, of course, was that they heard the horns and trumpets first, and then they realized whose they were, and then they experienced comfort: the dawn of day and the dawn of realization come together, so to speak. But the Beowulf-poet never presents information like this. He all but invariably (the statistics of this are complex, but the comment may stand) gives a result first, in the main clause, the cause of it second, in a subordinate clause: see, in this passage alone, lines 2911, 2914, 2960, and (feebly) 2970. The effect is, of course, to create something like shock, the shock of sudden reversal – the opposite, one may say, of the suspense that the poem so conspicuously shuns. Meanwhile, the obverse of this ‘essential hypotaxis’ is pronounced ‘causal parataxis,’9 which we see again in well-nigh

8 The term is Claes Schaar’s, in Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group, Lund Studies in English 17 (Lund: Gleerup, 1949), 153–72. 9 See once more Schaar, Critical Studies in the Cynewulf Group, 153–72. Schaar’s stylistic insights into Old English poetry have rarely been matched, but he used them primarily for the limited purpose of determining whether the Cynewulf corpus extended beyond the four self-labeled poems.

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perfect form (obscured to some extent by the editor’s well-meaning modern punctuation) in lines 2949–57, a sequence of five main clauses broken only by one noun-clause expansion or ‘variation,’ all of which might well be linked only by semicolons. The horns and trumpets take us straight to the ‘bloody swathe’ – battle has been joined, it seems, between lines 2945 and 2946. But as soon as it is joined the Swedish king retreats, though neither here nor later is there the slightest suggestion that he is afraid; indeed, the poet explicitly rejects the idea at line 2967. No, he is making a genuine tactical retreat, for good reason: ‘The good man went to seek the fortress; Ongentheow the earl turned back; he had heard of Hygelac’s warfare; he had no faith in resistance, in defending his bride and children [children? there has been no suggestion before that they need protecting, indeed just the reverse]; the old man turned back.’ Apart from the first two clauses, which are semantically parallel, surely it is obvious that between all the rest there is a causal connection. Ongentheow turned back because he had heard of Hygelac’s warfare, therefore he had no faith in resistance, and so the old man turned back. But these self-evident connections are omitted, just as the self-evident chronology of lines 2941–5 was inverted. In at least a similar way, the ‘but’ which is cried out for in the middle of line 2941 is not there, but is found in the middle of line 2923, where one might have expected a temporal conjunction of some kind, a ‘once’ or an ‘ever since.’ I do not think that these illogicalities are accidental, nor the result of mere barbarian confusion of mind (Beowulf has a much stronger sense of probabilities, of cause and effect, than Roland, and far more than Chrétien de Troyes). The poet knows what he is doing. But he does not care to do what might have been expected from any author still connected with the Classical tradition. His narrative mode does not come at any remove from Virgil, or from Homer, just as his often pronouncedly periodic structure, complex though it is, contains features not to be found in any Latin model. The concern of the poet is above all, and felt much more strongly than any concern with clarity or logical order of narrative, to express the ethos of a group. Exactly what the group is is less easy to say, or to express in terms of our own class structures. One might say, it is a military aristocracy, and that has a certain truth. However, it is not a hereditary aristocracy, or if it is, the hereditary principle is not yet strongly felt: Wiglaf tells the retainers who failed to support Beowulf that not only they but their families will forfeit their land for this, a punishment inconceivable in a later and more fully feudal regime. Moreover, the aristocratic sentiment does not seem yet to be fully exclusive. Beowulf’s retainers, loyal or disloyal, are all ‘earls’ (eorlas), but the word ‘churl’ (ceorl) is used in the poem without hostility

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or condescension: Ongentheow the king of the Swedes is described as ‘the old churl’ (ealdum ceorle) at line 2972, but the context is admiring and even triumphant. It is true that the lowest classes do not appear, or barely appear (the thief who stole the dragon’s cup may or may not be a slave on the run), but the best term I can find for the group whose ethos is here defined is ‘the honourable society’: and though this is an exclusive group, it seems that many may aspire to be part of it, perhaps even the Benedictine monks to whom we owe its preservation and (perhaps) its composition, and even females – for though they do not join in war, the main proving ground of the honourable society, they are free to comment on it, to act as its instigators (Hildegyth in the Waldere poem), or its conscience (Wealhtheow in this poem). In extreme cases, such as that of Judith, they may even engage in an analogue of heroic activity. The group is also defined by behaviour, and this is what the poet is concerned above all to stress by every available device of style. The admired virtue is not the dash and élan of Roland and Charlemagne’s cavalry, rather self-control, self-restraint, endurance, and discipline (qualities the descendants of this society have continued to admire ever since). This is what the warriors are showing when they sit silently and passively waiting for their leader’s return, or for the news of his death. There is no sarcasm in the term for them, bordhæbbende, even though they are so to speak ‘sitting on their shields’ at the time. There is a time for dignified silence, and there is a time for plain speech, as the Messenger shows when he lyt swigode (‘kept back little’), and spoke soðlice. We translate soð as ‘truth,’ but the word derives from the verb ‘to be,’ and still has a base-meaning of ‘factually, realistically, the way things are.’ Even more admirable, however, than dignified silence and plain speech is something between the two, the litotes or understatement by which the hero, or the poet, announces that he has grasped the situation fully but will not allow it to perturb his self-control. In Beowulf this has become a verbal habit, used at times almost randomly. The Messenger’s remark that ‘the favour of the Merovingian has not been given to us’ is a shadow of the real situation – the Merovingian hates them bitterly, intends only their destruction – but it shows him at once observing this and not giving way to fear even of what he knows is going to happen. His remark that Hygelac (being dead) was by no means in a position to distribute treasure to his followers may also come over as the rueful amusement with which failure should be confronted. On the other hand, there seems little point in the statement that the dragon is ‘sick from dagger-wounds,’ when it is in fact stone-dead; though similar emollients are often found in the language of violent

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groups to the present day. Dignity can of course be expressed in action as well as speech, as we see here in Wiglaf holding the ‘head-watch’ over his kinsman, eorl ofer oðrum unlifigendum. The first half-line expresses the strong cohesion of the group, the honourable society; one earl does a good turn for another as a matter of course. The second half-line expresses the power of this that overrides futility, for the bond is broken (no, it has not been broken) by death. Another aspect of the ethos that shows markedly in this passage is its moral neutrality. It is perhaps an accident that line 2927 is perfectly ambiguous. Did the Geats attack the Swedes, or was it the Swedes (the WarScilfings) who attacked the Geats? Either view is grammatically possible, and if opinion has come down on the former alternative, because of the later word ahredde, the latter alternative was expressed in Beowulf’s own account of the matter five hundred lines before. The poet does not seem to care who started it: if it was the Geats, he still views their triumph (on this occasion) without rooting in it the disaster that he now predicts they will suffer. His attitude to Ongentheow is similarly complex – or perhaps we should say it is simple, and it is only our bourgeois nationalism that fails to appreciate the simplicity. Ongentheow is a deadly enemy, and would in our day be considered a war criminal, but there is no doubt as to his courage, and he is acting like a king and a husband, a ‘keeper of the people’ (folces hyrde) indeed. So there is no difficulty in the fact that both Hygelac and Ongentheow, the opposing chieftains, can be called se goda within five lines of each other (2944, 2949). They are both good men; warfare is not between a good side and a bad side; there is no need to claim the (often false) moral authority of modern war movies. Moreover, just as with Homer, the poet’s ‘oral-formulaic’ style (whether genuine or a literary imitation of Virgilian type) provides him with an inexhaustible flow of phrases, collocations, and even dislocations that express his ethos, which in a strong sense are his ethos and that of his group. There are phrases to express the endurance of the fate that earls must expect, always be prepared for (I give the nearest modern alliterative variants I can find, straying from exact meaning, for which see further below): to fall on foot (line 2919), to weary of wounds, to bear woe of wounds (2937), to see the swathe of sweat (2946), the sweat of swinges (2966), the folk feuding (2948) over bairns and brides (2956), to fare on the flood (2915), to bear lief and loath at once (2910). The phrases can vary wildly in their contexts, both semantic and grammatical: if old and earth are put together, one expects a sense of age going into the grave, but that is not there at line 2957 – or perhaps it is, for though grammar rules the thought out, context

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and verbal habit rule it back in. And, of course, the poet can opt not for close connections but for sharp disconnections, as he does through his handling of temporal clauses or through his manipulation of causal parataxis (another version of understatement, leaving out what must be obvious to anyone, or anyone instructed in the ethos). The strong familiarity of the phraseology leaves the poet alert for variation, but unconcerned about direct repetition. Both Hygelac and Wulf Wonreding bugan sceolde, the one at line 2918, the other at 2974, but the repetition means nothing: it is just the way things are. Finally, we should note how ill-equipped is our modern language for the poet’s project. The difficulties of our translator (M.J. Swanton)10 have been mentioned here and there above, and they are the general difficulties of generations of editors and translators. Much of the activity of Beowulf courses as they are commonly taught consists in professors teaching students the laboriously evolved solutions to Beowulfian problems, from Klaeber’s worthy glossary. But the problems are ours, not the poem’s. One notices here the refusal to translate goda in lines 2944, 2949 as ‘good’ – they cannot both be good men; surely, they must be ‘great men’ instead. Ongentheow must be an ‘old fellow,’ for ‘churl’ or ‘carl’ would be – well, churlish. The leap from Eofor to Wulf in lines 2964–5, perfectly in accordance with the poet’s readiness to manipulate time in the interest of drama, has to be reorganized chronologically through the insertion of a schoolmasterly pluperfect, repeated a few lines later. But how dull it all then seems! Beowulf lies dead ‘as a result of the serpent’s actions’ – perhaps the serpent, or its heirs, will be charged for this, in some Dark Age police court! And there sits Wiglaf, ‘one warrior by the lifeless other,’ a clear translation that fulfils the examination requirement of translating all the words in the poem and making them fit, but destroys the sense alluded to earlier, of cohesion broken, but unbroken. Accommodations of this sort are inevitable in any modern translation, and I have no wish to criticize Professor Swanton for his. They are forced on us, among other things, by the rigid word-order rules which modern English has developed. But one cannot avoid a sense also of a rational, moralizing, essentially bourgeois society coming face to face linguistically with its dread opposite – and forever dropping its eyes. Beowulf represents a poetic tradition, and a social tradition, which has vanished from the world, and like some unfortunate Amazonian tribe, may be written off 10 Whose translation, I should repeat, is as good as any and better than almost all. Problems indicated here are inevitable results of difference in cultural expectation, in syntax and semantics.

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as a mere evolutionary blind alley, no part of the development of mimesis, as traced by Auerbach, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Yet we still do not know how great our losses have been in genes and species in the Amazon. Perhaps it is as well that the DNA of Beowulf should be preserved. Dropping the Auerbachian mask, with its characteristic combination of sweeping survey and local analysis, there are some points that can now be made in duller but more academic style. The first concerns ‘information.’ The Oxford English Dictionary now gives a very technical definition of this term, backed by a mathematical quotation, but one may paraphrase it by saying that the information-content of any word is inversely related to its predictability. If one takes any text and blanks out selected words, the harder it is to guess the omission, the higher its information-content. Modern poetry is very evidently a high-information genre. Consider, for instance, the start of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Lesbos,’ from her collection Ariel (1965). The first three lines go: ‘Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss. / It is all Hollywood, windowless.’ Clearly these words describe an experience of alienation, resentment. But even with this clue, if one were to blank out the fourth word of the next line, ‘The fluorescent light ****ing on and off like a terrible migraine,’ no reader would be likely to guess it. ‘Flickering’ would make sense (and alliterate), as would ‘flashing.’ But the word chosen was ‘wincing,’ well down the probability ratings. Plath’s phrases are (to quote Helmholtz Watson, the poet in Huxley’s Brave New World, see chapters 4, 12) ‘the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting … penetrating, X-rayish phrases,’11 and clearly they make for one kind of poetic (and novelistic) art. Poetry, a critic once said to me with some passion, ‘is surprise.’ But Old English poetry is not like that, though serious efforts have been made to make it appear so. It is a ‘low-information’ genre, and as suggested above, the higher a word’s alliterative ‘rank,’ the lower its information-content is likely to be. In the case of East-, West-, North-, and South-Danes, the word ‘Danes’ says something (though not much), but the first element of the compound as near nothing as one could get. The first element in Spear-Danes, Bright-Danes, Ring-Danes (etc.) says little more. Or consider a much-used concept like ‘hall.’ If any Old English poet wants to say ‘hall,’ he is likely to use a compound word, the first part 11 Huxley, Brave New World (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Modern Classics, 1955, repr. 1966), 63, 147.

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of the compound will carry alliteration, and if the alliteration in the line runs on m-, the word will be ‘mead.’ ‘Beer’ for a b-, ‘wine’ for a w-, and so on. The general truth of this is obvious, but before one writes it off as inartistic, or tries with effort to find hidden significances in the choices made, one should consider that low-information poetry may have unexpected, and cumulative, virtues. Alliterative poetry, with its heavy linked stresses, works very largely by strong association or equally strong dissociation, and those ass-/dissociations often carry a powerful charge of cultural tradition. In the Maldon poem the poet says of Offa, killed close by his lord Byrhtnoth, who ignored his warning, he læg þegenlice, þeodne gehende, ‘he lay like a thane, at the hand of his lord.’ Of course he did, that is what thanes are supposed to do and where they are supposed to be: ‘thane’ and ‘theoden’ is a reciprocal relationship, and the alliterative association expresses a cultural imperative – as do, for instance, the phrases þegn æt þearfe, þolian æt þearfe, which we find close by: thanes are supposed to endure (þolian) at the need (þearf) of their theoden. The predictability of the phrasing makes it stronger – and if the phrasing is negated, as of course it may be, that makes the condemnation stronger too. In the passage cited above one sees a dozen or more highly predictable alliterative collocations, including frod and fæder, wund and wea, goda and gædeling, swat and swenge, heafde and helm, brecan and bord. Any of these is capable of variation, of course: here we have the sword ‘breaking over the shield-wall’ (brecan ofer bordweall), whereas elsewhere in the corpus we hear just of borda gebræc, ‘shields breaking.’ But the connections are obvious, and if we knew as much Old English heroic poetry as did the Anglo-Saxons, they would no doubt be familiar as well. Sometimes these low-information phrases may carry a force outside their immediate context. I have suggested above that, though the syntax denies it, there may be something ominous in the connection of eald and eorð in line 2957. Old men go into the earth, not back towards it – and Ongentheow soon will. Feoll and foldan in line 2975 is another highly predictable phrase, but it may be that it signals one of the pivotal moments of Maldon in line 166 of that poem, when it is not the man but the golden-hilted sword, symbol of strength and authority, that falls to the ground as Byrhtnoth is crippled, feoll þa to foldan fealuhilte swurd. Meanwhile, violent dissociations, though rare in the passage cited, are part of the rhetoric of the Beowulf-poet and his tradition, as one may see from wop æfter wiste, gyrn æfter gomene, and in lines like Hrothgar’s extremely forceful ‘Ne frin þu æfter sælum! Sorh is geniwod …’ ‘Do not ask about joy! Sorrow is renewed …’

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One device tending to reinforce both association and dissociation is that of ‘pararhyme,’ for which we have characteristically no currently agreed technical term, though many familiar and still-colloquial examples, such as ‘love you and leave you,’ ‘bed and board,’ ‘tit for tat,’ ‘brain versus brawn.’ Besides feoll on foldan one may note, in the passage cited, goda mid his gædelingum, as also, in the Maldon line cited, feoll – foldan – fealu. But there are more powerful and suggestive connections than that, and in English they have lasted a long time: one may think of Macbeth’s dreary ‘My way of life Is fall’n into the sere and yellow leaf’ – lif and leaf are found together in Old English, and lives are like leaves, uncounted, doomed to fall – or Langland’s self-confession, ‘on this wyse y begge, Withoute bagge or botel …’ (Piers Plowman C V 51–2). They suggest furthermore another ruling principle which deserves to be recognized in Old English poetry (and which has also persisted), namely, the liking for expressing violent semantic contrast by minimal phonetic change. At the start of Maldon a young warrior, called to order by his leader Byrhtnoth, lets his precious hawk fleogan wið þæs holtes, ond to þære hilde stop ‘fly to the wood, and [he] advanced to battle.’ In this chiastic structure fleogan and stapan are opposites, the one free, easy, instinctive, the other deliberate, human, duty bound. The opposition is further stressed by the pararhyme on holt and hild. The wood represents safety and life, battle is peril and death, but the words for them are almost the same. The most extreme form of this device must however be to use not closely similar words, instead exactly the same words, but in such a way that the context inverts their meaning, and that is what we find in the refrain of Deor, six times repeated. The first five times the poet says ‘That passed, this can too’ (Þæt ofereode, þisses swa mæg), the ‘that’ refers to long-past misery felt by others, but the sixth time it refers to recent-past prosperity lost by the speaker; the ‘this’ each time refers to present misery, but only on the sixth occasion do we know what it means. The verbal device once again mirrors a cultural imperative, or at least a powerful recommendation, for the ‘poker face,’ the minimal expression of emotion however strong. Associated with this, one may say, is the liking for ‘exophoric’ words, i.e., those whose meaning is determined by the viewpoint for the speaker: words like ‘this’ and ‘that,’ ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘now’ and ‘then.’ The Wanderer uses the word ‘this’ ten times, and nine times out of ten it modifies a word meaning ‘world’ or a word meaning ‘life’: strong generalization is combined with equally strong assertion of closeness, immediacy, particularity, another marked instance of ass-/diss-ociation at once.

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Auerbach would, I think, have been able to round off these remarks with some suitably comprehensive statement, as he does at the end of chapter 4 – Gregory of Tours’s style revealing ‘a first early trace of the reawakening sensory apprehension of things and events’ – or at the end of chapter 5, the ‘historico-political function’ of the heroic epic as opposed to the courtly romance. I am bold enough only to say two things. One is that the inner aesthetic of alliterative, low-information poetry, long though it lasted and powerful though it remained even in its latest manifestations, has never been thoroughly described, perhaps because it is so alien to so many modern critical assumptions. And the other, much more tentatively expressed, is that one reason for its power and its survival may have been the close connection felt between lexis and ethos, the traditional phrasing and the traditional culture, perhaps affecting even mythos, narrative, and the way narratives are told.

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Contributors

Tiffany Beechy Department of English, University of North Florida Howell D. Chickering Department of English, Amherst College Michael D.C. Drout Department of English, Wheaton College Thomas E. Hart Salzburg, Austria John M. Hill Department of English Language and Literature, U.S. Naval Academy Sarah Larratt Keefer Department of English Literature, Trent University Yvette Kisor Department of English, Ramapo College Peggy A. Knapp Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University Geoffrey Russom Department of English, Brown University

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Tom Shippey Department of English, St Louis University Robert D. Stevick Department of English, University of Washington Janet Thormann English, College of Marin

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Index

‘A Prayer,’ and epithets for the Trinity, 106–7 Ælfric on Judith and irony, 33; letter to the monks at Eynsham, 109 aesthetics, and coherence and equilibrium, 151; and celebratory energy, 27n7; and connoisseurship, 6; and desire for wholeness, 222; and elegiac impulse, 212; and ethics, 22–3; and formulaic strategies, 65; and genre, 63; and half-line rhymes, 39–42; and historical periods, 7; and Kant, 82; and low information poetry, 265; and poetic compounds, 71–2; and the political, 4, 5; and proportion and form, 144; and pulsing polysyndeton, 27; and quality, 4, 5; and riddling, 50–2; and source detail, 79; and sublimation, 221; and static identifications, 218; and stimuli, 43; and unconscious processes aesthetic appreciation, 179, 181, 184, 196 Æthelbert’s statutes, and poetic devices, 45–7; and figura etymologica, 48

Alcuin, 191 Aldhelm, 58, 115 Alfred, King, 191 alliterative collocation, 69, 72, 78; and recall, 120–1; and cultural tradition, 263–4 alliterative rank, as style, 255, 262 Andersson, Theodore M., 235n49 Andreas, 146, 155, 159; and quantitative forms, 161 Anglo-Hibernian art, 178, 183 Anglo-Saxon Aloud, 126 Anglo-Saxon poems: layout compared with other media, 143–4; typological similarities of, 141 Anlezark, Daniel, on Grendel and Book of Wisdom, 191n16 ANSAX-L forum, 152 antiphons/antiphonal, 110n27 Apocalypse 20:2, 189 Apostles’ Creed, 108–10 Aristotle, 5 Auerbach, Eric, 248, 254, 262, 265; on figuralism, 88, 96 Augustine, Augustinian, 49–50, 53, 178, 186, 196, 197

292

Index

Bagby, Benjamin, 55 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 239n69 Baptismal Creed, 109, 111 Barnes, Daniel R., 233–4n40 Bauschatz, Paul, on past and present in Germanic experience, 87 beauty, and aesthetic standards, 9; and word patterns, 176, 178, 180, 182–3, 186, 190, 192, 193–5 Bede, 105, 191 Behaviorism, 68 Benedictine reform, 102, 104; influence on poetry, 132 Beowulf, 43–4, 53–5; aesthetics of, 19n15; as art of variation, graphic interplay of patterns, 159; binding and truth in, 177, 182; and binding words, 54; and cultural memory, 215; digressions in, 19n15; and early medieval thought, 195–6; and enargeia, 97; essential hypotaxis in, 257; its excellence and fortunate survival, 136; and faulty structure, 228–31; and group ethos, 258–9, 260–1; lack of Christian–Latin style, 80; litotes and self-control in, 259–60; and monsters, 189–90; moral neutrality of, 260; and the numerological, 80; patterns of feower in, 180–4, 186–7, 201; patterns of gebunden in, 187, 208; proportion and musical consonance in, 194n23, 204; and postpositions, 75–6; and reader response theories, 239–40; and recursion, 157; and regulation of metrical deviance, 76; and self-reference, 223–4; style of compared to The Odyssey, 252–5; and swords and the past, 91; and traditional verse introducing heroic

speech, 65; that line diagrammed, ‘Beowulf maþelode,’ 157–8; and unexpected pronouns, 245; varied patronymic, b-verse, 68; and violation of Homeric economy, 77–8; word patterns in, 186 Beowulf poet, as mathematician, 185. See also mathematics and aesthetics Berendsohn, Walter A., 227, 227n3 biology, evolutionary, 115–16 Bjork, Robert E., 176, 196, 233n34, 235n48 Boethius, ‘O qui perpetua,’ 178–9, 179n2, 181, 186, 193, 197–8, 202 Bolton, Whitney, 234, 234n45 Bonjour, Adrien, 232, 232n32 book-divisions, 180 Book of Durrow, 183 Borysławski, Rafał, on riddles and pneuma, 58 Bradley, Henry, 227n1 Brandl, Alois, 227, 227n4, 231, 231n27 Bredehoft, Thomas A., on cross-alliteration in Judith, 37; on hypermetrics and intensified sound, 37 Brodeur, Arthur G., on Beowulf and structure, 232, 232n32; on Judith, 27 Bronowski, Jacob, 228, 228n9 Brooks, Cleanth, on integration, 5 Brown, Michelle P., on Coptic influence in Irish art, 174–5 Burrow, J.A., on The Dream of the Rood, 171–2 ‘Cædmon’s Hymn,’ 115 Cahill, Thomas, on Coptic influence, 175 Carrigan, Eamonn, 234, 234n42 Cassiodorus, 193 catechesis, 113

Index Chambers, R.W., 232, 232n30 Chaucer, 182 chiasmus, 52 Christ II and golden section ratio, 147–8 Cnut, 48 complementarity, 193 Consolatio, Boethius, biblical allusion in and Beowulf, 190–1; extreme and mean ratio in, 199; four-term proportion in, 198; musical ratios in, 200 contemplation, 104 Contextualism, and change, 7; and correspondence theory, 6; and the operational, 6 continued fractions, 173 Conybeare, John Josias, 230n22 Coptic art and Irish monks, 174–5 cosmic agency, 145, 153 counterpoint, 154–60 Creator, 193, 195 Dante, 182 Dawkins, Richard, 116 deep forms, and the designing intellect, 17 Dennett, Daniel C., on cognitive tricks, pleasure, 121 ‘Deor,’ and nostalgia, 213 Derrida, Jacques, and logocentrism, 56 desire, as metonymy, 210; and the lacking object, 212; and memory, 213 Dewey, John, 5; on the fused moment, 5n9; on the perceiver, 228–9, 239n69 Dictionary of Old English Corpus, 48, 52

293

différence, 59–60. See also Derrida, Jacques division in Beowulf, lines 2199 plus 983 and √5, 207 Dolar, Mladen, on rupture and the self, 217–18 Doxology, 107 dragon, 178, 189 dramatic irony and Judith, 33–4; and double time scheme, 34–6 Earl, James W., on Beowulf poet as cagy, 83; on Beowulf and projection, 237 Eco, Umberto, 195, 239n69 Egyptian fractions, 173 Elene and the golden ratio, 142; and golden section ratio, 146–51 passim; and number symbolism, 142; and quantitative forms, 161 ethos and lexis, 265 Ettmüller, Ludwig, 231n23 Euclid, 174 evil, 189–90 Exeter Book, 57–9, 61; booklet theory, 128 fitt divisions/cuts, 180, 202. See also narrative divisions fitt groups, 180, 202 fitt numbering, authorial, 16; and Beowulf, 16 Foley, John Miles, 237n65, 240n74 formal divisions, in Beowulf and Consolatio, 181, 198 formula, formulaic, 55, 57, 63; domain of, 69–70 Frantzen, Allen J., on Beowulf text as supplement, 82n6; on Beowulf and reception theory, 242–3

294

Index

Frye, Northrop, 53–4; on riddles as reverse charms, 58–60 Fulgentius, 190 Fulk, Robert D., on fitt numbers in Beowulf, 16, 130, 156; on metrical decline in traditional Old English, 76n31 functions of language, 43–5, 47, 53–5, 58–9 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3n1; on art, 81; on horizons of understanding, 83; and wirkungsgeshichte, 83–4 Gang, T.M., 232n33 geometric constant, 183, 192, 193 geometric ratios, 145–6 giants, biblical and in Beowulf, 189–90 ‘Gloria I,’ 101n1, 106–7 ‘Gloria II,’ 101n1 Gloria in Excelsis, 107 Godzich, Wlad, 242nn84, 85, 86, 243nn88, 89 golden ratio, successive powers of, 173 golden section, 183, 193, 199, 234 Gospels, St Gall, 183 Grimm, Wilhelm, 230n22 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 230, 230nn17, 18, 19, 20 Haarder, Andreas, 230, 230nn17, 18, 19, 20 harmony of design, in illuminated gospels, 153–4; accumulating geometry, 153–4 Harris, Joseph, 235n49 Hart, Thomas E., and tectonic design, 137, 234, 234n43 Hays, Michael, 242n87 Healfdene, 185

Heineman, Frederick J., on the mock heroic in Judith, 32–3 Hengest’s sword and revenge, 91, 210 Heorot and Germanic visions, 90–1 hermeneutic circle, 3n1 Hiett, Constance, 234, 235n47 high frequency combinatives, and aesthetic values, 74–5; and archaisms in Beowulf, 75 Hildeburh-Finn and Freawaru-Ingeld digressions, 192, 193; bilateral symmetry of in Beowulf, 203 Hill, John M., on boasts in Beowulf, 92 Hill, Thomas D., on the Judith story, 28 Hloþhere and Eadric, 44 homology, 186–7 horizon of expectation, 3n1, 242–3 Howlett, David, on Beowulf, 234, 234n44; on golden ratio in The Dream of the Rood, 161–2 Hrothgar’s sermon, and mediation between Germanic and Christian, 94–5 Huizinga, John, on image and idea, 56 Hull, Derek, on transparent complexity, 17 Hume, Kathryn, 233, 233n37 Hundredgemot, 52 Huppé, Bernard F., on Beowulf, 234, 234n46; on closing prayer in The Dream of the Rood, 171; on Judith as Romanesque, 30; and punctuation in The Dream of the Rood, 167, 169; and Web of Words, 14 hypothetico-deductive inference, 177 ic (hyrde ic, gefrægn ic), 184–5, 201, 204

Index Ides ælfscinu, 31n15 Imaginary and opposition, 221 indeterminacy, 57, 59 Indo-European, 43, 53 Ine, 50–2 Ingarden, Roman, 239n70 insular art forms and perfect mathematical coherence, 151, 160 interlinear glossing, 108 irony and negation, 211 irrational numbers and lineal extension, 146 Irving, Edward B., Jr, on dramatic interaction in The Dream of the Rood, 170 Iser, Wolfgang, on reader response, 9n11, 228–9, 239nn68, 70, 240nn71, 72, 241, 244, 244n94, 246 Jackson, Leonard, 247 Jakobson, Roman, on the poetic function, 43–4, 45, 54, 59 Jauss, Hans Robert, 3n1, 242n83, 242–3 Jones, Gwyn, 227, 228n6 Judaism, music of, 109 Judith, 24–42; and celebratory energy, 27; and half-line rhymes, 39–42; narrative action in, 29–30; and Old Norse, 26n4; and puns in, 36; and pulsing polysyndeton, 27; and the psychosexual, 25; and source detail, 79 Juliana as steadfast type, 218–19 Junius manuscript and sectional divisions, 138 Kant and open-ended purposiveness, 86 Kay, Sarah, on Juliana and sublime martyrdom, 220

295

Kemble, John Mitchell, 231n23 Kendall, Calvin B., on imagined Beowulf biography, 64–5n5 Ker, William Paton, 231, 231nn24, 25, 26, 232 Kiernan, Kevin, 231n23 Klaeber, Frederick, 227, 227n5, 231, 232n28 Krapp, George, on sectional ms. divisions, 138 Lacan, Jacques, on metaphor and metonymy, 205n1; on psychic registers and the symbolic, 221 Lawrence, William W., 232, 232n29 Leiter, Louis H., on transformation in The Dream of the Rood, 169–70 Levi-Strauss, Claude, on mediation, 88 Leyerle, John, on Beowulf and design in Lindesfarne Gospels, 85–6; on Beowulf and glory, 93; and interlace, 85–6, 233, 233nn35, 36 libellus, 107 liedertheorie, 229, 231, 231n23 linguistics, 43–6 Lionardi Bigoli as Fibonacci, 173 Liuzza, Roy M., 245, 245nn97, 98 Logos, logocentrism, 53, 56, 58, 63 ‘Lord’s Prayer I,’ 101n1 ‘Lord’s Prayer II,’ 101n1, 107 ‘Lord’s Prayer III,’ 101n1 magic squares, cohesive form of, 152 Magoun, Francis P., on Beowulf poet as improviser, 64, 77 manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, 103n4; London, British Library Additional 43, 703, 110; London, British

296

Index

Library, Cotton Galba A. xiv, 108; London, British Library, Cotton Julius A. ii, 103n4; London, Lambeth Palace 427, 103n4; Oxford, Bodleian Junius 121, 103n4, 109; Paris, BNF Fonds Latin 8824, 103n3; Vatican MS lat. 3363, 179 Mass, 102 mathematics and aesthetics in Beowulf, 179, 183, 234 McNamee, M.B., on Beowulf and harrowing of hell, 96n39 Mechanism, and correlation, 6; and the mechanical philosophy, 8 meme-based theory, and tradition, 117–18 memes, as culturally replicating entities, 116; and selection, 13 metaphor, 51, 57–8, 62–3, 205n1 Meters of Boethius, and inferior repetition, 78n40; and literacy, 78–9 metonymy, metonymic, 51, 57, 62, 205n1 mindfulness meditation, 112–13 Möbius strip, 138 modules and cutting sections, Christ II, 147–8 monasticism, 113 Mone, F.J., 227, 227n2, 230n22 monsters, 189, 191–2 Müllenhoff, Karl, 231n23 musical ratios, diapason (octave), 183, 188–9, 194–5, 200–3; diapente (fifth), 183, 189, 200–1; diatessaron (fourth), 183, 189, 200–1, 204 narrative divisions/cuts/units, 185, 186, 192–3, 195, 196 New Criticism, and nature philosophy, 5

New Hymnal, 103 Night Office, 109 Niles, John D., 90; on audiences in Beowulf, 235n49, 237n65, 240–2, 244n93 ‘Nine Herbs Charm,’ 55 Nist, John A., 232n33 number symbolism, 165 objectivity and aesthetic frameworks, 7 O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine, 245, 245n97 O’Carragáin, Éamonn, on ms. punctuation in The Dream of the Rood, 166n11 Office, 102 ‘Old English Benedictine Office,’ 109, 110–11 Old English charms, and binding forces, 53, 55; and nonsense, 54; as magical locutions, 54; and repetition, 55 Old English formulas, and difficult variation, 70; and verse length, 69 Old English laws, as genre, 44; as balanced equation, 44 Old English liturgical poems, 101–2; and the eternal now, 106 Old English poetry and psychoanalytic criticism, 210; as low information genre, 262 Old English riddles, as puzzles without solutions, 58; and metalingual functions, 59 Oliver, Lisi, 44–7 Ong, Walter, 123, 125 Opus Dei, 102, 111 ordines, 105 Organicism, and German nature philosophy, 8; and New Criticism, 9

Index Osborn, Marijane, 230n16 Overing, Gillian, 229n12, 236, 236nn50, 51, 237–8, 244–6, 246n100 Ovid, 190 Owen-Crocker, Gale R., 235n49, 237n66 Paris Psalter, 77; and kennings, 77; and metrical deviance, 79 parish priest, 103 Parks, Ward, 235n49 Parry, Milman, on metrical function and epithet economy, 66; on dactylic hexameter, 68–9 Pasternack, Carol Brun, on stylistic disjunction in The Dream of the Rood, 172 Pater Noster, 107 Peirce, Charles Sanders, and pragmatism, 8; and semiotics, 8, 236; triadic logic of, 8 Pepper, Stephen C., and world hypotheses, 8; and formism and classical thought, 10 Plato, 234 poetic compounds and aesthetic constraint, 72; and metrical patterning, 71 poetological, 186 poetry as self-referential, 222 polyvalence, 183, 187, 200 practice in the presence of God, 108 ‘Precepts,’ 127; and cross-line alliteration, 132; and mnemonic instability, 132 Prime, 111, 111n29 prodesse et delectare, 181 proportion(ality), 183, 192–3, 194, 198–9, 204 proportion and metrical line count, 136

297

proportional mean, 185 ‘Psalm 50,’ 101n1 Psalmus idioticus, 103 psychoanalytic criticism and Old English poetry, 210 pulcher, patterns of in Consolation of Philosophy, 182 puns in Judith, 36 Pythagorean theorem, 183, 192, 201 Quadrivium, 184, 186 quality and beauty, 5 quantity-based composition, 142–3; and integrity of forms, 142–3 ratio 4 to 3, 164, 185–6 Raw, Barbara C., on The Dream of the Rood and reverse order reading, 171 reader-response, and the emerging aesthetic object, 9, 228–30, 237–8, 238n67 recognitio-actio-justificatio, as a complex, 118–19; and co-evolution, 124 Reidinger, Anita, on Old English riddles and formulaic expectations, 57 remembering and pleasure, 123 Renoir, Alain, 237n65, 240n74, 242n80 Responsorium, and beauty, 104; and the liturgical year, 109 rhyme, 52, 54, 59; and pleasure and remembering, 125, 131–2 Richards, I.A., on value, 3, 238n67 ‘Riddle 33’ and multiple signification, 60–3 Rimcræft, 183 ring structure, ring composition, 48–9

298

Index

ritual, 102 Robinson, Fred C., and appositive style, 104, 233; on riddling discourse in Beowulf, 79 Rosenberg, Jakob, on objectivity in evaluation, 3, 4 Rubin, David C., on alliteration and recall, 125; and memory in oral traditions, 120–1 Safouan, Moustapha, 221–2 Scarry, Elaine, on art and aesthetic attention, 81 sectional divisions, poetry manuscripts, 138, passim semantic properties, in liturgical language and Old English, 112–13 semantically inessential, and secondary meaning, 72–3, 77 semiotics, 8, 55. See also sign Shaar, Claes, on essential hypotaxis, 257 Shaw, Brian A., 235, 235n28 Shippey, T.A., on Assyrians in Judith, 32; on fate in Beowulf, 93; on structure, 233n34, 233–4n40, 246n99 sign, signifier, signified, signification, 43–4, 53, 55–8, 60, 63. See also semiotics Sorrell, Paul, 235n49 Stanley, Eric G., on Beowulf poet as lettered, 64, 235n49 Stevens, Martin, 233, 233n38 Stevick, Robert D., on numerology, 137; and relational qualities in design, 137, 137nn3, 4, 165 Stitt, J. Michael, 234n40 Storms, G., 54

structure, structuralism, 43, 45–7, 49, 52–3, 56, 58, 60, 63 style and transparent complexity, 18 Swanton, M.J., on The Dream of the Rood and ‘Riddle 62,’ 171 Sweet, Henry, 51 symmetry (bilateral/axial), 181, 193, 203–4 synagogue, 109 syntactic archaism, and metrical variety, 75–6 Te Deum, 107 Terce, 111 terms for God and beauty, 108 The Battle of Brunanburh and repetition of the past, 215–17 ‘The Creed,’ and Latin original, 109–10; as Responsorium, 111–12 The Dream of the Rood, 101n1, 161–73; affective drama in, 169; and Fibonacci numbers, 166; sesquitertian ratio in, 163–4 ‘The Fall of King Hæðcyn,’ in Beowulf, 249–52 ‘The Fortunes of Men,’ 127; anaphora in, 130; cross-line linking in, 131–2; envelope pattern in, 129–30; use of agents in, 133; stability compared with ‘Gifts,’ 131 ‘The Gifts of Men,’ 127; anaphora in, 130; envelope pattern in, 129; and use of agents, 133 ‘The Kentish Hymn,’ 101n1, 106–7 The Phoenix and formal signification, 140; and numerical interrelations, 141; and the module 84, 141, 162n2; and the seven ages of man, 165 ‘The Seafarer’ as urging voice, 214

Index ‘The Wanderer’ and hallucination, 213; and recuperation, 213; and lament, 214–15 ‘The Wife’s Lament’ and loss as object, 217 Tiffany, Daniel, on riddles and indeterminacy, 57 Timaeus, 186 time, 105 Thorkelín’s 1815 edition, 230 Tolkien, J.R.R., as aesthetic watershed, 232–3 Tonsfeldt, H. Ward, 235n49 traditions, merging of, 119 triangles, 1-2-√5, 192, 201; 3-4-5 triangle, 174, 183, 207 Vendler, Helen, 43, vernacular metrical prayers, 102 verse line = poem analogy, 191–2 Virgil, 177, 182 Watkins, Calvert, and reflexive indexical function, 43 Wessel, Claus, on Coptic influence in Irish art, 174

299

‘Widsith’ and praise, 213 Wihtred, 44 Williams, Raymond, on the aesthetic, 4–5 Williamson, Craig, on riddles, 57–62 Wisdom 8:1, 190–1, 191, 195, 197; 8:11, 189; 8:18, 189, 191; 11:18–19, 189n12; 11:21, 189nn11, 12, 195–6n25, 197 Wisdom poem, structure of, 129 Wisdom of Solomon, 11:21, 165 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and aspect recognition, 84 Woolf, Rosemary, on Juliana and sensationalism, 220 word pair, 46–8, 53 word-to-world fit, 119 Wormald, Patrick, 48 wræt, wrætlic, 176–7, 178, 188, 194–5, 197, 201 writan/forwritan, 188, 197 Wulfstan, and lexical negation, 48–50 wyrd, as term of mediation, 95

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Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series General Editor ANDY ORCHARD

Editorial Board ROBERTA FRANK THOMAS N. HALL ANTONETTE DIPAOLO HEALEY MICHAEL LAPIDGE

1 Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies, Samantha Zacher 2 Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition, Dieter Bitterli 3 The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Renée Trilling 4 New Readings in the Vercelli Book, edited by Samantha Zacher and Andy Orchard 5 Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse, Thomas A. Bredehoft 6 On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited by John M. Hill