Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination 1843842513, 9781843842514

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Volume 1

Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continue to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They offer fresh insights on established figures such as W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P.D. James, and Seamus Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image, and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beowulf into Grendel — as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment.

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ISSN 2043-8230 Series Editors Karl Fugelso Chris Jones

Medievalism aims to provide a forum for monographs and collections devoted to the burgeoning and highly dynamic multi-disciplinary field of medievalism studies  : that is, work investigating the influence and appearance of ‘the medieval’ in the society and culture of later ages. Titles within the series will investigate the post-medieval construction and manifestations of the Middle Ages  attitudes towards, and uses and meanings of, ‘the medieval’  in all fields of culture, from politics and international relations, literature, history, architecture, and ceremonial ritual to film and the visual arts. It welcomes a wide range of topics, from historiographical subjects to revivalism, with the emphasis always firmly on what the idea of ‘the medieval’ has variously meant and continues to mean; it is founded on the belief that scholars interested in the Middle Ages can and should communicate their research both beyond and within the academic community of medievalists, and on the continuing relevance and presence of ‘the medieval’ in the contemporary world. New proposals are welcomed. They may be sent directly to the editors or the publishers at the addresses given below. Professor Karl Fugelso Art Department Towson University 3103 Center for the Arts 8000 York Road Towson, MD 21252-0001 USA

Dr Chris Jones School of English University of St Andrews St Andrews Fife  KY16 9AL UK

Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk  IP12 3DF UK

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Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination

edited by David Clark and Nicholas Perkins

D. S . B r ew e r

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© Contributors 2010 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2010 D.S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978 1 84384 251 4

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website : www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Designed and typeset in Minion by The Stingray Office, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Contributors

ix

Foreword Bernard O’Donoghue

xi

Acknowledgements

xiii

Abbreviations

xiv

Introduction Nicholas Perkins and David Clark

1

1

From Heorot to Hollywood : Beowulf in its Third Millennium Chris Jones

13

2

Priming the Poets : the Making of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader Mark Atherton

31

3

Owed to Both Sides : W.H. Auden’s Double Debt to the Literature of the North Heather O’Donoghue

51

4

Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century : J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles Maria Artamonova

71

5

‘Wounded men and wounded trees’ : David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon Culture Tangle Anna Johnson

89

6

Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace Clare A. Lees

111

7

BOOM: Seeing Beowulf in Pictures and Print Siân Echard

129

8

Window in the Wall : Looking for Grand Opera in John Gardner’s Grendel Allen J. Frantzen

147

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Contents

vi

Re-placing Masculinity : The DC Comics Beowulf Series and its Context, 1975–6 Catherine A.M. Clarke

165

10

P.D. James Reads Beowulf John Halbrooks

183

11

Ban Welondes : Wayland Smith in Popular Culture Maria Sachiko Cecire

201

12

‘Overlord of the M5’ : The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns Hannah J. Crawforth

219

13

The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s Elmet Joshua Davies

237

14

Resurrecting Saxon Things : Peter Reading, ‘species decline’, and Old English Poetry Rebecca Anne Barr

255

Index

279

9

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List of Illustrations Black-and-white Figures 5.1

David Jones, ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription, reproduced by kind permission of the David Jones Estate and the National Library of Wales.

106

7.1

Bronze plaque from Öland, reproduced from Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans. F.H. Wood (London, 1888).

133

7.2

Gold collar from Öland, reproduced from Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans. F.H. Wood (London, 1888).

133

7.3

Vendel helmet, from Beowulf, trans.William Ellery Leonard (New York, 1923).

133

7.4

Viking readers, from Limited Editions Club reprint of Beowulf, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York, 1952).

135

13.1

Scout Rock, Mytholmroyd. Photograph by Fay Godwin, reproduced by kind permission of Collections Picture Library Ltd.

239

13.2

Abel Cross, Crimsworth Dean. Photograph by Fay Godwin, reproduced by kind permission of Collections Picture Library Ltd.

247

14.1

Peter Reading, Collected Poems 2 : p. 239, reproduced by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

262

14.2

Peter Reading, Collected Poems 2 : p. 278, reproduced by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

263

14.3

Peter Reading, Collected Poems 3 : facing p. 176, reproduced by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

272

14.4

Peter Reading, Collected Poems 3 : facing p. 182, reproduced by kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

275

Colour Plates

between pp. 146 and 147

i

Gareth Hinds, ‘Then Beowulf ’s glory’, from his Beowulf (1999), reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

ii

Gareth Hinds, Beowulf emerges from the mere, from his Beowulf (1999), reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

iii

Sheila Mackie, helmet illustration from Beowulf, adapted by Julian Glover (Gloucester, 1987), reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

vii

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viii

List of Illustrations

iv

Funeral of Scyld, from Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Opera, with particular thanks to Mark Lyons.

v

The scop sings, from Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Opera, with particular thanks to Mark Lyons.

vi

Grendel approaches Heorot, from Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Opera, with particular thanks to Mark Lyons.

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Contributors Maria Artamonova teaches Old and Middle English at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Her academic interests include English historical syntax, translations from Latin into Old English, and Anglo-Saxon monastic rules. She has also published on J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of Old Germanic languages in his fiction, and translated his medievalist essays into Russian. Mark Atherton is Lecturer in English language and literature at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University. His research interests are in Old English and medieval studies as well as in nineteenth-century philology and applied linguistics. Publications include Hildegard of Bingen : Selected Writings (London, 2001), Celts and Christians : New Approaches to the Religious Traditions of Britain and Ireland (Cardiff, 2002), and Teach Yourself Old English (London, 2006; new edition 2010). Rebecca Anne Barr is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar University. She works on religion, literature and the representation of masculinity in the long eighteenth century, with additional interests in contemporary poetry and prose. After finishing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University she taught at Oxford, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Bath Spa University. She is currently researching a monograph on male chastity. Maria Sachiko Cecire is completing her doctoral thesis ‘The Oxford School of Children’s Fantasy Literature : Medieval Afterlives and the Production of Culture’ in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her publications include essays in Journal of Children’s Literature Studies, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, and Arthurian Literature. She co-founded the Oxford Children’s Literature and Youth Culture Colloquium, and is currently co-editing the collection Space and Place in Children’s Literature with Malini Roy. She is a 2006 American Rhodes Scholar. David Clark is a Lecturer in Old English at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Between Medieval Men : Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2009). He is currently working on a book on friendship in medieval literature, a collaborative annotated translation of The Saga of Bishop Þorlákr, and co-editing a journal issue on Blood, Sex, and Malory. Catherine A.M. Clarke is lecturer in English and Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research at Swansea University. Her research centres on earlier medieval literature and culture, with particular attention to questions of place, power and identity and an emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. Her publications include Literary

ix

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x

Contributors

Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 (Cambridge, 2006), and the AHRC-funded Mapping Medieval Chester website. She explores ideas and uses of the medieval past in a number of forthcoming publications, and this interest has also shaped an undergraduate course at Swansea, ‘Transforming Beowulf in the Twentieth Century’. Hannah J. Crawforth is a Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London, having completed her Ph.D. at Princeton in 2009. Her work addresses the relationship between literature and the study of the English language in Early Modern England, and medievalisms from the Renaissance to the present. Joshua Davies completed his Ph.D. in 2009 at King’s College London, where he continues to teach in the English Department. Siân Echard is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent book, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), traces the post-medieval life of medieval British texts. Allen J. Frantzen teaches in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. His recent work includes Bloody Good : Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago, 2004) and Cædmon’s Hymn and Material Culture in the World of Bede (Morgantown, WV, 2007), a collection co-edited with John Hines. His new work concerns the food culture of Anglo-Saxon England. John Halbrooks is an assistant professor of English at The University of South Alabama. He received his Ph.D. from Tulane University in New Orleans, and he has published in Philological Quarterly, Studies in Philology, and Tenso. He is currently working on a book about medieval heroism as an anachronistic construction of modern culture. Anna Johnson is completing her D.Phil. in the Faculty of English, Oxford University. Her work focuses on the writer and artist David Jones, using an interdisciplinary approach to consider his response to the crisis of twentieth-century conflict. Chris Jones teaches English at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Strange Likeness : the Use of Old English in Twentieth-century Poetry (Oxford, 2006). Clare A. Lees is Professor of Medieval Literature at King’s College London where she teaches Old and Middle English literary studies. She has published widely on Old English literature and has particular research interests in gender and sexuality studies, religious writing and contemporary approaches to medieval studies. Heather O’Donoghue is Reader in Old Norse-Icelandic literature at Linacre College, University of Oxford, and is currently working on a book about the influence of Old Norse myth on poetry in English from Beowulf to Heaney. Nicholas Perkins studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University; he is now a Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in English. His publications include Hoccleve’s ‘Regiment of Princes’ : Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge, 2001), along with essays on Insular Latin, Early Middle English, and Chaucerian reception. His current work focuses on gifts, exchange, and narrative in medieval romances.

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Foreword Bernard O’Donoghue

S

ince the late eighteenth century and the onset of Romanticism in England, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture has grown steadily, through academic investigation, myth-making, translation, and popular culture, up to the extraordinary success of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in 1999, and beyond into the twenty-first century. There has, too, been a developing scholarly interest in the theory of ‘Medievalism’, in studies by Michael Alexander and others. Heaney’s translation echoed that, but was also the culmination of an insistent Old English presence in his poetry ever since North in 1975; the whole myth of the ‘Bog People’ that was the vivifying strand in his North and Wintering Out is founded in the northern past. Amongst modern poets, even before North, Geoffrey Hill in 1971 had taken the title of a ground-breaking book from a time-honoured item in Sweet’s Reader, ‘Mercian Hymns’. Earlier again, Anglo-Saxon poetry was firmly installed in the modern pantheon by Pound and Auden, whose versions of ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’ respectively never lost their grip on the poetic imagination in English. Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, then, is responding crucially to the spirit of its moment, and of other moments of intersection between past and present. The book is in part the product of a very successful and crowded conference under the title Bone Dreams (derived from Heaney’s poem of that title in North), held at the Faculty of English in Oxford University on Saturday 26 April 2008. The conference was organized by the present editors, and it brought together an enthusiastic gathering of students, writers and academics in lively debate. A glance at the contents of the book makes it clear how wide-ranging the recent influence of Old English has been: on the poetry of Heaney, Hill, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, and Peter Reading, but also extending to P.D. James’s crime fiction as well as to children’s literature, comics, opera, and the cinema. The line back to the Modernists is traced here too, in chapters on David Jones and W.H. Auden. Beowulf bulks large in all of this but it is not on its own. In pondering the relative familiarity of the classical heritage and the Anglo-Saxon xi

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xii

Foreword

past, Heaney said memorably in the introduction to his Beowulf translation that ‘Achilles rings a bell, but not Scyld Scēfing.’ The evidence of this book is that this is becoming less true. The editors here in their thought-provoking and wide-ranging introduction still acknowledge, in reference to Heaney, that ‘this treasure-trove of linguistic memory is not reached easily’. The essays in their book go a considerable way towards reaching the trove, suggesting on the way many avenues of approach for modern readers to approach. It is abundantly clear in this book that Anglo-Saxon literature and culture continue to have a vigorous and multi-faceted afterlife.

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Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to the institutions that have supported this project at various stages, including Oxford University Faculty of English (which hosted the ‘Bone Dreams’ conference in 2008); the University of Leicester School of English; and St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Many individuals have also contributed valuable ideas and suggestions, including Michael Alexander, Chris Jones, Peter D. McDonald, and Bernard O’Donoghue. We thank copyright holders who have given permission for texts and pictures to be reproduced, especially Faber & Faber, and Bloodaxe. For supporting the reproduction of illustrations, we thank the University of British Columbia, Loyola University Chicago, and the Lynne Grundy Memorial Trust. It has been a pleasure to work with the book’s contributors, and also with Boydell and Brewer; our particular thanks go to Caroline Palmer and Rohais Haughton. Nicholas Perkins would like to thank his family for love and support, and also the people who introduced him to Old English : Paul Oliver, Colin Wilcockson, Kathryn Lowe, Andy Orchard, and Michael Lapidge. David Clark would like to thank his parents for their continued support of his medieval and medievalist interests, even if they don’t usually get too far in reading his research outputs !

xiii

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Abbreviations ASPR

Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records

Bosworth and Toller

An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, based on the Manuscript Collections of the late Joseph Bosworth, ed. T. Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1898). Now available at : http ://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/BT/BosworthToller.htm

DOE Toronto Dictionary of Old English, ed. Antonette diPaolo Healey : http ://www.doe.utoronto.ca/index.html DOEC

Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus, ed. Antonette diPaolo Healey, with John Price Wilkin and Xin Xiang : http ://www.doe.utoronto.ca/ pub/webcorpus.html

EETS o.s.

Early English Text Society, original series

EETS e.s.

Early English Text Society, extra series

EETS s.s.

Early English Text Society, supplementary series

Klaeber 4th edn

Klaeber’s ‘Beowulf ’ and ‘The Fight at Finnsburg’, ed. R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, 4th edn (Toronto, 2008)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary, ed. John Simpson, online edn : http :// dictionary.oed.com

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

xiv

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Introduction Nicholas Perkins and David Clark

Come back past philology and kennings, re-enter memory where the bone’s lair

I

is a love-nest in the grass.1

n Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Bone Dreams’, the speaker/dreamer discovers layers of northern and personal history by delving through the linguistic past. A ‘White bone found / on the grazing’ is recognized as a verbal artefact at once through the ‘rough, porous / language of touch’ (p. 27). Its imaginative scope soon expands to ‘Bone-house’, later italicized as the Old English kenning ‘ban-hus’ : a found object, like the bone itself, part of the ‘coffered / riches’ of grammatical knowledge granted to those surrounding the fire-warmed benches of the heroic, intimate thinking space that the compound represents (pp. 27, 28). This treasure-trove of linguistic memory is not reached easily. The speaker’s earlier reaction is to ‘wind’ the bone ‘in the sling of mind / to pitch it at England’ (p. 27), an action reminiscent both of David versus Goliath, and of the street violence of 1970s Northern Ireland, signalling the place of (the) English as invader and colonizer. ‘Bone Dreams’, however, is far from simply oppositional, at times channelling an unpredictably erotic force through its responses to language, body, and landscape : here the bone’s fall in the fields of England seems already to have generative potential, echoing classical myths of Cadmus and Jason, both of whom sowed teeth that sprang up as warriors. The speaker then ‘push[es] back / through dictions’, plotting linguistic history in reverse and working past accreted layers of Elizabethan, French and Latin to arrive at ‘the scop’s / twang,

1  Seamus Heaney, ‘Bone Dreams’, in his North (London, 1975), pp. 27–30, at p. 29. Subsequent references, by page number, appear in the text.

1

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2

Introduction

the iron / flash of consonants / cleaving the line’ (p. 28). The Anglo-Saxon scop (poet, maker) is also a linguistic warrior, whose blade/tongue both breaks up (cleaves) the poetic line, and paradoxically structures or holds it together (cleaves in its other sense). Heaney’s own short lines and their rhythmic music echo the half lines of Old English verse, while the variety of sound effects in kenning-rich phrases such as ‘love-den, blood-holt, / dream-bower’ (p. 29) compound the technical and thematic energies of the poem.2 These virtuosic movements between the linguistic and tactile, through interlaced histories and mythologies, amongst dreamscape and bogland, and beyond any single reference point in Anglo-Saxon or other ‘northern’ culture, are indicative of the varied ways in which creative artists have reimagined and reshaped texts, images, and ideas from the Anglo-Saxon past since the turn of the twentieth century.3 In this collection, we have drawn together fourteen essays that explore something of that variety, from Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, a textbook whose many editions were thumbed and scribbled on by generations of students and which helped to define a modern canon of Old English texts, to the 2007 film Beowulf, starring digitally enhanced versions of Ray Winstone, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins. Mark Atherton demonstrates in his chapter how much Sweet’s Reader responds to the romantic traditions of nineteenth-century literary taste and contemporary pedagogical concerns, in turn providing material for scholarly and creative responses including those of Ezra Pound, while Chris Jones suggests that before scoffing at Robert Zemeckis’s movie as the shallow distortion of a great work of Literature, we should look more carefully at what the writers and director thought they were doing, how the film responds to ideas shaped by scholarly and pseudo-scholarly debate, and how this new version of the story of Beowulf takes its place in a lengthy performance history, including that of the Nowell Codex itself  the manuscript in which Beowulf has 2  For a reading of ‘Bone Dreams’ in the context of Heaney’s deep engagement with Old English, see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 207–13 ; Jones’s fine book also includes discussion of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Edwin Morgan. See also Heather O’Donoghue, ‘Heaney, Beowulf and the Medieval Literature of the North’, in The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, ed. Bernard O’Donoghue (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 192–205, and on Heaney’s medieval interests as a whole, Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge, 2008). For the structure and linguistic resources of Old English verse, see for example Donald G. Scragg, ‘The Nature of Old English Verse’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 55–70, and G.A. Lester, The Language of Old and Middle English Poetry (Basingstoke, 1996). 3  Influential discussions include Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, in his Preoccupations : Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (London, 1980), pp. 150–69 ; Fred C. Robinson, ‘The Might of the North : Pound’s Anglo-Saxon Studies and “The Seafarer” ’, The Yale Review 71 (1981–2), 199–224 ; Nicholas Howe, ‘Praise and Lament : The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn’, in Words and Works : Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson, ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto, 1998), pp. 293–310 ; Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge, 2000).

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Introduction 3



survived from the late tenth or early eleventh century until now, but which assuredly was not its first instantiation. Heaney’s ‘Bone Dreams’ uses the buried tools of language history to gain access to visceral and embodied memory : the ‘love-nest’ which philology both obscures and opens up. The essays in this book consistently explore the interplay between the scholarly connection with the Anglo-Saxons  something a writer might come to through hard-won study of paradigms at university  and the popular or mythic connection : something half-remembered or claimed as a ‘voice-right’. Seamus Heaney touches on this dynamic in his own translation of Beowulf, itself commissioned for the Norton Anthology of English Literature (and so a staple of US undergraduate literature courses), but also a book widely acclaimed and read independently : I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/and […] Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of cultural determination early on, in my first arts year at Queen’s University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the English language by Professor John Braidwood […] The Irish/English duality, the Celtic/Saxon antithesis were momentarily collapsed and in the resulting etymological eddy a gleam of recognition flashed through the synapses and I glimpsed an elsewhere of potential […] a region where one’s language would not simply be a badge of ethnicity or a matter of cultural preference or an official imposition, but an entry into further language.4 Lectures such as Professor Braidwood’s on the History of the English Language had a central place in many English Literature degree courses, partly as a result of a debate over the fitness of English as a subject for serious study at all. Despite continuing antiquarian interest in the Anglo-Saxon period as a point of origin for national character, political structures, or religious tradition, and the growing popularity of mythic narratives surrounding King Alfred, King Arthur, and the Vikings, it was not until the nineteenth century that sustained editorial and scholarly work on Old English texts made the literature of Anglo-Saxon England more directly and reliably available. Continental and especially Germanic scholarship led this revival, while in Victorian Britain large-scale cultural and linguistic projects (including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Early English Text Society, and the development of collections including those at the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum) drew on and also helped to prompt an increasing understanding of Anglo-Saxon material and literary culture amongst the public, scholars, and collectors.5 This understanding 4  Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (London, 1999), pp. xxiv–xxv. See also Seamus Heaney, ‘The Drag of the Golden Chain’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1999, 14–16. 5  See for example Anglo-Saxon Scholarship, the First Three Centuries, ed. Carl T. Berkhout and Milton McC. Gatch (Boston, 1982) ; Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians : Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2000) ; Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), 225–356. A survey of medievalist ideas across the arts in this period is

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4

Introduction

was, however, deeply entangled in the politics of racial, national and imperial identity, making the Anglo-Saxons a complex point of departure for any claims of belonging or continuity.6 Meanwhile, universities in Britain and North America were establishing courses in English, and the study of Old English language gave them an aura of serious philological enquiry lest they seem lightweight in comparison to classical languages.7 In England, it was London University that led the way in the nineteenth century.8 By the 1880s, moves were afoot to establish the study of English alongside Modern Languages at Oxford, but received fierce opposition. In a pamphlet against the proposals, Thomas Case warned that ‘[a]n English School will grow up, nourishing our own language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans but from the savagery of the Goths and the Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’9 Having eventually established a School of English in 1894, the Oxford provided in Michael Alexander’s richly illustrated Medievalism : The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, 2007). Material on the origins and early history of the OED is gathered on Charlotte Brewer’s website Examining the OED : http ://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main, accessed 20 September 2009. For the eccentric scholar whose energy gave impetus to the OED and Early English Text Society, see William Benzie, Dr F.J. Furnivall : Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK, 1983). Amongst life-size replicas of great European monuments such as Trajan’s column and Ghiberti’s Florence Baptistry doors, the cast gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum contains casts of the Ruthwell Cross (purchased in 1894) and Bewcastle Cross (1923). 6  See Clare A. Simmons, ‘“Iron-worded Proof ” : Victorian Identity and the Old English Language’, in Studies in Medievalism IV : Medievalism in England, ed. Leslie J. Workman (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 202–14 ; T.A. Shippey, ‘The Undeveloped Image : Anglo-Saxon in Popular Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien’, in Literary Appropriations, ed. Scragg and Weinberg, pp. 215–36 ; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Analogy in Translation : Imperial Rome, Medieval England, and British India’, in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages : Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 183–204. The arena of ‘postcolonial’ medievalism is the subject of Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World : The Idea of the Middle Ages outside Europe, ed. Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul (Baltimore, 2009), and see also Seth Lerer, ‘“On fagne flor” : The Postcolonial Beowulf, from Heorot to Heaney’, in Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Kabir and Williams, pp. 77–102. 7  Thomas Jefferson placed Old English on the curriculum of the University of Virginia as a way for students to ‘imbibe’ the ‘free principles of government’ from their Anglo-Saxon forebears ; see Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins : New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990), pp. 203–7. 8 See The Nineteenth-Century History of English Studies, ed. Alan Bacon (Aldershot, 1998). The pioneering Scottish role in the development of English literary studies is discussed in The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. Robert Crawford (Cambridge, 1998), though there is little discussion of Old English there. Many thanks to Peter D. McDonald for that reference and rewarding conversations about this project as a whole. 9  ‘An Appeal to the University of Oxford against the Proposed Final School of Modern Languages’ (Oxford, 1887), p. 5. F. York Powell defended the proposals on the grounds that ‘It is not an “easy” School. It is a classic School’, and, tongue only partly in cheek, assured dons that ‘[i]t is not the fruit of an insidious secret plot, the accursed machination of a vile band of “Early English” conspirators’ (‘A Brief Statement of the Case for the Proposed Final School of Modern Language & Literature’ (Oxford, 1887), pp. 11 and 6). Many thanks to Susan Usher for facilitating access to this and other material in the English Faculty Library, Oxford. Intertwined with these debates were arguments about Anglo-Saxon racial and

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Introduction 5

examinations in Old English were predominantly concerned with language, stylistics, and historical contexts. The 1896 Honour School paper on ‘Beowulf and other Old English Texts’, probably set by A.S. Napier, includes passages for translation and comprehension ; questions on grammar, metre, and dialect ; and material about the geography and contexts of the poem, such as ‘What various peoples are mentioned in Beowulf ? What was the probable geographical position of each ?’10 As Siân Echard shows in her essay, this concern with the ‘placing’ of the poem has a long reach in editions and readings of Beowulf. Anglo-Saxon studies, then, at least in language and literature, forged a belated antiquity that continually proclaimed but also questioned its scholarly credentials and continuities ; it was on offer to university students as a rigorous branch of philology, but as often appealed to them, if at all, as a private, even guilty, pleasure or as Heaney terms it, an ‘entry into further language’  into a space that was not limited by or to the potentially stifling roll-call of English Literature. J.R.R. Tolkien was one student who had excelled in the philological training provided at Oxford, returning there from a professorship at Leeds to become the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925. In her essay, Maria Artamonova details Tolkien’s serious play with his own compositions in Old English, modelled on the densely written, variant texts of pre-Conquest annals. Experimenting both with language and mythologies to write ‘for an Anglo-Saxon audience’ in the twentieth century, Tolkien’s Old English texts form a significant foundation for his later narratives of Middle-earth. As Heather O’Donoghue notes in her chapter, W.H. Auden described a sense of potential analogous to Heaney’s ‘etymological eddy’ while listening to Tolkien recite Beowulf in a lecture hall in Oxford : ‘I do not remember a single word he said, but at a certain point he recited, and magnificently, a long passage of Beowulf. I was spell-bound. This poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.’11 O’Donoghue highlights the ways in which Auden’s debt to Old English forms part of his larger interest in Germanic and northern traditions, especially Old Norse mythology, and she uncovers the subtle, mingled traditions of ‘the “barbaric” poetry of the North’ that he adapted throughout his career, from first being ‘fascinated both by its metric and its rhetorical devices, so different from the post-Chaucerian poetry with which I was familiar’.12 The gravitational pull of Old English and Old Norse verse forms and early medieval linguistic purity and continuity, for instance in Edward Augustus Freeman’s monumental The History of the Norman Conquest of England : Its Causes and its Results, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1867–79) ; see Kabir, ‘Analogy in Translation’, pp. 197–200. 10  Honour School of English. Papers 1896–1910. Oxford, English Faculty Library, XB 6.26. Oxford already set an ‘Examination for Women’ in English, which shows similar interests in dialect and the historical development of English language, though detailed textual work on Old English was not required. 11  W.H. Auden, ‘Making, Knowing and Judging’, inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, 11 June 1955, reprinted in The Dyer’s Hand and other Essays (London, 1963), pp. 31–60, at pp. 41–2. 12  W.H. Auden, A Certain World : A Commonplace Book (London, 1971), p. 22. Auden then includes (pp. 23–4) a translation by Michael Alexander of the Old English poem Deor.

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Introduction

culture is still at work in Auden’s later poems such as ‘Prologue at Sixty’, with its fourstress alliterating lines, compounds and appositions, kennings, and engagement with an imaginative geography of the north that responds to his own ambivalent identities : ‘by blood barbarian, in bias of view / a Son of the North, outside the limes’.13 This sense of the text as embodied history  personal and transnational  is at work in several of the other writers and artists discussed in this book. For example, Anna Johnson’s chapter shows how David Jones shapes the imagery of Old English battle poetry to open his own experiences of trench warfare up to the cross-currents of Germanic and Celtic conflict and mythology, played out at shorelines or border crossings, ‘where the sea wars against the river’. Here the foreboding Old English poetic motif of the beasts of battle, signified in Jones’s imagination by the eagle, the ‘speckled kite of Maldon’, and the crow, is transformed little by little into the ‘whiskered snouts’ of the Western Front’s rats. Johnson’s close reading of Jones’s poetry makes a powerful case for the imaginative traction engaged by what she calls Jones’s ‘cacophony of sources’, and her analysis of his ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription shows how Jones’s reading of intercultural relations is embedded in this work of lettered art, itself published as part of Jones’s poem The Anathemata. David Jones took the wording of his inscription from the Old English poem now titled The Dream of the Rood, part of whose text appears as a runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross. Here as elsewhere in this volume, the material and the textual are inextricably bound. Siân Echard, in her chapter about Beowulf editions and translations, demonstrates how the desire to place Beowulf alongside early medieval artefacts  helmets, swords, ships  has important implications for our reading of the poem, its significance as an object amongst other historical and cultural materials, and our continuing desire to ground Beowulf in space and time : filling lacunae in our knowledge of the poem and its material contexts, but also creating new disjunctures or mysteries.14 Several of the chapters explore this unsettling fascination with AngloSaxon remains : a tangible fragment that invites a dream of the whole ; a past whose 13  W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, rev. edn (London, 2007), p. 830. For the alliterative style of Auden and others, see Carl Phelpstead, ‘Auden and the Inklings : An Alliterative Revival’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103 (2004), 433–57. The reception of Old Norse literature and myth are addressed in Andrew Wawn, ed., Northern Antiquity : The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock, 1994), and David Clark and Carl Phelpstead, eds., Old Norse made New : Essays on the Post-Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture (London, 2007). 14  As this Introduction was being drafted, the discovery was announced of a huge hoard of AngloSaxon precious objects by a metal detectorist in Staffordshire. Apart from giving fleeting prominence to Anglo-Saxon historians and archaeologists, the media coverage of the find touched on exactly those paradoxes of awe and surprise at the richness of objects from a supposedly dark age, and the desire to make connections, especially with Beowulf. See for example ‘Golden Hoard Sheds Light on Dark Ages’, The Independent, 25 September 2009. An accompanying column by national finds advisor Dr Kevin Leahy quotes lines 3166–8 of Beowulf in Seamus Heaney’s translation, a passage describing the hoard of treasure consigned to the earth in Beowulf ’s barrow. Conveniently for Dr Leahy, Heaney’s version omits the Old English poem’s statement that the hoard still lies underground.

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Introduction 7

presence is only indirectly felt, or sensed as an absence ; an object whose survival paradoxically intensifies a sense of loss. These teasing absences are explored in Joshua Davies’s discussion of Elmet (a collaboration between poet Ted Hughes and photographer Fay Godwin), whose words and images seem to mark a shape where the retreating past can be recognized. They are also at work in Rebecca Anne Barr’s chapter on Peter Reading, whose poems stage an anti-elegiac, apocalyptic disenchantment, but (sometimes literally) draw on Old English text as a prophetic, crumbling survivor of previous declines, previous endings. As with David Jones or Hughes and Godwin’s Elmet, Reading produces imagetexts that play on the unreadability or riddling obliqueness of Anglo-Saxon writing, and its demand to be reckoned with as a physical entity.15 In another conversation between arts, cultures, and forms, Clare A. Lees traces a series of links between Basil Bunting’s poem Briggflatts and the notion of interlace  both as an artistic device and as an influential analogy for Old English poetic, used frequently as a shorthand for the narrative and linguistic structures of Anglo-Saxon verse and visual art. Like Auden and Jones, Heaney and Hughes, Bunting forged a personal sense of connection with the ‘northern’ past that deeply informed his poetic. Like them also, this past was not simply a national one : preConquest Insular histories enabled that ‘elsewhere of potential’ before and beyond the dangerous territory of nationalized identity formation, conflict, and myth-making.16 Throughout this collection, the unpredictable effects of remaking mythic narrative for new audiences are uncovered. Catherine A.M. Clarke’s chapter on Beowulf : Dragon Slayer shows how this DC Comics series responds to and fosters its 1970s adolescent readership’s dreams and anxieties, particularly those surrounding gender relations and men’s roles. Published contemporaneously with Heaney’s North, the Beowulf : Dragon Slayer series allows for escapist play with sexuality and heroism, while its paratexts speak to the uncertainties of a generation emerging from the Vietnam War. Clarke’s chapter attends closely to this context, and suggests how such attention might help us to return to the Old English Beowulf afresh. In her chapter on Wayland Smith, Maria Sachiko Cecire traces over a much longer period the shifting grounds of class and national mythology that have helped shape this legend’s use in fictions of identity, especially those written for children. She finds troubling potential in Wayland’s role as maker, craftsman, and working man, whose ambivalent power can lead to exaggerated or satirical forms of representation and masculinity, reaching from King Alfred, through Walter Scott, Rudyard Kipling, and Susan Cooper as far as Mr Burns’s private office in The Simpsons. Also reflecting on the problematics of 15  For a discussion of imagetexts, see W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory : Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1994), pp. 83–107. The implications of reproducing the medieval text as object are discussed from different perspectives in Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), and Martin K. Foys, Virtually Anglo-Saxon : Old Media, New Media, and Early Medieval Studies in the Late Age of Print (Gainesville, FL, 2007). 16  See Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997).

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8

mythic transposition, Allen J. Frantzen analyses the ways in which Elliot Goldenthal’s opera Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad stages the relationship between monster and people through, round, and across the wall that dominated the set of the first production in 2006. His essay explores how walls and openings divide, join, and are breached in the Old English Beowulf and in John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971), and how their subtle use of symbolic and physical space struggles to survive in a production both fearful and confused about heroism and its discontents. In this sense, Frantzen’s account resonates strongly with Chris Jones’s reading of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Helmet’ as a text whose hard-won, unironic acknowledgement of the heroic stands in contrast to the 2007 Beowulf film’s weary hermeneutic of suspicion. The survival, or impossibility, or relocation of the heroic emerges, then, as one of the features of this collection, and not only in the work of those directly involved in the twentieth century’s conflicts, such as Tolkien and David Jones (who fought in the trenches of World War I), or Basil Bunting (imprisoned as a conscientious objector in 1918, later joining the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of World War II). In John Halbrooks’s chapter on Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James, the crime-thriller’s inevitable focus on ethics, guilt, and (anti)heroism is extended by a meditation on the workings of institutional Christianity across the centuries, and through an intertextual relationship with Beowulf. James’s own hero Adam Dalgliesh is reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem, while facing some of the same dilemmas that mark Beowulf’s own reflection on the limits of human knowledge and the qualities that enable people to act in the face of those limits. Many of these threads are drawn through the texture of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, the subject of Hannah J. Crawforth’s chapter. A text called ‘Mercian Hymns’ appears in Sweet’s Reader : an Old English interlinear gloss in the Mercian dialect, added in the ninth century to an eighth-century Latin text of psalms and hymns, now London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A. i. Sweet’s ‘Mercian Hymns’ provide a richly inflected model not only for Hill’s poem but for imaginative responses to the Anglo-Saxons throughout the last century or so. An Old English text nesting between the lines of a Latin canonical work ; a supplement moving to the crumbling centre ; a rare dialect survivor in a battered textbook giving shape to a major twentieth-century poem ; a form that defeats expectations (poetry or prose ? personal or public ?) ; an anonymous text, yet with a psalmic persona demanding to be heard ; a cultural palimpsest ; in all senses, a translation. Crawforth’s essay focuses on the dynamics of sovereignty and sacrifice that inhere in Hill’s work, casting altered light via the immanent figure of Offa onto more recent, disastrous dreams of power, and onto the separation of ruler from subject : ‘He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An / ancient land, full of strategy.’17 These essays, while designedly eclectic in their approaches, and in the scope of material that they address, do then find repeated questions or inspirations, shared 17  Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (London, 1971), no. XV.

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Introduction 9

designs on discovered fragments. They show how powerfully Anglo-Saxon culture works its way into the dreams and landscapes of the modern arts in ways neither to be ignored as obscurantist nor dismissed as cliché-ridden. They make a compelling case for returning to Old English texts and Anglo-Saxon artworks through an alertness to their performances and (re)iterations as editions, translations, collections, motifs, parodies, and narratives in an ongoing intertextual arena. Inevitably, there are many instances of this exchange that do not find a place here : Tennyson and William Morris ; Jorge Luis Borges meditating on his distance and closeness to a Saxon poet’s voice ; retellings and new myths for young readers by Rosemary Sutcliff or Kevin CrossleyHolland ; Bruce Gorrie’s Glaswegian Wanderer, ‘freezin’ an’ pished wie nae mates’ ; films such as The 13th Warrior (1999, dir. John McTiernan) and Beowulf and Grendel (2005, dir. Sturla Gunnarsson), along with a tide of Tolkien-inspired material ; Neil Gaiman’s story ‘Bay Wolf ’ (the dyspeptic offspring of Beowulf and a futuristic episode of television flesh-fest Baywatch) ; shifting hybrids of Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Arthurian motifs, narratives and ‘wikimation’ via websites, chatrooms, and gaming.18 These and other ‘bone dreams’ continually refresh what Roland Barthes terms the ‘irreducible […] plural’ of the Text ; an ‘overcrossing’ that works between past and present and across languages and media.19 For this reason we hope that this book will engage not only scholars or students of Anglo-Saxon culture, modern literature and arts, and medievalism, but also those concerned with various kinds of cultural 18 On Tennyson, see most recently Damian Love, ‘Hengist’s Brood : Tennyson and the AngloSaxons’, Review of English Studies n.s. 60 (2009), 460–74. For Morris, see The Tale of Beowulf : Done out of the Old English Tongue by William Morris and A.J. Wyatt (Hammersmith, 1895). On translations from Old English, including Morris’s, see Eric Stanley, ‘Translation from Old English : “The Garbaging War-Hawk”, or, the Literal Materials from which the Reader can Re-create the Poem’, in Acts of Interpretation : The Text in its Contexts, 700–1600. Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in honor of E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, OK, 1982), pp. 67–101. Borges’s poems on Anglo-Saxon topics include ‘Composicion escrita en un ejemplar de las gesta de Beowulf ’ ; ‘Hengest cyning’ ; ‘Un sajon (A.D. 449)’ ; ‘Fragmento’ ; ‘A un poeta sajon’ ; ‘Al iniciar el estudio de la gramatica anglosajona’ ; and ‘A un poeta sajon’, all included in his Selected Poems, 1923–1967 (London, 1972). On Spanish and French versions of Old English see Fernando Gálvan, ‘Rewriting Anglo-Saxon : Notes on the Presence of Old English in Contemporary Literature’, S E L I M  : Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2 (1992), 70–90. The many translations and narratives for children grounded in the Anglo-Saxon past include Rosemary Sutcliff, Beowulf : Dragonslayer (London, 1961) ; idem, Dawn Wind (London, 1961) ; Kevin Crossley-Holland, Wulf (London, 1988) ; idem, with Jill Paton-Walsh, Wordhoard : Anglo-Saxon Stories (London, 1969). Bruce Gorrie’s ‘The Wanderer’ was published in Agenda 35 (1997), 54–7. Neil Gaiman, ‘Bay Wolf ’, in his Smoke and Mirrors : Short Fictions and Illusions (London, 1999, repr. 2005), pp. 219–25. Parodying the opening of Beowulf, the story introduces Gar Roth, chief among Venice Beach’s pimps and pushers ; ‘Þæt wæs god cyning’ is memorably updated as ‘He had the shit’ (p. 219). Ubisoft’s Beowulf : The Game (issued 2007) is a spin-off from Zemeckis’s film, receiving mixed reviews on retail and gaming websites and competing with numerous other medievaland especially Viking-themed games. 19  Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in his Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), pp. 155–64, at p. 159.

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Introduction

interplay across geographical or temporal divides. Two final examples of such interplay from public art projects in the UK show how the idea of the pre-Conquest continues to work its way, sometimes circuitously, into our sense of time, place, and self. On 30 March 2005 a sculpture by Michael Fairfax was unveiled in Exeter High Street by the leader of the City Council, as part of a scheme of improvements to the city centre which included (without irony) the removal of street clutter and the replacement of bus shelters. The sculpture is 6 metres tall : a stainless steel, tapering obelisk with a star-shaped cross-section, resting on a stone plinth, its glittering form reminiscent of 1950s comic-book rocket ships, or to an Anglo-Saxonist, a Ruthwell Cross de nos jours.20 On what we might call the verso of each fin or wing, one of the Exeter Book riddles has been incised in mirror writing, and may be read in its reflection on the recto of the next fin. The shiny fins, with steel balls at the base of each opening, create a hall-of-mirrors effect. The text of the riddles is derived from Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation.21 The starkly geometric form of the sculpture makes no apparent allusion to medievalism or ‘heritage’ art, but its teasing indirectness nicely stages the processes of deflection and reflection that the riddles themselves involve. At the time of writing, the Exeter Book itself  the richest collection of Old English poetry to survive  is kept a short walk from the High Street in a traditional, glass-topped cabinet in the cramped entrance space of the Cathedral Library.22 The City Council had originally suggested that Fairfax design a clock, but he discovered the riddles because his father John Fairfax had contributed to a lively collection of contemporary ones, The New Exeter Book of Riddles.23 This piece of ‘accidental’ Old English has now become a point of rendezvous and reflection in the middle of a busy shopping street, and is featured in tourist information as a noted link with Exeter’s Anglo-Saxon history. The size and prominence of the Exeter riddle sculpture are significant in its context, but are dwarfed by Mark Wallinger’s design for a white horse, fifty metres (164 feet) tall, to stand in a field at the newly created development of Ebbsfleet in North 20  See http ://www.michaelfairfax.co.uk/exeterriddle.html, accessed 15 September 2009. 21  The Exeter Book Riddles, trans. Kevin Crossley-Holland, rev. edn (Harmondsworth, 1993). The riddles are numbers 4 (bell) ; 7 (swan) ; 24 (magpie) ; 28 (ale) ; 35 (coat of mail) ; 37 (bellows) ; 46 (Lot and his daughters and their sons) ; 50 (fire). Fairfax’s original shortlist contained two double entendre riddles  25 (onion) and 45 (dough)  that were vetoed by the City Council (personal communication from Michael Fairfax, to whom we are grateful for discussing his work). In this context, the incest motif of riddle 46, while scriptural, seems a surprising inclusion. Each riddle’s solution is incised on a stainless steel sphere at the base of each opening. Passers-by pause to smile at their distorted reflections, puzzle over the texts or perch on the plinth to wait for a friend. 22  Exeter, Dean and Chapter MS 3501. See The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, ed. Bernard J. Muir, 2 vols. (Exeter, 1994). 23  Personal communication from Michael Fairfax. See The New Exeter Book of Riddles, ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail (London, 1999). John Fairfax’s riddle is number 22 in the collection. Outside Exeter Guildhall another riddle from this book, by Richard Skinner (number 81, solution ‘the river Exe’), is written in metal lettering, embedded as a curving trail on the pavement.

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Introduction 11



Kent, near London’s M25 orbital motorway and the railway line from continental Europe.24 A white horse marked on chalk uplands is, of course, a feature of the English landscape stretching back far beyond the Anglo-Saxons, and Wallinger’s personal fascination with equine art and form (in both senses) plays a large part in the project, described by one enthusiastic journalist as ‘a mesmerising conflation of old England and new, of the semi-mythical, Tolkien-esque past and the six-lane, all-crawling present’.25 Part of this conflation of influences and symbols is the legend of the earliest Germanic leaders to arrive in Britain, Hengist and Horsa, whose associations gave Kent its longstanding heraldic emblem of a white horse rearing on its hind legs :26 People arrive in Dover, travel along the A2 and go on to become part of that complicated human group known to the world as ‘British’. The Anglo-Saxons, led by Hengest and Horsa, did so in the fifth century. Wallinger is delighted to note that ‘Horsa’ means horse, and ‘Hengest’ is Anglo-Saxon for ‘stallion’, very probably because these chieftains  if they existed  worshipped a horse deity.27 24 See for example http ://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7880889.stm, accessed 18 September 2009. 25  Martin Gayford, ‘Mark Wallinger : The Inspiration behind my Horse’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 February 2009 ; http ://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/4613060/Mark-Wallinger-the-inspiration-behindmy-horse.html, accessed 18 September 2009. The proposal has had reactions ranging from admiration to incredulity, and has inevitably invited comparisons with Anthony Gormley’s huge ‘Angel of the North’ sculpture in North-East England. One of the oldest and best-known white horses in England, that at Uffington in Oxfordshire, is a short walk from the Neolithic burial site known as Wayland’s Smithy, around which (as Maria Sachiko Cecire discusses in her chapter) the legend of Wayland has accrued. 26  The Kentish emblem is gules a horse forcene argent, with the white horse said to be the symbol of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. Initially the site of the proposed statue (between Dartford and Gravesend, just south of the Thames) was confused in news reports with the landing place of Hengist and Horsa  named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as ‘Ypwines fleot’ or ‘Heopwines fleot’ (see The AngloSaxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton, rev. edn (London, 2000), p. 12). In fact, that Ebbsfleet is in East Kent, just south-west of Ramsgate, and is marked in Gothic type on the Ordnance Survey Explorer map ‘Canterbury and the Isle of Thanet’ (Southampton, 2007) as ‘Traditional site of the landing of the Saxons 449 and St Augustine 597’. The ‘Ebbsfleet’ of the horse does not yet exist as a separate entity on the map, and its creation and naming have been the subject of local controversy ; see ‘There is no Ebbsfleet’, BBC News online magazine, http ://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7215206.stm, accessed 18 September 2009. 27  Gayford, ‘Mark Wallinger’. The Old English for ‘horse’ is indeed hors ; OE hengest is cognate with, for example, Old Frisian hengst, ‘stallion’. See Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘hors’ ; ‘hengest’. On the early history of Kent, see Nicholas Brooks, ‘The Creation and Early Structure of the Kingdom of Kent’, in The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Steven Bassett (London, 1989), pp. 55–74 (see p. 59 for what Brooks calls the ‘surely fictitious doubleton Hengist and Horsa’). The Hengest of the Finnsburgh episode in Beowulf, and possible connections with the ‘Kentish’ Hengist, are discussed in J.R.R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest : The Fragment and the Episode, ed. Alan Bliss (London, 1982), esp. pp. 173–80, and Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 65–77. On the long-established tendency to romanticize Anglo-Saxon paganism, see Eric Stanley’s influential The Search for AngloSaxon Paganism, repr. in his Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past (Cambridge, 2000).

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Introduction

Given the current unstable financial conditions, Wallinger’s white horse  part ancient symbol, part postmodern kitsch  might face delays or cancellation, but it exists as an idea already changing the landscape in which it imaginatively stands. Likewise, the mixture of (pseudo-)history, etymology and identity-formation at its core is a telling indication of the roles that Anglo-Saxon culture continues to play in our fragile but inventive stories of what it means to be English, British, northern, or none of those, and how we communicate with the past in the present. This collection of essays will, we hope, encourage further explorations of such interplay between Anglo-Saxon culture and the modern imagination.

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1 From Heorot to Hollywood : Beowulf in its Third Millennium Chris Jones

T

o make a beginning is to miss things out ; we are never ‘from the egg’,1 but always launched in medias res. And the middle of things is where we pick up the story of Beowulf, by which I mean the story of the poem, not the story in the poem. What this essay assumes is that Beowulf, as it is enacted in its sole surviving manuscript, the Nowell Codex, now part of London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, is not the beginning of the story of the work we call Beowulf, but already an adaptation, a refraction. Even in the first glimpse we have of Beowulf, an early eleventh-century performance of narrative material from the first millennium, the poem is already in movement, transitory (læne) and in transition. As the Nowell Codex Beowulf is not only writing, but also a reading, as all writing must be, this essay argues that subsequent creative responses to Beowulf are not, therefore, different in essence from the manuscript text itself. Consequently, although the Nowell-Beowulf marks the opening out of a story in medias res, it is not itself a point of origin against which the authenticity of other uses of the Beowulf material are to be benchmarked. Subsequent performances of the Beowulf material, acts which literary criticism has traditionally labelled ‘reception’, are rather an integral part of the narrative of Beowulfthe-work. We should see the work not as an object, fixed in a web of written text and in need of atomizing analysis of its linguistic parts, nor even as an event in time, requiring historical contextualization, but rather as a process through time. After developing some of these introductory statements about Beowulf as always already in motion, this essay then reads two very different imaginative responses I am grateful not only to the editors of the present volume for helpful revisions and suggestions for improvement, but also to the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies’ reading group ‘In-progress’, and especially Christine Rauer, all of whom commented on a draft of this essay.

1 Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 147–8. Niall Rudd, ed., Horace Epistles Book II and Epistle to the Pisones (‘Ars Poetica’) (Cambridge, 1989), p. 63.

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to Beowulf made early in the twenty-first century : Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Helmet’, published in 2006, and the film Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis), released in 2007. I hope to show that Beowulf continues to have cultural ‘use’ (something all works must possess if they are not to atrophy) across three millennia, and that Anglo-Saxon poetry continues to be productive in contemporary imagination, where it is as political as it was in the late tenth/early eleventh centuries. An important ontological implication informs the approach here : that the limits of what we might term ‘the work’ are considerably wider than are usually credited, and may include, for example, films as well as poems that make very different use of shared elements. It is for this reason that I refer here to ‘the Beowulf material’, as meaning those narrative elements that can be deployed in re-performance, and ‘Beowulf-the-work’, by which I mean that entire process, in which the Nowell-Beowulf is not privileged as origin, for indeed, it is not origin  something the poem tells us explicitly in its first sentence, co-opting our participation as it claims its place in relation to earlier transmission : ‘Hwæt, we […] gefrunon’ (‘Listen, […] we have heard’, lines 1–2).2 More generally, this essay hopes to provide a methodological exemplar for a form of reading literary works from the distant past in a way which does not isolate the text in history, but, without being reductively presentist, attends to the work’s natural and ongoing opening out into history. That Beowulf travelled from the first millennium into the second is not, I hope, a contentious proposition. For the first direct material evidence (as opposed to hypothesis) we have for the work’s ongoing opening out into history, the poem in manuscript, survives from close to the year AD 1000, and in high probability from the first decade of the eleventh century.3 Indeed, it is entirely possible that the manuscript celebrated its millennial anniversary in the year of the present volume’s publication, an occasion that would be marked fittingly by this collection of essays on the longevity of Old English in the modern imagination. Yet what the editing hand of time has permitted us to see in the Nowell Codex is not the actual beginning or origin of the poem. For there is near universal agreement (a rare phenomenon in Beowulf studies) that scribes A and B copied Beowulf into the Nowell Codex from some pre-existing text.4 2  All parenthetical line references to the poem are from Klaeber 4th edn. 3  On palaeographical evidence, Dumville judges it ‘in the highest degree unlikely that the Beowulfmanuscript was written later than the death of Æthelred the Unready (1016) or earlier than the midpoint of his reign (which fell in A.D. 997)’, and writes of the ‘apparent necessity of dating the book very early in the eleventh century’. David Dumville, ‘Beowulf come lately : Some Notes on the Palaeography of the Nowell Codex’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 225 (1988), 49–63, at p. 63. This refines, but does not contradict, Ker’s previous dating of ‘s. X/XI’. N.R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), p. 281. See also Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier, ‘Date, Provenance, Author, Audiences’, in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Exeter, 1997), pp. 13–34. 4  For a description of the manuscript and its two scribal hands, see Klaeber 4th edn, pp. xxvii–xxxv.

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Leonard Boyle has drawn inferences about the size, foliation and lineation of the quires of what he terms the ‘copy-Beowulf ’,5 and Michael Lapidge has assembled persuasive palaeographical evidence that an eighth-century archetype of the poem existed, written in Anglo-Saxon set minuscule.6 Even if one dates the manuscript to very late in the tenth century, this does not negate the fact that it would have been read and used during the early years of the second millennium. Nor would the present point be affected substantially by accepting Kevin Kiernan’s slightly later dating of the manuscript, on historical grounds (an aspect of his brilliant work by which I am not convinced), to the reign of Cnut (1016–1035),7 since this would still necessitate other narrative materials, whether oral or literary, about most, or all, of the character-cast of the Nowell Codex poem having pre-existed its production in the previous millennium, and out of which scribe B composed our poem  materials which perhaps reach back as far as Iron Age Denmark, to Lejre, the putative UrHeorot.8 Nevertheless, scholars have cast much type on the ‘original’ Beowulf, the Beowulf which no longer exists, but the existence of which seems inescapable. Perhaps we should call this the Ur-Beowulf, or even the asterisk-Beowulf, to draw an analogy with other scholarly constructs for which we have no primary, first-hand evidence, but which nevertheless must have existed, such as lost manuscript exempla, or proto Indo-European, the postulated verbal forms of which are marked by an asterisk to show they are precisely that : imaginings, reconstructions. This asterisk-Beowulf is important to us because, as moderns, we prize originality as much as we do origins, and frequently locate the value of originality in the very originary moment itself.9 So the asterisk-Beowulf would be an authorial Beowulf : the thing as it was ‘really’ composed, witness to the manipulation of tradition by the individual talent, and the record of an innovative, purposeful creative act, before the work was altered and distorted, to whatever extent, by the process of transmission. If this were not reason enough to search for and attempt to fix the asteriskBeowulf, there are also disciplinary imperatives for doing so. Historicism, whether or old or new, has long been the dominant mode of doing literary criticism. There endures a widespread assumption, by no means universal or unchallenged, but nonetheless pervasive, even among critics who would not necessarily align themselves 5  Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Nowell Codex and the Poem of Beowulf ’, in The Dating of ‘Beowulf ’, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto, 1981), pp. 23–32. 6  Michael Lapidge, ‘The Archetype of Beowulf ’, Anglo-Saxon England 29 (2000), 5–41. 7  Kevin Kiernan, ‘Beowulf ’ and the ‘Beowulf ’ Manuscript, 2nd edn (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), pp. 4 and 18–23 ; also idem, ‘The Eleventh-Century Origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript’, in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Chase, pp. 9–22. 8  John D. Niles, ‘Beowulf ’ and Lejre, featuring contributions by Tom Christensen and Marijane Osborn (Tempe, AZ, 2007). 9  See Edward W. Said, ‘On Originality’, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic (London, 1984), pp. 126–39.

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with historicism, that a work means whatever it meant when it was created. For some this is understood to be whatever the work meant to its immediate readership (sometimes reductively totalized on the basis of selective evidence) ; for others it is whatever function the work performed within the network of social, economic and political relationships, out of which it was produced ; while among yet others persists an underlying presumption that the work means what it ‘must have meant’ to its author, however difficult this proves to recover (and too often is sought for as unnecessary justification of the critic’s own interpretation). In all these formulations meaning is located at, or immediately contiguous with, the moment of origin. Meaning is original meaning. It is for this reason that as teachers we spend much of our time in the classroom trying to disabuse our students of the various culturally and historically situated expectations they have of the text : expectations which we label anachronistic. In literary criticism nothing holes an interpretation as effectively as the accusation of anachronism : anachronistic readings are misreadings. To attempt to read Beowulf in a chronistic way, then, to historicize it  one of the ways we are most trained to read a poem  we need first to locate the asteriskBeowulf. This explains the popularity, and the importance, in Beowulf studies, of playing the dating game.10 Thus we have, for example, persuasive handling of detailed evidence that places the asterisk-Beowulf in the early eighth century in East Anglia, allowing the poem to be historicized as part of a legitimization of the dynastic claims of King Ælfwald (c.713–749) ;11 or during the reign of Athelstan (924–55), determining the poem as the product of the tenth-century penetration of the Christianized inhabitants of the Danelaw into English society ;12 or during the winter of 826–7 by Eanmund, abbot of Breedon on the Hill (NW Leicestershire), situating the poem’s composition within the Mercian political crisis of the early ninth century.13 This is to summarize but three of the many attempts to locate the asterisk-Beowulf, and each displays a committed scholarly engagement with a range of different types of evidence in order to put forward hypotheses which are, in their own ways, highly compelling, the most significant objection sometimes seeming to be that they cannot all be right at the same time.14 Reading the poem’s originary meaning (however we decide to construe that) is 10  I steal this phrase shamelessly from Professor Julia Smith, University of Glasgow, who used it in teaching a course on ‘Beowulf and History’ while at the University of St Andrews. 11  Sam Newton, The Origins of Beowulf and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia (Cambridge, 1993). 12  Audrey Meaney, ‘Scyld Scefing and the Dating of Beowulf  Again’, in Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England : Thomas Northcote Toller and the Toller Memorial Lectures, ed. Donald Scragg (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 23–73. 13  Richard North, The Origins of ‘Beowulf ’ : From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford, 2006). 14  Whitelock’s caution is salutary : ‘it is not enough to show, however convincingly, that the poem fits into a certain historical context, unless one can also show that no other historical context exists into which it could equally well be fitted’. Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of ‘Beowulf ’ (Oxford, 1951), p. 28.

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never going to be a wholly satisfying activity while there is so little consensus over its asterisked moment of birth. In the narrowest sense it seems likely that Beowulf will remain stubbornly undatable. Nevertheless, the impulse to fix and historicize the poem’s moment of composition is an understandable one, which we share with Beowulf ; the poem is as fascinated with its own origins as we are. This genetic self-examination is most evident in the passage immediately following the Danes’ return from Grendel’s mere (lines 853–915), when one of Hrothgar’s men begins ‘wordum wrixlan’ (‘to vary words’, 874), to extemporize a praise poem or story ostensibly concerned with ‘sið Beowulfes’ (‘the exploit of Beowulf ’, 872). What the poem purports to be giving us here is its own creation myth, its genesis : the first occasion on which heroic poetry about Beowulf was composed. Yet we do not read the ‘word oþer’ (‘other words’, 870) which the Danish poet ‘fand’ (‘discovered’ 870) at all, but instead materials of the ‘ealdgesegena’ (‘old stories’, 869) : not the first story about Beowulf, but pre-existing materials about Sigemund and Heremod. Here the Nowell-Beowulf reaches back to Heorot in search of its own Ur-text, but what it actually returns with are pre-texts. Locating Beowulf ’s point of origin seems both as desirable and as chimerical a possibility for the surface narrative voice of the poem, as it does for us, standing beyond that surface shell. While I do not wish to suggest that the project of searching for the poem’s origins in order to historicize the text, now fixed in the past, is in itself misguided, or should be abandoned, we should be cautious about privileging such an historicized reading of the asterisk-Beowulf above readings of the work as it subsequently passes through history : above those stories and responses that accrue around the work as it continues to move from that invisible asterisk moment, through time, in forms that visibly witness the ongoing story of Beowulf the work, and which constitute a proper part of the process, not object, that we call Beowulf studies. We should not neglect the Beowulfs we have for the Beowulf we do not. Some of those stories, and a part of that process, are manifestly visible around, perhaps soon after, the turn of the first millennium in the Nowell Codex ; indeed, there are some grounds for thinking of the NowellBeowulf as a millennial poem, although that need not extend to literal belief in apocalypse at one of the putative thousand-year dates.15 Space prevents development of this reading of the poem’s passage, although a case will later be made for thinking of Beowulf as once-again millennial, for the second time in its history, a thousand years later. What I wish to emphasize again, is that in Cotton Vitellius A. xv we first glimpse the Beowulf poem in transit, already on its way from then towards now, or rather, we

15  Part of what such a consideration might embrace is set out in Edward L. Risden, Beasts of Time : Apocalyptic ‘Beowulf ’ (New York, 1994). For a judicious synthesis of views on the ‘weak thesis’ of the year 1000, including how millennial rhetoric might be political rather than literal, see Simon MacLean, ‘Apocalypse and Revolution : Europe around the Year 1000’, Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007), 86–106, esp. pp. 100–105.

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see Beowulf already in a moment of reception and transmission. Ever since we first got to know it, Beowulf has always been a response, an adaptation.16 If one is willing to accept a definition of the literary work as the ongoing transmission of the poem through history, then recent uses of Beowulf in both popular and highbrow art indicate that the process of the poem is now in its third millennium, and that what we might properly call the story of Beowulf has travelled from Heorot and asterisk to Hollywood and the Zemeckis Beowulf of 2007 : the most visible of the twentyfirst-century responses to the poem so far, its screenplay penned not by scribes A and B, but by Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman.17 For professional Anglo-Saxonists to ignore Avary and Gaiman’s re-performance of the poem would be as intellectually complacent and as strategically unwise as it would be easy, and would concede and confirm the marginal position of Anglo-Saxon studies within the English-speaking world in the twenty-first century.18 In terms of film-making technique, Zemeckis’s Beowulf can make strong claims to ground-breaking status ; it is the first full-length motion picture to use performance capture technology entirely from beginning to end.19 Performance capture, also known as motion capture, is the process of sampling the movement, but not the appearance, of live actors, and then using that information to animate 3D digital images. Its blending of live film-making techniques and digital animation creates an effect of blurring the realistic with the fantastic, analogous to the blurring of heroic or mythic history with factual history in the poem. Although this technology is still in its primitive stages, if it catches on, then when future histories of cinematography are written, Beowulf will likely find itself being placed again in a foundational position, as the beginning, or origin of a certain kind of storytelling tradition arising from the interaction of old and new technologies, just as was perhaps the case when oral storytelling and scribal technologies first met.20 Once again, the poem will be made to stand as an origin myth, just as it does in the publicity and press release material

16  Roy Liuzza incisively deals with many of the conceptual, as well as methodological, problems, calling the poem before the manuscript ‘a changing complex of variant versions’, and the Nowell Codex’s date ‘the only meaningful date for the “effective composition” of Beowulf ’. Roy Michael Liuzza, ‘On the Dating of Beowulf ’, in The ‘Beowulf ’ Reader, ed. Peter S. Baker (New York, 2000), pp. 281–302, at p. 295. 17  Beowulf, dir. Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros., 2007). 18  One of the few scholars to have broken print silence on the subject is Carolyne Larrington, ‘Beowulf the Hard-Man’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 November 2007. Also http ://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article2914426.ece, accessed 7 June 2009. 19  The first film to make extensive, but not exclusive use of performance capture, was Sinbad : Beyond the Veil of Mists, dir. Evan Ricks and Alan Jacobs (Trimark Pictures, 2000). 20  See Jeff Opland, ‘From Horseback to Monastic Cell : The Impact on English Literature of the Introduction of Writing’, in Old English Literature in Context : Ten Essays, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 30–43, at p. 43. See also John D. Niles, Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 50–55.

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surrounding the film where it is usually described as ‘the oldest story in the English language’.21 There are, then, pragmatic reasons for Anglo-Saxonists to get involved with this response. From an intellectual point of view, there has been enough theorization of text and textuality by now for us to be comfortable with the idea that transmission and remaking are activities that go hand-in-hand, and we ought to be able to accept that the Zemeckis Beowulf is a translation of the poem in the broadest, but also the etymologically deepest, sense of that term. While there are no excuses for those with an investment in the poem to ignore the film, any temptation to patronize it as inauthentic or vulgar must also be resisted. Even to summarize the plot changes risks sounding supercilious : the film does, after all, make Hrothgar the father of Grendel, and has the dragon as the offspring of Beowulf and Grendel’s mother. However, to criticize the film for lack of authenticity is misguided ; the film-makers have no duty to treat the poem authentically, and in any case, this essay has sought to demonstrate that ‘the authentic’ Beowulf is an idea even scholars of the poem have found (or ought to find) rather slippery.22 We should not indulge the common prejudice, well understood by theorists of adaptation, that a work of art is debased as it moves ‘downwards’ through a perceived but unspoken hierarchy of media.23 We would also do well to bear in mind that much of what we study reverentially on medieval literature courses in universities now was once the popular culture of the Middle Ages. Moreover, it is important to recognize that while the film results in part from a desire to convert the poem into financial gain, for many of those who find this distasteful, Beowulf nevertheless represents a cultural wealth, long-accumulated through hard study, the exclusivity of which may appear to be under threat from the Avary–Gaiman adaptation. Anglo-Saxonists must be careful not to hoard their capital possessively, like the dragon in the poem. It is worth remembering that the materials of Beowulf have always been adapted in order to create and control cultural and political capital, whether those be the adaptations of the poem presented in the editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philologists in the pursuit of building and defending national identities,24 or the adaptations of pre-existing narrative materials by a late Anglo-Saxon poet or poets in order to legitimize a West Saxon myth of the manifold political destiny of ‘the English’ as extended to include 21  The phrase currently used in the synopsis of the poem on the film’s official website is ‘the oldest epic tale in the English language’ : http ://www.beowulfmovie.com/, accessed 7 June 2009. Almost all the online reviews of the film picked up on the phrase earlier used in interview by Gaiman : ‘the oldest story in the English language’ ; see http ://www.canmag.com/nw/9584-beowulf-neil-gaiman, accessed 7 June 2009. 22  See Richard Burt, for discussion of how film historians have moved the fidelity debate beyond issues of accurate representation, ‘Getting Schmedieval : Of Manuscript and Film Prologues, Paratexts and Parodies’, Exemplaria 19 (2007), 217–42. 23  See, for example, Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York, 2006), pp. 2–3 and 85. 24  The best guide to this story is T.A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder, eds., ‘Beowulf ’ : The Critical Heritage (London, 1998).

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Danes and other Continentals :25 an adaptation that at some time undoubtedly served some poet well in terms of political advancement and personal gain. Beowulf is not only concerned with wealth and power ; in its movement through history Beowulf has never been free from the operation of wealth and power, however much scholars may rue, or even deny, that such vulgarities impinge on their guarded treasure. Vulgarity not only impinges on, it abounds in the opening shots of the first scene of the Zemeckis Beowulf ; indeed it is their very point and purpose. We see Anthony Hopkins’s Hrothgar, intoxicated and inarticulate, carousing in the hall Heorot presumably not long after its erection, and exposing his own while dealing out the beagas (‘rings’ or ‘treasure’, line 80) to his retainers. Admittedly, the dialogue, here as throughout the film, falls a long way short of the elevated register and high manners which the passages of direct speech achieve in the poem.26 Yet one of the major preoccupations of the film is the gap between what happens and what is reported  the reliability of the evidential basis for our understanding of past events : the central problem confronting the historian in fact. Much later the film stages before an elderly Beowulf a live performance of the poem as we know it from the Nowell Codex (quoting from between lines 760 and 812), and yet by that time, the film has already portrayed the events of the fight with Grendel much less heroically ; Beowulf the statesman is wearily aware of the misrepresentation of his own deeds. Thus the propagandistic potential of heroic literature to manipulate ‘facts’ is explored by the film as disjunctures like these are opened up between what we are told and what we are shown. For those who know the poem’s ostensible depiction of Hrothgar as ‘god cyning’ (‘a good king’, 863), Hopkins’s portrayal of him in the film’s opening sequence is another such disjuncture and a falling off of expectations. The Zemeckis Beowulf finds itself sceptical of authority and of the claims upon which authority is founded, and mistrustful of leaders, who are presented variously as vulgar, inarticulate, ineffective at protecting their people, actively deceitful, or any combination of those qualities. In these respects the film catches something of the Anglophone popular disenchantment with political leadership after the 2003 Iraq War, and with foreign policy run as if in accordance with the heroic code. Nevertheless, a number of filmic clichés associated with the Middle Ages are tediously re-deployed in these same opening shots : a boar on a spit, excessive drunkenness and the obligatory burping ; the alterity of the Middle Ages as a site of uncivilized savagery is here reduced to bad table manners and boorishness. Parachronism and anachronism abound too : Hrothgar sports a toga, imperial Roman style ; Heorot is not a timber-framed, iron-age hall, but a formidable stone-built structure (which 25  Here I accept as convincing Niles’s account of the intellectual and social matrix in which the poem was possibly produced, and certainly through which it travelled. Niles, Heroic Poems, pp. 13–58. See also Craig R. Davis, ‘Redundant Ethnogenesis in Beowulf ’, The Heroic Age 5 (2001), http ://www. heroicage.org/issues/5/Davis1.html, accessed 30 July 2009. 26  On this aspect of the poem, see Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to ‘Beowulf ’ (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 203–37.

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by the end of the film has sprouted turrets and crenellations) ; and whatever sixthcentury Scandinavian music did sound like, presumably it was not the Greensleevesesque songs which Wealhtheow, played by Robin Wright Penn, sings to the harp. Perhaps the most significant ‘error’ of this kind is that the spreading worship of what John Malkovich as Unferth calls ‘the New Roman God, Christ Jesus’ throughout early sixth-century Denmark takes place two to three centuries too early. Before beginning to tut over historical accuracy, however, we should recall that the Nowell-Beowulf is no stranger to anachronism itself ; it has the Danish coastguard lead Beowulf to Heorot along a road paved with stone (‘stanfah’, 320), for example, when presumably there were no such imperial highways in sixth-century Denmark. Of more consequence is the interjection of Christian elements to a story of pagan setting, arguably to the extent of placing Christian sentiment into the mouths of characters who can never have heard of Christ, an assumed anachronism thought to be so problematic that it has generated decades of scholarly debate.27 Historical realism is plainly no more the mode of the Nowell Codex poem than it is that of the film. Gaiman and Avary, however, have done their homework well enough to make allusive gestures to plausibly chronistic historicity in a way that provides ‘optional depth’28 to those in the know. In proclaiming ‘Denmark AD 507’ over its opening shots of Heorot, for example, the film fixes the action of Beowulf with an informed speculation ; if Gregory of Tours’s King Chlochilaichus, the Hygelac of Beowulf, fell in a raid on the Frankish Hætware ‘about A.D. 521’,29 then the historical setting for the fictionalized events of the first part of the poem would very likely be the first decade of the sixth century, and the 2007 film might well mark the 1500th anniversary of significant events in the reign of a real-life, if shadowy, Scandinavian king, whether of the Geats, as the poem has it, or of the Danes, as in Gregory’s account. This anniversary possibility, with its tacit nod to those familiar with the content of the apparatus of Klaeber, amplifies any contemporary resonances we might wish to find in the film’s depiction of untrustworthy or vulgarized leadership. Optional depth operates also in the way Gaiman and Avary deal with the poem’s prologue, and Scyld Scefing in particular. Few of the figures in Beowulf are more 27  Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’ might be taken as one such example (lines 1700–1784). See also Wiglaf ’s comment on Beowulf ’s death (2819–20). Most of the dimensions of this issue were set out in F. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd edn (Boston, 1950), pp. xlviii–li. The secondary literature dealing with the subject is vast. A starting-point selection includes Larry D. Benson, ‘The Pagan Colouring of Beowulf ’, in Old English Poetry : Fifteen Essays, ed. Robert P. Creed (Providence, RI, 1967), pp. 193–213 ; Marijane Osborn, ‘The Great Feud : Scriptural History and Strife in Beowulf ’, PMLA 93 (1978), 973–81 ; Edward B. Irving Jr., ‘Christian and Pagan Elements’, in A ‘Beowulf ’ Handbook, ed. Bjork and Niles, pp. 175–92 ; Orchard, Critical Companion, pp. 130–168. 28  I borrow this phrase from Michael Alexander, who used it to describe the operation of T.S. Eliot’s language in the George Jack memorial lecture at the University of St Andrews, 29 April 2009. 29  Klaeber, ed., Beowulf, 3rd edn, p. xxxix. The recent ‘fourth’ edition of Klaeber’s ‘Beowulf ’ is more circumspect, but observes the event ‘must have taken place during the period A.D. 516–531’ (Klaeber 4th edn, p. li). The identification of Chlochilaichus with Hygelac was first made by N.F.S. Grundtvig in 1815.

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shadowy than Scyld, founder of the Danish Scylding dynasty and hero of the ‘proem’ (lines 4–11). In the film he is not even murkily present, but has been elided, as are many of the poem’s cast of characters who inhabit planes of heroic history other than that of the central linear narrative ; the temporal depth, as well as the geographical breadth, of the poem is compressed in the interests of telling a story in under two hours. Yet in another sense Scyld’s shadow continues to cast a thickening presence, for Scyld’s symbolic function in the poem’s prologue is transferred in the film onto the figure of Beowulf himself. When Gaiman and Avary deal with their hero’s passing away, they transform Beowulf ’s terrestrial funeral pyre and subsequent burial mound interment (lines 3137–68) into a ship funeral, as he is sent, at the film’s end, into the ocean and apparently into the receiving hands of Grendel’s mother. This is to transpose onto Beowulf ’s funeral many of the details from Scyld’s (lines 26–52, although it is said there that men do not know who received Scyld’s body). Earlier in the film, through the depiction of the Geats’ voyage to Denmark, and a flashback to the swimming competition with Breca, a sense of affinity with, or belonging to, the sea is established in connection with Beowulf ’s character, who announces at one point : ‘The sea is my mother, she’ll never take me back to her murky womb.’ Ray Winstone’s Beowulf then, arrives from the sea  how we are not quite sure  prospers and rises as a hero, and is committed back to the sea by his people, almost as mysteriously as he came. The shape, purpose and semi-mythical nature of Scyld’s narrative in miniature is elided with, and amplified through, the film’s central hero, just as at some point in the poem’s ongoing compositional process Scyld appears to have taken over some of the narrative function of the Scef figure.30 As scholars have long seen Scyld as a proleptic double for Beowulf, this is both an economical and a witty adaptive strategy. It might be argued that such allusions are elitist ; they appear to expect a knowledge of ‘the original text’ from the film’s audience. In truth the film can operate perfectly well without such knowledge. It is sometimes claimed that the poem’s original readers must have been familiar with a wealth of material to which the poet alludes, such as the back-story to the Finnsburh-episode, or that of the characters Heremod, or Hama.31 In fact there is no evidence, other than of the same internal kind offered by the Zemeckis film, that the readers of the poem were homogenized to the extent that they all brought the same levels of intertextual fluency to the poem. Presumably the poem operated on multiple levels for multiple readership groups with little fuss. ‘Optional depth’ is as likely a mode for the Nowell poem as for the 2007 film. Witty allusive nods to the Nowell text and the scholarship it has generated abound in the film’s handling of Grendel’s mother, played by Angelina Jolie. Jolie’s monster shows herself to be not just a pretty, computer-generated, demonic succubus’s face ; confronting Beowulf in her cave, she reveals that she knows the etymology of the name ‘Beowulf ’, first proposed by Grimm, as ‘bee-wolf ’, or ‘the Bear’. The film also 30  As Meaney has persuasively argued in ‘Scyld Scefing’. 31 Orchard, Critical Companion, p. 115.

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makes a visual sexual pun on the giant sword which Beowulf uses in the Grendelkin’s cave, and which is said to waste and melt away when it comes into contact with Grendel’s mother (lines 1605–10). In the film, the melting of Winstone’s weapon in Jolie’s hand quite clearly becomes a post-ejaculative waning of manhood. This joke’s complexity is only apparent if one knows the passage of the poem in question and its notorious hapax legomenon describing the sword as ‘hildegicelum’ (‘battle-icicle’, line 1606). Casting Jolie, a digitally exaggerated trope of hyper-femininity, as Grendel’s mother may seem absurd to those who know the poem’s depiction of her as monstrous and of ambiguous gender. Nevertheless, this casting does reflect a recent pseudo-scholarly populist view of the poem. In Beowulf and Grendel : The Truth Behind England’s Oldest Legend, John Grigsby argues that Grendel’s mother is a residual memory of the suppressed fertility goddess Nerthus, who dwelt in lakes and pools, and, as well as a Demeter-like aspect as fertility goddess, also had a ‘sexually voracious’ and ‘cannibalistic’ aspect as the nightmare-hag (in the film she appears to Beowulf twice as a night-hag).32 Grigsby’s thesis marks a new chapter in what Eric Stanley has previously documented as ‘the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism’ :33 a marriage of certain familiar primitivist assumptions with contemporary New Age concerns about apparently lost fertility rites and a quasi-religious attitude towards the landscape and environment. Grigsby’s notes attempt to anchor this reading in the work of scholars such as Chambers, Tolkien, North, McTurk, Newton, Shippey and Orchard. Zemeckis’s Beowulf, which clearly shares something of Grigsby’s view of the poem, is interesting in part for the opportunity it offers to reflect on what the filtered noise and din of Beowulf scholarship sounds like from the outside ; the film is a record of what escapes the academy and how its various discourses are selected, edited, altered, understood, misunderstood, and re-understood. Indeed, for an example of how research in the humanities has a wide social and cultural impact beyond the walls of the institutions of Higher Education, one need only browse the online interviews with Gaiman and Avary to see how familiar they became with the themes of a wide range of Beowulf scholarship in order to produce a multi-million-dollar-grossing Hollywood movie. Their Beowulf is the fruit of a long conversation that has always been going on between the academy and ‘the outside world’.34 In this respect it is instructive to consider the process of re-understanding by which Gaiman and Avary arrived at the innovation of making Grendel and the 32  John Grigsby, Beowulf and Grendel : The Truth Behind England’s Oldest Legend (London, 2005), pp. 115–20, at p. 20. 33  Eric Stanley, Imagining the Anglo-Saxon Past : The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism and AngloSaxon Trial by Jury (Cambridge, 2000). 34  In the early years of the twenty-first century the British Government funding body the Arts and Humanities Research Council began to demand evidence of the financial and social ‘impact’ of humanities research. The Beowulf-scholarship which ‘transferred knowledge’ to the Zemeckis film had been produced free of this audit culture.

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dragon the offspring of Hrothgar and Beowulf respectively, both seduced by the temptations of Jolie as Grendel’s mother. In interview Gaiman has noted that his first contact with Beowulf was through the DC comic Beowulf : Dragon Slayer, remarking : I was interested enough, even though it wasn’t a very good comic, to pick up the Penguin Beowulf translation just to see what the comic was based on. I read the Penguin translation and went, ‘This is really fucking great. This would make a cool movie.’ And I didn’t know that it was world literature. I just thought it was this thing they based a comic on. From my point of view I was just reading a story, and it was great as a story. I always assume  which is probably a bad post-modern habit  I always assume my narrators are unreliable unless I learn otherwise. So I was reading it going, ‘Beowulf, you head off searching for the monster’s mother and you disappear for eight days, you reappear eight days later carrying the monster’s head but not the mother’s  I wonder if there’s an element of textual unreliability going on here. I wonder if there’s something else going on here.’35 Both screenwriters have placed quite a lot of emphasis on this dubious gap of eight days and the suggestion that either Beowulf, or the text, is being less than honest ;36 there seems to be a conflation of narrator and narratee, poet and textual transmission, in this view of where ‘the truth’ of the story lies. Again the Nowell Codex poem offers us a parallel : Beowulf does, after all, become his own narrator in the court of Hygelac, the details of his account of the Danish adventure differing in some respects from that which the main narrative voice has earlier given. What is most puzzling about Beowulf ’s eight-day leave of absence is that Gaiman and Avary should have found it in the poem at all. At the surface of Grendel’s mere, when bubbles of blood reach the surface, Michael Alexander’s ‘fucking great’ Penguin translation reads : ‘Many were persuaded that the she-wolf of the deep had done away with him. The ninth hour had come ; the keen-hearted Scyldings abandoned the cliff-head.’37 ‘Hour’, it seems, has been misremembered by Gaiman as ‘day’. Even eight hours might be thought a suspiciously long time to be away fighting a monster, and certainly more than enough time for the average hero to do whatever is required to father a dragon. However, Alexander’s phrase ‘the ninth hour had come’ translates ‘þa com non dæges’ (line 1600), ‘then came the ninth hour of day’, i.e. the Roman canonical hour of nones, or mid-afternoon. As Beowulf ’s swim to the bottom of the mere takes him ‘hwil dæges’ 35  http ://www.chud.com/articles/articles/12435/1/E XC LU SI V E - I N T E RV I EW - N E I L - G A I M A N BEOWULF/Page1.html, accessed 7 June 2009. 36 http  ://www.thedeadbolt.com/news/102711/gaimanavary_interview.php, accessed 7 June 2009  ; http ://www.denofgeek.com/movies/6246/beowulf_neil_gaiman_and_roger_avary_interview.html, accessed 7 June 2009 ; http ://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_13367.html, accessed 7 June 2009. 37  Michael Alexander, trans., ‘Beowulf ’ : A Verse Translation, 2nd edn (London, 2001 ; 1st edn 1979), p. 101. David Wright’s earlier Penguin translation of the poem in prose could have given rise to the same error : David Wright, trans., Beowulf (Harmondsworth, 1957), p. 64.

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(‘a part/hour/while of a day’, 1495) a length of time over which there is no real agreement, and in any case cannot have begun at the first hour of the day, Beowulf cannot have ‘really’ been gone (whatever realism has to do with Beowulf) even for as long as eight hours. What is evident here, then, is a beautiful chain of transmission, translation, reading and misreading of a seemingly insignificant temporal detail, non dæges, which in any case may have been chosen for alliteration with næs, becoming ‘the ninth hour’, understood as indicating duration, not a point in time, and then misremembered as days. All of which appears to open a gap in the narrative which Gaiman and Avary desire to fill with an imaginative re-writing. How many ‘real’ medieval texts may have altered during transmission for just such a set of contingencies and accidents which we can now no longer track ? What can be tracked in this transmission is how the identification within literary studies of ‘the unreliable narrator’ has attached itself to a more general mistrust of authority within popular culture, and the sense that narratives are not given or essential, but that their truth is relative and dependent on the position, motivation, and investment of the narrator. This we could certainly link with postmodernism, as Gaiman does in self-diagnosis. Indeed the film is admirably aware of the process of making narrative, and of its own place within a chain of transmission that must inevitably construct the narrative as it re-tells it. This is evidenced throughout the film in the several self-referential asides made to what the bards, poets or scops are or will be saying about various events. Moreover, when John Malkovich’s Unferth mockingly asks Beowulf if it wasn’t twenty sea monsters he killed in the swimming match, Winstone’s Beowulf corrects the facts of the matter with seeming modesty : it was only nine, the number ‘our poem’ records. The camera then moves in close to reveal Brendan Gleeson’s Wiglaf whispering to Costas Mandylor’s Hondscio that the last time he heard Beowulf tell the story he had only claimed three ; as in the scene of the scop performing in Heorot mentioned earlier, we are allowed to observe the process of retelling and embroidering by which a narrative arrives with us. Slightly more disappointingly, if only because it seems such a tired theme in the twenty-first century, we find that the film has loosely post-Freudian anxiety issues about sexual desire and the consequences of its fulfillment, and about procreation and parent-offspring relationships. To some extent the development of this theme is warranted by the poem, which is itself concerned with succession and the consolidation of power through a firmly established line. In the film Hrothgar and Beowulf are doubled even more clearly in this respect than in the poem, both being incapable of producing a proper heir as a result of their unions with Grendel’s mother and their monstrous offspring. Thus the film echoes and amplifies that strand of Beowulf criticism which has sought to problematize the sense in which human and monster are fixed categories that can easily be defined against each other.38 In case anyone in the 38  See, for example, Orchard, Critical Companion, pp. 169–202.

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film theatre might miss the point, Angelina Jolie tells Ray Winstone : ‘I know that underneath your glamour you’re as much a monster as my son Grendel.’ As if to emphasize the matter further, Grendel’s dead body, on a plinth in the cave, appears to have shrunk and changed shape so that it resembles nothing so much as the pitiful image of a human embryo. While it may be contentious to argue that the poem is concerned with the ways in which heroes might also be monstrous, the film certainly innovates on this interpretation, by relocating monstrosity to human offspring, and expressing anxiety about the future consequences of present actions, consequences which threaten political and social stability. In this respect the film’s improvisations on the poem reflect entirely contemporary concerns about the begetting of a possibly monstrous future through a culture of immediate gratification of desire. In general, then, the Beowulf film is nourished partly by those strands of literary criticism that have sought out irony in the poem and its representation of heroism, but which are here developed to the point where irony becomes deep cynicism. Lest we see this as an inevitable, zeitgeistlich attitude to heroic epic, and one from which our age cannot escape, we can juxtapose the Zemeckis film with another twenty-first century response to Beowulf, one that wholly rejects this ironic, cynical approach to heroism in the face of a related set of challenges to the problem of how power and authority are exercised : Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Helmet’. Published in the 2006 collection District and Circle, ‘Helmet’ gestated over the same period of time as Zemeckis’s Beowulf, and alludes both to that poem and, passingly, to The Battle of Maldon.39 Any mention of helmets in conjunction with Anglo-Saxon will soon bring to mind the Sutton Hoo helmet, excavated in 1939. The image, then, invokes the trope of burial and excavation, and treats the helmet as something dug-up, or exhumed as grave goods. In conversation with Dennis O’Driscoll on 1 October 2003, Heaney said of the helmet that occasioned the poem : It was a gift from a Boston fireman. It was on my shelf for twenty years. It was one of those things, gathering dumbly in silence ; the unspoken hovered over it ; wanted out, but couldn’t get out. Then, the terrible circumstance of September 11, 2001 occurred and the need to write about the fireman’s helmet increased.40 Heaney goes on to link this poem to the passage of Beowulf in which Hrothgar presents the hero with the gift of a helmet after he has defeated Grendel : a gift, then, analogous to that which the Boston fireman made Heaney, although, as will become apparent, Heaney feels himself less deserving of it. In Heaney’s Beowulf the description of Hrothgar’s gift runs : 39  Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London, 2006), p. 14. 40  http ://209.85.229.132/search ?q=cache :965IFSZ7MXMJ :www.lannan.org/docs/seamus-heaney031001-trans-read.pdf+heaney+helmet+driscoll&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a, accessed 7 June 2009.

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An embossed ridge, a bent rod lapped with wire arched over the helmet : protective headgear to keep the hard-ground cutting edge from damaging it when danger threatened and the man was battling wild behind his shield.41 This translates lines 1030–34 of the Old English : Ymb þæs helmes hrof  heafodbeorge wirum bewunden  walu utan heold, þæt him fe[o]la laf  frecne ne meahte scurheard sceþðan,  þonne scyldfreca ongean gramum  gangan scolde. Heaney’s poem ‘Helmet’ joins an intertextual web with Beowulf, both directly, and through the refraction of his own translation of the Old English.42 For example, the 2006 poem also refers to the Boston fireman’s helmet as ‘headgear’, the same compound expression which Heaney had earlier chosen to translate heafodbeorge (more literally, ‘head-protection’). Heaney coins other compound neologisms in the poem, imitative of those typical in Old English verse, rather than literally replicating specific examples (e.g. ‘fireman-poet’, ‘fire-thane’, ‘shoulder-awning’, ‘rubble-bolts’, ‘hatchet man’, ‘hose man’). In particular Heaney employs one of his extended sequences of compound variation to describe the helmet, a riff he developed from Old English poetry, as I have previously argued :43 ‘Leather-trimmed, steel-ridged, hand-tooled, hand-sewn’. In the final stanzas, as the poem reaches its terrible climax, effects impressionistic of Old English, such as a denser pattern of alliteration on /sh/, /h/, /r/ and /b/, begin to build up. Finally, the poem refers directly to the breaking of the ‘shield-wall’, or ‘scildweall’ (line 3118), a word that Wiglaf uses in Beowulf when describing how the hero’s dead body will be committed to flame, although the synonym ‘scyldburh’ in Maldon (line 242) may have been simultaneously present in Heaney’s mind, as in that poem it is ‘tobrocen’ (242).44 Naturally, the breaking of the shield-wall presages catastrophe, and, in Old English heroic poetry as at the World Trade Center, the death and subsequent burial of the once-living : As if I were up to it, as if I had Served time under it, his fire-thane’s shield, His shoulder-awning, while shattering glass

41  Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf (London, 1999), p. 33. 42  It is possible to imagine an edition of Beowulf as process that would include this poem ‘Helmet’, for example, alongside other analogous and related materials such as The Fight at Finnsburg. 43  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : the Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 214–7 and 221–5. 44  Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, ed., The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ASPR 6 (New York, 1942), p. 13.

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And rubble-bolts out of a burning roof Hailed down on every hatchet man and hose man there Till the hard-reared shield-wall broke. Here then, Heaney approaches Beowulf the way an archaeologist approaches a site like Sutton Hoo, as a repository of artefacts to be brought to the surface in order to re-establish some connection between the past and present, between the living and the dead. Hrothgar’s helmet is a thing dug-up, a once-gift, sign of a certain kind of vanished heroic generosity ; in this respect it resembles the helmets of twentyfirst-century American firemen, tokens of interred heroism, in need of recovery. Heaney’s poem firmly brings into a contemporary political context certain heroic ideals embodied in Beowulf, such as that one must continue to persevere even in the face of certain death. In this respect ‘Helmet’ could not differ more sharply from the Zemeckis Beowulf ; for Heaney, cynicism about heroism is simply not an option after the events of 9/11. To conclude, the sort of work that I have attempted here on the long conversation which Beowulf has been having with us now during three millennia, has usually been labelled ‘reception study’. It has been thought of as different in kind from the proper object of study, the ‘original’ poem fixed in its place in the past, at the moment of composition, its proper context for study ; reception is secondary. And yet even if we knew where the original Beowulf lay, we should ask ourselves if we would want it rendered immobile there, where it can play no further part in a culture that we share with the past. The Nowell Codex Beowulf is itself an act of reception, one that was presumably responding to contemporary concerns around the year 1000, just as the Zemeckis film and the Heaney poem do a millennium later. Malcolm Godden, among others, has amply demonstrated the limits within which millennialist hopes, as well as fears, may sensibly be said to operate, both literally and as rhetorical strategy, within the writings of several genres in Anglo-Saxon England contemporary with the work of Scribes A and B ;45 historicization of this leg of the poem’s journey through time should not be overlooked, or treated as a secondary concern in the rush to historicize a moment of composition on which there will probably never be agreement. If we are to continue to use the word ‘reception’ in this sense, we should remember that it is not passive, but always a creative re-making ; the word derives from recipere, which has a much more active range of meanings than our modern usage tends to allow : it is to gain possession of, to acquire, to entertain, to give shelter to, to admit. Reception characterizes all creative endeavour ; it is an activity not subsidiary, but 45  Malcolm Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English : Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray and Terry Hoad (Oxford, 1994), pp. 130–62 ; Malcolm Godden, ‘The Millennium, Time, and History for the AngloSaxons’, in The Apocalyptic Year 1000 : Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. Richard Landes, Andrew Gow and David C. Van Meter (Oxford, 2003), pp. 155–80.

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central to all narration. In the case of Beowulf, even Ur-making, when the activity is probed, turns out to be re-making. Like other poems, Beowulf is not an object fixed in the past. Poems move through time, being kept alive by readings, misreadings, re-imaginings, and accruing stories and significance around themselves as they go. They are stories, as well as telling stories. As always, works which are not capable of being adapted in the light of contemporary concerns cease to live. Zemeckis’s film and Heaney’s poem not only respond to the Beowulf material, they add themselves to it and re-shape the work anew, demonstrating that Beowulf continues to live and to have use in the twenty-first century imagination. These parts of the ongoing process that is Anglo-Saxon culture, along with the other texts and phenomenon studied in this collection of essays, testify to the continuing and vital presence of Anglo-Saxon, still where it always was : the middle of things.

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2 Priming the Poets : The Making of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader Mark Atherton

Introduction

A

uthors of textbooks can be remarkably influential : consciously and intentionally they popularize new ideas and set the tone for future scholarship, while subconsciously their writings embody the culture and ideas of a whole period. Such is the case with the Victorian scholar Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, from its modest beginnings in 1876, through its division into two books with the publication of An Anglo-Saxon Primer in 1882 and the elaborated fourth edition of An Anglo-Saxon Reader in 1884, forward to a definitive form in the seventh edition of 1894, thence onward to its twentieth-century afterlife and final paperback edition in 1967.1 The influence of the Anglo-Saxon Reader on twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon studies was considerable, and Sweet’s choice of set texts became the accepted canon, part of our common knowledge of Old English literary culture. Modern poets such as Pound, Auden, Hill and Heaney all used this textbook, and all to varying degrees absorbed its late nineteenth-century ethos. Ezra Pound’s ‘The Seafarer’, for example, a translation of The Seafarer, was at one time dismissed by scholars such as Kenneth Sisam and Donald Davie as an over-literal crib by a poet ignorant of Old English.2 But the consensus changed with the discovery and study of Pound’s personal annotated copy of the 1894 edition of the Reader in the Pound archives at Texas. As the researches of Fred C. Robinson, Michael Alexander and Chris Jones have since shown,3 Pound was well versed in Old 1  Henry Sweet, An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1876), 4th edn (Oxford, 1884), 7th edn (Oxford, 1894) ; idem, An Anglo-Saxon Primer (Oxford, 1882) ; Dorothy Whitelock, ed., Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, 15th edn (Oxford, 1967). 2  Donald Davie, Ezra Pound : Poet as Sculptor (New York, 1964), reprinted in his Studies in Ezra Pound : Chronicle and Polemic (Manchester, 1991), pp. 29–38. 3  Fred C. Robinson, ‘“The Might of the North” : Pound’s Anglo-Saxon Studies and “The Seafarer”’,

31

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English and his poem ‘The Seafarer’ was intended to convey the rhythm and texture of the original verse rather than the literal sense of the Old English words (I will return to Pound’s ‘The Seafarer’ later in this chapter). Jones argues that Pound took his Anglo-Saxonism further, using Old English metrical rhythms and diction in The Cantos to explore the primitive otherness of the English past and to revitalize his own Imagist poetics. From Sweet’s Reader, Pound learned about the nature of Old English metre and its relation to what Sweet characteristically called the ‘natural stress of the spoken language’.4 Each verse had its particular rhythm which Sweet described (appropriately for Pound) as ‘consisting of two waves  which need not be of equal length or even weight  each wave containing a lift, either by itself, or preceded or followed by a dip’ according to the then newly discovered Sievers types.5 Pound eventually became fascinated with literary Chinese according to Fenollosa’s analysis of its syntax and diction, and he related it to the kennings and compounds of Old English verse, speculating on the nature of poetic thought, etymological roots and the origins of language.6 It is probably no coincidence that reflections on similar themes are also found in Henry Sweet’s general linguistic papers. It might prove valuable, therefore, to uncover more of the ways in which Sweet’s cultural world primed his students and readers, for his fields of interest ranged widely. Known to present-day Anglo-Saxonists as an editor of Old English texts, Henry Sweet (1845–1912) was also a remarkably gifted general linguist (and incidentally almost an exact contemporary of Ferdinand de Saussure).7 With a focus on Sweet’s developing thought, then, this chapter will explore the cultural and intellectual background of the textbook that twentieth-century poets such as Pound were to use so fruitfully and creatively.

Nature Poetry and ‘Primitive Man’

Sweet first published his Anglo-Saxon Reader in 1876, ‘at a time when interest in Old English studies was beginning to revive’.8 His starting point was the older book by Yale Review 71 (1982), 199–224, repr. in The Tomb of Beowulf and Other Essays on Old English (Oxford, 1993), pp. 239–58 ; Michael Alexander, ‘Ezra Pound as Translator’, Translation and Literature 6 (1997), 23–30 ; Michael Alexander, The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1998) ; Chris Jones, ‘“Ear for the sea-surge” : Pound’s Uses of Old English’, in his Strange Likeness : The Uses of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 17–67. 4 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894), p. lxxxvi, §360. 5  Ibid., p. lxxxix, §367. For a more recent introduction to Sievers’s metrical types, see Donald G. Scragg, ‘The Nature of Old English Verse’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 55–71. 6  Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1936). 7  For a good account of Sweet’s career, see M.K.C. MacMahon, ‘Sweet, Henry (1845–1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) ; online edn (2006) : http ://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/36385, accessed 30 September 2009. 8  Sweet, Preface to Reader, 7th edn (1894), p. v.

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Benjamin Thorpe, which he aimed to replace,9 and he partly followed Thorpe’s selection of texts, especially ‘The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan’, ‘Alfred’s Translation of Orosius’, ‘Alfred’s Translation of Boethius’, ‘Ælfric on the Old Testament’, and Judith. Sweet’s extract from the Old English Bede is shorter than Thorpe’s, since his ‘Account of the Poet Cædmon’ does not give the text of the life of St Hilda, and this may have helped further to promote the Cædmon story as an autonomous study-text. For his extracts from the Gospels and Chronicle, Sweet chose different texts to Thorpe ; the same is true of the homilies by Ælfric, although Sweet subsequently edited the Life of St Edmund, Life of Cuthbert, and the Colloquy for his Primers.10 New in Sweet’s selection were ‘Cynewulf and Cyneheard’, ‘On the State of learning in England’ (i.e. Alfred’s Prologue to the Pastoral Care), extracts from the Chronicle of Alfred’s day, Ælfric’s ‘St Oswald’, ‘Wulfstan’s Address to the English’ (i.e. the Sermo Lupi), ‘Beowulf and Grendel’s Mother’, The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, ‘Gnomic Verses’, and The Seafarer. Already it may be seen that Sweet places greater emphasis on King Alfred than does Thorpe, and many of the now standard canonical poems are prominent in the Reader. Sweet’s 1876 Introduction opens as follows : During the fifth and following centuries Britain was colonised by a variety of Teutonic tribes from Denmark and the shores of the North Sea, both north and south of the Elbe. All of these tribes had the same language, which, as spoken in Britain, was called ‘English,’ from the ‘Engle,’ or inhabitants of Angel (now Angeln in Slesvig), who were for a long time the predominant tribe in the confederation.11 Concerned with the ‘ancestral home’ like the nationalist historian E.A. Freeman, author of the celebrated study of the Norman Conquest, Sweet sees ‘English’ as a longstanding institution, both a language and a ‘confederation’, with its origins in the Teutonic Continent where the Frisians ‘stayed behind’.12 The above passage did not long survive the subsequent revision process, but it sums up well the ideological state of play when Sweet originally conceived his textbook. As for the literature itself, Sweet had this to say : Literature was first cultivated in the north of England, and the poems brought over from the Continent were first written down in the Northumbrian dialect. Most of the poetry composed in England seems also to have been Northumbrian. The Northumbrian literature culminated in the eighth century, but was 9  Benjamin Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica (London, 1834). 10  ‘St Edmund’ appears in Primer (1882) ; ‘Cuthbert’ in Sweet, ed., Selected Homilies of Ælfric (Oxford, 1885) ; ‘Colloquy’ in Sweet, First Steps in Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1897). 11 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876), p. xi. 12  Edward A. Freeman, ‘The Origin of the English Nation : Three Lectures. Lecture I’, Macmillan’s Magazine 21 (1869–70), 415–31, at p. 425 : ‘the Frisians […] are Englishmen who stayed at home’.

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almost destroyed by the Danish inroads. The south then became the centre of culture, and a great revival of literature took place in the ninth century under King Alfred. From this time onwards we have an uninterrupted series of prose works both original and translated from the Latin. The old Northumbrian poems were also copied in the West Saxon (W. S.) dialect ; and as the original texts are almost all lost, we know them only in their W. S. form.13 This is the traditional view of Old English literature and the ancient origins of its poetry, ‘brought over’ to Britain in oral form, and copied or composed in ‘Northumbrian’ i.e. Anglian. Indeed, many present-day undergraduate students of Old English still write about Anglo-Saxon literature in these very terms. Sweet’s remarks on the opening piece (the now hardy perennial ‘Cynewulf and Cyneheard’) have been highly influential  the first sentence survived right through to Whitelock’s revised text of 1967 : The following tragic narrative stands out conspicuously among the brief dry notices of which the Chronicle up to the time of Alfred is mainly composed : we do not meet with so vivid and circumstantial a piece of history till more than a hundred years later. It is no doubt contemporary with, or at any rate, only a few years later than the events it tells  it is, in short, by far the oldest historical prose in any Teutonic language. The style is of the rudest character, contrasting remarkably with the polished language of the later portions of the Chronicle  abrupt, disconnected and full of anacoluthons. The forms and orthography are, as throughout the earlier part of the Chronicle, those of Alfred’s reign, with a few occasional archaisms, which escaped the eye of the ninth-century reviser.14 Sweet assumes many voices here : the voice of the philologist and recent editor of King Alfred’s Pastoral Care ;15 the voice also of the historian interested in documents, particularly those of Alfred’s reign such as the Orosius.16 We hear the literary critic interested in ‘tragic narrative’, who in the same volume categorizes Beowulf as ‘our great national epic’.17 Here also is the linguist focussing on the differences between orality and literacy, between the disconnected anacoluthons of natural speech and the polished style of literary tradition.18 Here too is the anthropologist concerned with the archaic vestiges of poetic thought, a theme to be discussed below ; in this respect 13 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876), pp. xi–xii. 14 Sweet, Reader (1876), p. 1 ; Whitelock keeps Sweet’s first sentence essentially intact but then adds further historical information ; Whitelock, Reader (1967), p. 1. 15  Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s West Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, 2 vols., EETS o.s. 45 (London, 1871–2). 16  Sweet, ed., King Alfred’s Orosius, EETS o.s. 79 (London, 1883). 17 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876), p. 119. 18  Sweet, ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’, Transactions of the Philological Society [unnumbered vol.] (1875–6), 470–503 ; reprinted in his Collected Papers, ed. H.C. Wyld (Oxford, 1913), pp. 1–33.

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Sweet was not averse to seeing echoes of lost poems in some of the earlier annals of the Chronicle, for instance the annal for 473 (retaining Sweet’s presentation of the text) : Hér Hęngest and Æsc gef·uhton wiþ Wealas, and gen·ámon un-árímedlicu hęre-réaf, and þá Wealas flugon þá Ęngle swá swá fýr. Here Hengest and Æsc fought against the Welsh and seized immeasurable plunder, and the Welsh fled the English like fire. This rhythmical passage with alliteration was analysed in a brief article of 1879, and included in his selection of texts for the Primer of 1882.19 In short, then, the opening words of the first chapter of the 1876 Reader are highly revealing, and with hindsight we can detect many of the ideological, cultural and intellectual factors involved in the original conception and compilation of the Reader. Another criterion for Sweet’s choices was literary form. C.L. Wrenn called Sweet a philologist or ‘lover of the word’ in the true sense of the term, and there seems little reason to doubt this, since Sweet’s expressed admiration for the poetry is warm and genuine.20 One early article, ‘Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, written while Sweet was still a (mature) student at Balliol College, Oxford, demonstrates fairly well his ability to appreciate Old English poetic form. A characteristic of the poetry, Sweet states, is its ‘conciseness and directness’ seen in its avoidance of elaborate simile. For instance, on the compound brimfugol (which he terms a kenning as in Old Norse) he writes : ‘instead of comparing the ship to a bird, the poet simply calls it a sea-bird, preferring the direct assertion to the indirect comparison’.21 In many ways the ‘Sketch’ of 1871 can be regarded as a plan in preparation for the textbook of 1876, and we can see what attracted Sweet to the poems he eventually chose for the Reader. Sometimes, however, his opinions were downright idiosyncratic : the passages on the creation and the fall of the angels, for example, are said to have ‘all the grandeur of Milton without his bombastic pedantry’.22 Moreover, as Eric Stanley has pointed out, Sweet’s ‘Sketch’ also shares a typical nineteenth-century preoccupation with ‘fatalism’ in the Old English elegies,23 hence, no doubt, Sweet’s choice of The Wanderer. There is some truth here, but it need not imply that Sweet is foremost in the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism. In 1871 Sweet 19 Sweet, Primer, p. 80, lines 52–4, a passage discussed in Sweet, ‘Some of the Sources of the AngloSaxon Chronicle’, Englische Studien 2 (1879), 310–12. 20  C.L. Wrenn, ‘Henry Sweet’, Presidential Address delivered to the Philological Society, Transactions of the Philological Society [unnumbered vol.] (1946), 177–201 ; repr. in T.A. Sebeok, ed., Portraits of Linguists : A Biographical Source Book for the History of Western Linguistics, 1746–1963 (London, 1966), pp. 512–32. 21  Sweet, ‘Sketch of the History of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, in W.C. Hazlitt, ed., Warton’s History of English Poetry, 4 vols. (London, 1871), II, pp. 3–18, at p. 6. 22  Sweet, ‘Sketch’, p. 16. 23  Eric G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 37–8, 53–64, 104.

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argues that Beowulf has ‘a distinctly Christian element, contrasting sharply to the general heathen colouring of the whole’ ; and while arguing for the ‘homogenousness of the whole work’ he also subscribes to the ‘interpolations’ theory.24 However, absolutely none of this appears in the Notes to the 1876 Reader. The sole reference to paganism in the whole Reader occurs in the section on The Dream of the Rood, where ‘weop eall gesceaft’ (line 55, ‘all creation wept’) and ‘mid strælum forwundod’ (line 62, ‘severely wounded with arrows’) are explained as allusions to the myth of Baldor ‘the fairest and most beloved of the gods of Walhalla, who was slain by the mistletoe spear’.25 This particular note was not present in the fourth edition of 1884, and in the 1908 edition the only contextual (as opposed to linguistic) note on The Dream of the Rood concerns ‘ymbclypte’ (line 42) : here Sweet finds a parallel to ‘the idea of the crucified embracing the cross’ in a Latin poem attributed to Bede. And in a negative review of a book on the ‘picturesque heathenism’ of Vikings by Frederick Metcalfe, Sweet shows distinctly Alfredian and Christian enthusiasms for ‘the wonderful way in which our ancestors assimilated Roman and Celtic culture and the spirit of Christianity while at the same time vigorously maintaining their national characteristics’.26 As Stanley also demonstrates, nineteenth-century critics of Old English literature had a clear bias toward nature poetry and the ‘romantically poetic’.27 The point cannot be ignored, for such Victorian preoccupations may well have influenced Sweet’s selections. Indeed, on a quick count of the eleven poems in the ‘Poetry’ section of the 1894 Reader, seven were apparently chosen because they contain descriptions of nature ; in particular these include The Phoenix, the Riddles and the ‘Gnomic Verses’. Here Sweet mirrors present-day eco-critical trends ; he sees himself as a close observer and ‘investigator’ of nature, and indeed ‘observation’ is for him a chief virtue.28 He finds it in the poet of Beowulf, in a passage included in the Reader (lines 1357b–76a) : They hold a hidden land : where wolves lurk, windy nesses, perilous fen-tracts, where the mountain-stream shrouded in mist pours down the cliffs, deep in earth. Not far from here stands the lake overshadowed with groves of ancient trees, fast by their roots. There a dread fire may be seen every night shining wondrously in the water. The wisest of the sons of men knows not the bottom. When the heath-walker, the strong-horned stag, hard-pressed by the hounds, coursed from afar, seeks shelter in the wood, he will yield up his life on the shore sooner than plunge in and hide his head. That is an accursed place : the

24  Sweet, ‘Sketch’, pp. 9–11. 25 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876), p. 203. 26  Sweet, review of F. Metcalfe, The Englishman and the Scandinavian (1880), in The Academy 17 (May 29, 1880), 396. 27 Stanley, Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism, pp. 1–4, 38–9, 41 (quoting p. 41). 28  See also his remarks on scientific observation in Sweet, Collected Papers, pp. 2, 86, 91.

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strife of waves rises black to the clouds, when the wood stirs hostile storms, until the air darkens, the heavens shed tears.29 Sweet includes alliteration and a marked rhythm as he translates the passage, aiming no doubt to preserve aspects of its style and to capture some of the ‘vividness and originality’ in its description of the natural landscape, a feature that he sees it sharing with ‘descriptive poetry in modern English literature’.30 Why was Sweet so fascinated by nature ? An important source was the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, who can be seen to influence his work from at least as early as 1876. In both Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and his general linguistic paper ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’ there are occasional notes or comments on ‘poetry in its earliest form’ and ‘primitive man’, reminiscent of Tylorian anthropology, which was pervasive in this period.31 Tylor joined the Philological Society in 1871, and in 1877, after hearing Sweet read ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’ to the Society, he invited Sweet to read it to the London Anthropological Institute.32 The academic exchanges continued with Tylor’s use of Sweet’s writings in his Anthropology (1881) and Sweet’s quoting of Tylor on the origins of language and poetry in ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’ (1888) and The History of Language (1900).33 Sweet’s primer of modern spoken English  the Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (1885)  also contains passages from Tylor’s Anthropology (1881) as well as adapted passages from Physiography (1877) by the Darwinian scientist T.H. Huxley.34 Tylor’s emphasis was evolutionary, focussing on the origins of nature poetry, particularly as reflected in the mind of ‘primitive man’ as he gradually came to terms with the external world by an imaginative though sometimes misleading experimental approach, reasoning by analogy and striving towards mastery of the environment. 29  Sweet, ‘Sketch’, p. 11. 30  Sweet, ‘Sketch’, p. 7 ; these ideas were later developed in Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’ (1888), Collected Papers, pp. 229–84 ; see discussion below. 31 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876) introductory remarks to chapters XXIV The Wanderer and XXVI ‘Gnomic Verses’, pp. 174, 183 ; ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’. Tylor’s book Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation, 2nd edn (London, 1870) was reviewed in The Academy 2 (1870), 11–12, a periodical to which Sweet also contributed regularly. He may have read Tylor’s discussion of ‘Emotional and Imitative Language’ in Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture : Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, 2 vols. (London, 1871), I, 145–217 ; he also knew of similar ideas in A.H. Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philology (London, 1874). 32  Sweet, ‘Language and Thought’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute 6 (1877), 457–81, at p. 457. For Tylor’s comments on the paper, see p. 482. 33  Edward B. Tylor, Anthropology : An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilisation (London, 1881), epecially chs. IV and V on the theme ‘Language’, pp. 114–51, ch. XII, ‘Arts of Pleasure’, pp. 287–305, ch. XIV ‘The Spirit-World’, pp. 342-372, and ch. XV ‘History and Mythology’, pp. 373–400 ; Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, in his Collected Papers, pp. 229–84, at pp. 259–60 ; Sweet, The History of Language (London, 1899), pp. 33–40. 34 Sweet, Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch (Oxford and Leipzig, 1885) ; Thomas Henry Huxley, Physiography. An Introduction to the Study of Nature (London, 1877).

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Interested in the Old English records, Tylor speculates on the folk-beliefs reflected in Old English vocabulary. Thus for Tylor the word wudu-mær (‘wood-nymph’) is ‘a record of the time when Englishmen believed, as barbarians do still, that the Echo is the voice of an answering spirit’.35 The origin of myth, the object of much of Tylor’s research, lies in the tendency to impute will and personality to phenomena : When the cause of anything presents itself to the ancient mind as a kind of soul or spirit, then the cause or spirit of summer, sleep, hope, justice comes easily to look like a person. No one can really understand old poetry without knowing this.36 The myth-making tendency survives in modern poetry, for Tylor claims ‘the modern poet still uses for picturesqueness the metaphors which to the barbarian were real helps to express his sense’ ; the statement interested Sweet, who quotes it in his essay on Shelley.37 Sweet had expressed similar ideas in ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’. Applying a rigorous phonetic analysis to modern spoken English, he reinvestigates word-division and the separation of words and calls into question the parts of speech of traditional grammar. But within the discussion, his interests in contemporary psychology and anthropology emerge yet again ; he writes : If we confine our attention to material objects and to the simplest nouns, adjectives, and verbs, we see at once that the original function of these classes of words was to denote things and their attributes ; adjectives denoting their permanent attributes or qualities ; verbs their changing attributes or phenomena. It must be borne in mind that primitive man did not distinguish between phenomena and volitions, but included everything under the head of actions, not only the involuntary actions of human beings, such as breathing, but also the movements of inanimate things, the rising and setting of the sun, the wind, the flowing of water, and even such purely inanimate phenomena as fire, electricity, & c., in short, all the changing attributes of things were conceived as voluntary actions.38 Subconsciously, Sweet may have had in mind the intermingling of human, animate and inanimate activity that features in the Old English poem ‘Gnomic Verses’ (Maxims II). The first nine lines of that poem, for instance, place in parallel the activities and/or attributes of a king, cities, wind, thunder, Christ’s powers, providence, and 35 Tylor, Anthropology, p. 357 ; the passage is also cited in Stopford Brooke, History of Early English Literature, p. 193. 36 Tylor, Anthropology, p. 395. 37 Tylor, Anthropology p. 290 ; Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, Collected Papers, pp. 259-60. For more discussion see M. Atherton, ‘Imaginative Science : Interactions between Henry Sweet’s Linguistic Thought and E.B. Tylor’s Anthropology’, Historiographia Linguistica 37 (2010), 62–104. 38 Sweet, Collected Papers, p. 17.

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the seasons ; later (lines 16–27) we hear of courage, a sword, hawk, wolf, boar, a good man, spear, gemstone, stream, mast, sword, dragon, fish, and again a king. In his Reader Sweet described this as ‘poetry in its earliest form’39 and arguably, the passage in ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’ provides a key to its interpretation. The poem that follows ‘Gnomic Verses’ in the 1894 edition of the Reader is The Seafarer. He had always regarded it, even in 1876, as ‘undoubtedly the finest of them all’ but hesitated to print it because of its supposed ‘fragmentary and corrupt’ text.40 Against his usual practice, Sweet now supplied a literary commentary in his notes on the poem, commenting first of all on the ‘dialogue theories’ of Rieger and Kluge41 and then giving his own view of its theme : [T]he simplest view of the poem is that it is the monologue of an old sailor who first describes the hardships of his seafaring life, and then confesses its irresistible attraction, which he justifies, as it were, by drawing a parallel between a seafarer’s contempt for the luxuries of life on land on the one hand and the aspirations of a spiritual nature on the other, of which a sea-bird is to him the type. In dwelling on these ideals the poet loses sight of the seafarer and his halfheathen associations, and as inevitably rises to a contemplation of the cheering hopes of a future life afforded by Christianity.42 Perhaps following Stopford Brooke, who dismissed (in 1892) the second  explicitly Christian  half of The Seafarer as ‘a sad business’,43 Sweet relegated the last sixteen lines (109–24) of the poem, ‘just before the text becomes corrupt’, to the Notes of his Reader, thus providing (for him) a satisfactory conclusion and a parallel ‘in form as well as spirit’ to the ending of The Wanderer, in which the speaker anticipates the stability and consolation of heaven in similar formulaic language.44 Even Whitelock, who had every reason to regard The Seafarer as a product of English–Irish pilgrim contacts,45 was still persuaded by this textual argument, and followed Sweet’s practice in her own 1967 edition of the Reader. Inadvertently, then, Sweet’s approach 39 Sweet, Reader, 1st edn (1876), p. 183. 40  Ibid., p. 174. 41  M. Rieger, ‘Der Seefahrer als Dialog hergestellt’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 1 (1869), 334–9 ; F. Kluge, ‘Zu altenglischen Dichtungen. 1. Der Seefahrer’, Englische Studien 6 (1883), 322–7 ; Kluge, ‘Zu altenglischen Dichtungen. 2. Nochmals der Seefahrer’, Englische Studien 8 (1885), 472–4. 42 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894), p. 223. 43  Stopford A. Brooke, The History of Early English Literature. Being the History of English Poetry from its Beginnings to the Accession of King Alfred, 2 vols. (London, 1892), II, 170–82. 44 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894), p. 222. Sweet probably has in mind the lexical parallels between line 107 of The Seafarer ‘Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofað : cymeð him seo ar of heofonum’ (‘Blessed is the one who lives humbly : grace comes to him from heaven’) and lines 114b-115a of The Wanderer ‘Wel bið þam þe him are seceð, frofre to Fæder on heofonum’ (‘Well it is for the one who seeks grace, comfort from the Father in heaven’). 45 Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The Interpretation of The Seafarer’, in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, ed. Cyril Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 259–72.

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perpetuated a generally held ‘half heathen’ reading of the poem until well into the twentieth century. For Sweet, however, the idea of ‘half-heathen associations’ is not really the main point. Again the impulse comes from anthropology. A note highlights line 53 : the voice of the cuckoo boding the arrival of summer and the accompanying, irresistible urge to depart on a wandering life of hardship. Sweet sees an analogue in a report of travels in Siberia by George Kennan, a popular travel writer and explorer, who tells of the Siberian convict growing restless at the onset of the warm season, which fills him with ‘indefinite desires and aspirations, a vague melancholy’ and an urge to take to the travelling life, serving under ‘General Kukushka [cuckoo]’ : With many convicts the love of wandering through the trackless forests and over the great plains of Eastern Siberia becomes a positive mania. They do not expect to escape altogether ; they know that they must live for months the life of hunted fugitives […] But in spite of all this, they cannot hear in early summer the first soft notes of the cuckoo without feeling an intense, passionate longing for the adventures and excitements that attend the life of a brodyag [vagrant or tramp].46 Such Tylorian approaches to the affinity between nature and the workings of the mind clearly fascinated Sweet, and again it recalls comments on ‘primitive man’ in the passage on the origin of word classes cited above. In the further development of his argument in ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’, Sweet maintains that verbs first originated from the simple root with a personal pronoun following, an idea based on contemporary philology with its heavy focus on the ‘roots’ or ‘phonetic types’ to which the ‘Aryan’ (i.e. Indo-European) languages could be traced.47 The combination root + personal pronoun in turn led to the development of inflections  Sweet is presumably thinking of forms such as Latin port-o, -as, -at, etc. Moreover, if observed in its living spoken form and transcribed phonetically (ignoring the spaces between written words), modern English is seen to be similarly developing flectional or agglutinative forms : these prefix the verbal root gou ‘go’ in such forms as future wiylgou ‘we’ll go’, conditional wiydgou ‘we’d go’, emphatic preterite wiydidgou ‘we did go’.48 Like the great philologist Max Müller, Sweet saw language

46 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894), pp. 223–4. Sweet’s source is George Kennan, ‘The Convict Mines of Kara’, The Century Illustrated Magazine 38 (June 1889), 163–79, at p. 176. Similar information occurs in ‘The Summer’, ch. 5 of part 2 of Dostoyevsky’s The House of the Dead (1860), ed. David McDuff (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 270–2. 47  See Friedrich Max Müller, ‘The Constituent Elements of Language’, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, First Series (London, 1861 ; repr. London, 1994), pp. 237–61 and ‘On the Powers of Roots’, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series (London, 1864 ; repr. London, 1994), pp. 296–333 ; cf. Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philology, pp. 201–12. 48  An example of what is known as the ‘emphatic declarative form of do’ in Ronald Carter and

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as a natural phenomenon, a ‘living organism’, as he called it in preface to the Reader.49 Thus, unlike their contemporary Archbishop Trench, who regarded language as ‘sacred’, Sweet and Müller both considered language as a natural faculty  evolved or latent  of the human mind.50 Following Tylor, Sweet believed in evolution from concrete, active meanings to abstract ones, ‘in part a product of Lockean associationism’, as Joan Leopold has pointed out.51 Locke had proposed that ‘if we could trace them to their sources, we should find in all languages the names, which stand for things that fall not under our senses, to have had their first rise from sensible ideas’ and that from this ‘we may give some kind of guess what kind of notions they were and whence derived, which filled their minds who were the first beginners of languages, and how nature, even in the naming of things, unawares suggested to men the originals and principles of all their knowledge’.52 Similarly, Sweet wrote that the ‘ultimate ideas of language’ are not related to the findings of modern psychology or metaphysics : Language is not concerned with such psychological problems as the origin of our ideas of space and matter ; for at the time when language was evolved, these conceptions were already stereotyped in the form of simple ideas, incapable of any but a deliberate scientific analysis. Even such universally known facts as the primary data of astronomy have had little or no influence on language, and even the scientific astronomer no more hesitates to talk of the ‘rising of the sun’ than did the astrologers of ancient Chaldæa. Language, in short, is based not on things as we know or think them to be, but as they seem to us.53

Priming the Reader : Sweet’s Writings on Education

How was Sweet’s Reader intended to be used ? A recent essay has suggested that Victorian philology set a trend for ‘deadening pedagogy’, with a heavy emphasis on

Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English : A Comprehensive Guide (Cambridge, 2006), p. 73, §31c. 49 Sweet, Reader (1876), p. vi. Müller in fact eschewed the organic metaphor, which had been popularized by the German philologist August Schleicher ; see Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (London, 1998), pp. 88, 197–9. 50  Hans Aarsleff, ‘Language and Victorian Ideology’, The American Scholar 52 (1983), 365–72 ; Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford, 1993), pp. 50 ; 96–103 ; see also Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton, 1986), pp. 28–34. 51  Joan Leopold, ‘Anthropological Perspectives on the Origin of Language Debate in the Nineteenth Century : Edward B. Tylor and Charles Darwin’, in Theorien vom Ursprung der Sprache, ed. Joachim Gessinger and Wolfert von Rahden, 2 vols. (Berlin and New York, 1989), II, 151–76, at p. 157. 52  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 5th edn (London, 1706), Book III, 1.5 ; ed. Pauline Phemister (Oxford, 2008), p. 255 ; Sweet had probably read the discussion of this Lockean passage in Müller, Lectures, Second Series, p. 339. 53  Sweet, ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’, Collected Papers, p. 15.

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the rote-learning of ‘paradigms’.54 If this is so, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Reader cannot be held responsible, for Sweet was only too aware of the pedagogical shortcomings and woeful lack of linguistic awareness among his contemporaries, and he sought instead to promote what he called ‘living philology’.55 In his presidential address to the Philological Society of 1877, for example, he declares : The present practice of making the classics of a language the vehicle of elementary linguistic instruction is a most detestable one, and deserves the severest condemnation. What should we say of a music-master who gave his pupils a sonata of Beethoven to learn the notes on, instead of beginning with scales ? Yet this is precisely our present system of teaching languages.56 This principle  the easy acquisition of the basics of a language first, before studying its poetry  is the reason why Sweet published his Anglo-Saxon Primer in 1882 to act as a companion to the Reader. Two years later he clarified his views on language teaching reform in a paper to the Philological Society.57 In his approach, which might be termed a ‘phonetic/psychological’ method, Sweet highlighted ‘synthesis’, the process by which sentences are ‘grasped as wholes’ phonetically, and ‘association’, the process by which the forms of a language are combined together in the mind, associated with their meanings and retained in the memory. The two principles are embodied in a method of language study based on ‘the living language’, ‘phonology and psychology’, and ‘connected texts’.58 The then dominant ‘grammar–translation’ method of teaching a language (and usually this meant Latin or Greek) was widely regarded as a rigorous training of the mind ; it involved studying the basics of a language through its high literary texts, with grammar rules and their exceptions, translation exercises, parsing, and vocabulary lists.59 Sweet and his fellow reformers reacted against this, since they felt that language learning was a skill acquired by practice, like learning a musical instrument, as Sweet’s analogy suggests, and they promoted the teaching of a modern language through oral dialogues and simple reading texts. The learner should begin with pho54  Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Reading Old English Texts (Cambridge, 1997), p. 6. 55  For more discussion, see Mark Atherton, ‘“To observe things as they are without regard to their origin” : Henry Sweet’s general writings on language in the 1870s’, Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas 51 (November 2008), pp. 41–58. 56  Sweet, ‘Presidential Address’, Transactions of the Philological Society [unnumbered vol.] (1877–9), 1–16 ; reprinted in Sweet, Collected Papers, pp. 80–94, at p. 94. 57  Sweet, ‘The Practical Study of Language’, Transactions of the Philological Society [unnumbered vol.] (1882–4), 577–99 ; reprinted in Collected Papers, pp. 34–55. 58  Ibid., pp. 35, 38–40 ; for discussion see Mark Atherton, ‘Henry Sweet’s Psychology of Language Learning’, in Theorie und Rekonstruction, ed. Klaus D. Dutz and Hans-J. Niederehe (Münster, 1996), pp. 149–68. 59  For a contemporary Victorian overview, see William Henry Widgery, The Teaching of Languages in Schools (London, 1888) ; on grammar-translation methods see A.P.R. Howatt, A History of English Language Teaching (Oxford, 2004), pp. 151–8.

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netic exercises and then go on to study the colloquial language aurally : in the absence of cheap recording technology this was done through sentences written in phonetic script.60 To adapt this method to the Anglo-Saxon Primer, for example, a normalised orthography is used, along with acute accents to mark long vowels,61 while the primer of modern spoken English employs a system of accents to indicate word-stress and experiments with non-standard separation of words in order to represent the breathgroups of naturally occurring speech.62 Natural sentences (as opposed to artificially contrived examples) that are clear and unambiguous when separated from their original contexts are then used for language practice. Such are the ‘Colloquial Phrases’ found in Sweet’s Elementarbuch, or the ‘Sentences’ of the Primer. These would be used for initial teaching, and then later for revision, along with appropriate commentary  linguistic, cultural, literary and historical  to be given as and when necessary by the teacher. As far as vocabulary is concerned, Sweet gave clear and lengthy guidelines recommending what he called ‘synthetic vocabulary study’. The lexis of the target language would be acquired through graded and thematically arranged sentences in context, ‘grouped under the different categories of space, time &c., with as much logical continuity between them as possible’ along the lines of a thesaurus : In those happy days there will be no dictionaries used in teaching. There will, instead, be a carefully graduated series of vocabularies of words arranged, not alphabetically, but in sense-groups, as in Roget’s ‘Thesaurus’, with full examples, the most elementary of these works containing about three thousand of the commonest words, as embodied in the most natural and idiomatic sentences.63 Only after the ‘colloquial language’ had been mastered with ease and fluency would the student go on to study the literature, or take up comparative philology or history. This, in brief, was Sweet’s method outlined in the course of his 1884 paper, and it summarises Sweet’s language pedagogy for his work both in Old English teaching and in foreign language teaching. Along with his many ‘primers’ of the 1880s, the AngloSaxon Reader was to become part of a graded and integrated scheme of language 60  M.K.C. MacMahon, ‘Modern Language Instruction and Phonetics in the Later 19th Century’, in Sylvain Auroux, E.F.K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, Kees Versteegh, eds, History of the Language Sciences, II (Berlin, 2001). 61 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894) uses the macron to mark long vowels, useful for metrical analysis, while the acute accent is retained for any vowels marked long by the scribe of the manuscript on which the text is based. 62 Sweet’s Elementarbuch is discussed in Mark Atherton, ‘Being Scientific and Relevant in the Language Textbook : Henry Sweet’s Primers for the Study of Colloquial English’, Paradigm 20 (1996), pp. 1–20. 63  Sweet discusses vocabulary study in ‘Practical Study of Language’ (1884) and ‘Presidential Address’ (1877), Collected Papers, at pp. 42 and 94 ; see also ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’, Collected Papers, pp. 15–16.

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learning culminating in the classic work on that subject, The Practical Study of Languages, published in 1899.64 As Howatt has shown, Sweet’s work in ‘living philology’ laid a foundation for the applied linguistics of the 1940s and later,65 particularly with the emphasis on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing a foreign language. And Sweet’s emphasis on preparatory work with simple, authentic texts even anticipates present-day ‘communicative’ methods of teaching and learning.66

Creative Readers : A Comparative Approach

In May 1888 Sweet delivered a long paper on nature poetry to the Shelley Society, of which he was a founder member.67 In a section on Shelley’s ‘strong sense of structure’, he applied this method of ‘practical’ philology to literary criticism. Taking a hint from Stopford Brooke about ‘the intricate, changeful and incessant weaving and unweaving of nature’s life in a great forest’ Sweet identifies a passage in Shelley’s Rosalind and Helen, lines 128–30 : Through the intricate wild wood A maze of life and light and motion Is woven. Sweet then explores further poems, and he lists numerous examples of Shelley’s varied use of the word weave and its derivatives, ‘grouped roughly under heads’. Thus under the head Leaves he quotes passages from the poem Laon and Cythna containing the collocations ‘a verdurous woof ’ and ‘bloom-inwoven leaves’ ; here also Shelley’s Alastor is particularly productive : Beneath a woven grove it sails.            The woven leaves Make net-work of the dark blue light of day. The meeting boughs and implicated leaves Wove twilight o’er the Poet’s path.68 This essentially philological approach covers all the derivatives of the base-form weave ; thus we find in the passages cited : weave, web, woof, wove, woven (recalling, perhaps, the patterns of vowel-gradation explained in the grammar of the Primer). Collocates and compounds also occur : bloom-inwoven, inwoven, interwoven, unwove 64 Sweet, The Practical Study of Languages. A Guide for Teacher and Learner (London, 1899 ; repr. London, 1964). 65 Howatt, History of English Language Teaching, pp. 198–209. 66  Communicative language teaching is discussed by Howatt, History, pp. 326–52. 67  Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, Collected Papers, pp. 229–84 ; William Benzie, Dr. F.J. Furnivall : Victorian Scholar Adventurer (Norman, OK, 1983), pp. 243–4. 68  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, lines 401, 445, 426, in Nevill Rogers, ed., The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. II (Oxford, 1975).

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and spell-inwoven ; Sweet is providing a kind of concordance that recalls his lexicographic work for the Reader, where the Glossary supplies cross-references to any occurrence of the word in the texts.69 The headings Sweet uses in this thesaurus of the Shelleyan notion of weave are : ‘Leaves’ ; ‘Clouds’ ; ‘Wind’ ; ‘Water’ ; ‘Light and Colour’ ; ‘Sound’ ; ‘Language’ ; ‘Thought and Feeling’ ; ‘Time’ ; ‘Existence’ ; ‘Movement and Action’ ; ‘Cause and Make’.70 The model is Roget, but an intriguing analogue occurs in Coleridge’s approach to the learning of German. In his journal, kept during his period of study in Germany, Coleridge divided his vocabulary into ten generic categories based on aspects of the natural and human world such as ‘Names of Spirits, Men, Birds, Beasts, Fishes and Reptiles’ ; ‘Sight and Motion’ ; ‘Sound and Motion’ ; ‘Inanimate Things on the Land, the Productions of Nature’ ; ‘Inanimate Things in Air, Fire and Water’ ; ‘The Works and Inventions of Man, Clothes, Houses, Machinery, Ceremonies, Festivals’, akin to Sweet’s ‘descriptions of nature and natural phenomena, the different races of man, houses, food, dress & c.’ in his primers. Although Sweet did not know Coleridge’s Notebooks, the same ethos pervades both approaches to language learning and vocabulary, described as follows by a biographer of Coleridge : These categories suggest the way he approached language poetically, less a taxonomy of objects, but rather as a creative power in itself ‘re-inventing’ the world in terms of human perceptions.71 As outlined above, this kind of ‘synthetic vocabulary study’, to use Sweet’s term, was a key method in his ‘practical study’ of languages ; here applied to literary-stylistic study it gives another insight into the way Sweet intended ‘living philology’ to inform the use and teaching methods of his Primer and Reader. A good example of a creative user of the Reader is the poet Ezra Pound, and there is clear influence of key texts from Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader on Pound’s developing poetic. The connections are apparent, for instance, in the passage about the cuckoo and the lone-flyer from the The Seafarer, lines 53–63, which in Pound’s ‘The Seafarer’ reads : Cuckoo calleth with gloomy crying, He singeth summerward, bodeth sorrow, The bitter heart’s blood. Burgher knows not  He the prosperous man  what some perform Where wandering them widest draweth. 69  The Old English verb wefan ‘to weave’ is listed in the Glossary of the 1894 edition, and crossreferenced by chapter and line number to 31 c/6, a line in one of the ‘Mercian Hymns’ : ‘from ðæm weofendan lif min’. 70  Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, Collected Papers, pp. 252–6. 71  Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3 double vols. (London, 1957– 73), I, 354 ; Richard Holmes, Coleridge : Early Visions (London, 1989), p. 218.

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So that but now my heart burst from my breastlock, My mood ’mid the mere-flood, Over the whale’s acre, would wander wide. On earth’s shelter cometh oft to me, Eager and ready, the crying lone-flyer, Whets for the whale-path the heart irresistibly, O’er tracks of ocean.72 By way of comparison, here is Sweet’s summary of the context of this passage, and his paraphrase of lines 58–64a, taken from his essay on Shelley’s nature poetry : the approach of spring, when the earth’s bosom becomes fair again, and the groves resume their flowers, inspires the youth, with a longing to venture on the sea, and, like Shelley’s Alastor, ‘to meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste.’ The song of the cuckoo is to him even as the voice of the ill-omened raven : it bodes bitter heart-sorrow […] The Seafarer […] casts many a longing glance at the joys of the earth ; but neither the love of woman nor the sound of the harp, nor the joyous revelry of his beloved kinsmen avail aught against the mighty impulse within him : ‘My mind departs out of my breast like a seabird, screams in its lonely flight, returns to me, fierce and eager, impels me irresistibly over the wide waste of waters, over the whale’s path.’73 As is now known, Pound based his poem on Henry Sweet’s text,74 as edited in the definitive seventh edition of the Anglo-Saxon Reader in 1894 (lines 53–64a, retaining Sweet’s presentation of the text) : Swylce gēac mǫnað  gēomran reorde, singeð sumeres weard,  sorge bēodeð bittre in brēosthord.  Þæt se beorn ne wāt, sęcg ēstēadig,  hwæt þā sume drēogað, þe þā wræclastas  wīdost lęcgað ! For þon nū min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan, min mōdsefa mid męreflōde ofer hwæles ēþel,  hweorfeð wīde eorðan scēatas,  cymeð eft tō mē gīfre and grǣdig ;  gielleð ānfloga, hwęteð on [h]wælweg  hreðer unwearnum ofer holma gelagu.75 72  Pound, ‘The Seafarer’, in his Selected Poems, ed. T.S. Eliot, 2nd edn (London, 1948). 73  Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, Collected Papers, p. 236. 74  The evidence for Pound’s use of Sweet’s textbook is given in Robinson, Tomb of Beowulf, pp. 248– 56, and Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 30. 75 Sweet, Reader, 7th edn (1894), ch. XXIX, p. 173.

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A few parallels suggest that Pound was using Sweet’s Glossary in the Anglo-Saxon Reader to render gifre as ‘eager’ and unwearnum as ‘irresistibly’ ; and perhaps also there is a connection between Sweet’s ‘bodes bitter heart-sorrow’ and Pound’s ‘bodeth sorrow / The bitter heart’s blood’. In Sweet’s rendering, hyge and modsefa are conflated as one word ‘mind’, and hreþerlocan is rendered ‘breast’, whereas Pound has ‘heart’, ‘breastlock’ and ‘mood’ respectively.76 Clearly, Pound’s purpose was to echo the sound and texture of the original, with the purpose of revitalizing the elements of diction and ‘speech rhythm’ in English verse. Sweet, on the other hand, is decidedly modern in his diction, for he criticized ‘transliteration’ of older English words into their nearest modern cognates, ‘deadening the modern reader’s perception of the changes (often very delicate) of meaning which many old words preserved in the present English have undergone’.77 But in his choice of word Sweet, too, was creatively departing from his own practice in the 1894 Reader. In his Glossary there, anfloga is rendered ‘solitary flier’, the verb hwettan (line 63) is glossed as ‘sharpen, incite’, holm as ‘ocean, sea, water’, and gelagu as ‘extent […] tracts’ with a cross-reference to licgan ‘to lie […] extend’. But in the 1888 Shelley essay, lines 62b–3 are translated as ‘impels me irresistibly over the wide waste of waters’, a paraphrase in which ‘impels’ and ‘wide waste’ recall various lines from Shelley :        A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds. It rose as he approached, and with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main. A restless impulse urged him to embark And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste.78 The flight of the swan in the above perhaps recalled the departure of the anfloga or ‘solitary flier’ in the The Seafarer, or the Old English ‘swan riddle’. Applying to the two poems what Michael Lapidge has called ‘The Comparative Approach’,79 we could look for further correspondences, for instance the impulse in Alastor line 77 ‘To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands’ compared with the mind’s desire in lines 37b–8 of The Seafarer :

76  Sweet’s Glossary renders the relevant synonyms as follows : breosthord ‘heart’ and sorg ‘sorrow’ ; later in the passage hyge ‘mind, heart’, hreþer ‘heart, mind’, hreþerloca ‘breast’, modsefa ‘mind, heart’. 77  Sweet, review of Oswald Cockayne, ed., The Liflade of St. Juliana (London, 1872), in The Academy 3 (1872), 278. 78 Shelley, Alastor, 275–9, 304–5. 79  Michael Lapidge, ‘The Comparative Approach’, in O’Keeffe, Reading Old English Texts, pp. 20–38.

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      ðæt ic feor heonan elðeodigra  eard gesece. that I far from here should seek the land of strangers. Specifically in his essay, Sweet approaches the comparison of the two poems as follows : It is interesting to compare the Seafarer with Alastor. Alastor braves death in despair of otherwise attaining his ideal of love and beauty ; he lives in an atmosphere of sublime but unhealthy sentiment. His gentleness, his beauty, have something feminine about them. The Seafarer, on the other hand, is all manliness and energy.80 Differences of course there are. Alongside the gender stereotypes, Sweet elaborates a contrast between the ‘sublime but unhealthy sentiment’ of the Romantic character of Alastor compared with the Victorian ‘manliness and energy’ of the Seafarer.81 The image of the lone flyer in The Seafarer also elicited one more analogue. In a footnote in the essay on Shelley, Sweet compares lines 58–64a to a passage in Laon and Cythna (II.xxix) : Her spirit o’er the ocean’s floating state From her deep eyes far wandering, on the wing Of visions that were mine, beyond its utmost spring ! Sweet knew the many publications of the Shelley Society82 and was doubtless fully aware that Laon and Cythna is worlds apart from The Seafarer in its subject matter at this point in the narrative.83 What nevertheless attracts him, like Pound, is the ‘strange likeness’ (to adopt Geoffrey Hill’s phrase, used by Chris Jones) between poems ancient and modern. Like the various critics, philologists and scientists who shaped the ideas behind his Primer and Reader, Sweet is fascinated by the congruence of diction and imagery used by poets at work in different periods as they observe and investigate the phenomena of the world around them.

Conclusion

The first edition of Sweet’s Old English textbook appeared at a time of educational reform in 1870s England. Far from being a traditional ‘antiquarian’ philologist, Sweet was at the forefront of new thinking in education and applied linguistics, spelling

80  Sweet, ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’, Collected Papers, pp. 236–7. 81  J.A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality : Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester, 1987). 82  For example, he cites H.S. Salt, A Shelley Primer (London, 1887). 83  See Shelley, Laon and Cythna [The Revolt of Islam], canto II, stanzas xxv–xxvii in Rogers, Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. II.

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reform, and new methods of teaching modern languages.84 His selection criteria for the texts of the Reader were thus pedagogical as well as ‘purely’ literary. But neither are they ‘value-free’, for they also reveal typical Victorian interests not only in nature poetry and melancholy (as Eric Stanley has shown) but also in King Alfred and the texts associated with that monarch. Other intellectual influences emerge with the definitive version of the Reader that was published in 1894. In the end it was linguistic thought, rooted in philology but also drawing heavily on phonetics and anthropology, that informed Sweet’s highly influential choice of texts for his Anglo-Saxon Reader. And while it is likely that his curtailed text of The Seafarer did promote the long-enduring ‘Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism’, this was far from his intention : Sweet had other intellectual concerns. The 1894 textbook reflects Sweet’s interests in anthropology, cognition, the origins of language, of thought and of poetic imagery  interests which surely resonated with those of Pound in the early years of modernism, and as a comparative approach can show, both Sweet and Pound, in their own way, worked creatively with the text of The Seafarer. Such is the background to a book that taught Old English poetry to the twentieth century and continued to colour the subsequent imaginative reception of Old English literature. 84  See Atherton, ‘“To observe things as they are”’.

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3 Owed to Both Sides : W.H. Auden’s double debt to the literature of the North Heather O’Donoghue

T

he basic facts of W.H. Auden’s life-long engagement with things Icelandic  and especially its medieval literature and myth  are well known.1 His father believed that the family came from Iceland, the surname ‘Auden’ being an Anglicization of the Icelandic given name ‘Auðunn’. He even toyed with the possibility that it was related to the name of the god Óðinn, and wrote to the Icelandic scholar Eiríkur Magnússon for confirmation of this ; in a brief reply, Eiríkur dismissed the suggestion.2 But Dr Auden fostered in his son an interest in Old Norse myth  with considerable success. In Letters from Iceland, Auden writes that having listened to his father reading Icelandic folk tales to him, he now ‘know[s] more about Northern mythology than Greek’.3 His colouring  fair hair and a pale complexion  tended to confirm both his own and his friends’ assumptions about his Scandinavian ancestry, and he repeatedly referred to Iceland as ‘holy ground’.4 Towards the end of his life, in 1969, he and Paul Taylor published The Elder Edda, an English translation of selection of Old Norse verse which very largely comprises the mythological poems of the Edda.5 Just as familiar is W.H. Auden’s engagement with Old English poetry. His response to J.R.R. Tolkien reciting Beowulf is very widely quoted : ‘I was spellbound. This 1  I shall use the term ‘Old Norse’ to refer to the literature and culture of medieval Iceland and Norway. 2  See Sveinn Haraldsson, ‘“The North begins inside” : Auden, Ancestry and Iceland’, in Northern Antiquity, ed. Andrew Wawn (Enfield Lock, 1994), pp. 255–84, at p. 266. 3  W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937, repr. 1967), p. 210. 4  See Auden’s 1965 Foreword to Letters from Iceland, p. 8. 5  Paul B. Taylor and W.H Auden, The Elder Edda (London, 1969). After Auden’s death, a fuller selection including heroic pieces was published as Norse Poems (London, 1981).

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poetry, I knew, was going to be my dish.’6 But however positive his attitude to hearing Old English poetry read aloud, he did badly in his exams, and got a Third ; a friend reported that he cried when he came out of his Old English paper.7 Nevertheless, as Chris Jones notes, he was to write in 1962 that : ‘Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry have been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’8 Auden’s free translation of the Old English elegy The Wanderer (which begins, confusingly, with a line adapted from the early Middle English alliterative sermon Sawles Warde : ‘Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle’) is perhaps his most celebrated Old English derived piece, but the pervasive influence of medieval English alliterative metre is evident throughout Auden’s oeuvre. The distinction between the two elements of Auden’s double debt ought, then, to be pretty clear, Old Norse traditions providing the mythic allusions in Auden’s work, and Old and Middle English metres influencing or informing his prosody. Explicit reference to Old Norse myth in Auden’s work is easy to identify : the Norse gods and their attributes are immediately recognizable, and since virtually no trace of any pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon mythology has survived, there is no problem about distinguishing the two traditions. And yet the very depth of Auden’s engagement with and knowledge of Old Norse myth presents its own difficulties ; his imaginative re-interpretations of the central features of Old Norse myth go beyond mere explicit allusion, and can be hard to spot. The situation is further obscured by a series of misconceptions on the part of modern critics, whose direct experience of the Old Norse sources seems sometimes to be limited. So, for example, in a rather difficult account of Auden’s theory and practice of translation with reference to Old Norse literature, Rainer Emig assumes that the Icelandic sagas are poetic texts. Commenting on Auden’s (entirely justifiable) claim that the metrical complexity of Old Norse skaldic verse means that it is almost impossible to translate whilst at the same time preserving the metre, Emig writes that Auden ‘calls the sagas […] social-realist texts [because] he is convinced that their textual complexity drives them towards prose’, and that ‘their complexity forces a modern English translation to adopt a prose style’.9 But the Icelandic sagas are prose works  and social-realist prose is a very good way indeed of characterizing their unexpected (in a medieval context) secular naturalism. Emig accuses Auden of ‘notable’ and even ‘blatant’ contradiction in his claims about the [un]translatability of Old Norse verse ; but his criticism is based on his own fundamental confusion between saga prose and skaldic verse. Chris Jones’s work on Auden’s use of Old English metre, with its lucid specificity 6  W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London, 1963), pp. 41–2. 7  Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden, A Biography (London, 1981), p. 80. 8  Chris Jones, ‘W.H. Auden and “the ‘Barbaric’ Poetry of the North” : Unchaining one’s Daimon’, Review of English Studies 53 (2002), 167–85, at p. 169. 9  Rainer Emig, ‘“All the Others Translate” : W.H. Auden’s Poetic Dislocations of Self, Nation and Culture’, Translation and Nation : Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon, 2001), pp. 167–219, at p. 174.

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and real expertise with the Old English, is a welcome antidote to the rather vague accounts of Auden’s debt to Old English verse elsewhere in Auden scholarship.10 But it can be very difficult to distinguish between the influence of Old Norse and Old English metres  largely because both traditions drew on a common original Germanic alliterative metre based on stress rather than on syllable counting. And once again, the unfamiliarity of Old Norse poetic metres has proved a stumbling block to modernist critics. The misuse of the term dróttkvætt  literally, ‘court measure’  as if it were the name not of a skaldic metre but of a poetic form (as in ‘a drottkvaett’, analogous to ‘a sonnet’ or ‘a limerick’) is widespread, and betrays this unfamiliarity with the Norse. In fact, dróttkvætt is the most distinctive of Old Norse metres ; there is nothing remotely like it in Old English, and it is the metre which in its intricacy has proved so difficult, if not impossible, to preserve in translation. So Auden’s experiments in dróttkvætt are relatively evident, while his re-use of less distinctive Old Norse metres has proved elusive. One of the most striking characteristics of dróttkvætt, however, is its repeated use of internal half rhyme, or consonance (alternating with internal full rhyme). Albright’s assertion that ‘repeating whole syllables while altering the vowel’ is a ‘form of dissonant Modernist rhyme, invented by the war poet Wilfred Owen and developed by Auden’ is not quite right ; Auden’s use of half-rhyme must have been at least confirmed by his knowledge of Old Norse literature, if not adopted directly from it.11 W.H. Auden completed Paid on Both Sides (subtitled ‘A Charade’) in 1928, the year he finished his undergraduate degree in Oxford.12 The title  as has only relatively recently been recognized  is taken from the Old English poem Beowulf, in an authorial comment with which the poet deplores the self-destructive nature of feud :       Ne wæs þæt gewrixle til, þæt hie on ba healfa  bicgan scoldon freonda feorum.13 Its opening scene reveals Joan Nower, who has prematurely given birth to John because of the shock of his father’s murder in an ambush by the Shaws. Flanked by his corpse on one side, and the new baby on the other, Joan cryptically muses on the 10  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006). 11  Daniel Albright, ‘Modernist Poetic Form’, in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 24–41, at p. 27. How well, if at all, Auden could read Old Norse literature in the original language is uncertain. He could have learnt about Norse poets’ use of half rhyme from L.M. Hollander’s book The Skalds (Princeton, 1945) by the time he came to write The Age of Anxiety, but the situation is less clear with regard to Paid on Both Sides. 12 See The English Auden : Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, ed. E. Mendelson (London, 1977), pp. xii–xiv. All quotations from Paid on Both Sides are from this edition, referenced by page number. 13  Beowulf : A Student Edition, ed. George Jack (Oxford, 1994), lines 1304–5 : ‘That was not a good exchange, that they on both sides had to pay with the lives of friends’. Translations my own. Subsequent references to Beowulf will be by line number in the text.

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unstoppable continuance of feud. Similarly in Beowulf, Hildeburh the wife of Finn is shown in the aftermath of a battle between her husband’s forces and those of her brothers lamenting the deaths on both sides  a grim equation of loss which the Beowulf poet picks up a few lines later when he describes the doomed attempt at patching up the feud as an exchange of oaths sworn ‘on twa healfa’ (‘on two sides’, 1095).14 This is a woman’s place : to articulate a response to violent acts which men have carried out. In Beowulf, women are, like Joan Nower, the passive victims of the many feuds in the poem  with one extraordinary exception. The poet’s comment in Beowulf which Auden has taken for the title of the play relates not to a human family feud, but to the terrifying reprisals taken against the Danes by the mother of the poem’s first monster, Grendel. Grendel’s mother takes vengeance in her own hands, attacking the Danes in their great hall, Heorot, and carrying off one of the Danish king’s trusted retainers. His severed head is later found on the shore of the sinister, bloody lake in which Grendel’s mother lives. The threat of the maternal permeates Paid on Both Sides, and finds its monstrous equivalent to Grendel’s mother in the pantomimic central section of the play, in which Joan re-appears as a guard armed with a gigantic feeding bottle, and warns Seth Shaw’s brother, who has been taken as a spy, ‘Be quiet, or I’ll give you a taste of this’ (p. 8)  a grimly comic and inescapably Freudian double meaning. It is clear, then, that the Old English poem Beowulf was one of Auden’s primary influences in the writing of Paid on Both Sides. Further, as Chris Jones has shown in Strange Likeness, the play is shot through with echoes of Old English heroic poetry, and its verse dialogue is closely based on the two-stress alliterative metre used throughout the Old English canon. But it is in Old Norse, and not in Beowulf, or indeed anywhere else in Old English, that human females are shown to incite violence in an attempt to re-kindle an apparently quiescent feud, as happens in Paid on Both Sides. Seth Shaw’s mother responds with brutal simplicity to Seth’s query about what he should do about John Nower, whose marriage to Anne Shaw seems to have damped down the desire for vengeance : ‘Kill him’ (p. 16). She goes on to incite her son with the time-honoured rhetoric of such female figures in Old Norse tradition : ‘Have you forgotten your brother’s death […] taken out and shot like a dog. It is a nice thing for me to hear people saying that I have a coward for a son. I am thankful your father is not here to see it’ (p. 16). Seth’s response is inevitable : ‘It shall be as you like’, but even his reservations  ‘Though I think that much will come of this, chiefly harm’  are paralleled in saga literature.15 Seth’s mother, with her uncompromising insistence that the desire for vengeance must not be allowed to fade, finds her counterpart in the Old Norse poem Hamðismál, in which the matriarch Guðrún successfully urges her sons to avenge the death of their sister Svanhildr, an act of vengeance which they all know will result in their 14  See Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 72. 15  For a discussion of male responses to female inciting in Old Norse, see Jenny Jochens, Old Norse Images of Women (Philadelphia, 1996), pp. 195–8.

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deaths, by accusing them of cowardice and comparing them unfavourably with her brothers.16 The sorrowful female lamenter and the avenging matriarch (whether monstrous, or simply inhumane in her single-minded pursuit of vengeance) are here figures from poetry and legend. For analogues to the more naturalistic action in the play, we must turn to non-poetic sources  primarily to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Old Icelandic family sagas. The classic feud story from Anglo-Saxon history is found as the chronicle entry for AD 755, though its repercussions (as is the way with feuds) take the story well beyond this year.17 The West Saxon king Sigeberht is deposed and exiled by his rival Cynewulf, but years later Sigeberht’s brother ambushes Cynewulf, taking as his opportunity Cynewulf ’s visit to a woman, with only a small retinue. This story is clearly behind John Nower’s planned ambush in Paid on Both Sides : an informer reports that Red Shaw ‘goes to Brandon Walls today, visits a woman’ and ‘takes a few’ (p. 3). As the attackers report, Red Shaw is attacked at night ; awoken by the cries of the victims, his men ‘Ran to the doors / Would wake their master Who lay with woman / Upstairs together Tired after love’ (p. 6). These are precisely the circumstances of the chronicle entry  though with Auden’s characteristically economical updating of the setting : ‘upstairs’ for the unfamiliar layout of the original Anglo-Saxon sleeping arrangements. The laconic style of the chronicle could provide Auden with very little detail. But there is a surprisingly similar set of events in the thirteenth-century Old Icelandic Hrafnkels saga freysgoða, a pseudo-historical story which was long thought to be true, but which is now generally regarded as fiction, although its setting in eastern Iceland is very largely authentic, and its characters, dialogue and incidents are all highly naturalistic.18 A flawed but ambitious young lawyer, Sámr, is persuaded to take out a legal prosecution against the powerful eponymous chieftain Hrafnkell, who has killed Sámr’s cousin. Sámr wins his case, and with unexpected help from two influential chieftains from the north-west of the country, he sends Hrafnkell into exile and takes over the chieftaincy himself. But some years later, incited by an old woman in his household who accuses him of the cowardice which comes with advancing years, Hrafnkell takes 16 In The Poetic Edda, Volume I : Heroic Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford, 1969), pp. 161–7. 17  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton, rev. edn (London, 2000), pp. 46–9. 18 See Hrafnkel’s Saga and Other Stories, trans. Hermann Pálsson (Harmondsworth, 1971). Auden would of course have read an earlier translation of the saga, such as the literal translation in John Coles’s Summer Travelling in Iceland (London, 1882), a volume which Auden includes (in slightly garbled form) in his bibliography in Letters from Iceland, p. 88. Auden’s later memories of the books he read in childhood are neither exhaustive, nor very accurate : see Katherine Bucknell’s appendix on Auden’s nursery library in W.H. Auden, ‘In Solitude, for Company’ : Unpublished Prose and Recent Criticism, ed. Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (Oxford, 1995), pp. 197–206, esp. pp. 202–3.

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his revenge, ambushing and murdering Sámr’s brother. The detailed plans for ambush  and actual place-names  in Paid on Both Sides are strongly reminiscent of the authentic topographical detail in Hrafnkels saga. John Nower’s associate George ponders a map of the district, and concludes : ‘There’s a barn about a hundred yards from the house […] If we can occupy that without attracting attention it will form a good base […] commands both house and roads. If I remember rightly, on the other side of the stream is a steep bank. Yes, you can see from the contours. They couldn’t get out that way, but lower down in marshy ground’ (p. 4). In the saga, Sámr suggests a similar strategy for ambushing Hrafnkell in his farmhouse : the raiding party turn off the main route up to the house, up a steep bank, and hidden from sight of the farmhouse, they drop down unexpectedly on its occupants. When Hrafnkell enacts his counterrevenge, marshy ground lower down from the heathland plays a crucial part in his pursuit and ambush of Sámr’s brother, and, correspondingly, in Sámr’s failed counterpursuit : Hrafnkell escapes by putting the marshy ground between himself and his pursuers. Like Hrafnkell, Nower’s party will ‘get away Over the moor’ (p. 6), and Red Shaw, like Sámr, sees that this is inevitable. Intimate knowledge of the landscape is emphasized in the saga as being vital to the success of both ambushes, just as George advises appointing Sturton to lead the attack : ‘He knows the whole district blindfold.’ In a very striking scene in the saga, a servant boy urgently tells Sámr’s brother that armed men are riding in pursuit of him, reporting that there are no fewer than eighteen, and that one of them looks like Hrafnkell the chieftain. Auden’s Culley performs exactly the same function, though he is updated with field glasses : ‘There are twenty men from Nattrass, sir, over the gap, coming at once’ (p. 13). At the very end of the play, the Chorus laments the end of a family dynasty, when ‘the son [must] / Sell the farm lest the mountain fall’ (p. 17). At the beginning of Hrafnkels saga the hero’s father is warned by a mysterious figure in a dream to move his farm ; he heeds the warning and on the very day he moves, the mountain falls on the farm. In addition to these relatively specific echoes, there are various more general suggestions of family saga literature. The ambush in Paid on Both Sides is all conducted on horseback, as ambushes invariably are in the sagas, and Auden’s northern Pennine setting seems very Icelandic, as does even its climate, with its ‘wind from the snows’ (p. 12). Aaron Shaw looks back on a troubled past and characterizes it as a story of ‘horses stolen or a house burned’ (p. 13)  the staples of Icelandic family saga narratives. ‘Red Shaw’ is in itself reminiscent of saga nicknames which are frequently based on simple colour terms (perhaps the most notorious being Eric the Red – Eiríkr rauði, the Norse discoverer of Greenland). Even more generally, but no less evocatively, John Nower muses on his ancestral identity, and the formulation he comes up with  ‘The easy conquerors of empty bays’ (p. 7)  perfectly describes the first settlers of Iceland. It might also be argued that there are faint echoes too of the Old Icelandic Gísla saga Súrssonar, in which two brothers living together on the family farm  ‘Sometime sharers of the same house’, as John Nower puts it (p. 11)  are estranged, and

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this fissure forms an emotional fault-line in the whole saga.19 John’s brother Dick leaves home and family (taking a passage abroad with a relative, like a number of saga characters), but their parting is amicable and melancholy, and they exchange knives so that they ‘may remember each other’ (p. 11). In place of the bond with his estranged brother, Gísli is attached to his brother-in-law Vésteinn, and when separation threatens them Gísli constructs a coin which can be split into two halves, one for himself, and one for Vésteinn. Interestingly, games, especially ball games, feature very largely in Gísla saga, almost always as the site of conflict and violence, and as well as the odd references to public-school sports in Paid on Both Sides, John Nower himself recalls a vivid scrap of memory of how he ‘fell on the ball near time’ (p. 14). And after John Nower is killed, Seth Shaw’s urgent command ‘See that all the doors are bolted’ (p. 17) recalls the repeated and strategic bolting of doors in Gísla saga when men are murdered. As Randall Jarrell has said in his lectures on Auden, ‘The most important influence on [Paid on Both Sides] is the influence of the sagas  the more familiar you are with the sagas the more you’ll notice this.’20 Icelandic family sagas portray in convincing and apparently authentic detail the everyday life of a society which might well have existed just as it is depicted. They are in prose, though many quote skaldic verses either to substantiate the ‘facts’ of their narratives or as the heightened dialogue of significant characters.21 Most importantly  at least for the purposes of this essay  they are not mythic. Of course, as is sometimes true of novels, the subject matter of saga narrative may show the influence of mythic archetypes, but they are always thoroughly transformed into the familiar secular ‘social realism’ of the family saga. Actual Old Norse myth  in the broad sense of stories about the pre-Christian divinities of Norse culture  is found elsewhere, mostly in the form of allusions or fuller narratives, in Old Norse poetry, both Eddaic and skaldic, and in the thirteenth-century prose treatises of the Icelandic historian and mythographer Snorri Sturluson. So whilst Old Norse family saga narratives might help provide the subject matter and the settings for a work like Paid on Both Sides, with Old English poetry influencing its heroic ethos, its lyrical speeches and its prosody, it is harder to see how Old Norse myth might be woven in. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that there are a number of highly significant examples of mythic allusion in Paid on Both Sides. It is possible that Auden is associating the death of John Nower in a grim and pointless feud with the central tragedy of the Old Norse pantheon  the death of the young god Baldr, radiant, Christ-like and, as Óðinn’s son, bearing the future hopes of the whole divine dynasty. For the Old Norse gods, according to Snorri, the death of Baldr was the worst misfortune ever to have happened amongst gods and men. 19  The Saga of Gisli, trans. George Johnston (London, 1963). 20  Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden, ed. Stephen Burt (New York, 2005), p. 120. 21  Hrafnkels saga does not have any verses in its narrative. For an account of Old Icelandic prosimetrum, see Heather O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative (Oxford, 2005).

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When Baldr falls to the earth, fatally wounded, the gods are paralysed with horror, and speech fails them. So too, says Snorri, does the power to lift up Baldr in their arms. All they can do is weep.22 Anne Shaw-Nower’s reaction to her husband’s death surely alludes to this myth : ‘The hands that were to help will not be lifted, / And bad followed by worse leaves us to tears’ (p. 17). According to Snorri, Óðinn suffers most from the death of Baldr, because he understands the significance of this, the first death amongst the gods. Most modern scholars assume that what Óðinn knows is that Baldr’s death heralds the end of the world, the doom of the gods : Ragnarök. Snorri goes on to explain that vengeance was taken for the death of Baldr on the malevolent demigod, Loki, who planned the murder. But Snorri does not recount the very different revenge alluded to in a much earlier Norse poem, Vǫluspá. From this poem, we learn that ‘A brother of Baldr / was born quickly / he started  Óðinn’s son  / slaying at one night old.’23 The revenge he takes is on Baldr’s brother Hǫðr, who under Loki’s direction fired the fatal shot. Óðinn, in this scenario, is the old man to whom vengeance is denied, since he cannot kill one son to avenge the other, and who sees the dreadful prospect of his whole dynasty coming to an end. His response is to beget another son who magically reaches maturity in one night, his whole being ‘dedicated to vengeance’ as Dronke puts it.24 We must return to Joan Nower, in the opening scene of Paid on Both Sides, with her newborn baby, and the corpse of her dead husband. In the play, it is John Nower who reaches maturity almost immediately  seconds after his birth, in stage time  and vengeance duly follows. The appearance of miraculous maturation is considerably helped by Auden’s forgetful omission of a stage direction to explain the passage of time,25 but it is tempting to suggest that Auden had the myth in mind when he produced this bafflingly swift transition. It might be objected, of course, that the two allusions I have proposed require us to identify John Nower as both victim (Baldr) and avenger (the miraculous new-born brother). But in the inexorable cycle of feud  and therefore, in Auden’s swift, elliptical depiction of it in the play  this exchange of roles is precisely what happens ; vengeance in the next round is taken on the avenger from the previous one. The obscurity of some of Auden’s lines in Paid on Both Sides  and, indeed, elsewhere in his poetry  means that it can be difficult to propose a very precise match between allusions in the text and Old Norse sources. But sometimes knowledge of the myth can help make sense of otherwise opaque passages. This, I would argue, is the case with the lament spoken by Auden’s chorus, when Nower’s vengeance is imminent. After a series of clear echoes of Old English poetry (as in the story of Finnsburh in Beowulf, for instance, the coming of Spring ‘unsettles sleeping partnerships’ (p. 7) ; 22 See Snorri Sturluson : Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London, 1987), p. 49. 23 In The Poetic Edda, Volume II : Mythological Poems, ed. and trans. Ursula Dronke (Oxford, 1997), pp. 7–24 (stanza 32). 24  Ibid., p. 54. 25 Mendelson, Early Auden, p. 48.

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and Auden’s diction vividly evokes Old English poetic compounding with ‘the frothwet sand’ (ibid.)) the voice of the Chorus assumes a sudden plangency :        O how shall man live Whose thought is born, child of one farcical night, To find him old ?   (p. 7) Here we seem to have a conflation of the dilemma of a man himself too old to take effective vengeance  like Beowulf ’s King Hrethel, who also lost one son at the hands of the other, and ‘chose God’s light’ in resignation to his impossible position  and an allusion to the myth of the magical begetting of a son by a father too old to await the normal passage of time.26 The chorus continues with a reference to ‘The body warm but not / by choice’ : with the corpse (rather than the living body) still warm, action must be taken swiftly. There is one last faint reverberation of Odinic myth : the conflicted figure in this passage dreams ‘Where learns, one drawn apart, a secret will / Restore the dead ; but comes thence to a wall’ (p. 7). Óðinn is said to be able to ‘rouse up dead men from the earth’,27 and to know a magic spell which enables him to speak with hanged corpses.28 This is secret knowledge, and it may shed light on a celebrated question in Old Norse myth which has never been  and will never be  answered : ‘What did Óðinn whisper into his son Baldr’s ear, as he lay on his funeral pyre ?’29 But of course Óðinn did not succeed in resurrecting Baldr, or in averting Ragnarök. He came up against a brick wall here, in spite of his sorcery. In the Old Norse poem of creation and apocalypse, Vǫluspá, the mysterious seeress who prophesies Ragnarök  the end of the gods and the created world  foresees yet further, to the establishment of a new world order, a new heaven and a new earth. In her lyrical vision of rebirth, she speaks of the earth rising, green again, out of the sea. Cornfields will grow, though unsown. And above these verdant hills flies an eagle, hunting fish. Paid on Both Sides ends on the same note of hope, expressed in remarkably similar terms : feuding has created a wasteland, ‘though later there be / Big fruit, eagles above the stream’ (p. 17). Auden continued to allude to Old Norse sources, and Old Norse myth, throughout his life’s work, as Paul Taylor has shown,30 and his long poem The Age of Anxiety, which he began writing in 1944, is peppered with allusions to Old Norse. I want to 26 See Heather O’Donoghue, ‘What has Baldr to do with Lamech ?’, Medium Ævum 72 (2003), 82–107. 27  The Saga of the Ynglings (Ynglinga saga), in Heimskringla, trans. L.M. Hollander (Austin, TX, 1964), pp. 6–50, at p. 11. 28  Sayings of the High One (Hávamál), in The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (Oxford, 1996), pp. 14–38 (stanza 157). 29  Vafthrudnir’s Sayings (Vafþrúðnismál) ; ibid., pp. 39–49 (stanza 54). 30 Paul Taylor, ‘Auden’s Icelandic Myth of Exile’, Journal of Modern Literature 24 (2000–2001), 213–34.

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argue further that The Age of Anxiety is fundamentally structured around the Old Norse myth of Ragnarök, the Norse apocalypse. In Vǫluspá, the time leading up to Ragnarök is dramatically, even hectically, figured by the seeress as ‘an axe age, a sword age / […] a wind age, a wolf age’.31 Auden presents us with a modern version of this headlong descent into apocalypse which is yet bathetically less violent and more cerebral ; it is an age of anxiety.32 The action of The Age of Anxiety takes place on All Souls’ night, as four figures in a Manhattan bar in the 1940s  each ‘reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person’, as Auden puts it (p. 441)  first soliloquize, in turn, and then fall into a stylized conversation before setting off for an after-hours drink together. The epigraph to the poem consists of three lines from the thirteenth-century Latin hymn Dies Irae (Day of Wrath), a text traditionally included as part of the liturgy of the Requiem Mass, and so especially suitable for All Souls’ Day. The hymn heralds the Last Judgement, with its terrifying blend of retribution and apocalypse, when heaven and earth will be reduced to ashes. Auden’s three-line quotation Lacrimosa dies illa Qua resurget ex favilla Iudicandus homo reus   (p. 445) O that day of tears / when arises from the ashes / man, accused, to be judged is pointedly cut short before the gentler though still urgent plea ‘Huic ergo parce, Deus’ (‘Therefore, spare him, O Lord’). Auden is inviting us to see his four characters, Rosetta, Quant, Malin and Emble, in their war-time bar in New York, awaiting an imminent and destructive apocalypse.33 The name Ragnarök means ‘the judgement of the gods’. The price the Norse pantheon pays for its increasing decadence and moral decay is a huge, all-consuming conflagration, and individual encounters with monstrous opponents which the gods do not survive. It is sometimes suggested by modern scholars that the teleological element of Ragnarök  the sense that the gods deserve the fate they suffer  is the result of Christian influence, and it is true that there are a number of similarities between the Norse myth and biblical accounts. Nevertheless, though both traditions (and indeed, similar ones in other mythologies) exhibit a characteristic blend of judgement and destruction, it is clear that there are distinctively Norse elements in Auden’s version. As the Icelander Snorri Sturluson narrates in his thirteenth-century re-telling 31 Dronke, Poetic Edda II, stanza 44. 32  All quotations from the poem are taken from W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1976, rev. 2007), referenced by page number. 33  Auden’s epigraph to his Prologue is the opening of Sabine Baring-Gould’s celebrated Christian hymn ‘Now the day is over’. Baring-Gould was also an enthusiastic Icelandicist, so it is not too farfetched to see a little of Ragnarök in these lines too.

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of the myth of Ragnarök, the beginning of the whole story is that the god Baldr has ominous dreams.34 I would suggest that Auden is echoing this opening when Malin envisages a human infant, perhaps himself as a baby :        helpless in cradle and Righteous still, yet already there is dread in his dreams.   (p. 463) In a similar moment of self-reflection at the very beginning of the The Age of Anxiety, Quant sees himself in the bar-room mirror, marked with ‘the brand of a winter / No priest can explain’ (p. 449). According to Snorri, the first event of the coming Ragnarök will be a winter called Fimbulvetr  as long as three winters run together, with no summers in between, an obvious terror for the pagan north. And on their mysterious dream journey later on in the poem, Rosetta’s disquiet also seems to reference Ragnarök : she fears ‘These hills may be hollow ; I’ve a horror of dwarfs’ (p. 486). In Vǫluspá, the dwarfs are said, in the cryptic language of the poem, to groan in their stone doorways ; these creatures who are accustomed to being imprisoned in caves in rocks and mountains now gather ominously on their thresholds.35 Thus three of Auden’s four speakers in The Age of Anxiety are associated with the first signs of Ragnarök. Emble, the youngest of the four, is also associated with a sort of beginning : his name is a close echo of the name Embla, which the poet of Vǫluspá gives to one of the pair of first humans, transformed from inanimate driftwood by the gods who endow Ash and Elm with breath, spirit, and flesh. The name Embla is apparently a feminine diminutive of the tree name ‘elm’ in Old Norse, and the alliteration of Ash and Elm (Askr and Embla in Old Norse) has naturally reinforced  and even perhaps arose from  parallels with Adam and Eve as a male/female pair. But midtwentieth-century German-language scholarship on Norse myth had proposed that the primordial human pair were actually twin brothers.36 Apart from the striking similarity of the two names Embla and Emble, it should also be noted that according to Vǫluspá, the driftwood was, before the gods’ intervention, ‘lacking destiny’ ; it was not merely physically inanimate, but stood outside the world of gods and men as a non-participant in that world’s events and outcomes. Auden’s Emble is preoccupied by his status as a young man who has yet to find his place in life ; in an unexpectedly touching expression of this, Emble reflects that :     To be young means To be all on edge, to be held waiting in A packed lounge for a Personal Call From Long Distance, for the low voice that Defines one’s future.   (p. 472)

34  Edda, trans. Faulkes, p. 48. 35 Dronke, Poetic Edda II, stanza 49. 36  Ibid. stanzas 17–18, and pp. 122–3.

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Ragnarök is repeatedly figured as a time when, as Yeats put it, ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’, or, according to Snorri, when all fetters and bonds will be broken and torn apart. Nothing will be confined to its place any longer : the monstrous ship Naglfar will come loose from its moorings ; the giant World Serpent will haul itself up from the depths of the ocean on to land ; the great wolf Fenrir, previously bound by the gods, will break free from its chains.37 Auden’s version of this fantastic chaos is more cerebral, but equally and wittily destabilizing. As Malin puts it : ‘The primary colours / Are all mixed up ; the whole numbers have broken down’ (511), and a few lines later, ‘Our ideas have got drunk and drop their H’s’ (512). Malin has made specific reference to the end of the world : we cannot be deaf to the question : ‘Do I love this world so well That I have to know how it ends[ ?]’   (p. 508) and Rosetta wonders at the last moment if their dreams, like Baldr’s, really do herald apocalypse :        Does it exist,   That last landscape Of gloom and glaciers and great storms Where, cold into chasms, cataracts   Topple, and torrents Through rocky ruptures rage forever In a winter twilight watched by ravens,   Birds on basalt, And shadows of ships long-shattered lie, Preserved disasters, in the solid ice   Of frowning fjords ?   (p. 509) This vivid depiction of winter is plainly situated in a Viking north. But even as she speaks, ‘the world from which their journey has been one long flight rises up before them […] in all the majesty of its perpetual fury’ (pp. 509–10), and Ragnarök is apparently nigh. In swift succession, the four characters comment on cosmic horrors : ‘thunderheads threaten the sun’ ; ‘the clouds explode’ ; ‘the scene dissolves, / is succeeded by / a grinning gap’ ; ‘Violent winds tear us apart’ ; ‘The sullen south has been set on fire’ (p. 510). We can compare this with the events of Ragnarök : ‘The wolf will swallow the sun’, and ‘Surtr will come from the south with fire’.38 The grinning gap is a sinister distortion (first formulated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake) of the primal void of Old Norse myth, the ginnunga gap, or yawning gape. But for Auden’s Manhattan quartet, Ragnarök is a just a dream. They awake, 37  Edda, trans. Faulkes, p. 53. 38 Ibid.

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and with wonderfully theatrical bathos, it is revealed that the cosmic darkness with which their dream came to an end is the bartender turning off the lights. Even this moment of apparently modernistic iconoclasm is paralleled in Old Norse, for Snorri ends his lengthy narrative of Norse mythology, climaxing in Ragnarök, with the same manoeuvre : the mysterious authorities in Asgard, who act as Snorri’s mouthpiece for delivering the myths to an insistent questioner, suddenly disappear before his eyes, together with their great hall, in Snorri’s equivalent of a puff of smoke. Only the stories remain. Snorri explains how the afterlife of the stories of Norse myth led to a mistaken belief in the Norse gods : they were no more than literary shadows, an ‘insubstantial pageant faded’, in Shakespeare’s Prospero’s words. Similarly, the dream of Ragnarök leaves Auden’s characters with an ill-defined sense of disquiet, and a powerful sense of loss. They lament the absence of ‘some semi-divine stranger with superhuman powers’ (p. 513) and grieve for a world without belief or meaning, without structures imposed upon it. Ironically, it is here that Auden presents his clearest reference to Ragnarök, as   In the high heavens   The ageless places, The gods are wringing their great worn hands For their watchman is away, their world engine Creaking and cracking.   (p. 514) In Norse myth, the watchman of the gods is Heimdallr, who will blow his horn when he sees the first signs of impending Ragnarök. While the gods, ageless beings paradoxically nearing the end of their lives, gather to hold urgent counsel about their response, the cosmic World Tree, Yggdrasill, begins to show its own great age : like a real tree, it bends and creaks. In Auden’s world, with Heimdallr away, Ragnarök would catch the gods unawares ; that is why Auden’s old gods are wringing their hands. They are objects of pity now ; no longer leaders, and indeed leaderless themselves. And the unifying symbol of their cosmos is still splitting apart. In his redrawn Ragnarök, Auden hints at one of the most mysterious aspects of Norse myth : how do its events relate to real, or historical, time ? Has Ragnarök happened ? Or is it still impending, the sibyl prophesying the future from our own standpoint in time ? Is it merely one apocalypse of a never-ending series, each one an anticlimax, just as the bartender turns off the lights at the end of each day, or night falls, as Baring-Gould’s deceptively simple hymn (see n. 33 above) may suggest ? At the end of The Age of Anxiety Auden conclusively unites myth and poetry through their shared non-linear time-frame, as opposed to ‘the actual world where time is real and in which, therefore, poetry can take no interest’ (p. 533). An engagement with the Norse myth of Ragnarök helps us to understand the deeper drifts and rhythms of the poem. But as commentators have shown, Auden’s learned frame of reference was extremely extensive, and Norse myth is only one of the sources he drew on in the writing of The Age of Anxiety. I have tried to distinguish

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what is distinctively Norse about Auden’s presentation of the Last Judgement theme in the poem, given that there are inherent (and very thought-provoking) similarities between Christian and Norse traditions. But it is difficult to be certain about the source of some of Auden’s allusions  or even, in some instances, if he was intending to allude to one particular tradition alone. Thus, for example, Quant muses on the relationship between Man and myth, and mentions Polyphemus, Homer’s one-eyed giant. So when, at the end of his soliloquy, Quant concludes sardonically that ‘OneEye’s mistake / Is sorry He spoke’ (p. 475), then it is natural to assume, as John Fuller, for instance, does, that this is a reference back to Polyphemus.39 But the Norse god Óðinn was one-eyed, too, and is known in Old Norse as ‘All-father’, which is comparable with Auden’s labelling of One-Eye as ‘Ur-Papa’. And Auden’s bored Ur-Papa creates the universe with a ‘Primal Yawn’, a phrase which instantly recalls the primordial void of Norse myth, the ginnunga gap. Perhaps Auden’s capitalization of the masculine pronoun ‘He’ implies that the figure is divine. Or perhaps the capital letter is used to suggest that He does not have a merely unitary identity, but is a towering and composite figure. Auden’s syntax is so tricky that is not even clear whether the pronoun does actually refer to One-Eye, or what the mistake refers to at all. Quant’s own cautious maxim  ‘The safest place / Is the more or less middling : the mean average / Is not noticed’ (p. 498)  is clearly derived, in its tripartite form as well as its substance, from three verses in the Old Norse mythological poem Hávamál which all begin ‘Averagely wise / a man ought to be / not to be over-clever’ followed by one of three perceived advantages to mediocrity.40 Quant (like Auden) is an authority on mythology : ‘he had spent many hours one winter in the Public Library reading […] books on mythology’ (p. 448). I want to turn now from mythology to metre, and to take a brief look at how some knowledge of Old Norse poetic metres can also elucidate some of Auden’s apparently cryptic passages of verse, and his poetic practices more generally. Daniel Albright, with an unmistakable touch of exasperation, writes that Auden was ‘evidently determined to try every poetic form known to the human race’.41 So given Auden’s interest in Old Norse literature, it is no surprise that we should find imitations of Old Norse metres. The Age of Anxiety is dominated by a metre basically comprising a four-stress line, divided by a caesura into two half, or short, lines, with two alliterating syllables in its first half, and a third in the second, producing what Chris Jones has called ‘a convincing impression of the cadences of Old English poetry’.42 However, Auden’s verse in The Age of Anxiety differs from Old English verse in several important respects : its stanzaic form, its variety of metres and its use of dialogue and monologue, as if it were the script of a radio play. Old English poetry is not stanzaic ; although as set out in ma39  John Fuller, W.H. Auden : A Commentary (London and Princeton, 1998), 377. 40 Larrington, Sayings of the High One, stanzas 54–6. 41  Albright, ‘Modernist Poetic Form’, p. 39. 42 Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 114.

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nuscript, the half lines follow each other continuously, as if they are prose, once they are arranged, as they invariably are by modern editors, into pairs of half lines, there are no stanza breaks, and with few exceptions the basic two-stress metre remains steady, the half lines all roughly the same length (in fact, this basic metre is subtly but effectively varied by Old English poets, and the result is a good deal less monotonous than Auden’s stretches of Old English-derived metre). The form of The Age of Anxiety is thus much more like Eddaic poetry, which is stanzaic, and which consists very largely of dialogue or soliloquy, interspersed, like Auden’s poem, with short passages of explanatory prose. One of the commonest of the Eddaic metres is fornyrðislag (‘old story metre’) and it is very similar to the metre of Old English poetry. Given that, as Christine Brooke-Rose has pointed out, Auden’s imitation is not perfect, there is no way of definitively distinguishing Old English metre from Old Norse fornyrðislag as Auden’s model.43 But some Old Norse metres, imitated by Auden in The Age of Anxiety, are completely different from the Germanic two-stress half line, because they are not stress-based at all, but syllable-counting. When Rosetta begins to sing softly to a sad little tune, the stanzas are in a strange variant of kviðuháttr (poem-measure). This is a metre used for some of the most celebrated memorial lays in Old Norse. Its essential feature is that its half lines alternate regularly between three and four syllables, all first half lines having three, all second ones, four. An interesting refinement on this basic measure is that there is sometimes internal half rhyme linking the odd and even short lines. Rosetta’s song begins : Deep in my dark the dream shines Yes, of you, you dear always ; My cause to cry, cold but my Story still, still my music.   (p. 468) Auden alternates the alternation of three and four syllables characteristic of the Norse metre  that is, that in his first pair of half lines, four syllables are followed by three, and vice versa in the second pair, and so on. And in place of the decorative half rhyme in Old Norse, Auden goes a step further, and repeats a full rhyme in every alternate pair. His half lines are perfectly distinct. The most demanding of Old Norse metres was dróttkvætt (court metre). It was stanzaic in form, very strictly syllable-counting, each of its eight short lines having six syllables. Two stressed syllables alliterate in odd lines, with the alliteration picked up in each following even line. In the odd lines, there is internal half rhyme ; in the even lines, internal full rhyme. Each short line had to end in a trochee, and there were strict rules concerning stress and syllable quantity. Coupled with this extraordinarily 43  Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Notes on the Metre of Auden’s “Age of Anxiety”’, in Essays in Criticism (1963), 253–64. This is a mocking critical analysis of Auden’s pastiche of Old English, but perhaps unfairly does not take account of the morphological differences between Old and Modern English, for example Latinate polysyllabic words in the contemporary language, which inevitably hamper close imitation.

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intricate metre was a very rich and complex poetic diction based on synonyms and kennings. At its most cryptic, a kenning is a poetic periphrasis in which a base word, which may not be very obviously appropriate to the final meaning, is linked to a defining word, or determinant, and this forces the identification. Thus, to use as an example a kenning of the type common to both Old English and Old Norse poetry, the sea may be called ‘the path of the whale’. The sea is precisely not land, on which we might expect to find a path ; but it is land from the perspective of the whale, whose natural element is the sea. A pleasingly productive modern example of a kenning is the phrase ‘the ship of the desert’ to denote a camel. While both a ship and a camel are sorts of vehicle, a desert is the most unlikely place possible to find a ship. But forcing the reader to consider two disparate elements together may bring out unexpected similarities : the likeness between featureless, shifting sand dunes and a seascape, for instance, or even the swaying (and sickening !) motion of both camel and ship. Compared with Old Norse, there are relatively few kennings in Old English, and they consist of only two elements linked in a characteristically genitival relationship : the X of Y. But in Old Norse, poets could go on to divide the determinant itself into a base word and a determinant, producing a string of genitives : ‘the tree of battle’ may denote a warrior, but the battle itself may be expressed, with reference to Norse myth, as ‘the storm of Óðinn’, so that the whole kenning would be ‘the tree of the storm of Óðinn’, and so on, since Óðinn had many names, some of them kennings in themselves. The near impossibility of translating with any degree of faithfulness the content of skaldic verse whilst at the same preserving its metrical rules will be evident. The original composition of English-language stanzas in dróttkvætt is difficult enough. But Auden made the attempt, and we can see the result in The Age of Anxiety as Rosetta and Emble sing a dróttkvætt duet : Hushed is the lake of hawks Bright with our excitement, And all the sky of skulls Glows with scarlet roses ; The melter of men and salt Admires the drinker of iron : Bold banners of meaning Blaze o’er the host of days.   (p. 516) A stanza like this would not be admired (or its poet rewarded) in medieval Iceland or Norway. As we might expect from Auden, the internal rhymes and half rhymes are good. But the stress patterns are wrong (most obviously, as Auden himself conceded when he wrote about dróttkvætt and quoted this stanza in Secondary Worlds, he ‘had to ignore the unaccented ending rule’  that is, the final trochee.)44 In Norse, 44  W.H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (London, 1968), p. 68.

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the word order in a stanza is almost completely free because of the exigencies of the metre, and modern editions usually help the reader by offering a possible rearrangement of the words in prose word order. In Auden’s stanza, the word order is almost entirely conventional, apart from a couple of simple inversions, and half of the lines are end-stopped. No kenning has more than two elements, and there are no explicit mythological references. But the first four kennings are challengingly cryptic  so cryptic, indeed, that some of Auden’s critics have supposed that the stanza is no more than form, and has no meaning to speak of. Albright, for instance, comments that ‘this English drottkvaett seems an experiment with an abstract stanza form, an object for pure play’.45 No doubt he is right to feel that Auden was attracted by ‘the sheer exhilaration of the technical challenge’, 46 but the stanza is not devoid of meaning, and is rich in imagery. The first kenning is ‘the lake of hawks’, which denotes the air. If we read this phrase in the same way as the kennings I discussed above, then we must first reinterpret ‘lake’, the base word, in its broadest sense as a natural element for a living creature. It is of course inappropriate to its determinant ‘hawks’, but the determinant forces redefinition of the natural element from water to air. This is not just riddling for the sake of it  what the reader may gain from the kenning is a new image of the sky as having almost the limpid tangibility of water, and the hawk effortlessly swooping and circling in it like a fish or a porpoise diving and floating. The second kenning works in exactly the same way : ‘the sky of skulls’ is the earth, paradoxically, because the natural element for skulls, as parts of corpses, is the earth in which they are buried, and they look up towards the ground. This kenning highlights the transformation caused by death, when humans do not walk tall, heads in the air, one might say, but are laid down in the earth. There may also be a mythological image half-hidden here : the topos of the heavens as a great bowl-shaped skull inverted over the earth is found in Old Norse traditions. The next two kennings  ‘melter of men and salt’ and ‘drinker of iron’  work rather differently. Here, the base word is an agent noun, as is commonly the case in skaldic verse, and the action of the noun is usually taken literally, that is, the ‘melter’ does actually cause melting. Parallel skaldic examples might be ‘wielder of swords’ or ‘promoter of battle’ to denote a warrior. It is water which melts salt. I think the proposition that water melts men is more problematic, and possible interpretations  such as the idea that tears might melt one’s heart  are perhaps more ingenious than convincing, though that is not necessarily alien to the intellectually playful spirit of skaldic verse. The verb ‘melt’ is also perversely appropriate : technically, water dissolves salt, but melting is associated with heat, so that this kenning, though introducing the dominant image of the next one, which denotes fire, yet creates an elemental paradox quite common in skaldic verse. In the natural world, though fire may cause 45  Albright, ‘Modernist Poetic Form’, p. 39. 46 Ibid.

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melting, water, as its elemental opposite, does not, and would of course put out fire. Skaldic kennings such as fire or embers of the wave, to denote gold, produce the same paradox. Here, the kenning for fire, ‘drinker of iron’ is a little stretched. Fire does not so much drink iron, as cause iron to seem drinkable  that is, render it molten. And then we must supply another substitution, for in Auden’s stanza, the fire is the fiery ball of the setting sun, which the stretch of water ‘admires’. I would suggest that with ‘admire’ Auden is taking poetic licence and playing with etymology : the water rather ‘mirrors’ the setting sun, but Auden needs a full rhyme with ‘iron’, and was very likely aware of the connections of both words with the Latin verb mirari, ‘to admire’. Once we read Auden’s stanza using skaldic techniques, we can see that its evocation of a lake at sunset, the sun suffusing both earth and water with crimson light, creates not just an intellectual puzzle, but a series of (admittedly somewhat cerebral) poetic images. In fact, it could almost be a skaldic re-writing of the opening of Yeats’s ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ : The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky. And in the kennings of skaldic verse, hawks, as birds of battle, are regularly denoted, with calculated impropriety, by the base word ‘swan’. With his next two kennings, Auden seems to have run out of poetic steam. John Fuller suggests that ‘bold banners of meaning’ and ‘the host of days’ are consciousness and history respectively,47 but as such, both phrases seem little more than flat circumlocutions with no inevitable connexion with the rest of the stanza. Given what we know of Auden’s penchant for a recondite lexis sourced from the Oxford English Dictionary, it is possible that he is playing on a rare sense of ‘meaning’ recorded there, ‘the motion of the sun in mean longitude’, so that ‘banners of meaning’ might denote sunbeams, with its ‘host of days’ denoting the sky.48 But if Auden did indeed have Yeats’s celebrated late Romantic poem in mind, one might even propose a more riddlic interpretation of the final lines. Reading ‘banners of meaning’ like a skaldic kenning, one might define ‘banner’ as broadly as possible, to give something which flaps (perhaps noisily) in the breeze, and which is (perhaps) white. The determinant ‘meaning’ could therefore be argued to narrow the kenning’s referent to ‘swan’  for Yeats, a central symbol, and thus full of meaning. The ‘host of days’, as a literal kenning, might be not so much ‘history’ as ‘life[time]’. Auden’s final two lines would then echo the overall sense of Yeats’s poem, in which the flight of the swans is seen as a measure of the poet’s life. That these skaldic banners are said to ‘blaze’ above the

47 Fuller, A Commentary, p. 384. 48 See OED, s.v. ‘meaning’, n. 3. I am grateful to Nicholas Perkins for this ingenious suggestion.

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poet’s ‘host of days’ (Yeats’s nineteen Autumns) sustains the imagery of fire in the rest of the stanza. This Yeatsian excursus is of course highly speculative, and would raise the possibility of another double debt owed by Auden : Yeats, via skaldic verse. To return to the original double debt, I hope to have shown that the exact application of Old Norse parallels alongside those from Old English is enlightening for an understanding of Auden’s work and poetic practice, even, or especially, in cases in which a general debt to the literature of the North has already been recognized.

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4 Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century : J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles Maria Artamonova

T

he discovery of a new, previously unknown Old English manuscript is not something we can expect to happen in our lifetime. However, the following opening of an Old English book may well be unfamiliar to most AngloSaxonists : Her onginneð séo bóc þe man Pennas nemneð, ⁊ héo is on þréo gedǽled ; se forma dǽl is Valinórelúmien þæt is Godéðles géargetæl, ⁊ se óþer is Beleriandes géargetæl, ⁊ se þridda Quenta Noldorinwa oþþe Pennas nan Goelið þæt is Noldelfaracu. Þás ǽrest awrát Pengolod se Úþwita of Gondoline, ǽr þám þe héo abrocen wurde, ⁊ siþþan æt Siriones hýþe ⁊ æt Tavrobele in Toleressean (þæt is Ánetége), þá he eft west cóm. And þás béc Ælfwine of Angelcynne geseah on Ánetége, þá þá he æt sumum cerre funde híe ; ⁊ he geleornode híe swa he betst mihte ⁊ eft geþéodde ⁊ on Englisc ásette.1 Here begins the book which is called ‘Pennas’, and it is divided into three parts. The first is ‘Valinórelúmien’, or the Annals of the Land of the Gods ; the second is the Annals of Beleriand, and the third ‘Quenta Noldorinwa’ or Pennas nan Goelith, which means the Tale of the Noldoli. These were first written by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion’s Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa (that is the Lonely Isle) after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Ælfwine of the Angelcynn, when he once discovered them ; and he studied them as best he could and translated them into English.2 1  The Annals of Valinor, in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Shaping of Middle-earth. History of Middle-earth [hereafter HOME], IV, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2002), p. 339. 2  The italicized translation is my own, and the rest is taken from Tolkien’s Modern English version

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These lines are the beginning of one of three fragments of Old English prose chronicles or annals associated with the vast structure of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth legendarium. Indeed, this is where the word ‘Middle-earth’, still in its original Old English form middangeard, first enters the mythology. Quite characteristically for Tolkien, these Old English fragments were quickly drafted in the early 1930s and then left unfinished, just like their much more extensive Modern English counterparts. Also characteristically, they exist in several manuscripts with minute but elaborate variations of style and even dialect displaying Tolkien’s typical niggling perfectionism. This combination of chance and dedicated effort has resulted in a situation which is peculiarly reminiscent of original Anglo-Saxon texts, many of them now extant only in scattered notes or fragments, or surrounded by writings in a different, more prestigious language (Latin). The art of composition in dead languages such as Latin and Greek was routinely practised in schools and universities in Tolkien’s time, and it was a tradition with which he was intimately familiar. Moreover, Germanic scholars from the time of Laurence Nowell were also occasionally known to write ‘mock’ Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, for purposes ranging from private amusement to the need to demonstrate the affinities between related languages, and with results ranging from fairly persuasive to frankly feeble.3 It is not therefore surprising that Tolkien, with his keen aesthetic response to languages and his special love of all things Anglo-Saxon, would not be content with merely reading and studying the surviving Old English texts. This is how he himself describes this reaction to ancient languages in his essay ‘A Secret Vice’ : Certainly in the case of dead languages no scholar can ever reach the full position of a native with regard to the purely notional side of the language he studies, nor possess and feel all the undercurrents of connotation from period to period which words possess. His compensation remains a great freshness of perception of the word-form. Thus, even seen darkly through the distorting glass of our ignorance of the details of Greek pronunciation, our appreciation of the splendour of Homeric Greek in word-form is possibly keener, or more conscious, than it was to a Greek, much else of other elements of poetry though we may miss. The same is true of Anglo-Saxon. It is one of the real arguments for devoted study of ancient languages. Nor does it mean self-deception  we need not believe we are feeling something that was not there ; we are in a position to see some things better at a distance, others more dimly.4 of the Annals, HOME IV, p. 311. Elsewhere, all translations from Old English are my own, unless otherwise specified. 3  See Michael Murphy, ‘Scholars at Play : a Short History of Composing in Old English’, Old English Newsletter 15 (1982), 26–36. 4  J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘A Secret Vice’, in his The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1983), pp. 198–223, at p. 206.

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With this attitude to languages such as Old English and Gothic, it was only to be expected that Tolkien should start to write poetry and prose in these languages  which he did from early on in his career. Some of the verse is associated with his own mythology, and some attempts to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the transmission of ancient Germanic legends.5 Other poems are nothing more than pure pastiche or parody (like his contributions to an early volume entitled Songs for the Philologists),6 and still others were written for special occasions, happy and sad, like the obituary of Henry Bradley or the festschrift for W.H. Auden.7 However, it is his less prolific (and less well-known) Old English prose that is the focus of the present essay. Anglo-Saxon England was always at the background of Tolkien’s mythology  perhaps ‘in the foreground’ would be a more appropriate expression if we consider his lesser-known works, including the vast backdrop to the mythology published posthumously as the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. The Old English and Old Norse ‘sources and analogues’ of the Middle-earth legendarium have been explored in great detail  from Tom Shippey’s seminal book The Road to Middle-earth to the excellent recent collection edited by Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova.8 In the early concept of the legends, represented by the Book of Lost Tales, the first collection of the stories which ultimately evolved into what we know as The Silmarillion, the Germanic poetic tradition was credited with preserving the half-forgotten snatches of old lore from the days when England itself was inhabited by Elves  even if such vestiges only survived as tantalizing hints and fragments.9 The original identification of England with Faërie, the Lonely Isle of the Elves, also known as Tol Eressëa, was eventually abandoned, but the pivotal role played by the Anglo-Saxons remained.10 Their role was that of mediators, of messengers and travellers who came into contact with the strange inhabitants of the lands beyond the Sea, inaccessible to all but the most privileged of mortals, those with a keen sense of sea-longing  5  Two ‘fragments of a heroic poem of Attila in Old English’ were recently published in the same volume as Tolkien’s extensive reworking of the Vǫlsung legend : J.R.R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 2009). 6  J.R.R. Tolkien, E.V. Gordon et al., Songs for the Philologists (London, 1936). 7  J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Henry Bradley, 3 Dec. 1845–23 May 1923’, Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association 20 (1923), 5 ; ‘For W.H.A.’, Shenandoah : The Washington and Lee University Review 18 (1967), 96–7. 8  Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (London, 1982) ; Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth : Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien (New York, 2005). 9  See J.R.R. Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales, HOME I and II, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1983) ; idem, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1977). The latter was an attempt to present under a single cover the body of legends which had been evolving throughout Tolkien’s life and by no means represents a homogeneous structure. HOME I–V and X–XII present these stories in the fullest possible form, following the order of their conception and development. 10  For the conception of the Lonely Isle and England, ‘one stable thing about [which] is that it is unstable’, see Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, pp. 268–72.

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a feeling which was itself to a great extent based on the Old English elegies such as The Wanderer and The Seafarer. In Tolkien’s earliest writings, the narrator and reporter was a fifth-century Anglo-Saxon mariner known as Ottor Wǽfre or Eriol, father of the legendary Hengest and Horsa. Eriol travelled to the isle of the Elves beyond the Western Ocean, which was later moved East and became England. In a subsequent reworking of the Book of Lost Tales and in other writings associated with the Middleearth legendarium, the mariner was given the very appropriate name of Ælfwine (‘elffriend’) and transferred to a later period of Anglo-Saxon history, after the settlement of Britain. He no longer took an active part in the events, but merely recorded the history of the Elves told to him by their loremasters.11 But whatever the name or exact origin of the messenger, two things remained constant until the whole ‘Anglo-Saxon’ framework was dropped late in Tolkien’s life : (1) that an Anglo-Saxon sailed beyond the Sea and recorded the Elvish legends which were the ‘true’ version of what now survives in garbled form as ‘Germanic’ or even ‘English’ mythology ; and (2) that this character was a speaker of Old English, and that he used Old English to write down what he heard or even to converse with the Elves. Tolkien was not the kind of author to describe a situation in which the representatives of two very different cultures or races could meet and immediately fall into conversation  a regular occurrence in adventure stories, science fiction and fantasy. If an Anglo-Saxon and an Elf were to meet, they would have to learn (and while doing so, explore and comment on) each other’s languages. Indeed, in one of the early versions, the Elves themselves preserved the knowledge of Old English from the time of their sojourn in England, and ‘all who wish to speak to the Elves, if they know not and have no means of learning Elfin speeches, must converse in the ancient tongue of the English’.12 But Ælfwine the traveller was also credited with learning and recording the language of the Elves themselves. The Old English fragments which are the subject of the present article were written following another major revision of the whole mythology in the 1930s. By this time, Tolkien had already created two interrelated and highly elaborate Elvish languages, complete with grammars, etymologies and place names, not to mention a number of dialects.13 By this time, his mythology had already been developing for at least fifteen years, and the scale of the stories already 11  The figure of Ælfwine is central to Tolkien’s mythology and has been much discussed in Tolkien criticism. A useful short summary with further references is available in Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Vol. II : Reader’s Guide (London, 2006), entries for ‘England’, pp. 244–8, and ‘Eriol or Ælfwine’, pp. 258–62. Christopher Tolkien discusses the character in his notes to the Book of Lost Tales, HOME II (London, 1984), pp. 278–334. 12 HOME II, p. 305. 13  The literature on Tolkien’s invented languages is extensive, and a short summary would not do it justice. For accounts of the development of Elvish languages, see the Appendices on Names in HOME I and II ; ‘The Lhammas’ and ‘The Etymologies’ in HOME V ; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lost Road and Other Writings : Language and Legend before ‘The Lord of the Rings’, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1987), pp. 168–98 ; 341–400 ; as well as the sections on languages in HOME IX, XI and XII (J.R.R. Tolkien, Sauron Defeated ; The War of the Jewels ; The Peoples of Middle-earth, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London, 1992,

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extant was very impressive.14 This was a tree of tales with many branches, and it fell to Ælfwine the mariner to make sense of it all and to render it into an account which could be understood by the people at home. And so Tolkien set out to provide the authentic Old English versions of these accounts  but he never got very far. All that remains are a few pages from three texts otherwise extant in Modern English : Quenta Noldorinwa, Annals of Valinor and Annals of Beleriand. They were eventually published together with their Modern English analogues in Volume IV of the History of Middle-earth edited by Christopher Tolkien.15 In her article ‘The Footsteps of Ælfwine’, Verlyn Flieger compares Ælfwine to Gang­leri of the Prose Edda, who journeys to the world of gods to interrogate its dwellers about creation.16 Many mythological equivalents can indeed be found for a trip to the underworld or otherworld in search of information or wisdom. However, there is another aspect to Ælfwine’s role in the legendarium : that of a mediator between different cultures and languages. A reading of Ælfwine’s Old English accounts immediately reminds one, not so much of the contact with the world of the gods, but rather of the contact between the Anglo-Saxon culture and the sophisticated and refined world of Latin learning, which encompassed the tradition of Classical mythology, poetry and philosophy, the body of knowledge about the world, and, of course, Christianity. From the first recorded Old English Psalter glosses to the homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan, the whole history of Anglo-Saxon prose is to an extent one huge attempt to make sense of a different, partly alien, but all the more respected or revered, Latin culture : the eald enta geweorc in writing.17 Tolkien’s notes show that he was very interested in the correspondences between Latin and Anglo-Saxon culture  for instance, the appropriation of pagan Roman

1994, 1996 respectively). The Tolkien manuscripts related to his invented languages are published in the dedicated journals Vinyar Tengwar and Parma Eldalamberon. 14 HOME IV contains all the material extant by the early 1930s, including the Old English fragments which are the focus of this discussion. 15 HOME IV, pp. 251–61, 334–50, 406–11. 16 Verlyn Flieger, ‘The Footsteps of Ælfwine’, Tolkien’s Legendarium : Essays on ‘The History of Middle-earth’, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (Westport, CT, 2000), pp. 183–97. 17  On the reception of Latin language, literature and culture in Anglo-Saxon England see, inter alia, J.D.A. Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, 597–1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967) ; Nicholas Brooks, ed., Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, (Leicester, 1982) ; Michael Lapidge, AngloLatin Literature, 600-899 (London, 1996), Anglo-Latin Literature, 900-1066 (London, 1993) ; Michael W. Herren, ‘The Transmission and Reception of Graeco-Roman Mythology in Anglo-Saxon England, 670–800’, Anglo-Saxon England 27 (1998), 87–103 ; Mechthild Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999) ; 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, 2009).

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mythology, such as the association of Roman and Germanic gods (for example Wóden and Mercury).18 Typically, he was also contemplating Anglo-Saxon equivalents for the characters and places from his own emerging mythology (for example, Fëanor, the great smith of his world, was associated with Wayland, and his sons were associated with the Brósingas of the Brósinga mene, a legendary necklace named in Beowulf and associated in Tolkien’s writings with the necklace Nauglafring or Nauglamir).19 When the idea that England itself was the scene for the dramatic history of the First Age of the world was dropped, the association between Elvish and Anglo-Saxon remained – this time manifesting itself in Ælfwine’s attempts to understand and retell the Elvish legends that he heard during his stay in Faërie. One of the major stumbling blocks, which would have been just as puzzling for an Anglo-Saxon as it is to this day for some of Tolkien’s readers, is that his mythology contains gods, or the Valar, who are angelic beings ruling the world under the One God, Ilúvatar. Even given the original monotheistic premise, these gods were closely modelled on the actual gods of pagan mythologies. Once again, Tolkien contemplated an association between Wóden and Manwë, the chief of his Valar,20 and the Book of Lost Tales contains multiple associations between the Germanic myths and the divine hierarchy of Tolkien’s own mythology : thus, the sea-god Ulmo was also described as Neorth, the equivalent of Scandinavian Njǫrðr,21 and other associations are also present in the sketched outlines of the plot : It is then said, somewhat inconsequentially (though the matter is in itself of much interest, and recurs nowhere else), that Eriol told the fairies of Wóden, Þunor, Tíw, etc. (these being the Old English names of the Germanic gods who in Old Scandinavian form are Óðinn, Þórr, Týr), and they identified them with Manweg, Tulkas, and a third […].22 Real Anglo-Saxon writers were in fact trying extremely hard to portray the pagan gods either as demons worshipped by the heathens in their gedwyld, or, at best, euhemeristically  as mortal rulers falsely claiming divine origins. There are many examples of such an attitude in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature, from Aldhelm’s admonitions against spending too much time studying pagan beliefs,23 to the works of the Alfredian circle, Ælfric, and Wulfstan, in which the pagan gods (sometimes equated with their Germanic counterparts) are treated with suspicion and hos18  Arden R. Smith, ‘Early Runic Documents’, Parma Eldalamberon 15 (2004), 89–122, p. 93. The notes in question refer to the years 1918–1920, when The Book of Lost Tales was being written. 19  See Smith, ‘Early Runic Documents’, p. 96, and HOME IV, p. 260 ; cf. Beowulf, lines 1197-201. 20  Smith, ‘Early Runic Documents’, p. 96. 21 HOME II, pp. 331–2. 22 Christopher Tolkien’s summary of one of the sketched ideas for the meeting between Eriol/ Ælfwine and the Elves in HOME II, p. 290. 23  Herren, ‘Transmission and Reception’, pp. 93–6.

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tility. Thus, in the Old English translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Jove, Apollo and Circe appear as presumptuous royals pretending to be gods :

þa wæs þær Apollines dohtor Iobes suna ; se Iob was hiora cyning, & licette þæt he sceolde bion se hehsta god ; & þæt dysige folc him gelyfde, forþamðe he was cynecynnes ; & hi nyston nænne oðerne god on þæne timan, buton hiora cyningas hi weorþodon for godas. þa sceolde þæs Iobes fæder bion eac god ; þæs nama wæs Saturnus ; & his suna swa ilce ælcne hi hæfdon for god. þa was hiora an se Apollinus þe we ær ymb spræcon. þæs Apollines dohtor sceolde bion gydene, þære nama wæs Kirke.24 Now a daughter of Apollo, son of Job (Jove), dwelt there. Job was their king, and feigned that he was the highest god, and that silly folk believed him, for he was of the kingly clan, and in those days they knew no other god, but worshipped their kings for gods. Job’s father was also said to be a god ; his name was Saturnus, and each of his sons likewise they accounted a god. One of them was the Apollo we just now spoke of. Now Apollo’s daughter was, men say, a goddess whose name was Kirke (Circe).25 The works of Ælfric contain numerous references to the evil worship of pagan gods, with parallels between Germanic and Latin names used to suggest that these customs had been as repulsive in the old days as they were in Ælfric’s own time. For instance, the association of Mercury with Wóden noted by Tolkien appears in the following passage in Ælfric’s Life of St Martin : Mid þusend searocræftum wolde se swicola deofol þone halgan wer on sume wisan beswican, and hine gesewenlicne on manegum scinhiwum þam halgan æteowde, on þæra hæþenra goda hiwe ; hwilon on Ioues hiwe, þe is gehaten þor, hwilon on Mercuries, þe men hatað oþon, hwilon on Ueneris þære fulan gyden, þe men hatað Fricg, and on manegum oþrum hiwum hine bræd se deofol on þæs bisceopes gesihþe.  (lines 710–19) With a thousand wily arts did the treacherous devil strive in some way to deceive the holy man, and he showed himself visible in diverse phantasms to the saint, in the appearance of the gods of the heathen ; sometimes in Jove’s form, who is called Thor, sometimes in Mercury’s who is called Odin, sometimes in that of Venus, the foul goddess, whom men call Fricg ; and into many other shapes the devil transformed himself in the bishop’s sight.26 24  Walter John Sedgefield, ed., King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius ‘De Consolatione Philosophiae’ (Oxford, 1899), pp. 115–16. 25  Walter John Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Old English Version of the Consolations of Boethius : Done into Modern English (Oxford, 1900), pp. 133–4. 26  Walter W. Skeat, ed., Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, 4 vols, EETS o.s. 76, 82, 94, 114 (London, 1881–1900) repr. in 2 vols (London, 1966), II, 264–5.

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Tolkien clearly did not take the same stance as these Anglo-Saxon writers, and although he always regarded his work as profoundly Christian, the associations with pagan gods and beliefs were incorporated into his mythology along with the corresponding Old English vocabulary.27 Of the three Old English prose fragments he ascribed to his traveller Ælfwine, two open with a concise account of the creation of the world. In these accounts, the Elvish name of God, Ilúvatar (‘all-father’), is rendered by the Old English compounds Ealfæder, Heofonfæder and Beorhtfæder. These compounds are not recorded in the extant corpus of Old English, but they are immediately recognizable as analogues of the existing Old English compounds used to describe God, such as wuldorfæder or ealwalda.28 It is very interesting to see that the theme of confusion, heresy and ill-judgment which is so often associated with the description of pagan gods in Old English texts is also present in the following passage from Tolkien’s Old English annals, albeit in a slightly different form : Æfter þám þe Ealfæder, se þe on elfisc Ilúuatar hátte, þás worolde geworhte, þá cómon manige þá mihtegostan gǽstas þe mid him wunodon hire to stíeranne ; for þon þe hí híe feorran ofsáwon fægre geworhte and hí lustfollodon on hire wlitignesse. Þás gǽstas nemdon þá Elfe Valar, þæt is þá Mægen, þe men oft siððan swáþéah nemdon Godu. Óþre gǽstas manige hæfdon hí on hira folgoðe, ge máran ge lǽssan, ⁊ þára sume tealdon men siþþan gedwollice mid þǽm Elfum ; ac híe lugon, for þám þe ǽr séo worold geworht wǽre hí wǽron, ⁊ Elfe and Fíras (þæt sindon men) onwócon ǽrest on worolde æfter þára Valena cyme. (Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, p. 252.) After the making of the World by the Allfather, who in Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, many of the mightiest spirits that dwelt with him came into the world to govern it, because seeing it afar after it was made they were filled with delight at its beauty. These spirits the Elves named the Valar, which is the Powers, though Men have often called them Gods. Many spirits they brought in their train, both great and small, and some of these Men have confused with the […] Elves : but wrongly, for they were before the world, but Elves and Men awoke first in the world after the coming of the Valar. (Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, pp. 94–5.)29 This description, although different in substance, is remarkably similar in tone and 27  ‘I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief ’ (Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (London, 1995) ; Letter 269 to W.H. Auden, p. 355). 28  Wuldorfæder is used in Christ (line 217) and in Caedmon’s Hymn (line 2 : ‘weorc wuldorfæder’), and (e)alwalda is commonly attested in Old English poetry. 29  The Modern English text is by J.R.R. Tolkien.

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even in its choice of vocabulary to passages from Old English homiletic and hagiographical writings, in which a description of pagan gods is often accompanied by a commentary denouncing such false and dangerous beliefs which are apt to confuse weak human minds. Consider the following passage from Ælfric’s homily Dominica III in Quadragesima :

Þa sædon þa Iudeiscan þæt ure Drihten sceolde þa wundra wyrcan on þæs deofles naman þe men hatað Beelzebub, ac hi lugon forðearle.30 Then the Jews said that our Lord worked miracles in the name of the devil called Beelzebub, but this was completely untrue. In Tolkien’s case, the confusion is not between God and demons, or gods and mortals, but between gods and elves. But the verbal correspondences are noteworthy : both the phrase ac hie lugon ‘but they lied’ and Ælfric’s favourite word gedwollice ‘erroneously, heretically’ occur in the Tolkien excerpt quoted above. In addition to this creative use of a convention for introducing his gods, Tolkien also needed to find suitable Old English words to refer to his gods, which would be free of unwelcome associations with demons and at the same time rooted in traditional Germanic mythology. One solution would be to use synonyms associated with earthly lords and earthly power : thus, at different points the Valar are referred to as godu ‘gods’, frean ‘lords’, brega ‘rulers’, or mægen ‘powers’. As for words standing for divine or supernatural beings, their only source often proved to be Old Norse literature, which preserved a much better picture of the pre-Christian beliefs than anything surviving from Anglo-Saxon England. Old English cognates of Old Norse words for such beings sometimes survived as elements of personal or place-names, often deprived of any mythological associations. Thus, Tolkien makes use of Old English cognates of familiar Old Norse terms such as *regen (ON regin) ‘gods or powers’ and *ese (ON æsir) ‘gods or Æsir’, unrecorded in extant Old English texts outside personal names.31 All the gods of Tolkien’s pantheon are given Old English compound names ending in -frea ‘lord’, a cognate of the names of Scandinavian gods Freyr and Freya. In Tolkien’s usage, the compound Wolcenfrea ‘Cloud-lord’ stands for the god of Air, Garsecges Frea ‘Ocean-god’ for the Sea-god, and Manfrea ‘Evil-god’ for the fallen god Melko. These names are closely modelled on the existing compounds like liffrea (‘life-lord’, an epithet of the Christian God) or manfrea (‘evil lord’, an epithet of the devil used in 30  John C. Pope, ed., Homilies of Ælfric : A Supplementary Collection, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 259–60 (London, 1967–8), I, 265, line 12. 31  For this fact and much of the discussion of Anglo-Saxon evidence for words denoting various supernatural beings I am indebted to the book by Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England : Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Woodbridge, 2007) and the doctoral dissertation that preceded it, Alaric Hall, ‘The Meaning of Elf and Elves in Medieval England’ (University of Glasgow, 2004). Upto-date information on Anglo-Saxon personal names is provided by the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England Project : http ://www.pase.ac.uk.

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the Old English poems Juliana, Andreas and Elene in the form morðres manfrea ‘the evil lord of murder’).32 Tolkien must have known very well W.G. Searle’s Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum, which contains the information on the use of elements such as ælf, os or regen in proper names.33 There are several references to the Onomasticon in his works, including the research on the name Ælfwine undertaken by a character in the unfinished Notion Club Papers who is trying to establish a connection between Anglo-Saxon England and an older mythical world : ‘But it was while I was rummaging in the Onomasticon, and poring over the list of Ælfwines […]’.34 Another telling parallel between Tolkien’s Old English and real Old English texts is provided by the lists of the different kindreds of elves. Much of the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon word ælf, ‘elf ’, comes from the collected glosses to the passages in influential Latin texts, such as the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville and De Virginitate by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, which mention the nymphs, muses and dryads of Classical mythology. Some examples of such glosses are given below. nimphae aelfinni. oreades duunaelfinni. driades uuduaelfinne. amadriades 〈uaeteraelfinne〉. maides feldaelfinne. naides saeaelfinne35

Nymphs : elves Oreads : mountain-elves Dryads : wood-elves Hamadryads : water-elves Maiads (for ‘Naiads’) : field-elves Naiads : sea-elves

Ruricolas musas landælfe. Country-dwelling Muses : land-elves Castalidas nymphas dunælfa36 Castalian Nymphs : mountain-elves Castalidas nymphas dunælfa. Amadriades feldælbinne Maides sæælfenne. Nymfae wæterælfenne.

Castalian Nymphs : mountain-elves Hamadryads : field-elves Mayads (for Nayads) : sea-elves Nymphs : water-elves

32  Liffrea occurs in a number of poems : Genesis, lines 16, 868, 1808 ; Exodus, line 271 ; Daniel, line 395 ; Christ, lines 15, 27 ; Beowulf, line 16 ; morðres manfrea occurs in Juliana, line 545 ; Andreas, line 1313 ; Elene, line 941 (citing from DOEC). 33  William George Searle, Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum : A List of Anglo-Saxon Proper Names from the Time of Beda to that of King John (Cambridge, 1897). 34  The Notion Club Papers, HOME IX, p. 243. 35  Herbert Dean Meritt, ed., Old English Glosses : A Collection (London, 1945), no. 71, quoted from DOEC ; reproduced in Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 78–9. 36  John J. Quinn, ‘The Minor Latin-Old English Glossaries in MS. Cotton Cleopatra A III’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1956), quoted from DOEC. See also Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 82.

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Nayads : sea-elves Oreads : wood-elves

This classification of ælfe with regard to their favourite haunts is very similar to Tolkien’s classification of his own Elvish kindreds that he chose to translate into Old English : §1. Þæt eldre cyn : Elfe oþþe Wine 1. Ingwine : lyftelfe, héahelfe, hwítelfe, Líxend. Godwine 2. Éadwine : goldelfe, eorðelfe, déopelfe, Rǽdend. Finningas 3. Sǽwine : sǽelfe, mereþyssan, flotwine, Nówend. Elwingas.38 §1. The Elder Kindred : Elves or Friends 1. Friends of Ing : elves of the air, high elves, white elves, the Shining ones. Godfriends 2. Friends of bliss : gold-elves, earth-elves, deep-elves, the Wise ones (?). Finn­ ings [descendants of Finn] 3. Friends of the sea : sea-elves, sea-rushers, sea-friends, Mariners. Elwings [descendants of Elwe]. Linguistically, these lists of names for different Elf-kindreds are placed into a context which is very similar to that of the genuine Old English glosses. In both cases, Anglo-Saxon writers (real or fictional) are trying to transfer to their own language a hierarchy of beings which is deeply embedded in the world-view and mythology of a different people (the Classical myths in one case, and the Elvish lore in Tolkien’s invented world). But it should be noted once again that original Anglo-Saxon writings dealing with elves or nymphs nearly always have a strong connotation of danger and denial of pagan beliefs, from the association of the elves with the devil and Cain in Beowulf to Aldhelm’s invocation to the Carmen de virginitate where he explicitly claims, at great length, that he is definitely not invoking any muses or nymphs and specifically does not want Apollo to bless his song.39 The Aldhelm glosses were later picked up by Byrhtferth of Ramsey, who also explicitly asked the Castalian nymphs (dunylfa) and sirens (meremen) to depart from him in the invocation to his Enchiri­ dion.40 Far from yearning to meet the elves, the Anglo-Saxons were anxious to escape their evil influence. These negative connotations are, of course, completely absent in Tolkien’s body 37  William G. Stryker, ‘The Latin-Old English Glossary in MS. Cotton Cleopatra A iii’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1951), quoted from DOEC. 38  Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, pp. 259–260. Christopher Tolkien provides a useful commentary to the Old English words and their use in poetry. Thus, sæ, mere, flot are all poetic synonyms of the sea ; the compound mereþyssa ‘sea-rusher’ is used to describe a ship in Andreas, lines 257 and 446. 39  Beowulf, lines 111–14 ; Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 81. 40  Hall, ‘Meaning of Elf and Elves’, pp. 81–2. Michael Lapidge and Peter S. Baker, eds, Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, EETS s.s. 15 (Oxford, 1995), p. 134.

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of legend, resting as it is on the substratum of real Anglo-Saxon evidence. For him, the gedwyld of men consisted not in embracing the belief in Elves, but in abandoning it. By bringing back the Elvish chronicles from the Lonely Isle beyond the Sea, the English mariner Ælfwine could have hoped to restore these ancient ties between the two kindred but sundered peoples, and perhaps also to prove that Elves were not as incompatible with Christianity as it was commonly believed. Let us consider the techniques that are used in making such a transition (or perhaps a return to earlier beliefs) more accessible to the putative Anglo-Saxon audience. In his Old English ‘tally of the gods’ in Quenta Noldorinwa, Tolkien is using a great number of expressions which are normally reserved for poetry in the original Old English context. Epithets traditionally applied to God and the Virgin Mary are transferred to the divine ruling couple, Manwë and Varda, who are described as follows : Manwë wæs goda hláford, and winda and wedera wealdend and heofones stýrend. Mid him wunede to his geféran séo undéadlice héanessa hlǽfdige, úprodera cwén, Varda tunglawyrhte. Manwë was the Lord of the Gods and Prince of the airs and winds and the ruler of the sky. With him dwelt as spouse the immortal lady of the heights, Varda the maker of the stars.41 This short passage contains a number of epithets traditionally associated with the Christian God in Anglo-Saxon poetry. God is described as heofones w(e)aldend ‘lord of heaven’ or heofones (heah)cyning ‘(high) king of heaven’ in a number of Old English poems, including Genesis, Daniel, and Christ.42 The use of poetic compounds such as liffrea and manfrea has already been discussed above. The guardian of the souls of dead, the equivalent of Hades, is described as a waelcyriga ‘chooser of the slain’,43 a masculine equivalent of the word wælcyrige, ‘Valkyrie’, and the goddess of lamentation is characterized with a line taken almost directly from Beowulf : ‘hire bið geómor sefa, murnende mód’.44 It is interesting that Tolkien did not hesitate to use words generally confined to the sphere of poetry in genuine Old English texts, perhaps because he felt that they were archaic enough to suit his purposes of reflecting the ancient and traditional nature of the order of the world he was describing. Apart from the tally of the gods, the two documents that Tolkien at least started translating into Old English are the so-called ‘Annals of Valinor’ and ‘Annals of Beleriand’, a year-by-year, or, in some cases, a millenium-by-millenium account of the 41  Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, pp. 253 (text), 95 (Tolkien’s translation). Italics added except for the names Manwë and Varda. 42  Heofones w(e)aldend occurs in Genesis, lines 300, 673, 780 ; Christ, line 555 ; heofones (heah)cyning occurs in Daniel, line 407 ; Christ, lines 61, 150, 1588, quoted from DOEC. 43  Quenta Noldorinwa, HOME IV, pp. 253. 44  The original passage in Beowulf (lines 49–50) reads ‘him wæs geomor sefa, / murnende mod’, and is a description of the mourners at the funeral of Scyld Scefing.

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events happening in the realm of gods (Valinor) or the lands inhabited by the Elves (Beleriand). The many personal and place names which occur in the three chronicle texts and the accompanying lists of Elvish and Old English equivalents reflect the Old English tradition of translating, adapting or explaining foreign names rather than simply borrowing them wholesale. Proper names were often combined with explanatory common nouns  a good example from the original Anglo-Saxon Chronicle would be the compound Romeburh for Rome. In Tolkien’s case, we have similar compounds such as Noldielfe rendering the original ‘Noldor’, one of the Elvish tribes. Some place names are translated element-by-element, such as the city of Gondolin, ‘city of singing stone’, which becomes Stangaldorburg in Old English.45 In some cases, Tolkien devises word-plays, described by his son Christopher as ‘ingenious sound correspondences contrived from O.E. words’.46 For instance, a demonic Balrog is rendered into Old English as Bealuwearg, Bealubroga. This is more than just a sound correspondence : it very often happened that Tolkien used a word or name which had both a real etymology and a fictional one, going back to his invented languages. In this case, the Elvish (Sindarin) word Balrog has a cognate Valarauko in the related invented language Quenya, both meaning ‘mighty demon’ ; the Old English text transforms it into a word with the meaning of ‘evil exile’ or ‘evil, baleful terror’. Another device typical of Tolkien’s use of real ancient languages would be to pick out words with unknown or unusual etymologies, which he believed had originally had profound meanings and long histories, largely forgotten in later years. He used a similar approach in his academic work  for instance, in his articles on individual rare words such as the Old English silhearwa or the Middle English losenger.47 Thus, the Silmarils, the great jewels which are at the centre of his legends, are described in the Old English passages as Eorclanstanas  a word which Tolkien had already brought back into Modern English in the form ‘Arkenstone’, a splendid gem which played an important part in The Hobbit.48 Some of the Elvish names also undergo purely graphemic adaptations which make their spelling consistent with Anglo-Saxon conventions  another feature typical of adaptations of Latin texts or names occurring in Old English texts. Thus the name 45 HOME IV, p. 257. 46  Ibid., p. 256. The word Balrog as the name of a race of powerful demons serving the dark lord Morgoth occurs in the earliest sketches of the mythology. Tolkien devised different etymologies for it : cf. HOME I, p. 285 ; HOME V, pp. 377, 384 ; HOME XI, p. 415. The final version is quoted in The Silmarillion, p. 396. The first element of the word always seems to have the meaning of ‘evil, terror, torment’, while the second one stands for ‘demon’. 47  ‘Sigelwara Land’, Medium Ævum 1 (1932), 183–96 (Part I) ; Medium Ævum 3 (1934), 95–111 (Part II) ; ‘Middle English “Losenger” : Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry’, Essais de Philologie Moderne (1951), 63–76. For numerous other examples, see Shippey, Road to Middle-earth, or The Ring of Words : Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner (Oxford, 2006). 48  See Gilliver et al., Ring of Words, pp. 89–91.

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Maedhros, Maidhros is rendered into Old English as Maegdros ; Yavanna by alternate forms Geauanna, Geofanna, Iafanna, the river Sirion becomes Sirigeon, the OE form Tafrobele is used for Tavrobel etc. Ready parallels for this can be found in Old English equivalents of Greek, Latin and other foreign names : Trogiaburg for Troia (OE Boethius), Cathma for Cadmus, Cartaine for Carthaginis, Cwintus for Quintus, Profentse for Provincia (OE Orosius).49 Christopher Tolkien comments on the inconsistent rendition of Elvish names in the three Old English texts : a name can either occur in its original Elvish with Old English inflectional ending (e.g. Gondoline, Tafrobele) or else be translated into Old English element by element (e.g. Gondolin > Stangaldorburg).50 Besides, there are also spelling variants : ‘My father composed these annals, like the others, fluently and rapidly (hence such variations as Mœgdros, Mœgedros, Maidros) ; but he was interrupted, no doubt, and never took them up again.’51 While the speed of composition and a rapid evolution of ideas are certainly plausible explanations of such variation, the end result, whether intentional or not, is once again reminiscent of the scribal practices which frequently resulted in variant spellings, often in the space of a single manuscript page. Finally, there is another device echoing the concerns about the correct rendering of the meanings of foreign words and names shared by many Anglo-Saxon writers. Foreign names in Old English texts are often given in their original form followed by a gloss or explanation, whether correct or completely spurious, based on an etymology or gloss, as the following examples from the Old English Orosius and from Ælfric’s translation of Genesis illustrate : For þon hi mon hæt on Crecisc Amazanas, þæt is on Englisc fortende.52 This is why they are called Amazons in Greek, which means ‘burnt’ in English. & he awende hys naman & nemde hine on Egyptisc, Middaneardes Hælend, & sealde him Aseneth to wyfe, Putiphares dohtor, þæs sacerdes, of þære byrig þe is genemned Eliopoleos, þæt is on Englisc, Sunnan Buruh.53 and he changed [Joseph’s] name and called him in Egyptian, the Saviour of the World, and gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Potiphar the priest, from that city which is called Heliopolis, which is Sun City in English. 49 Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius, 39.20 ; Janet Bately, ed., The Old English Orosius, EETS s.s. 6 (London, 1980), 28.2 (Cathma) ; 5.20, 6.4, 20.10, 89.8, etc. (Cartaine) ; 74.29, 75.10, 104.11 (Cwintus/Cuintus) ; 18.31, 18.33 (Profentse). 50 HOME IV, p. 337. 51  Ibid., p. 407. 52 Bately, Old English Orosius, 29.34–5. 53  Genesis 41 : 45, in S.J. Crawford, ed., The Old English Version of the Heptateuch : Aelfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis, EETS o.s. 160 (London, 1922 ; repr. 1969), p. 185.

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This is precisely what Tolkien’s fictional Anglo-Saxon translator does to his text :

þæt wæs þæt ǽreste gefeoht, and hátte on noldisce Dagor-os-Giliað, þæt is on Englisc gefeoht under steorrum oþþe Tungolgúþ. They fought soon after the First Battle with Morgoth, that is Dagor-os-Giliath, or the ‘Battle-under-Stars’.54 A detail which adds an extra dimension of ‘reality’ to the ‘mock’ Old English of Tolkien’s Annals is that he went as far as writing versions in different dialects, perhaps while trying to find the right identity and time-frame for his mariner, Ælfwine. While most of the texts are in the familiar tenth-century Late West Saxon, one version is cast in the language of ninth-century Mercia, with some forms, as Christopher Tolkien says, ‘peculiarly characteristic of the Mercian dialect represented by the interlinear glosses on the Vespasian Psalter’.55 Such a choice reflects Tolkien’s life-long affinity with the West Midlands and its dialect, whether Old, Middle or Modern English. Compare the following two passages : The ninth-century Mercian Version

The tenth-century West Saxon Version

On frumscefte gescóp Ilúuatar þæt is Allfeder all þing, ⁊ þá þá séo weoruld ǽrest weorðan ongon þá cómun hider on eorðan þá Ualar (þæt is þá Mehtigan þe sume men seoððan for godu héoldun).

On frumsceafte Ilúuvatar, þæt is Ealfæder, gescóp eal þing, ⁊ þá Valar, þæt is þá Mihtigan (þe sume menn siþþan for godu héoldon) cómon on þás worolde.

Hí earun nigun on ríme : Manwe, Ulmo, Híe sindon nigon  : Manwë, Ulmo, Aule, Orome, Tulcas, Mandos, Lórien, Aule, Orome, Tulkas, Mandos, Lórien, Melkor. Þeara wérun Manwe ⁊ Melcor his Melko. Þára wǽron Manwë ⁊ Melko bróður alra mehtigoste, ac Manwe wes se his bróþor ealra mihtigoste, ac Manwë ældra ⁊ is Uala-hláfard ⁊ hálig, ⁊ Melcor wæs se yldra, ⁊ wæs Vala-hláford ⁊ béh to firenlustum ⁊ to úpahefennisse ⁊ hálig, ⁊ Melko béah to firenlustum and ofer-moettum ⁊ wearð yfel ⁊ unméðlic, úpahæfennesse and ofer-méttum and ⁊ his noma is awergod ⁊ unasproecenlic, wearþ yfel and unmǽðlic, and his nama for þám man nemneð hine Morgoþ on is awergod and unasprecenlic, ac man Noldælfisc-gereorde. nemneð hine Morgoð in Noldelfiscgereorde. (Annals of Valinor III, HOME IV, pp. 346–7) (Annals of Valinor II, HOME IV, p. 339.) It has often been remarked that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle seems to be the most likely prototype for such annalistic narrative in Old English. Consider the following passage : 54  Annals of Beleriand, HOME IV, pp. 407 (text), 394 (Tolkien’s translation). 55 HOME IV, p. 346.

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MMCCCCXCIX. Hér gefeaht Féanores fierd wiþ þam orcum ⁊ sige námon ⁊ þá orcas gefliemdon oþ Angband (þæt is Irenhelle) ; ac Goðmog, Morgoðes þegn, ofslóh Féanor, and Mægdros gewéold siþþan Féanores folc. Þis gefeoht hátte Tungolgúð.56 Here Fëanor’s host fought with the Orcs and was victorious, and pursued them to Angband (that is Iron Hell) ; but Gothmog, servant of Morgoth, slew Fëanor, and Maedhros ruled Feanor’s folk after that. This battle was called the Battleunder-the-Stars. At first, the reader might be excused for thinking that the Old English passage could have come from almost any part of the real Chronicle, including the famous passage describing the Battle of Maldon : 552  Her Kynric feaht wið Bryttas in þære stowe þe is genemned æt Searobyrg. ⁊ þa Bryttas geflemde. 993  Her on ðissum geare com Unlaf mid þrim ⁊ hund nigentigon scipum to Stane, ⁊ forhergedon þæt on ytan, ⁊ for ða ðanon to Sandwic, ⁊ swa ðanon to Gipeswic, ⁊ þæt eall ofereode, ⁊ swa to Mældune ; ⁊ him ðær com togeanes Byrhtnoð ealdorman mid his fyrde, ⁊ him wið gefeaht. ⁊ hy þone ealdorman þær ofslogon, ⁊ wælstowe geweald ahtan.57 552  Here Cynric fought against the Britons at the place which is named Salisbury, and put the Britons to flight. 993  Here in this year Olaf came with ninety-three ships to Folkestone, and raided round about it, and then went from there to Sandwich, and so from there to Ipswich, and overran all that, and so to Maldon. And Ealdorman Byrhtnoth came against them there with his army and fought with them ; and they killed the ealdorman there and had possession of the place of slaughter.58 However, in Tolkien’s text it soon becomes apparent that the protagonists are not fighting Vikings, but Orcs, and that their leader is not in fact an Anglo-Saxon lord, but an immortal Elf trying to reclaim his stolen treasure. The matter-of-fact style of the Annals is deceptive and conceals the true drama and scale of the events which unfold. Tolkien’s notes indicate that he was well aware of the ‘stirring tales that lie beyond the brief annalistic entries of the Chronicle’.59 The problem with the real Chronicle is that it is often our only available guide to the events that happened. We know that a truly dramatic event could be summarized in 56  Annals of Valinor, HOME IV, p. 336 (translation mine). 57 Charles Plummer and John Earle, eds, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, 2 vols (Oxford, 1892–9), I, 17 and 126. 58  Michael Swanton, ed. and trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), pp. 16, 126. 59  An unpublished manuscript quoted in Lee and Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth, p. 150.

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a few succinct lines in the Chronicle  as proved by occasional surviving analogues like the entry for the Battle of Maldon quoted above. The same happens in Tolkien’s case. At least a dozen Modern English accounts of the same fictional events exist, often in multiple manuscripts, some of them in verse. Some are just as concise as the Old English version, but some are written in a truly majestic ‘King James Bible’ style. In certain cases, the Old English versions served as the basis for alterations in the Modern English text, which creates a rather complicated textual history. At first glance, then, the fundamental elelments of Tolkien’s Annals seem to be the same as those of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : both provide a record of war and peace, foundation and destruction of cities and strongholds, as well as noting the key events in the life of prominent rulers (although the Elves’ longevity meant that the ascension of a new king was a rather rare occasion  unless, of course, a major battle wiped out important characters). The description of geography and the ordering of the world in the Quenta Noldorinwa is more reminiscent of Alfredian prose (such as Orosius or Boethius), or such short texts as The Six Ages of the World, also perhaps recalling the story told by those other famous Anglo-Saxon mariners, Ohthere and Wulfstan, who travelled north and east, not west, but brought back many tales of strange peoples and their customs.60 The style is still simple and understated, although it is used to tell stories of events which would have been just as new and strange to the Anglo-Saxon audience as the accounts of the Trojan war and other major stories of the Classical world, or the tales of strange peoples, beasts and monsters from far-off lands that we know were translated, copied and read in Anglo-Saxon England.61 However, if further Chronicle analogues are to be sought, the early parts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dealing with the semi-legendary history between the birth of Christ and the establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England would provide a better equivalent to Tolkien’s Annals than the more familiar records of the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. But even stylistically, his passages are far from being a straightforward imitation or pastiche of the Chronicle. The traditional annalistic form was used to convey a meaning which in Anglo-Saxon England was associated rather with such appropriations and adaptations of the Latin culture as the Alfredian Boethius or Orosius, and in later Medieval Europe with the numerous chronicles of the Ancient World, written in prose and verse in many vernaculars. Although the style of Tolkien’s Annals is understated and unelaborated, and there are generally no epithets borrowed from poetry (unlike the tally of the gods), their syntax is more varied and complicated than the ‘paratactic style’ of the original Chronicle. Once again, 60  For the short text on the Six Ages of the World, see Arnold Schröer, Die angelsächsischen Prosabearbeitungen der Benediktinerregel, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa 2 (Kassel, 1885–8) ; repr. with appendix by Helmut Gneuss (Darmstadt, 1964), p. xxi. The tale of Ohthere and Wulfstan is inserted into the Old English translation of Orosius (Bately, The Old English Orosius, pp. 13–18). 61 See, inter alia, Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies : Studies in the Monsters of the ‘Beowulf ’Manuscript (Cambridge, 1995) ; Klaus Ganda, ‘The Myth of Circe in King Alfred’s Boethius’, in Old English Prose : Basic Readings, ed. Paul Szarmach (London, 2000), pp. 237–66.

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the similarities with Alfredian texts are a lot more striking. The Old English Annals come across as a translation  whether from Modern English on the real plane or from Elvish in the fictional context, which once again, recalls Old English translations from Latin. Tolkien was not simply producing a chronicle, but rather a description of a different world specifically tailored for an Anglo-Saxon audience, in the same way that the much more extensive Modern English Annals were ultimately intended for those modern readers who were interested in such legends. Although the idea that the English had some part in transmitting the tales of the legendary past was never fully abandoned, Tolkien made no further known attempts at writing ‘for the AngloSaxons’. As a postscript, one might perhaps wonder what Tolkien himself would make of an attempt to read so much into his private pastime  there are no indications that the Old English passages were ever intended for publication in any shape or form. Certainly he took his mythology and his linguistic tastes seriously, but this does not mean that he could not be arch about them. An appropriate coda for this short study of Tolkien’s writings in Old English can be found in his Notion Club Papers, an unfinished account of a club of Oxford dons (closely modelled on the Inklings), who get drawn into a rather esoteric search for links with the mythical past. One of them comes across a strange fragment of an Old English text, and, not knowing what to make of it, takes it to a Professor Rashbold of Pembroke College  ‘Rashbold’ being a pun on the original German meaning of the name ‘Tolkien’.62 Professor Rashbold does not fail to come up with a well-coined characterization of this dreamed-up bit of Old English : To sum up : it is in Old English of a strongly Mercian (West-Midland) colour, ninth century I should say. There are no new words, except possibly to-sprengdon. There are several words, probably names and not Old English, that I have not succeeded in getting out ; but you will excuse me from spending more time on them. My time is not unlimited. Whoever made the thing knew Old English tolerably well, though the style has the air of a translation. If he wanted to forge a bit of Old English, why did not he choose an interesting subject ? 62  ‘My name is T O L K I E N (not -kein). It is a German name (from Saxony), an anglicization of Tollkiehn, i.e. tollkühn. But, except as a guide to spelling, this fact is as fallacious as all facts in the raw. For I am neither “foolhardy” nor German, whatever some remote ancestors may have been’ (Carpenter, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 165, p. 218).

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5 ‘Wounded men and wounded trees’ : David Jones and the Anglo-Saxon Culture Tangle Anna Johnson

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n 1937, David Jones published his first long poem, In Parenthesis. It follows the progress of the men of ‘B Company’, members of an Anglo-Welsh battalion, proceeding from their early training towards disaster and death in the final attack on ‘Acid Copse’. The temporal structure of the poem echoes Jones’s own experience of war in the years 1915–16, from his arrival in France to his battalion’s role in the Somme offensive. Despite this conventional narrative structure, In Parenthesis is in no sense a straightforward memoir. T.S. Eliot placed Jones firmly within a modernist coterie following its publication. In an introductory note on the text, he wrote that ‘The work of David Jones has some affinity with that of James Joyce […] and with the later work of Ezra Pound, and with my own.’1 In 1954, W.H. Auden reviewed Jones’s second long poem The Anathemata (which had been published in 1952), and argued so strongly for its importance that Jones felt moved to thank him. In response, Auden wrote to him, ‘your work makes me feel very small and madly jealous’.2 Recognising the technical achievements of Jones’s work, the approbation of these fellow writers came also from their awareness and appreciation of its allusive substructure. Old English literature formed a part of what Jones called his ‘materia poetica’3 even in his early work, at a time when his knowledge of it was certainly limited. Few critics have discussed at length the place of Old English in Jones’s work, choosing to focus on his

1  From an updated ‘Note of Introduction’, in David Jones, In Parenthesis (London, 1963), pp. vii–viii. This edition is hereafter cited as IP by page number in the text. 2  Letter to Jones from Auden, sent care of Harman Grisewood on 23 February 1954, now National Library of Wales, folder CT 2/2, p. 15. Grisewood had thanked Auden on Jones’s behalf for the article of 1954, published in Encounter. 3 David Jones, Epoch and Artist  : Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London, 1959), pp. 114–15.

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more obvious debts to Middle English.4 In a review of 1974 however, Seamus Heaney made a strong case for Jones’s use of Anglo-Saxon poetics as a unifying source and motif within his writing, describing Jones’s writings as a coherence, a ‘megalithic shape founded on In Parenthesis and raised through The Anathemata’. Heaney placed the distinctively Anglo-Saxon vision of the passion of Christ, The Dream of the Rood, at the centre of Jones’s poetics. There, he writes, ‘God bleeds as a maimed god at the centre of the world, on the “tump” of Calvary, on a tree.’5 Jones’s Catholic faith gives his later work its thematic coherence, and also its redemptive vision. In The Anathemata, the life of Christ makes sense of and redeems all human history and creation, and The Dream of the Rood becomes emblematic. This Old English poem is fleetingly present, too, in Jones’s early ‘War Book’. In Part Three of In Parenthesis Private Ball, a foot soldier in B Company, stumbles, exhausted, to the front-line trenches. Sleeping on his feet, his dreams take him from a vision of Christ in the manger ‘lapped in hay’, to memories of his own early life at home. The moon shows the surrounding trees of no-man’s land, blasted by artillery and transformed by its silver light into ‘silver scar with drenched tree-wound’ (IP, p. 35). The anthropomorphic, wounded trees are the Battalion’s first real encounter with the disfigured landscape of the Western Front. Lance-Corporal Jenkins, aware of his responsibilities as ‘shepherd’ to his men is also struck by tree-transformations, ‘this all depriving darkness split now by crazy flashing ; marking hugely clear the spilled bowels of trees, splinter-spike, leper-ashen’ (IP, p. 31). Jenkins worries for his ‘precious charge’, ‘his little flock, going with weary limbs’. Later, Jenkins is described as a ‘Mercian dreamer’ (IP, p. 35).6 Like the Anglo-Saxon dreamer of the eighth-century poem (later preserved in the Vercelli Book, in late West Saxon linguistic forms with a strong Anglian element),7 Jenkins understands the violent implication of the transformed trees. The irony of the allusion lies in the knowledge that the wounded trees are a sign of imminent suffering, but not necessarily of salvation. Jones’s critical writings testify to his wish ‘to conserve, to develop, to make significant for the present what the past holds’.8 He called these things the ‘myths’ and 4  For example Colin Wilcockson, ‘Presentation and Self-Presentation in In Parenthesis’, in Presenting Poetry : Composition, Publication, Reception : Essays in Honour of Ian Jack, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 235–56 ; see also Paul Robichaud, Making the Past Present : David Jones, the Middle Ages, & Modernism (Washington, DC, 2007). 5  Seamus Heaney, ‘Now and In England’, The Spectator, 4 May 1974, 547. 6  Thomas Dilworth, in The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones (Toronto, 1988), pp. 56–7, considers Jenkins’ characterization as a ‘Mercian Dreamer’ in relation to his full name, ‘Piers Dorian Isambard Jenkins’, arguing that the Mercian reference strengthens associations with Langland and Piers Plowman, each ‘a native of Shropshire’ (Jenkins is from Warwick). I think that using ‘Mercia’ here also deliberately evokes an Anglo-Saxon context. 7  Michael Swanton, The Dream of the Rood (Exeter, 2000), pp. 7–9. For Jones’s understanding of the poem as written in a West Saxon (he calls it ‘Wessex’) dialect, see David Jones, The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (London, 1978), p. 221, n. 20. 8 Jones, Epoch and Artist, p. 243.

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‘deposits’, and, like other modernist poets, Jones thought of himself as a writer in a cultural wasteland, whose duty was to act as ‘rememberer’9 for a society fast losing touch with its past. In his critical writings, Jones seized on texts, ritual practices and artefacts10 that he believed were in danger of becoming unavailable to a modern audience. In the Preface to The Anathemata he quotes Nennius  ‘I have made a heap of all that I could find’  identifying himself with the anxieties of that Welsh historian who was afraid that things dear to him ‘would become as smoke dissipated’ (Ana, p. 9). Jones’s project of conservation is never programmatically accretive or narrowly scholarly. The poet, he argued, ‘must work within the limits of his loves’ (Ana, p. 24) ; he cannot use things for which he has no affection or understanding. Primarily, the poet’s struggle is one of making the things of the past ‘valid’ for the present. Throughout In Parenthesis, we are faced with the desolation of modern warfare ; Jones’s engagement with Old English sources becomes both a part of this modern reality, and a heroic act of remembrance in the face of an increasingly mechanized world, forgetful of its history. Jones’s poetic negotiation with Old English literature is, however, not always an easy one. There are many instances in his writings where Old English allusions create a sense of alterity and unfamiliarity. His approach was made more complex as a result of his Welsh affinity, which, I will argue, creates points of friction within Jones’s writing and a form of cultural dialectic. At times, too, Jones would use the echo of Old English poetics to enforce myths of national difference, creating a complex myth of a German ‘other’, especially in In Parenthesis. This is something that could have become ideologically problematic in the context of that work and its stated aims. In Parenthesis is dedicated not only to the British soldiers who fought in the war, but to ‘the enemy frontfighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure’.11 Initially, Jones’s use of Old English sources seems to polarize and to pit cultures against one another (English against Welsh, British against German), and to be in this sense complicit with both the historical conflicts of Britain and the modern conflicts of twentieth-century Europe. Overwhelmingly, however, Jones’s use of Old English ‘uncovers’12 similarities between cultures. Anglo-Saxon battle poems are brought to bear on modern cultural conflict and physical suffering, revealing a continuity of experience. Most importantly, in his exploration of Anglo-Saxon history and culture Jones finds a potent symbol for cultural renewal, and an ideal of dialogue between nations. Through the central figures in its missionary culture, and in the literature and artefacts produced in a period of cultural exchange, he discovers evidence of a historic European unity that underscores the tragedy of modern war. 9  David Jones, The Anathemata : Fragments of an Attempted Writing (New York, 1972), p. 21. This edition is hereafter cited as Ana by page number in the text. 10  See ‘Art and Sacrament’, in Jones, Epoch and Artist, pp. 143–79. 11  ‘Inscription’ in block capitals, just prior to page 1 of IP. 12  See Preface to Ana, p. 33 : ‘my intention has not been to “edify” (in the secondary but accepted and customary sense of that word), nor, I think, to persuade, but there is indeed an intention to “uncover”’.

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The first difficulty for any writer seeking, as Eliot had advocated, to develop a perception ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’13 lies in the difference of context. Part Three of In Parenthesis reveals a point of contact between the landscape of the Western Front and the battlefields of Old English heroic poetry. As B Company reach the front lines John Ball, detailed for sentry-duty, looks across the wasted land towards the German trenches. Ball hears the rats ‘scrut, scrut, sscrut, / harrow-out earthly’. Eerily in the darkness this creature ‘night-feasts on the broken of us’. The rats of In Parenthesis undergo a curious metamorphosis :   Those broad-pinioned ; blue-burnished, or brinded-back ; whose proud eyes watched       the broken emblems droop and drag dust, suffer with us this metamorphosis.    These too have shed their fine feathers ; these too have slimed their dark-bright coats ; these too have condescended to dig in.   The white-tailed eagle at the battle ebb,        where the sea wars against the river the speckled kite of Maldon and the crow have naturally selected to be un-winged ; to go on the belly, to sap sap sap with festered spines, arched under the moon ; furrit with whiskered snouts the secret parts of us.   (IP, p. 54) The ‘slimed’ rats with their arched spines are transformed via John Ball’s quintessentially English imagination into the winged predators of Old English heroic verse. This passage represents a composite use of two Old English sources, The Battle of Maldon and The Battle of Brunanburh. Those who know these sources well will realise that there is no kite on the field of battle at Maldon, although ravens and eagles are mentioned. The ‘white-tailed eagle’, on the other hand, is certainly a Brunanburh predator, and the prevalence of the compound words  ‘blue-burnished’, ‘dark-bright’  suggests a passage towards the end of that poem : Letan him behindan  hræw bryttian saluwigpadan,  þone sweartan hræfn, hyrnednebban, and þane hasewanpadan, earn æftan hwit,  æses brucan, 13  T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in his Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 14.

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grædigne guðhafoc, and þæt græge deor, wulf on wealde.14 In the translation that Jones most likely had to hand during the composition of In Parenthesis, King Athelstan and Prince Edmund quit the scene of their victory, leaving behind them ‘the dark-coated, swart raven, horny-beaked, to enjoy the carrion, and the grey-coated eagle, white-tailed, to have his will of the corpses, the greedy war-hawk, and that grey beast, the wolf in the wood’.15 The sudden shift into alliterative compounds and the syllabic inversion of ‘blue-burnished, or brinded-back’ in Jones’s treatment of the ‘beasts of battle’ theme creates an Anglo-Saxonesque line with a form of caesura at its centre. This is continued in a more measured way through the alliteration of ‘droop and drag dust’, and ‘fine feathers’. The mingling of two sources, Maldon and Brunanburh, presents an indeterminate but identifiably Anglo-Saxon battleground, whose ‘broken emblems’ are superimposed upon the squalor of modern trench warfare. The emblems that ‘Droop and drag dust’ may recall Byrhtwold’s famous speech, ‘Here lies our leader all hewn down, the valiant man in the dust.’16 If the birds of prey suffer a humbling metamorphosis, shedding their ‘fine feathers’, the reader is nonetheless left with the impression that the physical depredations of war are the same throughout history. Corpses, the smell of corruption and the presence of foraging predators are a continual presence throughout In Parenthesis. The Battle of Maldon describes how the hungry, wheeling birds are gratified when warriors fall and ‘young men lay low’. In In Parenthesis, the action of the scavenging rats is horrible  ‘utile’, in Jones’s dichotomy between utility and gratuity  but not of course as terrible or futile as the destruction of man by man. The rats, at least, ‘redeem the time of our uncharity’ (IP, p. 54). The suggestion of similarity at the basic level of the ‘ends’ of war and the experience of violent conflict is a fundamental part of Jones’s allusive strategy, where the battles of the past are neither the focus of misguided nostalgia, nor an attempt to ennoble the miseries of modern warfare. When In Parenthesis invokes past conflicts, it is often in the service of this concept of psychological and physical suffering as a continuous feature of conflict. In an article of 1942 Jones argued that : We need no longer compare theoretically the panoply and the bravery [of past wars] with the sordidity and grief, or speak any more of ‘old, unhappy things’. The ‘battles’ are not ‘long ago’  they are today and also tomorrow […] We can 14  The Battle of Brunanburh, in Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, ASPR 6 (New York, 1942), pp. 16–20, quoting lines 60–5. 15  R.K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London, 1942), p. 360. This book appears in Jones’s library in a 1937 printing ; see Huw Ceiriog Jones, The Library of David Jones (1895–1974) : A Catalogue (Aberystwyth, 1995), p. 345. 16  R.K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 367. The Old English text reads ‘Her lið ure ealdor eall forheawen, / god on greote’ ; see The Battle of Maldon, ed. E.V. Gordon, rev. edn (Manchester, 1976), lines 314–15.

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guess, better than our immediate forebears, something of what a paid footsoldier at Crécy felt about a damp bow string and the heavy Picardy mud.17 The ‘Maldon kite’ passage is the most explicit reference to Anglo-Saxon poetry in In Parenthesis, and it forms a cogent example of this elision of time through shared experience. Through its agency, ‘then’ and ‘now’ form a unity. Below its surface however, this passage epitomizes some of the difficulties Jones encountered when conscripting Old English literature into the allusive structure of his work, difficulties that were in part a consequence of the unfamiliarity of the texts. In a conversation with Michael Alexander, Jones later admitted that his knowledge of Old English was limited. He would never learn to read it in its original form.18 The invented ‘Maldon kite’ may be a product of this distance between Jones’s own imaginative ‘feeling towards’ the texts and his formal knowledge of them. Equally problematic in this passage, however, are Jones’s Welsh allegiances, which create a thematic tension. This emerges in the Preface, where Jones argues that the foot-soldiers of his own Battalion were men of two cultures : ‘My companions in the war were mostly Londoners with an admixture of Welshmen, so that the mind and folk-life of those two differing racial groups are an essential ingredient to my theme. Nothing could be more representative […] Together they bore in their bodies the genuine tradition of the Island of Britain’ (IP, p. x). Here, Jones articulates a belief in a form of shared British cultural consciousness that the poet can access and recreate, but despite this initial commitment to an inclusive cultural myth, he goes on to marginalize the English literary tradition. Pitting the ‘English complex’ (represented, at its earliest point by Brunanburh) against the Mabinogion cycle and other early Welsh texts, he suggests that the latter, ‘more venerable’ culture forms the basis of a richer poetic tradition : ‘that elder element is integral to our tradition, From Layamon to Blake “Sabrina” would call up spirits rather than “Ypwinesfleot”’ (IP, p. xiii). These two last names signify two quasi-historical (but also mythical) events, both significant points of origin. The story of the landing of Hengest and Horsa at ‘Ypwinesfleot’ or Ebbsfleet, recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, marks the supposed beginning of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England. The legend of ‘Habren’ or Sabrina, the unfortunate daughter of a pre-Roman king of the Britons named Locrinus, serves as a Celtic point of origin. Murdered by Locrinus’s wife Gwendolen, Sabrina was supposed to have given her name to the Severn River (a narrative Jones would have found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain).19 The dis-

17  David Jones, ‘Art in Relation to War’, The Dying Gaul, pp. 127–8. 18  ‘[W]e discussed the passage about the hawk in The Battle of Maldon  he didn’t know any AngloSaxon, he explained apologetically’ : Michael Alexander, ‘From “David Jones” and “The Dream of the Rood”’, in David Jones : Man and Poet, ed. John Matthias (Orono, ME, 1989), pp. 65–71, at p. 67. 19  Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmonds-

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tinction Jones makes between these narratives is a politicized gesture, an indicator of a broader determination throughout In Parenthesis to renegotiate the history of invasion and conflict  and particularly, the marginalization of Welsh culture  by placing it at the centre of his project. In this fraught negotiation between two ‘venerable’ cultures, Jones anticipates the problems of writers such as Seamus Heaney and Edwin Morgan.20 In the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney admits that his Northern Irish heritage made the appropriation of Old English literature difficult : ‘to persuade myself that I was born into its language and that its language was born into me took a while’.21 As a Londoner of mixed Welsh and English parentage, Jones felt himself to be particularly of ‘Welsh affinity’, and was keenly aware of his disenfranchisement from his own culture and language.22 This anxiety to maintain a Celtic or Welsh centrality does not preclude an engagement with Old English poetics in In Parenthesis. However, the allusions become the focus of symbolic battles. In the ‘Maldon kite’ passage, the ‘whitetailed eagle’ (a predator common to Maldon and Brunanburh) hovers ‘where the sea wars against the river’. Jones’s notes on the poem (IP, p. 202, n. 47) tell us that this line is an interloper, taken from a translation of the Elegy to the Sons of Llywelyn the Great by the thirteenth-century Welsh poet Dafydd Benfras. Jones’s source for the translation, J.G. Davies, calls the poem an ‘elegy on persons long dead’ using ‘the real touch of nature-poetry’ where it ends in a dramatic description of the estuary at Aberconwy. This is the site where Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (d. 1240) and his sons, the Welsh princes, were buried : ‘God has caused them to be hidden from us, where the troughs of the sea race, where the sea wars against the great river.’23 Jones makes frequent use of the ‘secret Princes’ motif in In Parenthesis as a figure for centuries of Welsh defeat and suppression at the hands of the English. In its context, amongst the Old English allusions, the line of Dafydd Benfras’s elegy is at once thematically appropriate and historically provocative. The Battle of Maldon was fought along the causeway from Northey Island in the year 991, when Viking forces sailed up the river Blackwater from the open sea, engaging and defeating Byrhtnoth’s Anglo-Saxon army. At the site of battle, the sea does ‘war against’ the river, as the

worth, 1966), p. 77. ‘Sabrina’ enters Milton’s Comus as a naiad, becomes the third in Blake’s first list of Albion’s daughters, and (via Milton) significantly influences Jones ; see Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning, pp. 144–5. 20  On Morgan, see Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), pp. 122–81. 21  Beowulf : A New Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney (London, 1999), p. xxiii. 22  Jones never learnt to speak Welsh with any real fluency ; see ‘On the Difficulties of One Writer of Welsh Affinity Whose Language is English’, in The Dying Gaul, pp. 30–4. 23  J.G. Davies, ‘The Welsh Bard and the Poetry of External Nature’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, (1912–13), 81–128, at p. 95.

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famous half line ‘lucon laȝustreamas’24 may suggest : ‘the streams locked together’.25 Despite this superficial thematic link, the quotation sits uneasily in its proximity to the eagle of Brunanburh, reminding the careful reader of the historical Celtic defeat at the heart of that work. The Battle of Brunanburh (included in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for the year 937) recounts an Anglo-Saxon victory against a fighting force that included Strathclyde Britons. Moreover, its last lines recall the historic enmity of ‘the time when Angles and Saxons […] overcame the Welshmen’.26 In its complex negotiation with the Old English allusions, Dafydd Benfras’s elegy creates a point of AngloWelsh conflict, ancillary to the Anglo-German conflict taking place in the ‘now’  the Western Front of 1915  but nonetheless demanding the reader’s attention. In this period, Jones’s perception of what he called the ‘racial groups’ within the Anglo-Welsh battalion and their relation to the history of the Britons and AngloSaxons may have been conditioned, at least in part, by the racial stereotyping of contemporary historians. In 1935, having read R.H. Hodgkin’s two-volume History of the Anglo-Saxons, Jones wrote to his friend Harman Grisewood and complained of its ‘superior’27 attitude toward the defeated Britons. Hodgkin asserted, for example, that ‘the faults on account of which they [the Britons] lost their predominance in the island were many and various’, but gives ‘culpable blindness’ as one reason for their defeat. They failed to recognise their enemy.28 As Pt. John Ball, sitting at the fire-step, looks out across the tangled waste and transforms it into an Anglo-Saxon battlefield, he too is guilty of ‘culpable blindness’ towards his German enemies :   The relief elbows him on the fire-step : All quiet china ? bugger all to report ?  kipping mate ?  christ, mate  you’ll ’ave ’em all over.   (IP, p. 55) The well-documented presence throughout In Parenthesis of the poem Y Gododdin, preserved in medieval Welsh but with its roots in the migration period, reinforces links between Jones’s modern-day soldiers and an oppressed Celtic past. The men who march to war become, through lines taken from Y Gododdin, the British men who ‘marched, they had been nurtured together’ to die at the hands of the Angles at Catraeth (IP, epigraph to Part One). The dying British warrior becomes a potent symbol for defeat, for despite the outcome of the war, In Parenthesis itself ends with terrible loss of life in a single battle on the Western front. Catraeth, Brunanburh 24  The Battle of Maldon, ed. E.V. Gordon, line 66. Gordon suggests that the most likely meaning of this line is that ‘the incoming tide flows up the channels of the Blackwater around Northey island, where the Vikings are, and its two streams meet at the western end of the island’, but admits that it could also refer to the sea tide meeting and mingling with the current of the river. 25  R.K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 362. 26  Ibid., p. 360. 27  Letter to Harman J. Grisewood, 20 July 1935, in René Hague, ed., Dai Greatcoat : A Self-Portrait of David Jones in his Letters (London, 1980), p. 75. 28  R.H. Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1935), I, 181.

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 these become names to conjure with for later poets such as Geoffrey Hill, when considering the history of violent conflict in these islands29  and yet In Parenthesis is less concerned with the specifics of place-names. Rather, in his ‘War Book’ Jones explored the power of a single image to evoke multiple contexts. The indeterminate eagle at the river is at once a Maldon bird, a Brunanburh bird, and also (in its Celtic form) a relative of the Eagle of Eli who feasts on the dead after a terrible Welsh defeat in the Canu Llywarch Hen (preserved in the Red Book of Hergest). In this newer ‘stratum’ of Celtic poetry (following on from the migration-period defeat recounted in Y Gododdin) Jones noted the continued presence and struggle of the Celt, ‘fighting a losing battle’ ;30 his use of early and late texts in In Parenthesis brings this cumulative, apprehensive sense of defeat to bear on the experience of the modern soldier. The historic, specifically insular clash and conflict of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh elements in In Parenthesis becomes a less dominant theme as the work progresses, and allusions to Old English literature begin to be conscripted more generally into the conflict on the Western Front. This occurs through the depiction of the German troops in the poem as a historically unplaceable but certainly Teutonic ‘other’, and has its most dramatic expression in Part Four of the poem, where the Germans in their feldgrau uniforms are seen (again by Ball) as a ‘grey war-band’. The dim figures moving amongst the breastworks of their trench are set against the self-crucifying image of a ‘wounded’ tree (always a figure for suffering in Jones’s writings). Through the imagination of John Ball, its hanging ‘strippings-off ’ suggest a pagan immolation, an image of the Norse god Odin on his ‘windy tree’ in the Hávamál : The hanged, the offerant :   himself to himself   on the tree. Whose own, whose grey war-band, beyond the stapled war-net  (as grey-banded rodents for a shelving warren  cooped in their complex runnels, where the sea-fret percolates). Come from outlandish places, from beyond the world, from the Hercynian  they were at breakfast and were cold as he, they too made their dole.    And one played on an accordian :    Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen    Aus einer Wurzel zart. Since Boniface once walked in Odin’s wood.   (IP, p. 67) 29  See Hannah J. Crawforth’s essay in this collection for Hill’s allusion to the ‘Eagle of Eli’. 30  David Jones, ‘The Dying Gaul’ (1959), The Dying Gaul, p. 53, in which he discusses these specific englynion.

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The mythological depiction of the Germans as the ‘war-bands’ of Odin, come from an ‘outlandish Hercynian’, draws on Norse mythology (Jones took his knowledge of the Poetic Edda from James Frazer’s The Golden Bough),31 but the word-play in this passage suggests a grounding in Old English sources. The ‘war-band’, another compound Anglo-Saxonism, points us to the word here,32 Old English for ‘an army, a host, a large predatory band’. Jones would have found this in his early readings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (via Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader), where in its many permutations it is always used as the word for the Danish invaders.33 This identification of war-band and here- is made more likely when we consider the intriguing reference to ‘stapled warnets’. OE here-net is ‘a war net, coat of mail, corselet’, appearing once in Beowulf in the fight between the hero and Grendel’s mother. There, his ‘herenet hearde’ (1553 : ‘stout battle net’)34 protects Beowulf against the monster’s deadly ‘seax’ (1545 : ‘dagger’). In Jones’s poetic use of the translated compound word, the ‘stapled war-net’ is in fact the tangled barbed wire defence, stapled several rows deep to wooden fence-posts and running along the front lines of both British and German trenches. The association Jones achieves between the barbed-wire defences and protective armour is deeply ironic, and his use of Old English words throughout the passage lends an Anglo-Saxon element to the characterisation of the German troops. They become a dehumanized, rat-like war-band, with a ‘complex’, ingenious trench system. They are, however, much more dangerous than the scavenging rats. They are more like the ‘slaughterous wolves’, or ‘wælwulfas’35  the Viking hordes of The Battle of Maldon. Jones appends a note to this section of the poem, explaining the genesis of this image : The German field-grey seemed to us more than a mere colour. It seemed always to call up the grey wolf of Nordic literature. To watch those grey shapes moving elusively among the bleached breast works or emerging from between broken tree-stumps was a sight to powerfully impress us. (IP, p. 204, n.16) In this note, Jones makes it clear that Ball’s response is intentionally subjective. The impetus for John Ball’s characterization of the German troops comes from Jones’s own experience of the War, where rare glimpses of the enemy could take on symbolic resonance. While psychologically compelling, this approach is not without danger. The description of the German army in Part Four as Odin’s war-band draws on primitive cultural or even racial myths, and, in so doing, steps dangerously close to nation-

31  James Frazer, The Golden Bough : A Study in Magic and Religion, ed. Robert Fraser (Oxford, 1998), pp. 355–6. 32  Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘here’. 33  In other works Jones collapses the distinction between Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Viking in­ vaders. 34  R.K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 36. 35  Ibid., p. 363 ; The Battle of Maldon, ed. E.V. Gordon, line 96.

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alist rhetoric.36 The German enemy are identified here and elsewhere with a warlike pragmatism, and in 1935 Jones expressed his perception of the Anglo-Saxons as ‘steady, prudent’37 warriors, again drawing on Hodgkin’s rather two-dimensional types. The depiction of the enemy fighters as (historically vague) ‘men of the North’, aided by an undercurrent of Old English literary borrowings, is a vivid attempt to depict the psychological impact of ‘otherness’ from the point of view of the English soldier, whose inscape includes a remembrance of Anglo-Saxon and Viking invasions. It is a brave choice considering that the aims of the work (as expressed in the title page) were to portray the Anglo-German conflict as terrible mistake ; a ‘misadventure’ ; yet this moment of subjectivity helps to convey the polarization of national identity that makes such suffering possible. Increasingly useful to Jones was the power of Anglo-Saxon history to express the ‘invasion history’ of Britain. An article from 1938 provides an example of what this history could give him in the context of the breakdown of relations between Britain and Germany in the latter years of the inter-war period. Jones’s letters at this time express horror at the prospect of another war, and in this article Jones considers the moments in history when two cultures meet along the ‘marches’, the ‘borderlands’ (Jones also used the idea of the ‘marches’ in In Parenthesis when discussing the facing trench systems) and are forced to engage. He refers to these points of collision as the ‘culture-tangle’. In a passage reminiscent of In Parenthesis, he considers what it must have felt like for Anglo-Saxon settlers and Celtic monks alike during the Danish invasion, using a childish jingle expressing the ‘terror from without, which was more than a bogey for our ancestors in the dark age’ : Our own : Close the door they’re coming through the window Close the window they’re coming through the door Close the door they’re coming through the window My God ! They’re coming through the floor ! is perhaps the most contemporary expression of that in-breaking upon an established order. Indeed the words, without alteration, might be put into the mouth of a shopkeeper in the Saxon-shore Zone, as might Lear’s rhyme describe what the monks in their wattled bangors felt, when they saw, tossing, the steer-board lights on the spume  the long-ships nose at the estuary bar.38 A line in Part Seven of In Parenthesis confirms that Jones had had this particular 36  See Hague, Dai Greatcoat, p. 89 on Jones’s juvenilia, and the characterization of German forces as ‘the Teuton terror’. 37 Hague, Dai Greatcoat, p. 75. 38  David Jones, ‘The Roland Epic and Ourselves’, first published in The Tablet, 24 December 1938. Taken from The Dying Gaul, p. 102. The Edward Lear reference is to ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’, previously discussed by Jones.

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evocation of cultural ‘in-breaking’ in mind a few years before. In this final section of the poem, the British soldiers have taken the German strip-trench, but suddenly find themselves engaged in hand-to-hand fighting as the enemy attempt to re-take it. Confusion ensues and Jones puts the poem ‘in the mouth’ of the British soldiers : But which is front, which way’s the way on and where’s the corporal and what’s this crush and all this shoving you along, and someone shouting rhetorically about remembering your nationality    and Jesus Christ  they’re coming through the floor, endthwart and overlong : Jerry’s through on the flank . . .   (IP, p. 180) The threat of invasion becomes a terrifying nursery rhyme, a Grendel-myth for the modern imagination, in face of which ‘remembering your nationality’ becomes the rallying cry. The construction of a language based around culture-clash and invasion is brought to a higher level of philological complexity in The Anathemata. In a section called ‘Angle-Land’, the poem considers the shaping of Britain in a formative period, some time in the fifth century AD. It depicts a ship of intrepid Angles making their way up the East coast of a now Saxon-dominated land. The country has been overridden, or more aptly in terms of Jones’s poetic treatment, overwritten by the migrating sailors, who travel :    Past where they placed their ingas-names where they speed the coulter deep    in the open Engel fields to this day.    How many poles of their broad Angle hidage to the small-scattered plots, to the lightly-furrowed erwau, that once did quilt Boudìcca’s róyal gwely  ?  (Ana, p. 111) Juxtaposed place names (or individual words symbolizing occupiers past and present) are used to create a kind of poetic ellipsis, denoting change over time whilst collapsing historical distance. In ‘Angle-Land’, the Saxon ingas displaces the Romano-British erwau (the Welsh word for a plough acre). In this method of communicating ‘the change of people on the unchanged site’39 Jones may have taken his cue from James Joyce. In a painted inscription from 1945 he used a quotation from the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake, ‘Northmen’s Thing made Southfolk’s Place’ describing in a contracted play of words the impact of the Viking settlers in Dublin.40 39  Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, David Jones : The Maker Unmade (Bridgend, 2003), p. 283. 40  The inscription is pictured in Miles and Shiel, The Maker Unmade (Bridgend, 2003), p. 282. Lawrence Rainey paraphrases the meaning of Joyce’s complex verbal play, ‘The high place where the

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In ‘Angle-Land’ the sense of invasion and change is dramatically conveyed through this kind of symbolic word-use. The dispossessed Britons flee from the invaders, ‘Romanity gone Wealisc’, the Old English wealh (plural wealas) meaning Celt, or Briton, but also ‘outsider’ ; the etymological antecedent of the modern-day word ‘Welsh’. Here, the Anglian and Saxon invasions begin or engender the culture-tangle of Saxon against Welsh, a tangle which we recognise from In Parenthesis. Jones plays on the fear of the ‘other’ : the Angles (who think of themselves as bold adventurers, not as invaders) are terrified of raising a British ghost, an educated Romano-Briton who will ‘latin-runes tellan [Old English for ‘reckon’, or ‘recount’] in his horror-coat standing’ (Ana, p. 112). The invader imagines this apparition in his own language. The Latin letters become runic inscriptions, while the ghost’s horror-coat is the here-byrne or ‘war corselet’, another borrowing from Beowulf (line 1443). In theme, form and structure The Anathemata is a departure from In Parenthesis. It is not concerned with the recalling of a modern event, and the structure is not that of conventional narrative. Instead, we are taken on an argosy, a ‘wonder voyage’ through moments in Western history. The poem moves between times and places, dictated to an extent by chronology, but also by typological correspondences. Underpinning the whole work is the ‘riddling’ presence of God’s revelation through the figure of Christ. The scope of the poem is enormous, and Thomas Dilworth has called it ‘an anatomy of Western culture from its prehistoric beginnings to the present’.41 But although The Anathemata has its roots in the past, and makes only fleeting reference to the events taking place when Jones was engaged in writing it (the poem was begun in ‘experiments’ between 1938 and 1945)42 the presence of modern conflict is still felt. Neil Corcoran argues that that the reader and critic of the poem must ‘insist on the actual, contactual nature of the crisis in the face of which Jones was undertaking his vast act of celebration and preservation […] Europe was once again undergoing the disruption and anguish of a World War’.43 This anguish is brought to the fore in ‘Angle-Land’ as Jones employs a comparable tactic to that used in Part Four of In Parenthesis, and the Anglo-Saxon migrations are connected to the war strategies of a modern-day German nation. We move to a twentieth-century setting, taking stock of the fact that these migration period invasions occurred : I speak of before the whale-roads or the keel-paths were from Orcades to the fiord-havens, or the greyed green wastes that they strictly grid Norwegian Thing once met has become Suffolk Place, or Suffolk Street, the site of St Andrew’s Church, now renovated and named the Dublin Tourism Centre’. See Lawrence S. Rainey, Modernism : An Anthology (Oxford, 2005), p. 300. 41 Dilworth, The Shape of Meaning, p. 152. 42  Preface to Ana, p. 14. 43  Neil Corcoran, The Song of Deeds : A Study of ‘The Anathemata’ of David Jones (Cardiff, 1982), p. 32.

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quadrate and number on the sea-green Quadratkarte              one eight six one G              for the fratricides of the latter-day.   (Ana, p. 115) Jones returns to the language of otherness that characterizes the British response to the German troops throughout In Parenthesis, where ‘Jerry’ is referred to as ‘He’ or ‘They’. The ‘they’ who ‘strictly grid’ are the naval officers of a modern German nation, a modern equivalent of the Anglian invaders with their ‘whale-roads’ and ‘keel-paths’ (Old English kennings for ‘sea’). Reading beneath the surface in Jones’s poetry, it becomes clear that these concepts of national identity and evocations of a historic ‘threat from outside’ (derived from Anglo-Saxon history) are not evolved with the aim of enforcing a cultural dichotomy. In ‘Angle-Land’, as in In Parenthesis, the movement from the fifth-century migrations into modern day conflict uncovers the shared history that makes war both a tragedy and a fratricide ; the ‘fratricides / of the latter day’. When describing ‘Jerry’ as an invading Anglian settler, the conflict is in a historic sense internal. Returning to the grey war-band in Part Four of In Parenthesis there is a suggestion of the route Jones will take out of this particular ‘culture-tangle’. As Ball looks across to the ‘grey warband’ the sympathy expressed in the lines ‘they were at breakfast and were cold as he, they too made/ their dole’ comprehends the mutual miseries of the warring troops. It is Christmas Eve, and some of the German soldiers remember Christ’s Nativity with a carol :    And one played on an accordian :    Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen    Aus einer Wurzel zart. Since Boniface once walked in Odin’s wood.   (IP, p. 67) Critics have tended to read this reference to St Boniface in an oppositional way. Thomas Dilworth sees it as a barbed, prophetic inclusion which ‘ironically anticipates the incursion of the English (and Welsh) into Mametz Wood for a purpose contrary to that of the early missionaries’.44 Situational ironies notwithstanding, there is good reason for seeing a more poignant and straightforward emphasis behind this recollection of the conversion of the German tribes by Boniface in the period of the eighthand ninth-century missions to Frisia. Jones’s knowledge of history was conditioned, from the early 1930s until the end of his life, by the writings of the cultural historian Christopher Dawson. He is cited in the Preface to In Parenthesis and again in the Preface to The Anathemata where Jones places him first among his influences. Recording his conversations with the writer as late as 1970 William Blissett noted that Jones

44  Thomas Dilworth, The Liturgical Parenthesis of David Jones (Ipswich, 1979), p. 19.

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remained ‘convinced of the permanent importance as a philosopher or interpreter of history of his dear friend’.45 Dawson and Jones first met at an intellectual gathering in a house in St Leonard’s Terrace in Chelsea. Subsequently referred to as ‘The Chelsea Group’, the salon has become known as the most important meeting of Catholic intellectuals in the period.46 In Christopher Dawson’s 1934 book The Making of Europe, which Jones read at the time of publication, St Boniface becomes a central force for Christian renewal at a formative moment in the emergence of European Christendom. Dawson depicts Boniface as a loyal missionary of Rome, but also (crucially) as the product of an earlier culture. His mission, Dawson argues, was not just the product of a ‘new’ piety, the faith of the convert, but the product of a native tradition, the Christian faith of the Romano-Britons, reasserting itself. ‘The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons’, Dawson argues, ‘produced such a vital change in England because it meant the reassertion of the old cultural tradition after the temporary victory of barbarism. It was the return of Britain to Europe and her past’.47 This belief in cultural continuity, made possible by Dawson’s ‘organic’ approach to historical development, held a strong appeal for Jones. The impact of Boniface’s mission to the German tribes is described at length in The Making of Europe : It was through the work of St Boniface that Germany first became a living member of the European society. This Anglo-Saxon influence is responsible for the first beginnings of vernacular culture in Germany […] the very idea of a vernacular culture was alien to the traditions of the continental Church and was the characteristic product of the new Christian cultures of Ireland and England, whence it was transmitted to the continent by the missionary movement of the eighth century.48 Dawson argues that it is this missionary movement that provided the root or foundation for a German vernacular culture, and for the subsequent development of medieval Europe. The Benedictine monasticism that the missionaries took with them had inherited ‘the learned traditions of the Roman Civil Service’49 in an Anglo-Saxon environment, and therefore represented a union of ‘Teutonic initiative and Latin culture’. Dawson describes Boniface as a man who had ‘a deeper influence on the history of Europe than any man who has ever lived’.50

45  William Blissett, The Long Conversation : A Memoir of David Jones (Oxford, 1981), p. 65. 46  See Aidan Nichols, Dominican Gallery : Portrait of a Culture (Leominster, 1997), p. 29. 47  Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe : An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London, 1934), p. 209. 48  Ibid., p. 211. 49  Fernando Cervantes, ‘Christopher Dawson and Europe’, in Eternity in Time : Christopher Dawson and the Catholic Idea of History, ed. Stratford Caldecott (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 51–68, at p. 59. 50 Dawson, The Making of Europe, p. 213.

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In Dawson’s analysis, the unity of culture fostered by the missions of the eighth and early ninth centuries flowers in the Carolingian period. This becomes, for Dawson and for Jones, a period representative of the ‘ideal of unity’,51 ‘the foundation and starting point of the whole development of Medieval and Western Civilization’.52 Dawson’s particular methodological achievement as a cultural historian was his rebuttal of both the flawed idea of ‘Progress’, and his parallel rejection of relativistic histories for a much more fluid history of cultural exchange. In order to explain the life of civilizations, he argued, ‘we must […] understand the laws of cultural interaction and the causes of the rise and fall of the great cultural syncretisms, which seem to overshadow the destinies of individual peoples’.53 It is through this idea  that a special vitality of culture is produced at moments of cultural crisis and exchange  that we can begin to reassess Jones’s use of Anglo-Saxon history in In Parenthesis. Returning to the episode on Christmas Eve in the trenches, it is possible to re-read the reference to the eighth-century missions in Germania as more than an ironic prophecy of future conflict. Jones recalls the reader to a point of contact that helped to form the future unity of both countries. The German soldiers can sing Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen only ‘since’ the events which led to their conversion, at a time when ‘Boniface walked in Odin’s wood’ (Jones puns on two meanings of ‘since’, invoking both temporal and causal implications). Equally, the application of Old English allusions to German and English troops alike reinforces the idea of an interdependent history, making the present conflict all the more ironic. The British troops try to drown out the carols of their German enemies, to frustrate communication. Nonetheless, we can read the implications of ‘Angle-Land’ back into the earlier poem. It is worth noting that this is achieved in the poem without dogmatism ; the ‘objective’ narrative of In Parenthesis is almost never broken into by a didactic, authorial voice. From In Parenthesis into The Anathemata the ideal of cultural overlap and exchange and its importance in the formation of ‘vital cultures’ becomes a part of Jones’s response to the irrationality of twentieth-century nationalism, and the fratricidal tragedy of modern warfare. It finds a potent symbol in the historical events of the period in which an Anglo-Saxon culture flourished. In The Anathemata, Jones would find a way to represent cultural syncretism in the form of a visual artwork, which, in its interaction with the text of the poem gives expression to ‘the extraordinary mix-up of the break-up of the phenomenally mixed mess-up of Celtic, Teutonic and Latin elements in the dark ages’, but also reflects on the common roots of modern nation states. In ‘Sherthursdaye and Venus Day’, the last section of The Ananthemata, Jones’s thematic treatment of the Passion is shaped by the image of a resolute Christ, running to embrace the cross, which draws deeply on the portrayal of Christ as a military hero in The Dream of the Rood. Working through typology and drawing on later medieval 51  Cervantes, ‘Christopher Dawson’, p. 60. 52 Dawson, The Making of Europe, p. 213. 53  Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion : An Historical Enquiry (London, 1931), p. 41.

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material, Jones compares Christ to Celtic quest heroes (Peredur and Gawain), and to the Christ of Piers Plowman, who jousts in Jerusalem, as the poem tells us, wearing his armour of ‘humana natura’ (B text, XVIII.23). Finally, Christ is compared to a Roman soldier wielding his shortsword, or ‘gladius’ : He would put on his man’s lorica.        He has put it on His caligae on        and is gone to the mark-land. Unless his two-edged gladius gain it                what tillage is there ?  (Ana, p. 226) for the Volk  Throughout this section the references are fairly evenly garnered from Celtic (Arthurian) tradition and from a Latin tradition in the evocation of the Christus miles (Christ’s ‘caligae’ and ‘lorica’). The third part of the cultural triad is represented by the curious ‘Volk’ at the end of this passage, which takes the reader inevitably back to the plough-teams of ‘Angle-Land’. Earlier, the figure of Odin on the ‘windy tree’ is included as a pagan counterpart to the Christian event, and when the crucifixion takes place it does so on ‘rune-height by the garbaged rill’ (Ana, p. 240). The cacophony of sources builds up to and has its final expression in the painted inscription opposite page 240 (see Figure 5.1, overleaf). This takes as its subject matter lines from The Dream of the Rood that describe how the warrior Christ readies himself, preparing to ascend the gallows-tree to redeem mankind : Ongyrede hine þa geong hæleð,  þæt wæs God ælmightig, strang ond stiðmod ;  gestah he on gealgan heanne, modig on manigra geshyðe,  þa he wolde mancyn lysan. Then the young Hero  He was God almighty  firm and unflinching, stripped Himself ; He mounted on the high cross, brave in the sight of many, when He was minded to redeem mankind.54 Jones’s inscription was never intended to look like an Anglo-Saxon manuscript. It tries to give a sense of the alterity of Old English literature, its ‘otherness’ and antiquity, and Jones approaches this through the smallest unit of signification, the written letter. He would have agreed with Roland Barthes on the symbolic power of letter-forms : ‘take a letter’, Barthes writes, ‘you will see its secret deepen (and never come to an end) down through the infinite associations […] in which you will discover everything about the world : its history, yours’.55 Jones’s painted inscriptions explore the power of 54  R.K. Gordon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 236. 55  Roland Barthes, ‘The Letter, the Spirit, the Letter’, in The Responsibility of Forms : Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford, 1986), p. 116.

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Figure 5.1  David Jones, ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription, by permission of the David Jones Estate and the National Library of Wales.

letters to evoke a cultural complex and a historical moment. In a letter to his friend and fellow artist Nicolete Gray, Jones wrote, ‘I try always to find a precedent for all the shapes I use. When uncial or Gothicised etc. letters appear in a word in juxtaposition with Roman caps, it is always for some reason of evocation, of re-calling.’56 The ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription is an exercise in this kind of juxtaposition. It feels dynamic, as different letter-forms pull away from or move towards others in the same word. Particularly interested in representing the ‘special signs used in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts’,57 Jones uses the futhorc-derived letters thorn and eth throughout. Ne56  Nicolete Gray, The Painted Inscriptions of David Jones (London, 1981), p. 104. 57  Letter to Nicolete Gray, 4 April 1961 ; Gray, Painted Inscriptions, p. 18.

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glecting to use the letter wynn (which is employed in the Vercelli Book’s version of the poem), Jones’s ‘W’s are a mixture of Roman capitals and lower-case, uncial forms. In the word ‘Geong’, we find an insular form of the letter yogh,58 a Celtic element which Jones associated with the Irish monastic tradition. The crossed eth Jones erroneously thought of as an Old Welsh as well as an Old English character,59 a precursor for the modern Welsh ‘dd’ (pronounced as a voiced ‘th’). The inclusion of these disparate forms within the typographical ‘collage’ is not a fanciful device, but has its roots in the eclectic design of the late-seventh- or early-eighth-century Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, on which part of the text now called The Dream of the Rood is inscribed. In a 1950 article, Jones discusses the implications of the poem’s existence both in the Vercelli Book and on the Ruthwell Cross. ‘The Manuscript’, he writes, ‘is in late West-Saxon, but it is perhaps not without significance that a fragment of this great poem was inscribed in the old Northumbrian dialect […] on the Anglo-Celtic Ruthwell Cross in Scotland. This suggests a valid and wide appeal in this island.’60 As Christopher Dawson saw no trace of a Celtic influence in the stone crosses at Ruthwell, it is likely that Jones’s understanding of its composite decoration came from Hodgkin, whose analysis of influences was wide-ranging : The Anglian [sculptor] is eclectic, but […] he is no mere imitator […] From the Celts he takes the idea that a tall cross is a good kind of monument, a good memorial to a departed friend or an emblem round which country folk may gather for worship ; from the Byzantines or Romans he takes the pose of the figures and the vine-scroll, from them or others the interlace. He takes Roman letters, but they are written in an Irish style. He takes runes from his Teutonic ancestors, on one border he inscribes a verse from the Vulgate, on another a stanza composed by a new Anglian poet. All these are fused harmoniously.61 In microcosm, through its typographical experiments, Jones’s inscription enacts the same ideal of a co-existence of different cultures (Latin, Germanic, Celtic) that we find in Hodgkin’s description of the stone cross. The existence of the Ruthwell Cross proved, for Jones, the ‘valid and wide appeal’ of the later poem. In the inscription he mirrors this, creating an artefact emblematic of a time when a large community made up of disparate elements looked to the poetry and the imagery of Christ’s passion. In a recent book Éamonn Ó Carragáin describes the Ruthwell Cross as a ‘synthesis […] of English, Irish, British and Roman ideas’, and thus as a product of the ‘mixed-rule’ 58 Ibid. 59  See Colin Wilcockson, ‘Notes on Some Letters of David Jones’, Agenda 14 (1976), 85–6, at p. 85, n. 10 : ‘whenever David Jones uses the symbol ð (“eth”) he implies voiced “th” (as in Welsh “dd”). He was guided to this usage by a note in Ben Johnson’s English Grammar’ (Wilcockson notes that Johnson’s derivation is incorrect). 60  David Jones, ‘A Note on Mr. Berenson’s Views’ (originally published 1950), in Epoch and Artist, p. 269. 61 Hodgkin, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, I, 363–4.

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of Benedict Biscop and the great monastic establishment at Wearmouth-Jarrow. Benedict was responsible for fusing elements of different local customs into a new religious ‘rule’ ; the aim was one of incorporation and inclusion, ‘diversity within unity’.62 J.A.W. Bennett has described The Anathemata as a strangely ‘public’ poem,63 and Jones’s ‘Ongyrede hine’ inscription is like a public, religious art-work. It represents a gathering point, becoming in itself an image of the ‘sigbecn’ ; one of the ‘victory beacons’ which Jones imagined ‘standing like masts on open sites and suffering the wind and weather of many centuries’.64 A counterpart in meaning to the allusion to St Boniface in In Parenthesis, the inscription is also testament to the ‘culture-tangle’ in a moment of dialogue and creativity. It reflects upon the contemporary situation, as past and present collide for a final time. Our attention on the Christ who, as Heaney put it, ‘bleeds as a maimed god at the centre of the world’, we are suddenly brought back to the present dilemma of war. Linked thematically to his portrayal of the warrior Christ, Jones finds a place for the men of the Western Front ; as the poem considers the ‘sacramentum’, the oath in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26 : 40) of the Christ who ‘must be broken off at knee’, we learn that modern soldiers will make a similar oath of allegiance, suffering similar pains : Down the traversed history-paths       his stumbling Grenadiere in the communication-ways           his burdened infants shall learn like vows to take.   (Ana, p. 228) This passage completes the memorial made in In Parenthesis, and it seems no accident that it also recalls the reader to Part Three of that poem, where the men ‘stumble’ in the communication-trenches, going up the line, and where the ‘Mercian Dreamer’, Mr Jenkins, glimpses the Christ-like qualities of his men.65 The Anathemata redeems the soldiers of the Western Front not only through its emphasis on a universal redemption through Christ, but through a poetry whose linguistic and typographical innovations demand that the reader consider the long history of Europe, investigating moments of unity or exchange. Inspired by Dawson’s theory of ‘great cultural

62  Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood : Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the ‘Dream of the Rood’ Tradition (London, 2005), p. 57. Ó Carragáin writes of the Ruthwell scheme that ‘such openness to diverse influences can reasonably be related to the ecclesiastical ideal of “diversity within unity”’. 63  J.A.W. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion : Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford, 1982), p. 204. 64  David Jones, ‘An Introduction to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Thomas Dilworth (London, 2005), p. 39. 65  René Hague notes the similarity of theme and treatment in ‘Sherthursdaye and Venus Day’ in A Commentary on ‘The Anathemata’ of David Jones (Wellingborough, 1977), p. 245.

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syncretisms, which seem to overshadow the destinies of individual peoples’,66 Jones opposes the kind of narrow focus which makes national and cultural divisions possible. It is here that the history, literature and art of the Anglo-Saxon period become instrumental and emblematic. Imagined in In Parenthesis and The Anathemata as a time of cultural exchange, the internal divisions, migrations and invasions of the period provide a language appropriate to modern discord and power-struggle. Yet this language of dissonance gives way before the power of its history and its monuments, both literary and artistic, to evoke an ideal of synthesis and inclusion that is not merely nostalgic, but profoundly forward-looking. 66 Dawson, Progress and Religion, p. 41.

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6 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, Lindisfarne, and Anglo-Saxon Interlace Clare A. Lees

A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking till the stone spells a name naming none.   (Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, I, p. 61, 14–21)1 Tortoise deep in dust or muzzled bear capering punctuate a text whose initial, lost in Lindisfarne plaited lines, stands for discarded love.   (Briggflatts, II, p. 68, 2–6) Ic seah wrætlice  wuhte feower samed siþian ;  swearte wæran lastas, swaþu swiþe blacu. I saw four creatures wondrously travelling together ; black were their tracks, so dark their path.   (Exeter Book Riddle 51, 1–3a)2

1  All references to Briggflatts are to Basil Bunting, Complete Poems, ed. Richard Caddel (Newcastle, 2000), pp. 59–81, by page and line number. The poem was completed in 1965 and first published in London by Fulcrum Press in 1966 : the most recent reissue of the Complete Poems was by Bloodaxe (Tarset, 2009). 2  All references to the Exeter Book Riddles are from The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ASPR 3 (New York, 1936). See also The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977). All translations from the Old English are my own.

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his chapter explores how apprehensions of Anglo-Saxon verbal and visual arts resource the poetry of the twentieth-century British modernist poet, Basil Bunting (1900–1985). It is a commonplace of Bunting scholarship that this Northumbrian poet consciously engaged with earlier Northern poetic and visual traditions, including those of the Anglo-Saxons, in the forging of his long modernist poem, Briggflatts (1966). With the important exception of Peter Makin, however, few have explored in any detail how Anglo-Saxon and modernist aesthetics meet in this poem and, of those few, none (as far as I know) have been Anglo-Saxonists.3 Yet, at the same time that Bunting was working on his poetry, the Old English critic John Leyerle was working on his classic essay on ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’ (1967).4 Critic and poet alike are drawn to interlace because of its potential for illuminating early English culture, whether material or verbal. Their shared interest in this subject illustrates the degree to which modern poetic imaginings of the past have points of contact with contemporary scholarship about that past. But this chapter also argues that a better understanding of modern aesthetic appropriations of early English culture can offer us new ways to read the literature of the period itself. If this chapter begins, therefore, in the twentieth century, it ends in the tenth, with a reading of the Old English riddle, Exeter Book Riddle 51, usually solved as ‘a pen with three fingers’. The first three lines of Exeter Book Riddle 51 constitute the last of the three quotations with which this chapter begins. They image, as is well known to AngloSaxonists, the art of writing : the wondrous creatures travel together over the page, leaving a trail or path of black ink. My first quotation offers a different scene of writing. In this first movement of Bunting’s Briggflatts, a stonemason engraves rhythmically, fingertips ‘checking’ the letters, listening as ‘the marble rests’, while we reflect on the puzzle of a name ‘naming none’. Sight, sound, touch and rhythm combine into a riddle-like structure : the mason ‘times’ his mallet to the tune of the lark ; he senses the letter shapes with his fingers ; he listens for the marble to give up its clue of how and where to carve ; but we are not able to see or to read what it is that he has carved. Looking, seeing and puzzling are also at the heart of the second quotation, again from Briggflatts, where the scribal art of the late-seventh- or early-eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels, produced in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, provide the ground for a metaphor of a ‘discarded’ love, lost in Lindisfarne’s ‘plaited lines’.5 In each of these quotations, the written and verbal arts are evoked by means of a powerful and provocative combination of lines, letters and sounds : what we might otherwise call the visual in the verbal. 3  Peter Makin, Bunting : The Shaping of His Verse (Oxford, 1992). 4  John Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’, University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967), 1–17. 5  See Michelle P. Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels : Society, Spirituality and the Scribe (London, 2003) ; it is highly likely that Bishop Eadfrith is indeed the scribe of the Gospels.

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Poetry can speak directly to poetry, of course, across the gulfs of periodization and specialization (about which the success of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and other chapters in this collection also have much to say). For Bunting, as for Louis Zukovsky (1904–1978), one of Bunting’s close associates and fellow Objectivist,6 a poem is usefully thought of as an object, and objects, ‘things about the place’ (as Bunting puts it), are the stuff of poetry.7 Place can be also thought of in relation to verbal patterning  laces, metre and alliterative line  which is where sound is resolved into, and finds its location in or as, a poem. The poetic line, the object that is the poem and the place of things  objects  in the poem, all recurrent preoccupations of the post-Poundians on both sides of the Atlantic, are good ways to think about the riddles of the Anglo-Saxons as well. Briggflatts is famously a difficult poem to puzzle out. ‘Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing’ (IV, p. 75, line 37), provokes this apparent ‘autobiography’ (as Bunting terms it) in the form of a modernist long poem. The interpretative challenges begin early. The poem invites us to watch the mason engraving the letters but not to see a ‘name’ in my first quotation from Briggflatts ; in the second, the poem asks us to consider another scene, not of writing but of the already written  evoked by means of the interlaced art of the Lindisfarne Gospels  and to find something in its ‘plaited lines’. Both quotations invite us to make sense of, to participate in, the making of the meaning of the poem in much the same way as Exeter Book Riddle 51 asks us to look afresh at the scribal art of writing : what are those creatures making tracks ? Bunting’s poetry, with its interest in the pleasurable puzzles of the relation of the verbal and the visual, has affinities with the tenth-century Old English Exeter Book Riddles, in other words. Modernist poem and Old English riddle alike put the aesthetic, the sensual and the intellectual into play.

Seeing and Hearing : Bunting, Leyerle, Beowulf, and the Lindisfarne Gospels Rhythm can be as visible in space as it is audible in time ; and symmetry, and proportion, are as discernible in time as they are in space.8

The techniques of interlace, of patterns made for the ear and for the eye, and the ways in which the visual and the verbal are folded one into another, are fundamental to this chapter. Bunting’s Briggflatts, with its reference to the Lindisfarne Gospels and its ‘plaited lines’, quoted above, was published in 1966. Its first edition, from Fulcrum 6  See Mark Scroggins, The Poem of A Life : A Biography of Louis Zukovsky (Emeryville, CA, 2007). See also Bunting’s ‘Zukovsky’, in Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore and London, 1999), pp. 151–70. Bunting was the only British poet included in An Objectivist Anthology, ed. Louis Zukovsky (Le Beausset, 1932) : he also sent Zukovsky early drafts of Briggflatts ; see, for example, his letter to Zukovsky of 23 November 1964 (Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin). 7  A. McAllister and S. Figgis, ‘Basil Bunting : The Last Interview’, Bête Noir 2/3 (1987), 22–50, quoted from Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Makin, p. 172, note 27. 8  Bunting, ‘The Codex’, in Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Makin, pp. 1–18, at p. 4.

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Press, features on its cover a stylized bird-image, a cormorant, in a deliberate echo of the zoomorphic interlaced cormorants that are such a feature of the art of the Gospels and that also appear in the fifth movement of Briggflatts. In 1967, a year after the first publication of Briggflatts, John Leyerle first published his celebrated essay ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’. Modernist poem and critical essay have been widely celebrated, although, to the best of my knowledge, they have rarely been celebrated in the same circles. Bunting’s poem is regarded as arguably one of the best long poems of the second half of the twentieth century ; Leyerle’s article has been widely anthologized, although it has never attained the prominence of Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics’ (what piece of Old English criticism has ?).9 In the article, Leyerle called attention to the ways in which some patterns evident in Old English poetry could be said to parallel those patterned interlace structures so popular in early Anglo-Saxon, especially Northumbrian, visual culture. This is something that also fascinated Bunting, who, in order to talk about poetry in 1969/70, found himself first thinking about the Lindisfarne Gospels and its ‘graphic art’, an association he had also made in writing Briggflatts several years earlier. The poem’s most recent edition of 2009 has as its cover the second incipit page of St Matthew’s Gospel from the Lindisfarne Gospels.10 Some forty years on, Leyerle’s insight about interlace has been so assimilated into the critical vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon literary critics as to seem mundane  a mere commonplace or convention, though one significant enough to ensure that it is now part of the critical apparatus of the Norton edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.11 Through such routes, students of Anglo-Saxon poetry are routinely trained to identify verbal patterns apparently indicative of interlace  a feature of Old English poetry which effects a degree of stylistic, structural and thematic coherence by using patterns larger than those of the units of half line and line, although the term ‘interlace’ now competes with others : formula, apposition, repetition and variation.12 Anglo-Saxon literary critics, however, have often had more to say about the impact of poetry on the ear than on the eye or, rather, the eye of the mind. Leyerle’s influence in this regard has been profound. Using Beowulf as his prime example, but also drawing on Anglo-Latin poets such 9  J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 245–95. 10  Bunting, ‘The Codex’, p. 4, and also pp. 10–11 ; see Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels, pp. 272–394. The ‘gruff sole cormorant’ makes its appearance in Briggflatts, V, p. 78, line 12. My thanks to Josh Davies for calling my attention to the Fulcrum edition of Briggflatts, a copy of which featured in the 2009 exhibition, ‘Writing the Middle Ages’, at the Maughan Library, King’s College London, curated by Davies with Katie Sambrook. 11 See Beowulf : A Verse Translation, trans. Seamus Heaney, ed. Daniel Donoghue (New York, 2002), pp. 130–52. All references to ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’ are to this edition : Leyerle’s essay appears after a reprint of Tolkien’s ‘Monsters and the Critics’ (pp. 103–30). 12  Useful are Fred C. Robinson’s Beowulf and the Appositive Style (Knoxville, TN, 1985) and Elizabeth Tyler, Old English Poetics : The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (York, 2006).

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as Alcuin and Aldhelm, Leyerle’s case for the structural importance of verbal interlace (at the level of individual phrases as well as thematic and structural units) is built on the identification of visual analogues common in the early Anglo-Saxon material arts : manuscript illumination, stone sculpture, metalwork, embroidery, to cite his main examples. The Lindisfarne Gospels, the Ruthwell and Bewcastle monuments, the Sutton Hoo belt buckle  all products of the earliest centuries of what we now call Anglo-Saxon England  are thus part of an argument that, not coincidentally, also stakes a claim for the early composition of Old English literature’s most famous poem, Beowulf. Issues of date aside (although we should probably always leave issues of the dating of Beowulf on one side, I return to this shortly), contemporary criticism has left Leyerle’s brilliant insight intact. Studies of Old English poetry have moved beyond the identification of interlace patterns that dominated so much criticism of the 1970s and 1980s (when it was not engaged on the practice of source identification and analysis) to questions of forms and formularies, on the one hand, and of cultural criticism, on the other. Proponents of the oral aesthetic of Old English poetry  never comfortable with visual analogues for oral forms  have become ever more skilled at identifying poetic features as orally derived.13 Critical understanding of the sophisticated verse techniques of Anglo-Latin poets such as Aldhelm continues to grow (though Aldhelm’s best-known reader, Andy Orchard, keen though he has been to bind AngloLatin and Old English poetry ever closer together, does not discuss Leyerle’s case for their broader cultural context).14 But, in spite of (and perhaps also because of) these developments, Leyerle’s insights remain undeveloped : art of the spoken word  art for the ear (whether or not produced orally)  continues to find some rationale in art for the eye, though just what that rationale might be is rarely examined. Content that there is a connection between verbal and visual art  manifested in interlace  critics of Old English poetry in particular have been disinclined to ask in what does this connection reside. ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf’ thus raises one major question : how are we to relate the pattern spoken and heard (verbal interlace) to the one seen (visual interlace) ? This, as we shall see, is a fundamental question for Bunting. For Leyerle, however, it might have been a non-issue. Throughout ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’, Leyerle’s strategy was to identify verbal interlace patterns that could be paralleled in the visual arts : ‘parallel’, ‘pattern’, ‘design’ and ‘counterpart’ are key words in the essay. The by now familiar etymology of the Latin verb texere (to braid, weave, interlace), which gives rise to both ‘text’ and ‘textile’ in Modern English, facilitates these parallels. Anglo-Saxon verbal artists exchange words (‘wordum wrixlan’, Beowulf, line 284) and weave words (‘wordcræftum wæf ’, 13  See, for example, Mark Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition : Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame, 2005). 14  Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994) ; see also Christopher Abram, ‘Aldhelm and the Two Cultures of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’, Literature Compass 4/5 (2007), 1354–77.

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Elene, lines 1236–7) ;15 their counterparts in visual art weave interlace. Parallels aside, Leyerle’s description of just what interlace is in the visual arts is subjective : looping, knotting, braiding, banding, and weaving are used as apparent synonyms, without consideration of whether or not these practices are in fact the same techniques and relate in the same or similar ways in manuscript, sculptural and verbal practices.16 Nevertheless, analogies are powerful mechanisms for invoking and celebrating the achievements of both visual and verbal art, whereby each form accrues status, cultural capital, from the other. ‘A poetic text’, says Leyerle, ‘is a weaving of words to form, in effect, a verbal carpet page’ : a Lindisfarne carpet page.17 Bunting is similarly alert to the metaphor of weaving as a way of exploring composition and design, both in his poetry and in his lectures. His lecture on the codex (the first in that series of lectures on poetry given in 1969/70) is devoted largely to an analysis of the art of the Lindisfarne Gospels, and, like Leyerle, Bunting is fascinated by this art of what he too terms variously knots, loops, ribbons, spiral and circles. What Bunting takes from the carpet page, however, is the importance of its design, which prompts from him a three-part poetic manifesto in a minor key : first, ‘to simplify detail till only the barest essentials of detail are left’ ; second, ‘to weave an enormous number of such details into an intricate pattern which yet keeps perfect balance and proportion’ ; and, third, ‘to set the central theme with infinite care in just the right place […] and to leave it there without calling attention to it, leave it there for the reader to discover himself ’.18 Bunting the poet here is alert to form (the difference of the verbal from the visual), technique (design), and interpretation ; Leyerle the critic is more interested in theme and structure  the thematic unity of Beowulf in particular  than in how those themes are built at the level of sound, rhythm and word. For Leyerle, then, the relationship between patterns spoken and heard and patterns seen is a matter of likeness or similarity : poetry is a verbal carpet page. In such a critical world of resemblances, of similes and similitudes, what varies is the medium (words, parchment, metal, stone and so forth) : patterns in stone are like those in metal and can be substituted one for the other ; patterns in manuscript art are like those in the poetry, and so forth. The methodology at work here is by no means restricted to Leyerle’s study of interlace, but is a long-lasting feature of the study of Anglo-Saxon cultural artefacts. In visual culture, the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture uses a system of likenesses and resemblances to classify stone sculpture, while, more recently, Richard Bailey and Jane Hawkes, among others, have pointed out a tendency in some Anglo-Saxon sculpture (especially that produced post-Viking Age) to model in stone images and techniques more familiar from the repertoire of 15  Leyerle, ‘Interlace Structure’, pp. 138–40. 16  Fred C. Orton is currently working on interlace and has highlighted for me the problems associated with these and other inexact terminologies : the research was previewed as ‘Fragments of History, Footnote 1  Interlace’ at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, 2009. 17  Leyerle,‘Interlace Structure’, p. 140 ; see also p. 133. 18  Bunting, ‘The Codex’, p. 18.

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Anglo-Saxon metalwork.19 A version of this methodology is also current in textual analysis  especially among those who deal with the sources and analogues of AngloSaxon literary culture (those verbal parallels and similarities between Latin and vernacular texts). But sameness and similarity are notoriously difficult to theorize. The concept of similarity is ‘hopelessly ambiguous’, Nelson Goodman reminds us in ‘Seven Strictures of Similarity’ in an essay put to powerful use in Fred Orton’s recent analyses of the Ruthwell and Bewcastle monuments (which have long been viewed as similar and related monuments).20 The ‘thoroughly problematic concept’ of similarity (on what basis do we evaluate sameness ?) may indeed explain why Leyerle identified likenesses and parallels across different media but, perhaps wisely, did not pursue the meanings of those similarities once identified.21 To the extent that there is a theoretical model of culture that informs such critical methodologies (and it is by no means the case that critics articulate their theoretical conceptualization of culture in their work), it assumes that Anglo-Saxon artefacts (textual and material objects) circulate in a unified cultural world. A paradigm of culture as uniform well accommodates parallels and likenesses by placing both verbal and visual signs in that same system and at the same level structurally so as to facilitate exchange between the verbal and the visual. With respect to Leyerle’s article, the extent to which his argument about the early date of Beowulf is dependent on such a paradigm is clear.22 Favour a late date  say the tenth or eleventh century  for its composition and the force of Leyerle’s argument diminishes because the use of interlace in visual media itself diminishes in the post-Viking age. Patterns in verbal structures, however, persist long after the moment of production and first use of something like the Lindisfarne Gospels. It is, after all, the tenth and early eleventh centuries  not the seventh and eighth centuries  that see the production of the vernacular Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts including the great poetic anthology of the Exeter Book.23 Does the production and reception of this manuscript poetry foster a taste for the archaic that is out of step with what is going on in the visual arts, perhaps ? Or is the poetry doing something else entirely, which we can only glimpse by means 19  See Rosemary Cramp, A Grammar of Anglo-Saxon Ornament : A General Introduction to the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture (London, 1991) ; Richard Bailey, ‘Innocent from the Great Offence’, and Jane Hawkes, ‘Reading Stone’, in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture, ed. Catherine Karkov and Fred C. Orton (Morgantown, WV, 2005), pp. 93–103 and 5–30 respectively. 20 See Fragments of History : Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments, by Fred Orton and Ian Wood, with Clare A. Lees (Manchester, 2007), pp. 62–80. 21  Ibid., p. 66. 22 ‘Beowulf was composed in the early eighth century in the Midlands or North of England, exactly the time and place where interlace decoration reached a complexity of design and skill in execution never equalled since and, indeed, hardly ever approached’, argues Leyerle, ‘Interlace Structure’, p. 131. See further note 28 below. 23  The evidence of the Aldred glosses to the Gospels argues, however, for a tenth-century revival of interest in these earlier arts at least in the north of Anglo-Saxon England ; for discussion, see Brown, The Lindisfarne Gospels, pp. 90–104.

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of analogy and similitude ? As my questions suggest, this unified model of culture, which also lies behind so many other critical practices of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, is problematic. It fails to account for the historical particularities of production and use of any given artefact and it also minimizes the vagaries of social relations, unequal as they are in the Anglo-Saxon period, that are embedded in such artefacts. To say, as Leyerle did, that interlace patterns, seen and/or heard, are resourced by AngloSaxon culture because such patterns are found in Anglo-Saxon culture does not have strong explanatory power. Indeed, Leyerle’s emphasis on how interlace works at the structural, thematic level (hence the title of his essay) is arguably as much influenced by his reading of Eugène Vinaver’s studies of ‘entrelacement’ in Arthurian romance as by Anglo-Saxon interlace. As Leyerle notes, ‘enterlace’ is a term first used by Robert Manning in his fourteenth-century Chronicle : interlace has its etymological origins in French, not in Anglo-Saxon English.24 In short, it is not immediately obvious what to do with a cultural system of parallels and resemblances across artefacts other than identify them. Beyond identification, the path of least resistance (that is, greatest desire) for critical reflection and analysis is to proceed along parallel paths that are destined not to converge : art historians will analyse visual interlace, literary critics verbal interlace, most commonly as a way of building a case for the thematic unity of any given text. This is the path taken by Leyerle, and it heavily influenced those interested in verbal and visual art after him. What interests Leyerle least, but what might actually prove as productive for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon poetry, are the ways in which sounds  not just themes  are linked and laced structurally. Sounds produce  are  the lines of verbal arts. So, to return to the quotations with which this chapter began, let us look again at the question of patterns seen that are also patterns heard : patterns that invite us to see as we hear the sound of the stone mason, the look of an illuminated letter in Briggflatts or the track of an ink trail in an Anglo-Saxon riddle. Leyerle’s insight into the powerful symbolism of early Northumbrian visual and verbal arts (for what else are the Lindisfarne Gospels about if not the power of the Word made visible ?) can be usefully redirected into an analysis of the visual in the verbal.25 This is precisely Bunting’s conclusion in ‘The Codex’. Indeed, Bunting has no truck with the idea that features of the visual comfortably parallel those of the verbal (or with academic criticism, for that matter !). In his analysis of the art of the Lindisfarne Gospels, Bunting does not even use the term ‘interlace’. What absorbs him instead is the complexity of design elements, of patterns and simplifications, of the use of abstractions and their impact on the reader or the viewer. Bunting’s sense that ‘rhythm can be as visible in space as it is audible in time ; and symmetry, and proportion, are as discernible in time as they are in space’ is one derived in part from visual analysis of the Lindisfarne car24  Leyerle, ‘Interlace Structure’, pp. 150–1. 25  The power of ‘The Word made word’, as Brown puts it in The Lindisfarne Gospels, p. 227.

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pet pages.26 Yet it is also an argument highly conscious that poetry deploys rhythm, symmetry and proportion differently. Furthermore, in looking at the graphic art of Northumbria and in seeing how much of it can be ‘brought over’ by poets, as he puts it, ‘into their own art of poetry’, Bunting is also reaching consciously and sentimentally back in place and time with the idea that this earlier culture can be reworked so as to ‘develop and fit it for 20th and 21st century conditions’.27 Bunting and Leyerle seem to agree that Beowulf might be a northern, even Northumbrian poem reflecting an aesthetic evident also in the Lindisfarne Gospels, but Bunting’s aesthetic pushes the Northumbrian card much harder and in ways that few Anglo-Saxonists would now comfortably endorse.28 Regardless of the ‘nativist’ impulse in Bunting’s aesthetic, perhaps Anglo-Saxonists can repay the compliment of his profound interest in earlier British cultures.

Briggflatts : The Riddle of the Poem

There are further connections to be made between the art of the second-generation of modernist poets like Bunting and that of the Anglo-Saxons. For, as Chris Jones has recently taught us in his important book, the poetry of the British modernists (using the term in its loosest sense) offers bold intuitions about Anglo-Saxon poetry, which enlarges our understanding of how this old poetry works.29 Jones excludes Bunting from his study, however, although for good reasons. Jones is rather more interested in how modernist poets rework the metrical effects of the Old English line than I am, and in this regard Bunting is as much influenced by Pound (whom Jones includes) and by Old Norse and Welsh poetry (which Jones excludes) as by Anglo-Saxon.30 Indeed, Bunting’s Briggflatts is probably better regarded as a northern, rather than Saxonist poem (in the sense that Jones uses it, which is that of a modernist poetics influenced by an understanding of Old English prosody). Briggflatts moves very much between places and through time : north (Northumberland, Yorkshire) and south (London, Italy, the Mediterranean and the Persian ‘East’ of the Alexander romances) ; the early medieval and the modern. Its northernness, fittingly enough for a poet committed to reworking earlier northern British culture in his own poetry, is a complex semi-autobiographical mythology of place confected in part from stories 26  Bunting, ‘The Codex’, p. 4. 27  Ibid., pp. 4, 16. Bunting’s friend David Jones was doing something similar in his modern versions of late classical and medieval scripts : see, for example, the title page of The Tribune’s Visitation (London, 1969), as Bunting notes in ‘The Codex’, pp. 8–9 ; and Anna Johnson’s essay in this volume. 28  Bunting is more equivocal than Leyerle about dating (see, ‘The Codex’, p. 16), but insists on a strong early-medieval Northern aesthetic in Briggflatts. His contempt for southerners (‘Southrons’) is well known ; see the prefatory comments to Bunting’s notes to Briggflatts p. 226. For a useful summary of the current debate about the dating of Beowulf, see Klaeber 4th edn, pp. clxii–clxxx. Subsequent references to Beowulf are to this edition, by line number. 29  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006). 30  Ibid., pp. 12–13.

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of Viking, British (that is, Welsh) and Anglo-Saxon Northumbria (another part is that of the world of the epic hero, Alexander, known in both classical and medieval contexts).31 As this material suggests, Briggflatts is a poem that searches, ambivalently, for a hero and sometimes finds one in the old songs of kings and heroes as well as earlier poets. Northern heroes, early saints, ancient wildmen, progenitors and poets all find their way into this poem : Scandinavian sagaman Eric Bloodaxe and Northumbrian Ida (one of the mythical founders of the royal line of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria), Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the Welsh poet Taliesin, Irish Saint Aidan and Northumbrian Saint Cuthbert, to name some of them. In bringing this material to poetic fruit, Bunting draws on some useful apprehensions about Anglo-Saxon art and, in consequence, it can be argued that Briggflatts moves in and out of what might be called an uncannily modern Anglo-Saxon poetics. It is sometimes hard to know which came first or which influenced which in the forging of Briggflatts  the early poetry of the north or that of modernism  but sequence and influence matter less, I think, than the fact that this poem offers us ways to apprehend the verbal art of the Anglo-Saxons anew. I am by no means the first to connect Bunting’s poetry with Anglo-Saxon poetry. Aside from the fact that Bunting himself made the connection (not just in his poetry but also in his lectures, as we have already seen), Peter Makin’s major study of Bunting has carefully explored Bunting’s dense use of Beowulf-ian textuality and interlace as a resource for his wordhoard of weaving and spinning in Briggflatts.32 My interest in Bunting, however, resides rather more in how his poetry helps us rethink the affinities of Anglo-Saxon literary culture with modernism. For further insights into this association, we need to turn directly to Briggflatts and to Bunting’s art. And when we do so, we see that the closely textured relation between the verbal and the visual is fundamental to Briggflatts. Bunting sometimes drew on this relation as a Northumbrian (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) effect, but he was also aware that this effect of sound and vision was in turn a product of a modern insistence on the materiality of the word  its stuffness or thingness. These issues are in fact condensed in the very title of the poem, with its reference both to a place and to a poem.33 Exploring this set of relations will in turn cast greater light on the visual and the verbal in my final example, Exeter Book Riddle 51. The matter of sound and vision  of sound effects, if you will  can be explored 31  For discussion of the reach of what might be called the local, national and transnational in Briggflatts, see Burton Hatlen, ‘Regionalism and Internationalism in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, Yale Journal of Criticism 13 (2000), 49–66. There is, of course, an association to be made between the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels and Persian carpets, which facilitates the connections to be made between the North and the Alexander legend (though Bunting also had a long-lasting interest in Persian poetry). 32 Makin, Bunting : The Shaping of His Verse, especially pp. 160–89 ; see also Peter Makin, ‘Briggflatts and Beowulf ’, Scripsi 4 (1987), 225–41. My thanks to Chris Jones for sending me a copy of this essay and for stimulating conversations about Bunting. 33 Makin, Bunting : The Shaping of His Verse, pp. 11–12.

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in a number of dimensions in Briggflatts. It inheres in the way that the poem is structured as a piece of music like a sonata, though with five movements and a coda.34 So it is worth quoting one of Bunting’s own best-known pronouncements on poetry, namely that ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound  long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another.’35 This is as good an introduction to Anglo-Saxon poetry as any I know, by the way.36 Briggflatts announces itself as a poem to be sung ; its music, internally marked by reference to pipes, flute or strings, asks to be heard. The poem begins ‘Brag, sweet tenor bull, / descant on Rawthey’s madrigal’ (I, p. 61, line 1), which immediately draws attention to voice and music because of its wordplay on bragging, boasting and announcing. This is reminiscent of speech acts used at rituals such as feasts in the early medieval period and, at the same time, it recalls the utterance that opens so many Old English poems  Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood to name but two  and that is so problematic to translate : ‘Hwæt’.37 The beginning of the poem’s final section, the coda, offers us this Poundian play on alliteration, assonance, long and short vowels : ‘A strong song tows / us, long earsick’ (p. 81, lines 1–2). As art to be performed, the ‘strong song’ of Briggflatts presents us with a modern gloss or variant on the importance of voice in Anglo-Saxon literature, which is celebrated in heroic poetry (as the ‘scop’ recites in the hall in Beowulf, for example) and which is often accompanied by music (as Bede describes it in his account of the reluctant, prototypical Anglo-Saxon poet, Cædmon). ‘Poetry and music are both patterns of sound drawn on a background of time’, Bunting argues.38 At the same time, however, and like much Anglo-Saxon poetry, Bunting’s poetry is also resourced visually. In fact Bunting first drew the structure of Briggflatts as a line drawing, as Makin has noted, but visuality does not only image the structure of this poem : visual images produce  are  sound effects too.39 This brings me neatly back to the Lindisfarne Gospels, and to this particular passage of the second movement of Briggflatts, quoted at the chapter’s opening. As we have seen, these lines refer to the superb manuscript art of these Gospels with their carpet pages and the laced capitals or initials that turn 34  As Makin points out (Bunting : The Shaping of His Verse, p. 239), Bunting thought that his contribution to poetry had been the introduction of the sonata form. 35  See Caddel’s discussion in his Introduction to the Complete Poems, p. 11. 36  Although Bunting’s explicit comments on Old English verse come close ; see ‘Thumps’ in Basil Bunting on Poetry, pp. 29–30. 37  Beowulf, line 1 ; see also The Dream of the Rood, ed. Michael Swanton (Manchester, 1970), line 1. Both poems are mentioned by Bunting in ‘The Codex’, p. 16. 38  Bunting, ‘The Codex’, p. 4. Hrothgar’s ‘scop’ recites the story of Finn accompanied by music in Beowulf, lines 1063–1160. Cædmon passes up the chance to recite accompanied by the harp in Bede’s account of this so-called first English poet ; see Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1994), Book IV, chapter 24. 39  ‘Basil Bunting Talks About Briggflatts’, interview with Peter Quatermain and Warren Tallman, Agenda 16 (1978), 8–19, with the line drawings at pp. 9, 10, and 15 ; and Makin, Bunting : The Shape of His Verse, p. 152.

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into or run round, or indeed embrace its zoomorphic imagery. The slow tortoise has other resonances in Briggflatts, however. One of the poem’s male subjects  the young boy-lover of the first movement  claims to be characteristically slow in an erotic sense. At the same time, tortoise and bear are condensations, images which move this second movement of the poem focusing on the young adult poet in Italy back through time into Northumbria, Brigflatts itself, and the younger man’s first lover. With its references to plaiting and its weaving of references forward and back in the poem itself, Briggflatts delivers us to interlace. Interlace here provides a visual analogue both for textual production (it moves the poem on) and for structure (it links various sections of the poem together). At the same time, however, interlace provides a visual image (of an illuminated initial or capital letter from the Gospels), though one made of sounds in their loops, links or laces (consider the alliteration within and across the lines of this quotation on ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘l’). The punctuation of this sound-lace (like the pattern of those dusty tortoises and capering bears) is as much an effect of silence (the bear is ‘muzzled’) as it is of sound (the ‘punctuating’ beats of the alliteration). At the same time, these lines encode a strong physical, material presence (it is tortoises, capering bears and plaited hair that we are talking about). Manuscript page, letter, image, poem and lost beloved are wound up and bound one into another. Presence and absence : now you see it ; now you don’t. Sometimes a pattern seems intentional  a meaning can be deduced, sense can be made ; sometimes we aren’t so sure. This is what tends to happen when we follow a lace  a link or a line  whether we are looking or listening. To find the initial which ‘stands for discarded love’ in these lines of Briggflatts, we have to get ‘lost in Lindisfarne plaited lines’. The afterimage of hair is startling  losing yourself in her hair  but so too is the half-heard echo : are we to get lost in Lindisfarne or in Lindisfarne’s ‘plaited lines’ ? Or both ?40 The alliteration in this line is marked ; its effect is definitely Saxonist (as Chris Jones might put it) or Anglo-Saxon (as I would prefer).41 And, above all, these are deeply sensuous lines, linked in sound just as eye and finger might link  and lose  a Lindisfarne line. I noted earlier that Briggflatts issues a playful challenge to its readers to puzzle out its form and meaning (‘Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing’, IV, p. 75, line 37). Visual interlace offers a similar puzzle  pleasurable or frustrating  of finding and following the lace, or of losing it and with it, perhaps, something more, some new link or association. Both Bunting and Leyerle comment on the power of interlace to draw the eye into the design of an image or a poem in order to figure out what might be said to be simple ornament and what carries a greater significance or symbolism. Looking for, and sometimes finding, the crosses in the carpet pages of the Lindisfarne Gospels, for example, form a powerful dimension of the meaning of the 40  This is an effect of the poem as a whole, of course : Brigflatts or Briggflatts ; Lindisfarne or the Lindisfarne Gospels ? 41 Jones, Strange Likeness, pp. 14–15.

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Gospels, critic and poet note. Visual interlace and verbal riddles are close cousins (as is equally evident in the relation between the Ruthwell monument and The Dream of the Rood).42 In fact, this particular plait of Briggflatts traces a puzzle  or rhymes a riddle. The firm alliterative association linking loss, Lindisfarne, line and love is deepened by the secondary sound-echo and visual rhyme of Lindisfarne with line. Yet the initial of the name of the lover lost in these lines is not disclosed here or elsewhere in Briggflatts, although it is dedicated to Bunting’s first love, Peggy (Greenbank). A riddle of names is at work earlier in the poem as we have already seen : the mason works his tune ‘at letter’s edge’ but we do not know who or what is being named. A similar gesture is made later to ‘Letter the stone to stand / over love laid aside’ (I, p. 64, lines 18–19). Is the lover buried and memorialized by this line or merely put ‘aside’ ? Loving and losing, looking and lettering are at work across the whole of Briggflatts : ‘It looks well enough on the page, but never / well enough. Something is lost’ says the disenchanted poet in the second movement (II, p. 67, lines 17–18). Few Anglo-Saxon riddles formally disclose the name of their subjects either, of course : this is the point of a riddle. On the other hand, in the Lindisfarne section of Briggflatts that we are discussing here, ‘p’ in ‘plaited’ stands for Peggy, perhaps ? And if that ‘p’ stands for ‘discarded love’, a love put ‘aside’, then to card something as wool is carded (we are still with weaving, one way or another) is to put it in order, into the order of a poem, perhaps. A woman, a beloved, is tangled up in these lines.43 Now you see her, now you don’t. At least one of the subjects of Briggflatts is a first love, lost and betrayed ; a ‘letter unanswered’, as the poem puts it (V, p. 80, line 30). But if that lover has been lost, or discarded, long ago by the poet-hero, then she is reclaimed, found, again, in the plaited lines of its poetry. After all, Bunting’s Briggflatts is written from the perspective of the long after. Fifty years after, in fact, a gap of time that uncannily resembles the famous fifty-year gap in Beowulf ’s own heroic career : ‘She has been with me for fifty years’, the poem tells us (Briggflatts, V, p. 80, line 32). The sudden contractions and expansions of time in this line and its Anglo-Saxon associations help explain why the Northumbrian past of the Gospels conceals in its initial the name of the young lover of a twentieth-century poet-in-the making. Is the ‘p’ for poetry, the poet himself, and Peggy, I wonder ? For it is the particular power of poetry to use tense to condense time. We might even want to consider how this poem goes one better than its precursor Beowulf by trading in love as well as in war 42  See ‘The Ruthwell Runes and The Dream of the Rood ’ in Orton, Wood, and Lees, Fragments of History, pp. 144–69. 43  Nicholas Perkins points out to me that there is another association here too, between the poet, the poem, Peggy and the Gospels, since this text’s initial (the first word of this section of the poem) is ‘Poet’. The initial of a new section of the Lindisfarne Gospels is of course the one most plaited too. The chain of association may well be ‘P’ for the poet, Bunting, as well as for poetry and Peggy. And, as noted earlier, the first letter of the first word of the poem as a whole is ‘B’ (‘Brag’ and Basil Bunting ?). The initials P and B are thus interlaced in the poem.

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 although Briggflatts is as much fascinated by forms of masculinity (like Beowulf ) as by (a long-lost) heterosexual romance. Nevertheless, Bunting’s poem offers a modern appropriation of the poetry and arts of the past, and in these Lindisfarne lines in particular we can make an association with the Anglo-Saxon riddles and their play on names, naming and the unnamed, the spoken and the unspoken, the seen and the not-seen.

On Writing Poetry

By way of conclusion, I want to turn back from Bunting’s Lindisfarne lines to Exeter Book Riddle 51, the famous pen-and-three-fingers riddle, to the scribal art of writing, and look one final time at the visual in the verbal. The clue that I am following here is prompted by Bunting, with his references to the mason’s craft of engraving, which ‘times’ its rhythm to a ‘lark’s twitter’ as he fingers the ‘letter’s edge’, to those cormorants that punctuate the interlaced art of the Lindisfarne Gospels as well as Briggflatts, and to the initials that haunt its ‘plaited’ lines. Letters, laces and lettering : pens, fingers and birds. Let us look at the whole riddle : Ic seah wrætlice  wuhte feower samed siþian ;  swearte wæran lastas, swaþu swiþe blacu.  Swift wæs on fore, fuglum framra ;  fleag on lyfte, deaf under yþe.  Dreag unstille winnende wiga  se him wegas tæcneþ ofer fæted gold  feower eallum. I saw four creatures wondrously travelling together ; black were their tracks, the paths very dark. It was swifter on its journey among birds ; it flew in the sky, dove under waves. The struggling warrior persevered without rest, who pointed out the paths over the ornamented gold to all four. This riddle can be seen as an English poetic relative of a Latin question-and-answer text from the clerical miscellany known as the Collectanea of Pseudo-Bede. The miscellany, which is not definitively connected with Anglo-Saxon England but which certainly shows insular affinities in a number of its riddling questions and commonplaces, was probably compiled in several stages between the ninth and tenth centuries : ‘Quae sunt tria muta, quae docent sapientiam in corde hominis ? Est mens, oculus, et litera.’ (‘What are the three silent things that teach wisdom in the heart of man ? They are the mind, the eye, and the letter.’)44 The thirty-eighth question in the Old English Adrian and Ritheus also seems relevant : ‘Saga me feower stafas dumbe. Ic þe secge, an is mod, oðer geþanc, þridde is stef, feorðe is ægesa.’ (‘Tell me four silent letters. I say to you that one is mind, another thought, third is writing, fourth is 44  Collectanea Pseudo-Bedae, ed. Martha Bayliss and Michael Lapidge, Scriptores Latini Hiberniae 14 (Dublin, 1998), number 175.

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fear.’)45 An earlier Latin poem by Hrabanus Maurus, on copying Scripture, speaks to a similar association : ‘Nam digiti scripto laetantur, lumina visu, / Mens volvet sensu mystica verba dei.’ (‘For the fingers rejoice in writing, the eyes in seeing, and the mind in examining the meaning of God’s mystical words.’)46 These Latin and vernacular texts are examples of an early medieval commonplace about knowledge (or wisdom) that links writing with seeing, interpretation with the word and letters with silence, reticence, the enigmatic and the riddling. For Isidore of Seville, letters are visible signs : letters introduce words by the eyes and not by the ears ; they transform sound into sight.47 The Anglo-Saxon reader first sees the letters, and then sounds them in the act of reading, Malcolm Parkes reminds us.48 Anglo-Saxon scribes are certainly alert to visual codes for representing Old English verse, as Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has demonstrated.49 And Anglo-Saxon scenes of reading are primarily visual. Consider Asser’s Latin description of King Alfred’s attraction to the look of the lettering in the book of Anglo-Saxon poetry offered to him by his mother, Osburh, or that of the runic letters on the sword found by Beowulf in Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave and gazed on by Hrothgar as he gives his so-called sermon.50 Reading and riddling are etymologically connected, Nicholas Howe has pointed out ; both encode structures of sight, sound and wisdom : ‘rædan’ = to read (by seeing), to counsel, to give advice (by speaking).51 What does Exeter Book Riddle 51 see ? And what is read ? What does the Exeter Book Riddle see ? In its opening lines, the narrating eye of the riddle watches (‘Ic seah’) an act of writing on a page, which is reinscribed metaphorically as bird (the pen) and warrior (the scribe) by the rest of the poem. The mind perceives the letters differently through the sensory medium of sight in this representation of a commonplace activity of clerical culture  writing. Mind, eye and letter are imbricated in a displacement of a convention of heroic poetry by clerical culture for, 45 See The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus, ed. James E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill (Toronto, 1982), p. 39 ; the editors regard the Old English version corrupt in comparison with its Latin analogues, which include Ps-Bede, Collectanea number 175. 46  Peter Godman, ed. and trans., Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 248–9, lines 5–6. 47  ‘Verba enim per oculos non per aures introducunt’ ; see W.M. Lindsay, ed., Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum siue Originum libri xx, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911), I. iii.1–3. 48  M.B. Parkes, ‘Rædan, Areccan, Smeagan : How the Anglo-Saxons Read’, Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997), 1–22. 49  Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song : Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, 1990). 50  For Asser’s account of Alfred’s reading lesson, see his Life of Alfred in Alfred the Great, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth, 1983), chapter 23 (p. 75). See also Beowulf, lines 1687–99, where Hrothgar examines the runic sword. Whether or not he actually reads it is moot : see further note 52. 51  Nicholas Howe, ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England’ in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 58–79.

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while the warrior (‘wiga’) in the riddle appears to replace the scribe, what is happening is the opposite, the scribe is the new warrior of poetry. This, then, is a useful poem to set against that great work of heroic literature, Beowulf, in which there are plenty of warriors, but no scribes and, it would appear, no-one able to read either.52 The riddle has more to offer. As is conventional for the genre, the riddle works through a series of images and associations, the most obvious of which are those connecting the eye with the creatures, fingers and hand with the pen, the scribe with the warrior, the tracks with the written, and the flying and diving birds with the gold. We see through the creatures to the pen and to the hand that holds it : the heroic scribe.53 We see too, however, the switch from the plural subject in the opening lines of this riddle to the single subject of line 3  four have become one  only to become four once more (evident in the dative plural, ‘feower eallum’, line 7). In the body of the poem, thumb, two fingers and pen work together as one ; the writing hand. This writing hand dipped and flew among the birds in a visual image that replaces the activity of the travelling hand that holds, touches, the pen  a feather pen.54 Sight replaces touch. Indeed, in the final lines of the riddle, the warrior (wiga) reveals the path of writing to all four. The imagery of tracks (wegas) picks up that of the dark paths (lastas) of line 2 : writing is a journey, which is tracked as a warrior or hunter tracks an animal. King Alfred uses a similar image of tracking (seeking and finding) knowledge in the Letter that accompanies the Old English translation of Gregory’s Pastoral Care.55 By the final lines of this riddle, however, those inky dark paths travel, improbably, over a gold surface. Glimpsed here is the dominant colour system of the Anglo-Saxons, structured along an axis of reflection from dark to light, especially gold, shiny things. The ornate gold (‘fæted gold’), however, points more to Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscripts than to any extant manuscript of Anglo-Saxon vernacular poetry, none of which are known for their use of gold. Put another way, the visual imagery of interlace maps the poem  that dipping and flying bird could be a zoomorphic image straight from Anglo-Saxon art, reminiscent perhaps of the Lindisfarne Gospels. A cormorant, perhaps. Perhaps, too, reminiscence is a good way to capture the sense

52  See Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Writing the Unreadable Beowulf ’ in his Desire for Origins : New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 1990), pp. 168–200. 53  Brown speaks powerfully of the heroic scribe and artist of the Lindisfarne Gospels, Bishop Eadfrith, in The Lindisfarne Gospels, pp. 395–404. Scott Gwara and Barbara Bolt have recently suggested that Riddle 51 has a double solution, with the second being Gospel book, although they do not comment on the visuality of the riddle ; see ‘A “Double Solution” for Exeter Book Riddle 51, “Pen and Three Fingers”’, Notes and Queries 54.1 (March 2007), 17–19. 54  John D. Niles points out that, although the solution of this riddle is usually taken to be a pen and three fingers, it can in fact be resolved, elegantly, as a feather pen (punning on the feathers and fingers of the riddle itself) : see Niles, Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 126–7. 55  Conveniently edited in A Guide to Old English, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, 7th edn (Oxford, 2007), pp. 216–19, lines 35–7.

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of the past at work in this tenth-century riddle, with its heroic-age warrior and its heroic scribe. In following the tracks of this particular path of writing, Exeter Book Riddle 51 poses the question of whether there is anything to be found. What is it that this riddle sees ? What is it that we are looking for ? These questions are variants on those posed by the Lindisfarne letters in Briggflatts (whose name is it that is lost in this poetry ?), which is itself a modern analogue of the riddling interlace of the Gospels (do these laces mean anything ?). If sight replaces touch in the Old English riddle, then sight and sound are nonetheless complexly intertwined. Sight is voiced (seeing becomes hearing in the recitation of ‘Ic seah’), yet the letters themselves, as opposed to their inscription, remain not merely unseen, invisible, but also unvoiced, silent, mute. The analogy with the three silent things of the Pseudo-Bede question-and-answer text as well as the dumb letters (‘stafas dumbe’) of Adrian and Ritheus is marked. Here too, in Exeter Book Riddle 51, we do not know what the writing says. In the fiction of the riddle, the metaphoric scene of writing overwrites, as it were, what that writing might have said. This self-conscious poem has writing as its self-reflexive content. We follow the trace. Something has been found. Sense has been made of sight in a poetic meditation on the scribal activity of writing. But, at the same time, something has been lost, which is the specific content of the particular act of writing that is imaged in this riddle. One subject that is several ; a writing hand that tracks birds ; an activity of touch that is presented as seen and heard ; a writer who is a warrior and a scribe ; writing whose inscription we trace but cannot verbalize : a riddle, finally, that is not simply a meditation on the act of writing (though it certainly is that in part) but one on the art of writing and, at the same time, the art of poetry. I began this chapter with an exploration of the striking parallels between Basil Bunting’s understanding of AngloSaxon interlace and John Leyerle’s article on the interlace structure of Beowulf. This developed as an exploration into the ways in which poetry  old and new  makes sense of sight : the visual in the verbal. This has led me in turn to think about how the Old English riddles might be read as verbal laces that make use of visuality  like Bunting’s Lindisfarne lines. In Exeter Book Riddle 51, I would argue that we have a conscious aesthetic practice that, for want of a better word, Anglo-Saxonists term interlace, and also a verbal representation of just such a practice : a lace, a bird, a cormorant perhaps. Ekphrasis.

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7 B OOM : Seeing Beowulf in Pictures and Print Siân Echard

A

ccording to the popular bookselling web-site AbeBooks, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is one of ‘30 Novels Worth Buying for the Cover Alone’.1 The cover in question is from the 2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, the first North American printing of Heaney’s translation. It is an austere, clean design, featuring a photograph of a steel-gray chainmail cowl, seen from the back, on a black background. The title and Heaney’s name are printed in the modern sans-serif font Futura Bold, in white. The cover has, in North America at least, attained iconic status : for many readers, it is the poem. But the story of Heaney’s translation  or rather, the presentation of it  is considerably more complex than this instant recognition might suggest. The translation was commissioned by W. W. Norton, and it duly appears in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, the third item in the venerable textbook that supports what many of us still call the ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ’ survey.2 But Norton also allowed publication in Britain, by Faber & Faber, and in stand-alone format in North America  this is the Farrar, Straus and Giroux printing. The Faber edition appeared in 1999. The Faber cover is semirepresentational, showing drips of black falling vertically across a central roundel of orange and red  I imagine it as the view out from the dragon’s barrow, perhaps (it is

1  See Beth Carswell, ‘30 Novels Worth Buying For the Cover Alone’, http ://www.abebooks.com/ books/great-fiction-covers.shtml, accessed 20 September 2009. The reference is to the cover of Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf : A New Verse Translation (New York, 2000). The Faber edition is Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf : A New Translation (London, 1999). 2  The first two items are an excerpt from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, and a prose translation of the Dream of the Rood. Heaney’s translation first appears in the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology (New York, 2000), replacing E. Talbot Donaldson’s translation. The excerpt from Bede is the story of Caedmon, an originary moment in the English poetic tradition ; this is, in other words, another example of the search for origins which I will be tracing through this paper. Thanks to Nicholas Perkins for pointing out the significance of this excerpt to me.

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in fact a detail from the 1986 painting ‘Then Rain’, by the Irish abstract expressionist Barrie Cooke). The cover font is the elegant, serifed Minion. The book is slim, at fewer than 140 pages, and quite small (22 × 14 cm). The American edition, by contrast, is a few centimeters both taller and wider, and double the length  because it presents both Old English and Heaney’s translation, in facing-page format. Thus the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition’s contents continue the combination of medieval and modern in the cover design, and the extra heft of the book might be seen as a kind of confirmation of its historical importance. A later edition by Faber sharpens the contrast between the British and North American presentations, as Heaney’s Beowulf is now available as part of Faber’s Poetry Series, designed by Justus Oehler of Pentagram.3 The series features ‘typographic’ covers  each book uses three plain colours, and left-justified names and titles, all in one size of the font Perpetua. There are no images. Heaney’s Beowulf thus appears uniform with the works of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Andrew Motion, Wendy Cope, and other contemporary poets ; it is also, of course, uniform with Heaney’s other works in the series. The current Faber edition, then, gives us Heaney the poet. The Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition is at present adorned with a Whitbread Prize sticker, and I do not mean to downplay either Heaney’s achievement or the importance of his name (though in a smaller font) in the selling of the North American edition.4 But I have chosen to begin this essay with the contrasting treatments of Heaney’s translation because the popular North American cover underlines a persistent habit in the presentation of Beowulf  what I am thinking of as the artifactual habit. The Faber single-language editions, particularly the most recent, are in fact the exception, rather than the rule, in their eschewal of a medieval or medievalized image to stand in for the poem. That marvelous cowl on the American edition has a very long history, one that is both visual and symbolic. Helmets, swords, and other medieval artifacts have become a convenient shorthand in the packaging of Beowulf, so automatic that we almost fail to notice their presence or effect. But I will argue that this presentation both grows out of, and can even perpetuate, the situation famously described by J.R.R. Tolkien when he wrote that scholars had often come to 3  This is the edition currently offered for sale on Faber’s website. There is also a 2007 dual-language edition by Faber, though at the time of writing, while it is available through amazon.co.uk, it does not appear in Faber’s online catalogue. The cover for this bilingual edition features a photograph of the Kingston Brooch, in keeping with the emphasis on artifacts common in many of the editions I treat in this essay. 4  A particularly interesting treatment of that name is another Norton publication of the translation : in addition to appearing in the Norton Anthology, it also appears in a stand-alone volume in the Norton Critical Editions series. The cover is ‘artifactual’ in my terms, featuring a photograph of the Cuerdale Hoard. Heaney is listed on the title page with ‘Harvard University’ below his name  in this textbook presentation, what matters more than Heaney’s poetic reputation is his scholarly affiliation. Seamus Heaney, trans., and Daniel Donoghue, ed. Beowulf, a Verse Translation : Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism (New York, 2002).

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the poem in search of ‘a history of Sweden, a manual of German antiquities, or a Nordic Summa Theologica’.5 When Beowulf first appeared in print, it was in Grímur Thorkelin’s edition of 1815.6 For Thorkelin, this was a ‘Poëma danicum dialecto anglosaxonica’, and the physical presentation did everything possible to underline the poem’s claimed status as a foundational Scandinavian epic. In addition to the Latin apparatus (of course not uncommon in scholarly European texts of the time), there were Thorkelin’s own classicizing Latin verses as epigraph, and a two-column presentation of the original in a Roman font with Anglo-Saxon additional characters on the left, and a Latin translation in an italic font on the right.7 There are no images apart from the device on the title page of a harp pierced by a sword, in a wreath (all of them very eighteenth-century in appearance). The reception of Thorkelin’s edition and the subsequent early editorial history of Beowulf is a story that has been told in many excellent studies. My concern here is simply to establish that at its first appearance in print, Beowulf was packaged with an eye to a particular impact  but that impact was confined to the effects of type and layout. Nevertheless, studies of the Viking and Saxon past were, by the nineteenth century, frequently accompanied by many illustrations, and the archaeological discoveries of the later part of the century doubtless accelerated the demand for visual renderings of objects like the Vendel grave goods or the Gokstad ship.8 By the beginning of the twentieth century, then, a critical mass of objects was available, waiting to be attached to Beowulf. And that attachment happened most importantly, I will argue, in Friedrich Klaeber’s 1922 edition of Beowulf. Beowulf had been presented with accompanying illustrations before Klaeber’s edition. For example, Wentworth Huyshe’s prose translation, published in 1907, is punctuated with line-drawings of many of the artifacts I will have occasion to discuss in what follows.9 What makes the presentation of Klaeber’s Beowulf so important for the visual history of the poem is the prominence his edition was to have, for the whole of the twentieth century, in the teaching of, and scholarship on, Beowulf. The edition first appeared in 1922, a small and modest printing with only six plates  but 5  J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 245–95, at p. 248. 6  De Danorum rebus gestis secul. III & IV. Poëma danicum dialecto anglosaxonica, ed. Grímur Jónsson Thorkelín (Copenhagen, 1815). This is the first complete printing of Beowulf  for an overview of the poem’s textual history, see R.D. Fulk, ‘Textual Criticism’, in A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln, NE, 1997), pp. 35–52 ; note in particular the chronology of editions with which the essay begins. 7  The two-column presentation necessitated printing each half line on its own line ; the Latin translation matches the layout exactly. I discuss the contribution of typography to the claims being made by and for Beowulf in Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2008), especially pp. 53 and 56–9. 8  For a survey of the impact of archaeology on the discussion and presentation of Beowulf, see Catherine M. Hills, ‘Beowulf and Archaeology’, in Bjork and Niles, A Beowulf Handbook, pp. 291–310. 9  Beowulf : An Old English Epic (The Earliest Epic of the Germanic Race), trans. Wentworth Huyshe (London, 1907).

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these plates were to set the tone for everything that followed. Klaeber included two folios from the manuscript ; a map10 of ‘The Geography of Beowulf ’, and drawings of the Gokstad ship (reconstructed) ;11 a bronze plaque from Öland showing warriors with boar helmets ; a helmet from one of the Vendel graves ; the great collar of gold from Öland ; and a burial mound from Zealand. The drawings come from nineteenthcentury works on the history and archaeology of the Viking era.12 Figures 7.1 and 7.2 are drawn from the English translation by F.H. Woods of one of these, Oscar Montelius’s The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times.13 They are doubtless familiar images to students of Beowulf. They remained part of Klaeber’s edition through subsequent revisions, of course. Even the most recent version, the 2008 overhaul of Klaeber’s work by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles (called Klaeber’s ‘Beowulf ’ : Fourth Edition, in recognition of Klaeber’s achievement), shows the effect of these first illustrative choices. While new technology has made for better reproductions, Klaeber’s own selections are all but untouched, and even the sequence remains largely intact.14 Some drawings have been replaced by photographs, but the Öland necklace continues to appear in the nineteenth-century drawing, itself now an object of antiquarian interest. I note this survival in particular because it illustrates not merely the importance of Klaeber’s choices, but also the fluid traffic of text and image in the transmission of Beowulf. Figure 7.3 is another antiquarian illustration as found in Klaeber, a Vendel helmet, this time in a 1923 printing of William Ellery Leonard’s verse translation.15 Its presence might have been suggested by Klaeber’s recent edition (which used the same

10  Alfred Hiatt, ‘Beowulf off the Map’, Anglo-Saxon England 38 (2009), 11–40, discusses the use of maps in editions of Beowulf. I am grateful to him for allowing me to read this in advance of publication. 11  The Gokstad ship was discovered in 1880. There were in fact four vessels in all, three smaller boats being found in the bow of the ship ; see A.W. Brøgger and Haakon Shetelig, The Viking Ships : Their Ancestry and Evolution (Oslo, 1971), pp. 52 ff. The Norwegian edition appeared first in 1951. Thanks to my colleague Richard Unger for sharing his vast knowledge of medieval boats with me. 12  Hills notes that the connection between Beowulf and archaeology has long been a two-way street : ‘From Stjerna onwards Swedish archaeologists have tried to use Beowulf to attach names to the kings buried at Uppsala and elsewhere’, p. 294. Klaeber refers to such efforts himself in his edition. 13  Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans. F.H. Woods (London, 1888). Klaeber credits the German version of this text. He also drew on Studier tillägnade Oscar Montelius af Lärjungar (Stockholm, 1903), and M. Hoernes, Die Urgeschichte des Menschen (Vienna, 1892). The figures are on pp. 162 and 128. The bronze plaque is one of four found at Björnholfda in Öland (Sweden) in 1870. The collar is also from the island of Öland, and dates from the fifth to sixth centuries. 14  See Klaeber 4th edn. The Gokstad Ship has been replaced by the Ladby Ship (excavated at Ladby on Funen, Denmark, between 1935 and 1936), perhaps because of a desire to give more prominence to Denmark, something Niles remarks upon in his illustrated edition of Heaney’s Beowulf, discussed below. Klaeber’s single map has been replaced by two. The Vendel helmet is not the same as that used in Klaeber’s earlier editions, and this new edition also includes a photograph of the Benty Grange helmet. 15  The graves in Vendel, Uppland, Sweden, were excavated between 1881 and 1883. See Hjalmar Stolpe, Ture Algot Johnsson Arne, and O. Sörling, La nécropole de Vendel (Stockholm, 1927).

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Figure 7.1  Bronze plaque from Öland, from Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans. F.H. Wood (London, 1888).

Figure 7.2  Gold collar from Öland, from Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden in Heathen Times, trans. F.H. Wood (London, 1888).

Figure 7.3  Vendel helmet, from Beowulf, trans.William Ellery Leonard (New York, 1923).

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illustration), but it is credited here to Knut Stjerna’s Essays on Beowulf.16 Stjerna’s essays, published between 1903 and 1908, demonstrate the degree to which archaeology and Beowulf had come to exist in a reciprocal relationship. John R. Clark Hall, who translated and edited the essays after Stjerna’s death in 1909, issued the caution that ‘notwithstanding the great value of archaeological evidence, we must be on our guard against looking upon it as necessarily conclusive’, and one of his examples was the Öland necklace. He argued that, because only three such necklaces had been found, and only one at Öland, it would be dangerous to take the necklace as proof of Stjerna’s theory as to the pre-eminence of Öland in the Geatish kingdom.17 Perhaps  but the object is stunning, as is the meticulous drawing of it, and my interest here is in the tracking of images, in the role of the visual in the presentation of Beowulf. Hall’s collected edition of Stjerna’s essays, published in 1912 with a title-page that promised ‘one hundred and twenty-eight illustrations and two maps’, both highlights and facilitates the interplay of poem and object. Stjerna’s work remains an important image source for other editions and translations, with the plates he published (himself drawing on other archaeological publications) moving freely from printing to printing. Meanwhile, Leonard’s translation is also repackaged, appearing with illustrations by Lynd Ward first in 1939, and then again with these illustrations in a 1952 Limited Editions Club printing. Leonard’s is only one of many translations of Beowulf to move from one presentation to another. Like the pictures, then, the proliferating texts of Beowulf are in constant motion. Some translations recur with completely new illustrative programs. For example, Kevin Crossley-Holland’s 1968 translation has been illustrated by Brigitte Hanf, Virgil Burnett, and Charles Keeping.18 Each new set of illustrations can constitute a new interpretation : Marijane Osborn argues that Burnett’s illustrations turn Beowulf ‘into a fairy tale’, and in the case of the Limited Editions Club illustrations, she comments with some distaste on Ward’s pictorial program as ‘Aryan art, Jugendstil at its finest and most disturbing’.19 But the image that

16  This is Knut Martin Stjerna’s Essays on Questions Connected with the Old English Poem of Beowulf, ed. and trans. John R. Clark Hall (Coventry, 1912). The plate appears here as in William Ellery Leonard, Beowulf : A New Verse Translation for Fireside and Class Room (New York, 1923). This edition also includes a page from the manuscript, a photograph of the Oseberg ship (without the restored prow), a drawing of a sword from ‘an old Swedish grave’ (this is from Ultuna, Uppland), a map, and two plans of Heorot. 17  Hall in Stjerna, Essays, p. xxiv. Catherine M. Hills cites C.J. Arnold’s exasperation, expressed in 1988, with the ‘Beowulf and brooches’ approach to archaeology, suggesting the longevity of the relationship between objects and the poem ; ‘Beowulf and Archaeology’, pp. 293, 295. 18  Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., Beowulf (London, 1968), has three impressionistic black-andwhite drawings by Brigitte Hanf. The Folio Society published the translation in 1973 with illustrations by Virgil Burnett. Crossley-Holland produced another version aimed at children for Oxford University Press, and this was published in 1999 with illustrations by Charles Keeping. 19 Marijane Osborn, ‘Translations, Versions, Illustrations’, A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Bjork and Niles, pp. 341–72, at pp. 355, 356 ; she goes on to refer to Ward’s ‘arrogant blond Beowulf ’.

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Figure 7.4  Viking readers, from Limited Editions Club reprint of Beowulf, trans. William Ellery Leonard (New York, 1952).

most interests me in this presentation of Leonard’s translation is Figure 7.4, from the book’s colophon. These three Vikings with their winged and horned helmets, apparently reading from stone tablets by starlight, are of course amusing and whimsical. The style is very much at odds with the sharp, modernist lines of Ward’s full-page illustrations, suggesting instead the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative vocabulary, particularly as it appeared in popular histories and in such early pictorial realizations of Beowulf as Wentworth Huyshe’s (1907). These figures are quaint, in a way Ward’s Geats are not. Their helmets, as any historian of the era would say, are all wrong. But outside the context of the Limited Edition Club printing, these helmeted figures are what many readers might expect : Beowulf is supposed to include drawings of objects from the past, however loosely understood that past might be. I have said that the winged helmets in Figure 7.4 are wrong. The publication history of Beowulf would suggest that other helmets, however, are right. I have already mentioned the Vendel helmets that appeared in Klaeber and others ; after 1939, these helmets were joined, indeed overwhelmed, by the Sutton Hoo helmet. Beowulf responded, Roberta Frank writes, ‘like a moth to a flame’ to the discovery of the ship burial at Sutton Hoo, and ‘nothing has been the same since’.20 Frank goes on to argue trenchantly for the inappropriateness of the Sutton Hoo helmet, patiently drawing attention to the effects the find has had on dating the poem and on translation practices ; she also illustrates the extent to which the poem is asked to illuminate histories 20  Roberta Frank, ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo : The Odd Couple’, in The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England : Basic Readings, ed. Catherine E. Karkov (New York, 1999), pp. 317–38, at p. 317. The essay first appeared in Voyage to the Other World : The Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. Calvin B. Kendall and Peter S. Wells (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 47–64. My thanks to my colleague Gernot Wieland for drawing this article to my attention.

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to which it might be at best peripheral. But, she concludes, ‘Neither Beowulf nor Sutton Hoo is about to throw over fifty years of shared learning and experience.’21 A quick glance at any bookseller website tends to confirm the observation. The Penguin Classics prose translation by David Wright first appeared in 1957 with a drawing, reminiscent of the archaeological drawings in Klaeber discussed above, of the great buckle from Sutton Hoo.22 Michael Alexander’s verse translation, also for Penguin, first featured an enameled escutcheon from the hanging bowl. That was in 1973 ; while the current cover features a detail from the later Strickland Brooch (a ninth-century artifact),23 the general appearance still fits comfortably with what buyers might by now have come to expect from the cover of an Anglo-Saxon poem (oddly, the Penguin original-language edition sports a detail of William Blake’s The Body of Abel found by Adam and Eve  thematically appropriate, but otherwise unexpected).24 The 1975 Norton Critical edition of E. Talbot Donaldson’s translation presented a modern, graphical rendition of the Sutton Hoo harp.25 But it is the Sutton Hoo helmet that has come to define Beowulf. It appears, for example, on the covers of the current reprint of Wright’s translation for Penguin ;26 on the 2001 Norton Critical edition of Donaldson’s translation ; on the first edition of Howell Chickering’s dual-language edition (1977) ;27 on the updated version (2004) of Frederick Rebsamen’s verse translation ;28 and on two critical companions, both from 2005 (Andy Orchard’s and Ruth Johnston Staver’s).29 There are other approaches to cover design, of course. The cover of Klaeber’s edition had no image at all until the 2008 revision, which features a handsome photograph of the Snartemo Sword.30 Crossley-Holland’s translation is repackaged once again, this time by cover art, in the Oxford World’s Classics version, which features a detail from Dijon Municipal Library, MS 168, a copy of Gregory the Great’s 21  Frank, ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo’, p. 331. 22  David Wright, trans., Beowulf : A Prose Translation (Harmondsworth, 1957). The classic orangeand-cream Penguin covers are currently being revived. For discussion of Penguin covers, see Phil Baines, Penguin by Design : A Cover Story, 1935–2005 (Harmondsworth, 2006). Penguin also produced Seven Hundred Penguins in 2007. 23  Michael Alexander, trans., Beowulf : A Verse Translation (Harmondsworth, 1973). The revised edition was published in 2001 and reprinted in 2003. 24  Michael Alexander, ed., Beowulf : A Glossed Text (Harmondsworth, 1995) ; revised 2000, reprinted with revised Further Reading 2005. 25  Joseph F. Tuso, ed., Beowulf : The Donaldson Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (New York, 1975). 26  See note 22 above. 27  Howell D. Chickering, Jr., ed. and trans., Beowulf : A Dual-Language Edition (New York, 1977). A new edition, with a new afterword, appeared in 2006. This edition’s cover features a handsome photograph of four Viking sword hilts. 28  Frederick Rebsamen, trans., Beowulf : An Updated Verse Translation (New York, 2004). An earlier edition appeared from HarperCollins in 1991. 29  Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to ‘Beowulf ’ (Cambridge, 2005) ; Ruth Johnston Staver, A Companion to ‘Beowulf ’ (Westport, CT, 2005). 30  This is a Norwegian ring-hilted sword dating to the sixth century.

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Moralia in Iob, done at Citeaux c.1111.31 The image shows an angel killing a monster (perhaps a dragon). But nothing matches the ubiquity of helmets, and in particular, the Sutton Hoo helmet. The lavishly-illustrated art book version (Alan Sutton, 1987) of Michael Alexander’s translation, presented by Julian Glover as a follow-on to his one-man performance of the poem, includes many plates by the artist Sheila Mackie.32 These combine period detail with touches that suggest the world of fantasy illustration, but that is in itself, of course, a medievalizing world, and here too we find the Sutton Hoo helmet (see Plate iii). This figure makes the point that, where the helmet does not grace the cover of a book, it nevertheless often features in the illustrations. Another example is found in Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s Blackwell edition of the poem (1998).33 That edition uses the more recently-discovered Coppergate helmet on the cover, while the title page features the boar-crested Benty Grange helmet.34 The supplementary essay on ‘Archaeology and Beowulf ’, by Leslie Webster, however, features by many illustrations, including the Sutton Hoo helmet and other objects.35 Sometimes the helmet is the object as found ; sometimes it is the restoration/replica made in 1939 by the Tower of London Armouries. The image, particularly in versions of Beowulf aimed in some way at scholarly or classroom use, is usually photographic, though there are some line drawing versions of it which connect it more squarely to the Vendel helmets favoured in an earlier period and still occasionally used (there are photographs of a Vendel helmet on the covers of books produced by Barnes and Noble and Manchester Medieval Classics).36 But one thing these helmets all have in common, of course, is that they are empty. Beowulf is not merely defined by an artifact ; it is defined by an object that announces the absence of any wearer. The artifactual emphasis links Beowulf, not merely to the human workings which the poem 31  Kevin Crossley-Holland, trans., and Heather O’Donoghue, ed., Beowulf [and] The Fight at Finnsburh (Oxford, 1999). The manuscript image appears in a striking collage with the first page from the Beowulf manuscript on the website Beowulf on Steorarume (Beowulf in Cyberspace), designed by Benjamin Slade (http ://www.heorot.dk/beowulf-on-steorarume_front-page.html ; following the link from ‘Beowulf Artwork’ towards the foot of the page, then ‘Read Beowulf ’ will take readers to a much larger and clearer image). This collage is picked up in the illustrated edition of Heaney’s Beowulf discussed below. 32  Beowulf : An Adaptation by Julian Glover of the Verse Translations of Michael Alexander and Edwin Morgan (Gloucester, 1987). There is a foreword by Glover, and an Introduction by Magnus Magnusson. Mackie also provided illustrations, a few in a very similar spirit, to Magnusson’s Lindisfarne, the Cradle Island (London, 1984). 33  Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson, eds, Beowulf : An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Oxford, 1998). 34  The Coppergate helmet was unearthed in 1982. While the Benty Grange helmet has been known since 1848, it seems, in my admittedly incomplete survey, to be among the least popular choices. 35  This essay is also found in the Norton Critical edition version of Heaney’s translation (see note 4 above), again with its illustrations. 36  John McNamara, trans., Beowulf (New York, 2007). A 2005 printing of the same translation uses one of the Oseberg prow figures instead. The Manchester edition is Michael Swanton, ed., Beowulf, rev. edn (Manchester, 1997).

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itself, with its references to armour, weapons, cups, and rings, celebrates, but also to that which is lost. The Last Survivor’s speech mourns the loss of his companions in terms of the decaying of war-gear and warriors alike : Sceal se hearda helm  (hyr)stedgolde, fætum befeallen ;  feormyng swefað, Þa ðe beadogriman  bywan sceoldon ; ge swylce seo herepad,  sio æt hilde gebad ofer borda gebræc  bite irena, brosnað æfter beorne.   (lines 2255–60) The persistent linking of Beowulf to objects like the helmets and swords which speak so eloquently of absent human bodies turns the speech into a précis of the poem as a whole, directing our understanding of it even before we open the book. The single cover images I have dealt with in the last few pages have a particular power, precisely because they are the first, and in some cases the only, images a reader of Beowulf will see. But as the discussion of Klaeber has I hope made clear, there has also been a persistent tendency, in the presentation of Beowulf, to offer multiple illustrations of artifacts as a way of encountering the poem. Klaeber’s modest collection of maps, photographs and drawings set the tone ; later, more lavish versions expand on that initial approach. I turn here to three recent attempts to realize Beowulf visually, not merely in terms of cover art, but in a more thoroughgoing way. Two are the efforts of scholars to draw on photographs of medieval objects in order to add a visual, material dimension to translations of the poem. The third is a recent graphic novelization of the poem. All show their inheritance of the visual culture I have been tracing thus far ; each contributes further to the continuance of that culture. They also show the extent to which scholars exercise artistic imagination, while artists conduct scholarly research. The pictorial world of Beowulf is a symbiotic one, with each new version responding, consciously or perhaps unconsciously, to what has preceded it. Marijane Osborn deployed her knowledge of both the poem and its pictorial history in her own verse translation, published by the University of California Press in 1980. The subtitle offers ‘A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North’, and the restored version of the Sutton Hoo helmet forms the frontispiece. The treasures in question are reproduced in handsome black-and-white photographic versions, artistically deployed in the margins of the generously-sized pages, sometimes spread across the centrefold. Their origins are meticulously documented, and Osborn’s notes make clear the importance these illustrations hold for her reading of the poem : ‘Only with recent archaeological discoveries has it become clear how accurately the Beowulf poet is describing the objects of worth in his poem ; the monsters may be highly symbolic aggressors, but the poet’s reconstruction of the material culture of the society upon which they prey accords largely with the facts.’37 The emphasis on 37  Marijane Osborn, trans., Beowulf : A Verse Translation with Treasures of the Ancient North (Ber-

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‘facts’ is underscored by Osborn’s further remarks that these artifacts ‘give the poem a credibility within a material dimension’.38 The artifacts chosen include a variety of helmets, the Oseberg ship, a range of swords (second only to helmets in popularity as cover-art), and some manuscript images. The overwhelming impression is of authenticity and archaeological exactitude. But there are some interesting choices, too, choices which push beyond the artifactual and begin to show how the visual references confect a world that responds to our desires and expectations, as well as to facts and credibility. The poem’s famous first words have, from the beginning of Beowulf ’s print history, attracted special attention. Thorkelin used slightly enlarged capitals for both ‘Hwaet’ and ‘Qvomodo’ (the latter the first word of the Latin translation), but by far the most common treatment is typified by Klaeber’s use of capital letters, ‘HWæT WE GARDEna’, indicating exactly the manuscript practice in treating these opening syllables. Sometimes the opening word may be set off, as in the Penguin edition of Alexander’s verse translation, where ‘Attend !’ stands on its own line, or in the Penguin edition of Wright, which opens ‘HEAR’. Sometimes the first several words appear in capital letters ;39 sometimes the opening line is prefaced with a title, such as ‘THE OPENING’, a title that precedes Leonard’s unfortunate ‘What ho !’ Osborn’s opening follows this kind of typographic practice, but with a twist. Her first word, ‘WHAT’, begins with an initial from the Lindisfarne Gospels (London, British Library MS Cotton Nero D. iv)  the ‘M’ from Marcus, on folio 90r, here flipped to look like a ‘W’.40 The manuscript dates to the late seventh or early eighth centuries, a period consistent with some datings of the poem, and its elaborately interlaced artwork accords with both Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian historical contexts.41 But there are even more accurate sources for the first letter. The Beowulf manuscript itself provides a capital wynn, if what one is seeking is authenticity, and even the Lindisfarne Gospels have that letter-form, though in the late tenth-century Old English gloss rather than in a decorative hand. Clearly then, there has been a search for letters which are not merely authentic, but which reflect the weight that has long been accorded to the first word of the poem.42 Sheila Mackie’s full-page illustration reproduces some of the lettering keley, 1980), p. 128. The translation has an introduction by Fred C. Robinson. The book is published in association with Robert Springer/Pentangle Press. 38 Osborn, Beowulf, p. 129. 39  As for example in Ruth Lehmann’s 1989 translation, which opens ‘N OW W E HAV E H E A R D S T O R I E S of high valor’, Beowulf : An Imitative Translation (Austin, TX, 1988), p. 21. 40 Osborn, Beowulf, p. 1 ; the inversion is noted on p. 129. 41  John Leyerle’s essay on ‘The Interlace Structure of Beowulf ’, included in the Norton Critical edition version of Heaney’s translation, uses such similar manuscripts as the Book of Durrow and the St Chad’s Gospels to support its argument. The essay first appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967), 1–17. 42  Or to its opening understood more broadly  for example, Beowulf, ed. Mitchell and Robinson, introduces the text with the title B E O Ƿ V L F (using the Old English letter-form wynn for the ‘W’) ; the

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from the Beowulf manuscript, but here too there is adjustment : her initial H is large, gold, and interlaced. Osborn’s choice, in other words, participates in an approach to the presentation of the poem which has its roots in both the manuscript and the first print presentations, yet which has also taken on a momentum of its own. In 2008, Norton produced an illustrated edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.43 The back jacket cover features an endorsement by the writer Neil Gaiman, who had recently co-written the script for Robert Zemeckis’s film Beowulf (2007) : ‘This illustrated edition is possibly the finest version of Heaney’s translation yet, and is the next best thing to being in the mead hall at Heorot, watching the action, with Heaney chanting it beside you.’ In Gaiman’s imagination, watching (and listening) add crucial elements to the poem  the visual is central to a complete apprehension of the text. Gaiman is himself a graphic novelist of note, so his is the response of one already keenly aware of the importance of the visual.44 John D. Niles, for his part, says that the images have been chosen ‘first and foremost for visual delight’ ;45 at the same time, the presentation of the images is often in the scholarly mode, sometimes explicating, sometimes registering points of debate or disagreement  even, on occasion, with the translation. The verso of each opening presents a colour photograph, usually of an artifact ; the recto has Heaney’s translation, with a footnote, in small italic type, commenting on the illustration.46 A typical example is found next to a detail of the Benty Grange helmet : ‘The arms worn by Beowulf ’s men identify them as members of the aristocratic warrior class. “Boar-shapes flashed” on their helmets, the poet states. This image of a boar from Benty Grange, Derbyshire, surmounted a helmet as an emblem of ferocity in war. Though modeled in part on Roman parade helmets, Germanic helmets had a distinctive style.’47 In this case the note quotes Heaney ; in a later instance, the note is slightly at odds with the translation, when Niles explains his choice of the Bronze Age Rillaton Cup to illustrate line 2231 : The thief takes a single cup from the hoard. The poet calls it a sinc-faet, literinitial ‘B’ here is drawn from folio 4r of the Ramsey Psalter (British Library, Harley 2904), which dates to the last quarter of the tenth century. 43  Seamus Heaney, trans., and John D. Niles, ed., Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney : An Illustrated Edition (New York, 2008). 44  Gaiman does not provide the illustrations for his graphic novels himself, but he works closely with the artists, and his commentaries in the famous Sandman series make it clear that his storytelling often begins with an image. 45  Heaney and Niles, Beowulf, p. 215. 46 Another Beowulf clearly designed with the openings in mind is Marijane Osborn, Randolph Swearer, and Raymond Oliver, Beowulf : A Likeness (New Haven, CT, 1990). Fred C. Robinson’s introduction notes, p. 1, that ‘This volume is not designed page-by-page but as two-page units, and the reader should see the images and the segment of text presented at any opening of the book as a meaningful unit.’ The illustrations include photographs and designs that draw on the Beowulf manuscript, landscapes, weapons  and of course the Sutton Hoo helmet, in this case forming the book’s frontispiece. 47  Heaney and Niles, Beowulf, p. 21.

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Heaney’s gems may remind us of Roberta Frank’s comments on the effects of Sutton Hoo on translations : she points to a ‘drastic increase in the gold and silver content of the verse’ since 1939, remarking in one case on the use of ‘garnets’ when none are to be found in the Old English (though they are plentiful in the burial).49 In her illustrated edition, Osborn used the Jelling Cup, from Jutland, dating to around 950, at this point, and while Niles offers the Rillaton Cup here, his general approach might otherwise endorse such a choice, since he makes clear that he has chosen to emphasize Denmark more than Sweden, in a conscious differentiation ‘from what one sees in earlier pictorial compilations going back to Huyshe 1907 and Stjerna 1912  works published at a time when the poem’s Swedish affinities were widely thought to deserve highlighting’.50 The choice to emphasize Danish artifacts is informed by contemporary scholarship, but Niles’s images are also sometimes drawn from a more personal and imaginative register. He uses his own photograph for the haunted mere : ‘Perhaps no illustration can to justice to this scene, but this photo is meant to be suggestive of it. The picture was actually taken at a serene spot in Ireland ; its colors were subsequently distorted.’51 The mere is in fact one of the most popular subjects for artistic illustration (as distinct from representation in the artifactual mode), so Niles here makes contact with a different way of approaching the poem visually. He also occasionally acknowledges the past history of Beowulf in print, using, for example, the same nineteenth-century drawing of a sword hilt from Ultuna, Sweden, that one finds in the 1923 printing of Leonard’s translation (sourced there from Stjerna) ; a nineteenth-century plate of Vendel helmets and ornaments very similar to those found in Klaeber’s Beowulf ; and the same engraving as found in Klaeber of a tomb from Zealand. Niles remarks of this last plate that ‘Though idealized in a rustic manner, this nineteenth-century engraving […] is architecturally exact’, but a later use of a nineteenth-century lithograph of Old Uppsala has been chosen, he says, because it ‘accents the romantic atmosphere of the place’.52 I might remark here in passing on the cover design of R.M. Liuzza’s recent translation for Broadview, which uses a sepiatinted detail from an 1867 photograph of the Danish Baltic island of Bornholm, by Gottlieb Stöckel.53 The nineteenth-century albumin print has the same romantic, 48  Ibid., p. 151. 49  Frank, ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo’, p. 327. 50  Heaney and Niles, Beowulf, p. 245 n. 5. 51  Ibid., p. 55. 52  Ibid., pp. 149 and 161. 53  R. M. Liuzza, trans., Beowulf : A New Verse Translation (Peterborough, Ontario, 2000).

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antique quality which Niles remarks on in his Uppsala lithograph. The illustrations sometimes nod, in other words, to the world of antiquarian illustration which was, I have argued, so important to the first presentations of Beowulf to a reading public. Niles also offers a thoughtful use of the Sutton Hoo helmet. The unrestored helmet appears next to the opening of the dragon fight, and Niles remarks that ‘The hero Beowulf is never described in physical detail and remains fairly inscrutable. Since 1939, however, when the treasures buried at Sutton Hoo were unearthed, many persons have been tempted to associate the poem with objects found at that site. This helmet, for some present-day readers, may be as close to the man “Beowulf ” as one can get.’54 Later, he uses the replica to illustrate Wiglaf ’s rebuke, explaining that ‘The king is the helm of his people […] This modern replica of the Sutton Hoo helmet serves as a reminder of this heroic ethos, which centers on the figure of a single charismatic leader.’55 The final image is a photograph of a barrow at sunset, allowing one to contemplate, Niles writes, ‘the difference that one heroic life can make in what is otherwise an unremarkable landscape’.56 This beautiful book is itself a monument and a tribute to the poem. But as the barrow also makes clear, the hero is dead. The helmets are empty, the swords are fragments, and the hands that gripped them, dust. The faceless cowl which first introduced the Heaney translation to North American readers has been replaced, in Niles’s version, with a dagger, but I would argue that the elegiac impact remains. The lay of the Last Survivor reminds us that this impact is inherent in the poem, but it is also the product of a long tradition of representation, of which the Niles–Heaney edition is only the most recent and accomplished example. I have noted the occasional scholarly register of Niles’s notes, and thus far I have been concerned with the visual as it appears in texts that are in some way academic  the products of scholars, aimed at the classroom or at a reading public to whom the addition of scholarly authority will make the final product more appealing. My final example belongs instead to the world of the graphic novel. Plate i is the illustration that frames the response to Beowulf ’s triumph over Grendel, from Gareth Hinds’s self-published graphic novel of the poem.57 In this version of his presentation, Hinds uses Francis Gummere’s 1910 translation, one he characterizes as ‘more archaicallyflavored’ than the adaptation of A.J. Church’s 1904 translation which replaced it when Candlewick Press picked up and republished the graphic novel in 2007.58 The

54  Heaney and Niles, Beowulf, p. 173. 55  Ibid., p. 191. 56  Ibid., p. 209. 57  This version appeared in three parts between 1999 and 2000, self-published by theComic.com. A one-volume version, The Collected Beowulf, is still available directly from Hinds. 58  Hinds makes the remarks on his website, http ://www.garethhinds.com/beowulf.php. In the Candlewick edition, the author’s note observes that ‘the authors and editors […] have attempted to strike a balance between easy readability and the poetic drama found in our favorite verse translations (particularly that of Francis Gummere)’ ; Gareth Hinds, Beowulf (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

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figure shows the care invested in the detail of the drawings. The text is hand-lettered by a calligrapher who worked with Hinds to develop a script loosely based on Carolingian forms.59 The objects surrounding Beowulf are sufficiently accurate as to suggest actual artifacts  the penannular brooch, for example, suggesting a fanciful reimagining of the Breadalbane Brooch. The boar-plaques on Beowulf ’s helmet also suggest the images first used by Klaeber, as well as the many illustrations and pictures of Vendel helmets discussed above. There are runes visible on several of the objects. Hinds confirms that he immersed himself in books on the archeology of Viking sites, and in an e-mail communication with me made the following observation about the helmets : ‘A lot of the Viking helms had too much face coverage for my purposes. Don’t want the audience to lose touch with the identity and emotions of the character as soon as they gear up ! So I think I did base it more on the Vendel helms (and scaled back the nose piece even further).’60 In other words, Hinds began with the same artifacts that have long accompanied Beowulf into print, but his modification to the helmet suggests a desire to re-populate those artifacts. Plate ii shows Hinds’s stunning depiction of Beowulf ’s emergence from the haunted mere. Here there is no helmet at all ; the sword hilt is massive and plain, clearly not based on the various historical artifacts used to illustrate the poem in other versions. In an earlier panel, the sword is shown to have cuneiform characters on the hilt. Hinds reports that he was striving for ‘extreme age, even primitivism’ ;61 the effect is the same sought by Niles when he chose the Rillaton Cup to illustrate the theft from the dragon’s hoard. Hinds’s comments are particularly interesting in light of what seem to be clearly Christian elements to the drawing : the sword hilt suggests a cross, and the beams of light are very like those attached to any number of stainedglass saints. In any case, what is clear is that, unlike Plate i, Plate ii strips away the expected Saxon/Viking decorative elements, and presents instead a strong image that might well be said to crystallize Niles’s closing emphasis on a single heroic life. Reviews of Hinds’s Beowulf commented on the opportunities presented by the graphic novel medium. Charles McGrath, writing in the New York Times, remarks, great stretches of this ‘Beowulf ’ take place with no words at all, except the occasional ‘SM A SH’, ‘S S WAC K’ and ‘SK U T C H L P’. Hinds stages great fight scenes, choreographing them like a kung-fu master and then drawing them from a variety of vantage points, with close-ups, wide angles and aerial views.

59  I discuss Hinds’s treatment of letter-forms in Printing the Middle Ages, p. 59. The Candlewick re­issue replaces the font along with the translation, using instead several generically ‘medieval’ script fonts : Yuletide Log, Humana Serif, and ATQuill. 60  Gareth Hinds, e-mail communication, 9 June 2009. 61  Hinds, e-mail communication, 9 June 2009. Hinds is fully aware of the whimsicality of using cuneiform : ‘(I like to think Gilgamesh has a little-known adventure in Scandinavia !)’. I am very grateful to Hinds for his willingness to discuss his work with me.

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In its way, the result is as visceral as the Old English, which was consciously onomatopoeic.62 My title for this essay was suggested by this aspect of Hinds’s graphic realization  it expresses my delight when I came across ‘ BOOM’ in perfect Lombardic capitals as Beowulf first enters Hrothgar’s court. As I have discussed elsewhere, the early modern scholars who first printed Old English made considerable efforts to represent the letter-forms exactly, commissioning special fonts in order to do so. Beowulf, because of its considerably later print history, did not receive this treatment, and so I was both startled and pleased when my typographic researches led me to Hinds’s work, with its blending of historical research and a visual vocabulary that does indeed remind one of cartoon super-heroes.63 The comic-book and cartoon register is one important strand in Hinds’s realization of the poem, but there is more to this visualization than ‘SP L AT ’. McGrath, for example, goes on to note how Hinds changes his palette to match the darkening of the poem’s mood. Hinds’s adaptation of his chosen translations cuts away many of the poem’s digressions and interpolations. This graphic novel can, as the New York Times review notes, run for pages without text of any kind. The textual pruning combines with the visual approach to shift the poem, in its final moments, back into the elegiac mode that, I have argued, is underlined by the artifacts so often used to illustrate it. Hinds ends, not with the summary lines of praise of Beowulf, but, instead, with the comments on the treasure in his barrow : in Gummere’s translation, ‘trusting the ground with treasure of earl / gold in the earth, where ever it lies / useless to men as of yore it was’. The final image is a two-page spread of a grim sea and dark sky, the last lines as Hinds presents them in a small box on the left. On the right we see the ruins of the barrow on a cliff-top at the far side of the frame. Here Hinds presents us with the familiar archaeological object, emptied of life, ‘unnyt’ indeed (line 3168)  an effect all the more striking because of the vigour with which his imagined visual world has, temporarily, animated those objects and the people who used them. Roberta Frank has remarked on our ‘emotional commitment’ to associating Beowulf with particular objects from Sutton Hoo.64 I have tried to suggest in this essay how objects can both cut off and enact emotional response to the poem. The mining of the past for visual correlatives for the poem certainly has the potential to create the situation deplored by Tolkien, reducing Beowulf to a kind of gloss on an archaeological past  Swedish, Danish, Anglo-Saxon, and sometimes all of these jumbled 62  Charles McGrath, review of the Candlewick Press edition, The New York Times, 17 June 2007. The review also considers graphic versions by James Rumford and Michael Morpurgo. 63  I discuss the typographic treatment of Old English in the early modern period in Printing the Middle Ages, pp. 21–59. The chapter title, ‘Form and Rude Letters’, reflects my argument that the archaizing typographical habits initiated by Matthew Parker did a great deal to mark Old English off as somehow primitive. 64  Frank, ‘Beowulf and Sutton Hoo’, p. 325.

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together. This possibility has been present at least since the early twentieth century, when the illustrations to nineteenth-century archaeological discoveries were plucked to accompany editions and translations of Beowulf. At the same time, whether by accident (as I suspect in the case of the many blank helmets) or by design (as I have argued with respect to Hinds), the objects of the past can evoke a powerful response to at least one element of the poem, its elegiac tenor. This is not all there is to Beowulf the poem, nor to Beowulf the hero, however. Beowulf is also (to quote the lines Hinds omits) manna mildust  ond mon(ðw)ærust leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.  (lines 3181–2) the gentlest and the kindest of men, most gracious to his people, and most eager for renown. Are we to dwell on his passing, on his life, or both ? Our current visual practices may suggest the former, and the Farrar, Straus and Giroux cover with which I opened, in offering another faceless armoured head, may seem to participate in this elegiac economy. But this is not exactly an empty helmet. Instead, it is, as a mailed cowl, not as instantly identifiable as the Vendel and Anglo-Saxon helmets, and hence not immediately carrying the whiff of the museum. It is also not so much uninhabited, as unknowable  we view it from the back. In a review of the American edition of Heaney’s translation, Jeffrey Gantz remarked that this anonymous head is ‘a fitting image in view of how little we know about the poet, the time and place of composition, and, for that matter, the protagonist’.65 Mystery is appropriate, too, when we consider the range of possible meanings in so many of the descriptive terms of the text (especially those terms with which the poem closes). The Farrar, Straus and Giroux cover, then, powerfully combines the imaginative, the artifactual, the elegiac, and the allure of the unknown. And perhaps the fear of the unknown contributes to this design’s power as well. The face we cannot see could in fact be monstrous : our popular culture is replete with masked villains, and horror films (and Gothic novels) play on the irresistible impulse to lift the veil, to see what is behind the mask. Did the designers set out to accomplish precisely this complex fusion ? In a sense, it does not matter. Some of the visual realizations I have discussed here suggest deliberate, carefully argued choices. Others are all too easily seen as knee-jerk and even lazy decisions, and still more probably inhabit some middle ground. What does matter is that generations of students, scholars, and general readers have been conditioned to expect certain things from their copies of Beowulf. Many of the versions I have discussed here are now available in such new formats as audio and electronic books, carrying the same cover art  and so Beowulf moves into a new century, taking with it the full hoard of treasures from the past. 65  Jeffrey Gantz, ‘Name game : Heaney’s Beowulf, Merwin’s Dante’, in the Boston Phoenix, 17 April 2000. Gantz goes on to note that this figure is a change from the ‘ubiquitous Sutton Hoo helmet’.

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Plate i  Gareth Hinds, ‘Then Beowulf ’s glory’, from his Beowulf (1999), by permission of the artist.

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Plate ii  Gareth Hinds, Beowulf emerges from the mere, from his Beowulf (1999), by permission of the artist.

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Plate iii  Sheila Mackie, helmet illustration from Beowulf, adapted by Julian Glover (Gloucester, 1987), by permission of the artist.

Plate iv  Funeral of Scyld. Flames at left ; women in gold dresses dancing. From Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, by permission of LA Opera.

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Plate v The scop sings. Poet with harp at lower right ; warriors seated opposite him ; Grendel on platform above. From Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, by permission of LA Opera.

Plate vi  Grendel approaches Heorot. Warriors with spears leap around the platform. From Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad (2006). Photograph by Robert Millard, by permission of LA Opera.

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8 Window in the Wall : Looking for Grand Opera in John Gardner’s Grendel Allen J. Frantzen

T

he Wall works !’ That is how Anthony Tommasini, writing in the New York Times, began his review of Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad, an opera based on John Gardner’s eponymous novel. In development for over two decades, the opera was given its first performances in Los Angeles and New York in 2006. Grendel was composed by Elliot Goldenthal ; Julie Taymor directed.1 The wall to which Tommasini referred was the centrepiece of the production, forty-eight feet wide, twenty-eight feet high, and nine feet deep.2 Weighing forty thousand pounds and manoeuvred by twenty-six motors, the ‘ice-earth unit’ was rich in both practical and symbolic meaning. On one side was earth, the world of heroes ; on the other was ice, the realm of monsters. The object, balky as well as bulky, overshadowed the work it was intended to support, prompting Tommasini to ask, ‘Opera has long embraced spectacle, but isn’t it supposed to be a music-driven art form ?’3 The ‘earth-ice unit’ rotated 200 degrees ; it featured a central panel weighing four tons which, when lowered, formed a playing space balanced between the wall’s two worlds. In that position, the platform opened a window in the wall and connected the opposed physical and moral worlds of the opera’s textual sources, Gardner’s novel

‘

1  Anthony Tommasini, ‘Monster Inc. : Inside the Sensitive, Suffering Soul of Grendel’, The New York Times, 13 July 2006, http ://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/arts/music/13gren.html ?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt, accessed 2 August 2009. Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad, an opera in two acts and twelve scenes, composed by Elliot Goldenthal, libretto by Julie Taymor and J. D. McClatchy, directed by Taymor, and conducted by Steven Sloane. Seen 11 June 2006. 2  Eileen Blumenthal, ‘Taymor Meets the Monster’, Theatre Communications Group, July–August 2006 : http ://www.tcg.org/publications/at/ julyaugust06/taymor.cfm, accessed 2 August 2009. 3  Tommasini, ‘Monster Inc.’ The opera cost the Los Angeles Opera and the Lincoln Center Festival (where Grendel went next) over $2.8 million. The premiere was postponed because the unit malfunctioned, costing another $300,000 ; see ‘Computer Gremlins Delay Opera Premiere’, Los Angeles Times, 25 May 2006.

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and Beowulf itself. There was, predictably, much talk about what the set did and little, if any, commentary on what, as either wall or window, it meant. Like any stage properties, no matter what size, the wall and the window, as objects ostended within a playing space, helped to shape the drama. But windows and walls are particularly potent elements of a stage set. They embody literal and symbolic meanings essential to the theatre as ‘a place for viewing’ and raise two issues relevant to a volume about modern views of the medieval.4 First, since it served as a miniature stage, the platform created meta-drama ; the use of puppets, along with the actors miniaturized in puppet form, accentuated this aspect of Grendel. Meta-narrative now seems coy, and puppets, made famous by Taymor in other projects, including The Lion King, have become cliché. But it is nonetheless true that both Beowulf and Gardner’s Grendel are rich in stories-withinstories and in performances that, among other things, are about performance. Any Anglo-Saxon scop reciting the poem a thousand years ago would have described how an earlier scop in Heorot, Hrothgar’s hall, told the story of Finnsburg (Beowulf, lines 1063–160). When he recounted his adventures before Hygelac, Beowulf performed the speech of an old retainer who incited a young one to revenge  a performance enacted, once again, by the scop reciting the poem (lines 2046–69).5 Second, the wall and the window also thematized the paradoxical role of technology in framing medieval cultures. Technology has broadened access to medieval texts and images but has also transformed our understanding of both text and image : it changes how we see but also changes what we see. By no means a transparent or neutral force on the set of Grendel, technology, as Tommasini’s comment suggests, became the focus rather than the means of maintaining it. My aim in this essay is to assess the function of technology as both wall and window in providing a passthrough from the present to the Anglo-Saxon age. I begin with a look at doors and windows in Beowulf and Gardner’s novel and then turn to the opera’s engagement with these devices.

Walls and windows in Beowulf

Of the three Old English words for wall  mur, wag, and weall  only the last is common.6 Weall appears often in Beowulf (24 times, including compounds), wag twice.7 A related word, eodor, means both enclosure and, by extension, protector. Hrothgar is twice called eodor (‘eodor Scyldinga’, line 426 ; ‘eodur Scyldinga’, 662), and Beowulf is

4  OED, s.v. ‘theatre’. 5  Allen J. Frantzen, ‘Drama and Dialogue in Old English Poetry : The Scene of Cynewulf ’s Juliana’, Theater Survey 48 (2007), 99–119. 6  Jane Roberts, Christian Kay, and Lynne Grundy, eds, A Thesaurus of Old English : In Two Volumes (London, 1995), section 05.10.05.04.15.02. 7  See Klaeber 4th edn, pp. 283–5. Word-frequency counts are based on entries to the glossary of this edition, from which all quotations of the poem are taken.

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called ‘eodor Ingwina’ (1043). The phrase ‘(in) under eoderas’ seems to mean ‘within the walls’ when Beowulf ’s horses come into Heorot (1037). The poet’s use of ‘under eoderas’ suggests that the walls form a towering backdrop. They recall the gigantism implied in the towering, frost-covered walls of The Wanderer, signs of ancient glory, human achievement, and, finally, pride, referred to there as both weall and eoder (lines 76, 77, 80, 88, 98).8 Walls in Old English are most often seen as defensive barriers. There are many such references in Beowulf, of which the first might also be the richest :

Þa of wealle geseah  weard Scildinga, se þe holmclifu  healdan scolde, beran ofer bolcan  beorhte randas, fyrdsearu fuslicu.   (lines 229–32a) From the high wall the Scylding watchman, he whose duty it was to guard the sea-cliffs, saw shining shield-bosses passed over the gangway, ready war-gear. Although only one word in this passage means ‘wall’ (weall), there are two other references to objects that are called walls elsewhere. ‘Holmcliff ’ suggests the walllike verticality of the land that abuts the sea ; Beowulf ’s lord Hygelac dwells ‘with his companions near the sea-wall (‘mid gesiðum sæwealle neah’, line 1920). ‘Beorhte randas’ suggests a wall of shields. In the battle at Ravenswood, Eofor swings his sword through the ‘shield-wall’ of Ongentheow and slashes into the king’s helmet : Let se hearda  Higelaces þegn brad[n]e mece,  þa his broðor læg, ealdsweord eotonisc  entiscne helm brecan ofer bordweal.   (lines 2977–80) There where his brother lay, the strong one, the thegn of Hygelac, let his broad blade, the ancient sword made by giants, break the helmet through the shieldwall. The approach of Beowulf and his thegns to Heorot, measured in a detailed and extended narrative, shows that ceremony as well as prudence was required in order to go from one side of a wall to another (lines 229–404). When the visitors reach the hall, they sit on benches outside it. They form a wall of their own when they set their shields against the building and rest while Wulfgar, the chamberlain, urges Hrothgar to let them enter (‘rondas regnhearde wið þæs recedes weal’, 326). So persuasive is the sense of the hall’s implied architecture that editors have supplied two half-lines to make it explicit in what happens next : ‘then Wulfgar went to the door of the hall’ (‘þa to duru healle / Wulfgar eode’, 388–9). But all we have on the poet’s authority is that 8  The Wanderer, in The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ASPR 3 (New York, 1936), pp. 134–7.

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‘[Wulfgar] spoke from inside’ (‘word inne abead’, 390).9 The poet’s only reference to the hall’s doorway is the famous scene in which Grendel breaks down the entrance to Heorot : ‘the door gave way’ (‘duru sona onarn’, 721), a literal reference immediately refigured as the ‘mouth of the hall’ that is broken open by the monster (‘onbræd […] / recedes muþan’, 723–4). In The Fight at Finnsburg, in comparison, four references to doors in just ten lines signal that in the battle about to begin those who guard the doors will fight those who intend to charge them.10 Walls play a small role in Beowulf, windows none. Literally a ‘wind hole’, traceable to a Norse root, vindauga, a window is an opening for air in motion.11 There are two Old English words for window, eag-duru (‘eye-door’) and eag-þyrel (‘eye-hole’). The latter was the more common term (found thirty-two times) ; all three occurrences of eag-duru are found in the Old English Martyrology ; a third term, the Latin loan-word fenester, is found only in the Old English translation of The Dialogues of Gregory.12 Examples of walls with windows are rare in Old English, found mainly in sources translating references to ecclesiastical architecture. In the fourth book of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, for example, Bishop Chad goes to the window of his oratory to summon the monk Owine after the bishop hears music associated with the worker’s vision.13 Sometimes devices that enable communication, windows might also have been a means of entrance or exit. In the life of St Martial (June 30), found in the Old English Martyrology, two men who were fornicating in a church were thrown out of it but could not understand how that was done, for ‘there was no door undone or wall breached or window opened’ (‘Næs þær duru ontyned, ne weall toslyten, ne eahþyrl geopenod’).14 Visual contact matters in Beowulf, but only when physical contact is possible. The poet initially relies on sound to suggest the delights of the hall that Grendel cannot share ; the monster hears rather than sees the merry-making of the court (‘dream gehyrde, / hludne in healle’, lines 88–9). Thereafter his relationship to the hall becomes visual. He leaves his lair to ‘seek out’ or ‘inspect’ (‘neosian’, 115) how the Danes arrange themselves in the hall after their beer-drinking. Having found them (‘fand’, 118) inside, he kills thirty and departs ‘to seek his home’ (the poet repeats the verb : ‘wica neosan’, 125). But this first entrance (and subsequent entrances, it seems) are 9  Klaeber 4th edn, p. 15, note to line 389. 10  The Fight at Finnsburg, ibid., pp. 283–5. 11  OED, s.v. ‘window’. 12  DOEC, s.v. ‘fenester’, accessed 2 August 2009. Hans Hecht, ed., Bischof Wærferths von Worcester Übersetzung der Dialoge Gregors des Grossen (Leipzig and Hamburg, 1900–1907, repr. Darmstadt 1965), p. 220 (line 15, 22). 13  Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, IV.3, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), pp. 340–3. 14  Günter Kotzor, ed., Das altenglische Martyrologium, 2 vols (Munich, 1981), II, 136–7. The men were joined in fornication (‘hig geðeoddon hig tosomne myd unryhthæmede’) and once cast out of the church were unable to decouple until the morning, when their sin was revealed to everybody and they were then freed ‘from their shameful deed’ (‘fram ðære sceandlican dæde’).

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made without spectacle ; the poet does not bother to describe how Grendel breaches the hall during the years of his raids. Only when Beowulf and his men are inside, it seems, does the door become a barrier (and, strangely, also a mouth) that fails to protect those whom it should protect. Its strength  the technology of iron-fast bonds (‘fyrbendum fæst’, 722)  gives way at the touch of the monster’s hand (‘syþðan he hire folmum [æt]hran’, ibid.). This episode reinforces the impression that the energy of Beowulf is organized around a dichotomy of inside and outside, centre and margin  common claims in the criticism.15 But it seems instead that Beowulf contrasts its courts  one monstrous and out of sight, the other the pinnacle of civilization, evolved into an elaborate stage of display  by situating between them a natural world that both humans and monsters must traverse. The monsters are monstrous because they torment humans and haunt the natural realm that Hrothgar and his people subdue by hunting, farming, trading, and other forms of domination and exploitation essential to settlement life. Walls without windows isolate the culture of Hrothgar’s court from the natural and monstrous worlds outside. Beowulf begins and ends in ambivalence about the collective successes of Hrothgar. The poet celebrates the construction of Heorot not as the work of a tyrant but rather as the achievement of a lord who collected food rents and required military service in return for land and protection that only the lord could extend.16 He respects land held by everybody (folcscare) and living creatures (feorh) :       Him on mod bearn þæt healreced  hatan wolde, medoærn micel  men gewyrcean þon[n]e yldo bearn  æfre gefrunon, ond þær on innan  eall gedælan geongum ond ealdum,  swylc him God sealde, buton folcscare  ond feorum gumena.   (lines 67–73) It came to his mind that he would command men to make a hall-building, a greater mead hall than the sons of men had ever heard of, and inside it share among young and old everything that God had given him  except the people’s land and the lives of men. Although Heorot is a folcstede, a homestead that is adorned by ‘many peoples’

15  For a discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous comments on monsters and margins, see Jonathan Evans, ‘The Dragon-Lore of Middle-earth : Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition’, in J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances : Views of Middle-earth, ed. George Clark and Daniel Timmons (Westport, CT, 2000), pp. 21–38, at pp. 25–6. 16  Richard Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement : Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 88.

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(‘manigre mægþe’, lines 75–6) it is also a place of battle (1463).17 It is fitting that Beowulf never imagines triumphs without anticipating their collapse ; no one expects heroic glories to last forever. No sooner is Heorot built than the narrator anticipates its passing :        Sele hlifade, heah ond horngeap ;  heaðowylma bad, laðan liges   ne wæs hit lenge þa gen þæt se ecghete  aþumsweoran æfter wælniðe wæcnan scolde.  (lines 81–5) The hall towered, high and horn-gabled, awaited war-fierce flames, hostile fires, nor was it yet long until the sword-hatred between the son- and fatherin-law should arise after deadly hostility. Celebrated in the great hall with laughter and the scop’s melodies (lines 88–90), the king’s feats awaken the envy of the ‘wonsæli wer’ and bring about Hrothgar’s retribution (105). All this is seen in the first fitt ; the poem goes on to represent heroic culture in the darkest possible tones.

Gardner’s Grendel

Those who parody masterpieces seldom account for their ambivalence. Gardner’s Grendel is no exception. His premise (to tell the tale from the margins) forced Gardner to leave three-quarters of Beowulf behind and to end with the monster’s death. Within this truncated narrative, Gardner then created a cartoon of Beowulf, shaping a world in which ambitions can be made to seem foolish, grandiose, vulnerable, and nothing more. In order to realize the tale within this shrunken world, Gardner exploited the poem’s tripartite symbolic geography and richly elaborated its world of walls. When Grendel defines the height from which he sees the world, he says : ‘I can see for miles from these rock walls’.18 Those walls divide Grendel and his mother (who live in a cave under water ; somehow he ascends through water to heights from which he then climbs down to the fens and forest) and divide the monstrous from that on which it preys. The rock-wall is an image of unity : the wall and the rock growing out of it are one thing, as are Grendel and his dam (p. 17), and their own cave has walls (p. 28). Grendel listens through the timber walls of Heorot to the scop’s song (p. 43) and later thinks of Hrothgar, trapped by circumstances inside Heorot, as living in a cave himself (pp. 121–2). On the night of his first attack in his ‘war with Hrothgar’ (p. 76), Grendel goes up to the walls of Heorot and finds a crack to peak through (p. 77), making the lack of windows evident. Gardner borrows the image of the sea17  DOEC, s.v. folcscare, folcstede. The latter word is translated as ‘dwelling place’ in line 76, ‘battleplace’ in line 1463. 18  John Gardner, Grendel (New York, 1971), p. 11. Further references to this edition will be given by page number in the text.

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cliff as a wall from the poem (p. 139), but most walls in the novel are his inventions. He describes Grendel listening to water beneath ice, just as the monster has listened to the scop’s song through the walls of the hall. This water music, so to speak, tells Grendel that fifteen heroes, ‘fat as cows’, are on their way to meet their doom (pp. 151–2). We cannot put too much weight on Gardner’s walls, for some of them might as well be windows. At many points the monster knows what goes on behind walls without accessing the interior ; it is as if he could see through them, as in the extended sequence in which Grendel imagines Hrothgar’s difficulties inside what the monster calls the ‘stiff coffin-walls of the world’ (p. 123). Readers are forced to overlook this lapse, one way in which Gardner circumvents the limitations of his narrative and the paradox of a hero (or anti-hero) who claims to be ignorant of human values but at the same time is wittily critical of them. The implied meaning of the work’s many walls emerges only in the last of the book’s twelve chapters, after Beowulf has trapped Grendel in the hall. This episode also develops the role of technology as Grendel’s enemy. The dragon, who does not appear in Beowulf until the hero is an old man (line 2312), in Grendel supplies an ancient consciousness, provides cynical advice, and, not incidentally, casts a spell that protects Grendel from weapons. He has warned Grendel of new rules and ‘noncerules’ generated by ‘man’s cunning mind’ and the ‘new complexity’ it brings. Each innovation creates the need for more of the same : ‘technology, click click, click click . . .’ (p. 71). When Grendel watches one of Hrothgar’s bowmen kill a hart, the phrase ‘click click’ registers the automated but skillful gestures that enable the hunter to get his prey (p. 127). In the last chapter, walls themselves embody the dragon’s prophecy of technology that has arrived to stay. Grendel’s previous visits to the hall have not suggested that the structure itself is in any way an obstacle ; indeed, when he smashes through the iron-bound door, the opposite seems to be the case. But when he is caught by Beowulf, Grendel suddenly finds that a wall is his undoing. Gripping the monster’s arm, Beowulf whispers strange taunts into his ear : Feel the wall : is it not hard ? He smashes me against it, breaks open my forehead. Hard, yes ! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls ! Sing ! (p. 171)19 Caught between the hero and a hard place, Grendel howls : ‘I sing of walls’ and ‘Hooray for the hardness of walls’. Beowulf mocks the monster’s singing as ‘terrible’. Grendel replies, ‘If you think I created that wall that cracked my head, you’re a fucking lunatic’ (p. 171).20 Of course Grendel did not create the wall, and that is why Beowulf orders him to write and ‘sing of walls’. A product of the civilization Grendel seeks to 19  Italics, in Gardner’s original, distinguish Beowulf ’s speeches. 20  Compare Grendel’s gryreleoð (‘terrible song’) in Beowulf 786 ; I thank Nicholas Perkins for the suggestion.

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destroy, perhaps even that civilization’s epitome, the wall is permanent and lasting. Grendel is not. Inside the hall, the monster cannot penetrate a wall that, from the outside, presented no obstacle. Beowulf again commands him to ‘Sing walls’ (p. 171) and Grendel does, becoming a version of the scop whose music and words fascinated him earlier : The wall will fall to the wind as the windy hill will fall, and all things thought in former times : Nothing made remains, nor man remembers. And these towns shall be called the shining towns !   (p. 172) Nothing remains and nothing is remembered of the towns, and yet  ‘yet’ is the conjunction that is needed here  they are ‘shining towns’. Per Winther has noted that Grendel quotes Gardner’s ‘Setting for an Old Welsh Line’, a poem which itself quotes his novel, The Resurrection, in which the village of Trenn ‘shall be called a shining town’. As Winther notes, this is an image of affirmation that greatly alters Grendel’s poem. Winther goes so far as to call it the mark of the monster’s conversion, but this seems to be overstated.21 The encounter between Grendel’s head and the wall does not change his view of the world. His sarcastic ‘Hooray’ shows that Grendel continues to resist the symbolic as well as the real boundaries between his world and the world of Hrothgar’s court. Grendel’s song has it both ways : the wall will fall, but the town shines nonetheless, which is to say that civilization is both glorious and doomed  certainly a laconic digest of the Anglo-Saxon epic, but not a bad one. Beowulf laughs at Grendel’s second lyric and calls it ‘Better’ than the first one. But Grendel claims a small triumph, suggesting that Beowulf ’s laugh acknowledges the monster’s slyness (pp. 172–3). The wall is harder than Grendel’s head, just as Beowulf ’s grip is stronger than the monster’s. A decorated artefact made by humans from trees, the wall has broken Grendel and made a poet out of him. He runs out the door  further testifying to the wall’s power (p. 172)  and assures himself that Beowulf ’s victory is part of the ‘blind, mindless, mechanical’ way of the world, ‘mere logic of chance’ (p. 173). ‘Is it joy I feel ? ’ Grendel asks. His enemies, nearby, ‘watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. “Poor Grendel’s had an accident”, I whisper. “So may you all”’ (p. 174). Beowulf speaks to Grendel in fierce whispers punctuated by bursts of flame shooting out of his mouth ; he is a figure equal in stature to the dragon seen earlier and he delivers a crushing blow to Grendel’s shabby nihilism. But Grendel’s curse  he’s ‘had an accident’ and whispers ‘So may you all’ (p. 174)  proves that Beowulf has failed to persuade him to a view of history that, at whatever expense, builds culture, civilization, and community. Grendel seems to hunger for all three and to fail in his pursuit of each. In Gardner’s novel, there is no question that he is responsible for his own 21  Per Winther, The Art of John Gardner : Instruction and Exploration, rev. edn (Albany, NY, 1992), pp. 173–5.

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defeat ; once he hits the wall, he must die.22 Technology, which fails to protect heroes against the monster in Beowulf (Beowulf uses no weapons, the hall door gives way), succeeds in Grendel, not only as a ubiquitous ‘click click’ but also as a permanent intervention in the landscape, architecture that will outlast those who created it, if only as ancient foundations that lesser ages will eulogize. In Gardner’s novel, the wall stands for permanence and for transcendence : it kills Grendel, but first it makes him a poet.

Grendel as opera

In the novel, technology is humanity’s way of subduing the natural world but also its way of transcending walled-off courts. The opera’s massive wall embodied the boundary between these worlds but also collapsed the space between them, producing, for all its inventiveness, a simple binary. The audience was either on one side of the wall or the other and only briefly in the natural world that separated those two sides. In the novel, the natural world is filled with animals Grendel persecutes (as the ram in the opening chapter, pp. 5–7 ; see also p. 11) ; if that world is the realm of human exploitation, it is also a playing space in which monster and human meet and misunderstand each other. When Grendel is trapped in a tree and becomes the target of men who stumble upon him (pp. 19–25), one could hardly wish for a clearer instance of a liminal space in which opposed forces meet before settling into their dichotomous antagonism. The opera did not develop the liminal realm of nature, which instead became an extension of the world of the court. In the words of J.D. McClatchy (co-librettist), the roots of the earth-world ‘reach into the cave of the sleeping monster’ and undermine the security of his ice-world with knowledge of the other realm (Act 1, scene 1).23 The ‘roots of the earth-world’ are really the roots of Hrothgar’s court. Several scenes develop the premise that the king and his technological prowess are corrupting the earth. Like Gardner, the librettists portray Hrothgar and his people as warlike and rapacious. According to Gardner’s novel, Hrothgar was the first king to work out ‘a theory about what the fighting was for’ and to prosper (p. 37). As his empire grew, he conferred with his counselors and ‘they built roads’ so that tribute could then be collected more efficiently and the king’s realm expanded at a corresponding pace (p. 39). ‘They hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange.’ They caused ‘accidental fires that would burn for days’. Soon ‘there was nothing to stop the advance of man’ (p. 40). This passage appealed to the politically correct instincts of the opera’s creators. As the supertitles flashed the news 22  ‘Beowulf beats Grendel against reality and turns him into an empiricist’, according to Craig J. Stromme, ‘The Twelve Chapters of Grendel’, Critique 20 (1978), 83–92, at p. 91. Stromme bases his views on Gardner’s own, reported by Joe David Bellamy, The New Fiction (Urbana, IL, 1974), pp. 173–4. 23  My summary is based on the synopsis by J.D. McClatchy : ‘Synopsis’, Performances Magazine, June 2006, P4. (Uppercase 〈p〉 refers to the numbered pages of the special insert for this issue.)

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that ‘HROTHGAR BUILT ROADS’, the king rolled out in an elegant wooden cart with two claws like shovels at the front. Trees in a small forest (each held by a blackclad dancer) trembled and fell as Hrothgar’s machine advanced. Behind it a road, composed of dancers (also in black) lying rigidly like a string of corpses, magically emerged.24 The opera’s two-sided set supported a flat concept of opposed worlds, one predatory, one preyed upon ; readers of Beowulf might expect these to be the world of the monsters and the world of heroes, respectively, but the opera reversed those positions far more simplistically than Gardner did. Like the novel, the opera mocks the heroic culture of the Danes (and, implicitly, of the Anglo-Saxons who created Beowulf) without establishing either that culture’s greatness or its sense of impending doom. Language itself cleverly made the heroic world incomprehensible to the audience. Grendel speaks in modern English and the Danes in Old English (sometimes Danish characters lapse into modern English, as Unferth does when he speaks to Grendel).25 However inconsistent, this use of Old English language created an alliance between Grendel and the audience and simultaneously alienated the audience from the Danes. This strategy reinforced the opera’s premise that the heroic is as alien and incomprehensible to the modern world as it was to Grendel and slyly modernized Grendel’s consciousness (since he sees things the way we see them). He observes the heroic world engaging in rites he cannot comprehend ; none of the Danes observe Grendel or his routines with similar detachment. Technology, curiously, gave the monster the upper hand. For example, Grendel stands on the platform in the opening scene, looking from behind the ice wall through the window at the funeral of a ‘great lord’, unnamed but clearly the poem’s ancestral Scyld Scefing (Plate iv).26 In the novel, the ceremony takes place around a pyre for Grendel’s latest victims, not the tribe’s heroic leader. Later, when Wealhtheow arrives in Heorot, Grendel watches her from a ‘frozen cliffwall’ which he also calls an ‘ice-crusted rock’ (p. 102).27 In the opera, Hrothgar’s court is situated on the lowered platform, opened as before into the ice wall ; rather than peering through the window, Grendel looks at the couple from the heights of the wall that marks the boundaries of his world and gives him the advantages of spectatorship. When the scop sings to the king’s assembled warriors, Heorot itself rests on the platform, which now opens into the earth space (Plate v), with the earth wall forming 24  The synopsis puts it more picturesquely : ‘King Hrothgar’s tractor gobble[s] up trees and excretes roads’, ibid. 25  Some Old English dialogue was taken from the poem and some written by the librettists and translated into Old English. The translation, by Roberta Frank and Eric Jaeger, is noted in the programme, Performances Magazine, P14. 26  Photographs by Robert Millard used with the permission of the Los Angeles Opera ; with thanks to Mark Lyons and the LA Opera. 27  Just as the dragon (mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves) was echoed by a chorus of three ‘dragonettes’ floating in space as three prongs of her tail, Grendel had three ‘shadow-monsters’ surrounding him.

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the background. When Grendel approaches Heorot to begin his attack, he does so on the platform, opened once again into the earth space, as warriors leap into the air to ward him off (Plate vi). The representational possibilities of the window and the wall were, then, at least sporadically realized in the opera, but they could not overcome the twodimensionality of a libretto that not only stripped heroism of its self-doubt and fatalism but also juxtaposed it to incurably contemporary notions of social justice. In the novel, Grendel hears the scop’s song and is seduced by its claim of a world divided into light and dark ; the monster recognizes that he belongs to the darkness. ‘Mercy ! Peace !’ he cries, rushing to the hall ; but the horrified thegns (hardly able to understand Grendel’s speech in any case) attack him and he flees, thereafter plotting to bring down his opponents (pp. 51–3). Later he recalls this episode as the weakness of ‘one ridiculous night’ (p. 76). In the opera, we meet Grendel as a child, albeit a monstrous one, who walks among Danish children and wants to play winter games with them. They mistreat him, drag him onto ice, and taunt him. Then the monster ‘accidentally rips off the arm of one child’, and Hrothgar (seen as a young prince) orders the monster’s death. Grendel is saved by his mother, perhaps the archetypal single parent, but not before Hrothgar hurls an axe at him (Act 1, scene 2).28 The opera sentimentalizes the monster’s envy of human community : as a child Grendel just wants to play. It is apparently the trauma of his rejection that sets the monster off on his rampages. The scene of child abuse is crucial to the opera’s thesis  mocked by more than one commentator in the New York Times  that the monster is a suffering, misunderstood soul traumatized by insensitive playmates.29 In Gardner’s version, Grendel observes adults who build roads, kill off endangered species, and exploit subalterns. In the opera, Grendel is victimized as a child by selfish children ; his rampages are less a judgment on a self-important, self-absorbed heroic culture and its leaders than revenge for rejection that he experienced at the hands of children. As the plot moves forward in time, those who oppose Grendel continue this abuse. Beowulf himself excepted, all the human characters are seen unsympathetically. In Gardner’s novel and in the opera, Unferth, the only one of Hrothgar’s thegns to confront the monster, arrives at Grendel’s cave as an outcast himself, already humiliated by the monster’s indifference to him in the king’s hall (pp. 82–5). In the opera, Unferth sings passionately about his desire for heroic fame. Grendel is unimpressed and, like a Hollywood hipster, shows it by using the occasion to urinate. Wealhtheow, who might have aroused some sympathy as a woman caught up in the 28  McClatchy, ‘Synopsis’, P4. The 2005 film Beowulf and Grendel, directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, used the device of the backstory to create childhood trauma for the monster and to establish his ethical superiority to his human enemies. See http ://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402057/ for details, accessed 3 August 2009. 29 Edward Rothstein, ‘Something Evil (Well, Maybe Tragically Misunderstood) this Way Comes’, The New York Times, 24 July 2006. http  ://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/arts/24conn. html ?scp=1&sq=&st=nyt, accessed 2 August 2009.

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evils of Hrothgar’s world, is complicit in abuse. Grendel watches Hrothgar and the queen copulate, then dreams that he sails in a glass-bottomed boat with her (Act 2, Scene 9). Goldenthal supplied a soaring duet for Wealhtheow and a tenor  one of the monster’s three shadows  as they sat in a ship that floated across the stage. The magic was sabotaged when the queen suddenly slapped the shadow-monster’s face, underscoring the malice and hypocrisy of the human world. The gesture (an instance of internalized repression ?) was deeply illogical if ideologically consistent. This is Grendel’s dream, after all, and it is he who imagines the occasion of his rejection by the beautiful queen, not she who imagines and rejects him. The sole exception to the thoughtless and cruel treatment of Grendel by those who refuse to respect him is, ironically, the conventional protagonist, Beowulf himself, who is spared the indignities heaped on the Danes. In pointed contrast to Gardner’s novel, the role in the opera is a non-speaking part for a dancer whose lines are voiced by a small chorus. In the 2006 performances, the dancer, Desmond Richardson, was also black. Thus his person (but not his role) triangulates the opera’s tensions, positioning him between the monster and the Danes not simply as a Geat but, possibly, as an outsider among his own people. He alone fights without weapons ; he alone does not sing. More so than any other character, he also comes out of a comic-book world or a world of computer games and action figures ; a fantasy superhero, his human flaws never emerge because he is, simply, not human. In the last moments of the opera, he arrives as a new kind of hero, silent, enigmatic, automatic, victorious, and soon forgotten. Up to the moment of Beowulf ’s entrance (and the showy stripping of his armor to reveal tattoo-like body paint  perhaps an African warrior ?), Grendel is the hero of the piece, not its villain. Thus Beowulf could not be clearly seen as conventionally heroic ; he is not part of Hrothgar’s corrupt, feckless court, but neither does he belong to the ice-world. The enigma surrounding Beowulf, Hrothgar, and Grendel needed to be dissected ; instead it was bisected by the wall, a monumental symbol that dwarfed the drama and obscured its driving conflicts. The producers ignored Gardner’s illuminating use of the wall  the technology that would not go away, that could not be beat  even as they made the wall the centre of their production. Gardner’s wall is the instrument of Beowulf ’s victory, the hard reality of human progress that Grendel cannot outlast. In the opera, the wall itself did not represent technology (there’s irony for you), the evil meaning of which was displaced onto Hrothgar’s cart, for example, and even onto the arrival of Beowulf and his thegns, which is compared to the arrival of ‘a huge machine’.30 When Beowulf grips Grendel and smashes his head against the wall, human brutality crushes yet another victim. The opera’s similarities to Gardner’s novel, always tenuous, end at this point. Bested by Beowulf, Gardner’s Grendel mixes self-pity and malice : ‘“Poor Grendel’s had an accident”, I whisper. “So may you all”’ (p. 174). Gardner makes it clear that technology will outlast the monster. The anti-hero of the novel, technology becomes 30  McClatchy, ‘Synopsis’, P4.

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the villain of the opera. Yet we cannot help but juxtapose the technology the opera satirizes to the technology used to bring the opera into being. Rather than ‘The wall works !’ Tommasini might have written ‘The wall wins !’ For Grendel, the undisputed hero of the opera, wins only by losing. The librettists leave Gardner far behind when they turn the monster’s parting curse into its antithesis : ‘I will fall. I want to fall. I will my fall.’ And then he adds, ‘So may you all.’ Having rejected delusional institutions such as the heroic code and the expansionist depravities of humanity, Grendel becomes self-determining and autonomous. ‘For the first time in his tortured life, the monster feels a nameless, engulfing joy, and hurls himself into the abyss’, McClatchy writes.31 Grendel’s death is his decision, and his defeat is his wish for himself. But the novel does not make his fate so clear, as John Michael Howell has suggested : Grendel’s sight clears, his enemies gather around him to watch him die, but he does not leap.32 Goldenthal echoed McClatchy’s comment, saying that Grendel ‘meets his reconciliation with eternity before he leaps’.33 To understand this strange twist of fate, we need to understand the producers’ views on terrorism and human suffering. Taymor has claimed that ‘Human beings need the “enemy”.’ In the novel, this view is asserted by the dragon, who says to Grendel, ‘You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves’, the force that makes humans embrace their mortality. He adds, ‘If you withdraw, you’ll instantly be replaced’ (p. 73). According to Taymor, ‘If [Grendel]’s not there, they’ll find, or create, another.’34 McClatchy amplified Taymor’s assertion, claiming that Grendel ‘is a monster because humankind needs to feel threatened, needs “monsters” (be they heathens or terrorists) to find a communal identity and feel good about itself ’.35 However, what Taymor and McClatchy say about society’s need for a monstrous other is not actually demonstrated in the plot. No one imagines Grendel or brings him into being ; rejected as a child, given a remote mother who neither defends nor comprehends him (and an absent father, of course), he stores up resentments against the rituals and pleasures of the court. The plot does not demonstrate that the cause of evil is culture’s need for imaginary enemies. Grendel is an enemy ; he tears the arm off a child and appears to be an order of being quite different from theirs  not an ethnic version of their nation, or another nation, but a completely alien species. Is it prejudicial to react to such a presence with fear ? By grouping terrorists together with ‘heathens’, whoever they might be in the modern world, McClatchy rationalizes terrorism as a weakness of those on whom terrorists prey. But this pairing is illogical. ‘Heathens’ do not usually seek to kill thousands of innocent people every chance they get. That is what terrorists do, and often 31  Grendel’s final lines quoted from Elliott Goldenthal, ‘A Note from the Composer’, Performances Magazine, P5. 32  John Michael Howell, Understanding John Gardner (Columbia, SC, 1993), pp. 86–7. 33  Goldenthal, ‘A Note from the Composer’, P5. 34  Julie Taymor, ‘A Note from the Director’, Performances Magazine, P6. 35  J.D. McClatchy, ‘Grendel : The Transcendence of the Great Big Bad’, Performances Magazine, 10–12 and 62, at p. 12.

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out of deep religious convictions that clearly separate them both from nonbelievers and from others in their faith communities with equally deep beliefs which do not sanction such violence. Perhaps McClatchy really is persuaded that, like the Danes of the opera, we need terrorists to ‘find a community identity and feel good’ about ourselves. But those who alienate the monster are children, not adults, and short of claiming that there is no difference between childish and adult motivation, or that the deeds of the children are visited on their fathers, it is difficult to see how the Danes are responsible for Grendel’s malice. Moreover, the producers seem not to have realized that the charges they level against their political targets apply equally well to them. Grendel failed to realize the potential of its rich set design because Taymor and McClatchy needed to demonize their own enemies, forces represented in the opera  and outside it as well ?  by heroic, military, male-dominated culture. Grendel, it seems, helped them find ‘community identity’ and ‘feel good’ about themselves. Political aims are hinted at by the opera’s full title, Grendel : Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. Describing evil  terrorism in particular  as ‘a great big bad’ looks like an attempt to banalize it as a nuisance, like crabgrass or a traffic jam or a foul in a basketball game. The title might seem ambiguous (does the big bad transcend, or is it transcended ?), but any doubts about the work’s political aims were removed by an interview Taymor gave in 2006. ‘I am, to be quite honest’, Taymor told an admiring interviewer, ‘sick of hero stories. I feel that they are a bit full of crap.’36 Taymor and her team seemed to be stuck in time  in 1971, perhaps, the year Grendel appeared ; directors like Taymor seem to imagine that classic works like Beowulf are themselves stuck in time, although Beowulf endures because it is not. Taymor failed to realize that Gardner’s inversion of epic heroism has itself been inverted and that expectations of hero stories have moved on. Gerard Jones has argued that the heroic has moved from the genres of realism to genres of fantasy ruled by superheroes.37 Historically-situated figures like Beowulf, by virtue of their heroism, are no longer icons of greatness but rather of masculinity run amok. An example is the Watchmen comic book series launched in 1985 by Alan Moore. John Podhoretz writes that Moore’s ‘explicit design was to rip the pseudo-heroic mask off the superhero and reveal the monster beneath. The superheroes are not heroes at all but chess pieces in a geopolitical game they do not understand’, manipulated by president-for-life Richard Nixon. The critical reception of two films based on works by Moore, including Watchmen (2009, dir. Zack Snyder), and V for Vendetta, ‘a movie with a terrorist hero in which the bombing of the British Parliament is treated as a heroic act of liberation’ (2006, dir. James McTeigue), was predictably mixed. Podhoretz

36  Taymor, interview, Academy of Achievement, 3 June 2006. 37  Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow : Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York, 2004).

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observed  much to the dismay of viewers like Taymor, we can assume  that some people ‘like the genre’ of the heroic narrative.38 Justifying her anti-heroism, Taymor insisted that the opera took its view ‘from the condemned side’. She listed other excluded groups, including Jews, homosexuals, and Muslims, and added, ‘If you are, then, the enemy or the terrorist or the outsider, you don’t necessarily have any say in that.’ This is a remarkable leap in logic, although it goes unobserved by Taymor or her interlocutor, as well as a patronizing comment that implies the cultural superiority of a speaker who both protests the silencing of others and yet speaks for them. An act of will to do violence is what makes the terrorist a terrorist ; a will to do violence to others does not, of course, come with being a Jew, a Muslim, a homosexual, or an outsider, as Taymor no doubt would agree. Nor is violence the only way to negotiate difference. Indeed, the grim comedy in Taymor’s argument is that terrorists who perpetrate violence against others perpetuate the very cult of heroism that Taymor affects to disdain. She might be ‘sick of hero stories’, that is to say, but she is not above retelling them so long as her hero despises what she despises.

Technology and representation

The wall, I have shown, was introduced by Gardner to facilitate his anti-heroic retelling of an epic in which neither walls nor windows are prominent. The opera made much of the wall but gave it little to do. For example, the window formed when the platform was lowered seems to have offered views in one direction only. It provided a position for Grendel as a spectator and it offered a miniaturized playing space that helped Taymor downsize the heroic world. The world of the monsters was not exposed to view, nor was it miniaturized, as was the world of the Danes. Indeed, there was no attempt to present a Danish perspective rather than critique it. Gardner’s cartoon version of Beowulf was itself cartooned in the opera ; the set was a room with no view, a wall with nothing behind it, a husk without a heart. A wall must reveal as well as conceal ; a window must be looked out of as well as looked into. The opera was unusual in combining miniaturization with grandiosity : Heorot was both a birdcagelike model and a vast interior shaped by projections that crossed the entire stage. But on the moral and philosophical level, there was no such eclecticism : the wall was enormous, but both monsters and humans were cut down to size. Grendel was more human than monster ; warriors  Beowulf apart  either cowards or puppets ; women were shrunk to suit. Technology formed part of the entertainment, but this was hardly an innovation. Tommasini’s lament about musical values  ‘Opera has long embraced spectacle, but isn’t it supposed to be a music-driven art form ?’  could be applied to many other productions.39 Viewers might sometimes find (as did the performers and producers 38  John Podhoretz, ‘Blockbusted’, The Weekly Standard, 30 March 2009, p. 38. 39  Tommasini, ‘Monster Inc.’

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of Grendel, given the expensive delays caused by the ‘earth-ice unit’) that technology can be a barrier as well as a point of access. Technology has never been showcased more successfully than it is now in the High Definition broadcasts launched by the Metropolitan Opera with Taymor’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (30 December 2006). High Definition cameras quickly became a tool for nudging aside both words and music. Before the second act of Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust (22 November 2008), for example, the backstage camera trailed mezzo-soprano Susan Graham up a flight of stairs, her train held by a mouse-like assistant as the diva swigged water and gathered her resources for her entrance.40 During the famous entr’acte in Act II of Massenet’s Thaïs (20 December 2008), cameras showed crew members moving the set into place behind the curtain. The first intermission of Lucia di Lammermoor (7 February 2009) featured Natalie Dessay, the programme host, interviewing a stage manager who described how the set would be dismantled and stored for the next performance. Audiences watched these events with at least as much attention as they gave to the musical theatre of Berlioz, Massenet, and Donizetti. Such moments put the HD broadcast audience on the inside of the theatrical project in a way unavailable to the audience in the opera house. Being in the opera house for the performance is no longer the most privileged position. Knowing how the magic happens is now part of the magic. Opera-lovers might deplore the ascendency of technology at the expense of musical values. It is no consolation, but such concerns are very old. In 1885, when the actor and impresario Henry Irving staged Goethe’s Faust in London, he used an unprecedented array of special effects, including dueling scenes with sparks flying from swords, brimstone, calcium arcs, and others. Henry James observed that ‘special precautions should be taken against the accessories seeming a more important part of the business than the action’ of the play. ‘We care nothing for the spurting of flames which play so large a part’, James wrote ; ‘that blue vapours should attend on the steps of Mephistopheles is a very poor substitute for his giving us a moral shudder.’41 When Irving revived the production seventeen years later, the preference for spectacle over drama was again criticized.42 In 1899 Charles Hiatt complained that ‘the mechanist and scene-painter overwhelmed a mock masterpiece. Such coming and going of demons, such alarm of lurid illumination, were assuredly never before seen on any stage ; but amidst it all one never felt anything of the philosophy or the passion of this immortal legend to which Marlowe and Goethe paid homage.’43 40  This and subsequent other HD performances mentioned were seen on the dates indicated. 41  Henry James’s review is quoted from Century Magazine by Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History : The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and their Remarkable Families (New York, 2008), pp. 173–5. 42 ‘Faust in London’, The New York Times, 30 April 1902. 43  Charles Hiatt, Henry Irving : A Record and Review (London, 1899), pp. 213–14. Hiatt’s reference to ‘a mock masterpiece’ points to Irving’s extensive abridgments of his texts. Irving cut Faust heavily ; see Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, pp. 173–4.

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More than a century later, technology occupies centre stage, an end in itself rather than a medium the viewer passes through to gain access to dramatic experience. The gap between the technical sophistication of Grendel and the opera’s drama is great. To paraphrase James, to say that a wall rotates or that puppets fly through the air is a poor substitute for absorption into the dilemma of power and its passing. Both too complicated and two-dimensional, the opera was upstaged by its set. Gardner’s Grendel banged his head against a wall, and thanks to Beowulf ’s belief in what the wall meant, the monster woke up. One longed for a similar heroic figure to render a comparable service  in this case, an awakening to the limits of technology and to the drama inherent in complex source materials  for the opera’s creators.

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9 Re-placing Masculinity : The DC Comics Beowulf Series and its Context, 1975–6 Catherine A.M. Clarke

T

he Beowulf : Dragon Slayer series, written by Michael Uslan with artwork by Ricardo Villamonte, was launched by DC Comics, New York in May 1975.1 Only six issues were ever published, with the final issue appearing in March 1976. The series is predictably free with its Old English source material, deliberately incorporating additional episodes and adventures which allow the narrative to be sustained as a continuing series and which blend the familiar myth of Beowulf the hero with other staples of the comic-book genre, such as dragons, demons  even Dracula, the Cretan Minotaur, and inter-planetary alien adversaries. Yet, alongside these creative divergences, there are also points of striking resonance with the Old English Beowulf, and the authors of the series discuss self-consciously their engagement with their medieval source and other literary influences. As a point of intersection between Anglo-Saxon culture and the modern imagination, the DC Beowulf series repays serious scholarly analysis. This essay represents an experiment in exploring how the Beowulf story is used in this one particular historical moment, and the ideological work which it might do for a set of audiences within the specific cultural context of 1970s America. In particular, my discussion will focus on representations of masculinity and male roles in the comics. Clearly, the context of the DC Beowulf series is one in which questions of gender roles and relations and masculinity are acutely prominent. The publication of the comics coincided with the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the return of many veterans  something which 1  Hereafter referred to as DC Beowulf, cited by volume, issue and page number. This paper was completed with the generous assistance of an Everett Helm Visting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, where I was able to consult material in the Michael E. Uslan Collection of comics and graphic novels.

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I will show to be strongly present in the comics’ paratextual material  as well as the rise of second-wave feminism and reactions to feminist movements within American society. In her highly influential book The Remasculinization of America : Gender and the Vietnam War, Susan Jeffords argues that it is the crystallized formations of masculinity in warfare that enable gender relations in society to survive, offering territory in which to adjust, test, and reformulate general social relations.2 I want to reflect upon these re-negotiations of gender relations in 1970s America through their traces in the ambivalent, divided masculinities presented by the DC Beowulf comics. But, as a medievalist, I am also interested in how a close analysis of the Beowulf comics  ephemera of late-twentieth-century popular culture  might illuminate the Old English poem Beowulf itself. Despite the asymmetry of these sources in their perceived literary status, can a reading of the DC Beowulf comics in any way extend or nuance our understanding of this canonical Anglo-Saxon text ? Medievalists are good at thinking about reception. In the case of Beowulf itself, for example, scholarly debate continues over the origins of the poem, with hypotheses of its date ranging from the late eighth to the eleventh century.3 Rather than representing any kind of perfect ‘original’, the Beowulf of the Nowell Codex (London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv) is almost certainly just one particular appropriation of this early-medieval myth, committed to writing in one particular social and cultural context.4 The DC Comics Beowulf series is simply one other re-appropriation and re-making of the narrative, again reflecting the concerns and agendas of one particular historical moment. Medievalists are also skilled in examining the context of texts  not just in historical and cultural terms, but also in the more immediate sense of their place within manuscripts, alongside other material. I have brought this approach to the DC comics, considering the full syntagmatics of publication rather than simply excerpting the Beowulf narrative frames themselves. The comic-book format presents the narrative alongside a range of paratextual material including front and back matter and advertisements. Clearly, the context and placing of advertisements throughout the text contribute to the comics’ presentation of the Beowulf narrative and models of masculinity, as well as offering evidence for the kinds of audience reading the material and social expectations of their roles. This inclusive analysis of the comic-book material has also been influenced by recent work on nineteenth-century serial publications, which has emphasised the importance of examining their integral advertisements and other ephemera as a crucial aspect of early reception and readers’ 2  Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America : Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, IN, 1989), p. xv. 3  For an overview of many of the major contributions to this debate, see The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto, 1997), or the shorter discussion in Klaeber 4th edn, pp. clxii–clxxxviii. 4  Compare Chris Jones’s essay in this volume.

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experience of a novel.5 By engaging with the full range of material within the Beowulf comics  as a typical comic-book reader would do  it is possible to develop an analysis of the deeply conflicted, divided masculinities presented by the DC series. As in the Old English poem itself, the alluring figure of the hyper-masculine warrior hero emerges as ambivalent and problematic. The DC Beowulf series, too, can be seen to ‘image the ambiguous functions of the masculine world’.6 Volume 1, issue 1 of the DC Beowulf series begins with a full-page frame or ‘splash page’, which introduces us to : A distant past shrouded in the mist of time ; when men lived savagely in the shadow of all-mighty Wyrd, the God of Fate, and in the terror of Satan, dragon-lord of the underworld. When the earth was no more than a few tribal lands cast in the darkness of mystic lagoons, fog-cloaked swamps and devil-haunted castles ! A time of villains, demons, spirits of evil  and the blood-beast Grendel ! A time of heroes, kings, warriors of good … and the noble savage … Beowulf !7 The text and imagery here firmly position the Beowulf narrative within all the visual, linguistic and thematic conventions of the comic-book medium. Beowulf himself, pictured in the centre of the frame swinging a huge mace, conforms to popular notions of the medieval hero with his bulging muscles and horned helmet. In the upper section of the frame, the red face, yellow eyes and fangs of Grendel leer out of the darkness and at the right edge of the image crouches the bikini-clad figure of NanZee, Beowulf ’s female accomplice  an addition to the Anglo-Saxon myth which I discuss in more detail below. Clearly, the DC adaptation of Beowulf is not constrained by any sense of rigid fidelity to the Old English poem. The Beowulf narrative is necessarily re-shaped in order to fit within the generic framework of the comicbook super-hero adventure. Yet, even here, there is some evidence of a self-conscious attempt to suggest the linguistic and stylistic features of the Old English text. As is typical throughout the series, there is heavy use of hyphenated adjectives and nouns (‘fog-cloaked’, ‘devil-haunted’, ‘blood-beast’), which are apparently intended to replicate the compound forms, or even kennings, conventional to Old English poetic

5  See the influential volume Literature in the Marketplace : Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge, 2003), or the more recent article by Emily Steinlight, ‘Advertising and the Victorian Novel’, Narrative 14 (2006), 132–62, which argues that ‘advertising plays a crucial role in producing and shaping the novel as a literary genre and in creating the real and imaginary conditions for a mass culture of novel-reading’ (p. 156). For a more general introduction to theories of paratext and paratextual reading see Gérard Genette, Paratexts : Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, 1997). 6  Clare A. Lees, ‘Men and Beowulf’, in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees with Thelma S. Fenster and Jo Ann McNamara (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 129–48, at p. 144. 7 DC Beowulf, vol. 1 issue 1 (April–May 1975), p. 1.

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diction.8 In the back-matter to this first issue, Allan Asherman comments on the authors’ aims in creating a particular linguistic idiom for the comics, whilst also offering a wry warning that they should not be regarded as an accurate translation of the Anglo-Saxon text : While we’ll be doing what we can to capture the flavor and spirit of the poem (including the use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and the kenning), we caution you not to try writing those [school] book reports after reading the comic book version.9 From the start, the comic evokes a particular version of the popularly-imagined mythic early-medieval past, where ‘all-mighty Wyrd, the God of Fate’ meets ‘Satan’, himself a conflation of vaguely Judaeo-Christian allusion and other unspecific mythological dimensions (‘dragon-lord of the underworld’). The issue continues with another full-page frame, which presents the character of Grendel and the title of this first episode, ‘The Curse of Castle Hrothgar’  a formula which again re-locates medieval myth, this time within the conventions of the Hammer Horror or B-Movie genre and the popular gothic. But here there is interesting evidence of a thoughtful engagement with the Old English text, as well as with other relevant literary sources. The page begins with a single rhetorical question in a text-box : How evil is a fiend from Hell ? How monstrous is a shadow-walker who chokes down men and women for sustenance ?10 Here the language does echo elements of the Old English poem, recalling Beowulf line 101b (‘feond on helle’), as well as compounds such as ‘sceadugenga’ (‘shadow-walker’, line 703a) and ‘mearcstapa’ (‘boundary-walker’, line 103a).11 As the first tier of frames shows us Grendel emerging from the waters of the mere, the text continues : Does he reek of vile swamp putrescence  or is it more the scent of chopped bones and age-old blood ? Is Satan’s hell-spawn man or beast … dragon or God of Death ? No  it is much worse … … It is Grendel !12 The emphasis on the grotesque and macabre here is undoubtedly well-judged to appeal to the comics’ younger male readership. Yet also, even in these first frames, the 8  For an introduction to Old English poetic diction see G.A. Lester, The Language of Old and Middle English Poetry (New York, 1996), or A History of Old English Literature, ed. Robert D. Fulk and Christopher M. Cain (Oxford, 2003), pp. 26–35. 9 DC Beowulf, 1.1, back-matter by Allan Asherman, facing p. 18. 10 DC Beowulf, 1.1, p. 2. 11  Klaeber 4th edn. All subsequent references to Beowulf are from this edition ; translations my own. 12 DC Beowulf, 1.1, p. 2.

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narrative alludes to the ambiguities surrounding Grendel’s identity in the Old English Beowulf  the fact that he is ‘on weres wæstmum’ (‘in the shape of a man’, line 1352a) whilst not fully human, and the possibility that he may be a form of devil from hell (as in line 101b, cited above). In issue 2 of the DC series, a speech by Grendel’s mother also alludes to the discussion of ‘Caines cynne’ (‘the kin of Cain’, line 107a) in the Old English poem, which is suggested as the origin of Grendel and of all creatures corrupted and demonic. In answer to a question from Grendel about his identity, Grendel’s mother replies : I tell you today, as I did yesterday, and the day before … when Cain killed his brother, Abel   it was the first crime against nature ! From the heart of Cain sprang demons and spirits. And then came Grebnel [sic] !13 These frames certainly recall the genealogy of ‘untydras […] eotenas ond ylfe  ond orcneas, / swylce gi(ga)ntas’ (‘corrupted things […] giants and elves and evil spirits, and also ogres’, lines 111–13a) which are said to derive from Cain’s crime in Beowulf. In the main frame of issue 1, page 2, Grendel’s own thoughts appear in ‘thought balloons’ above his head. These early lines offer an insight into the range of literary influences which are drawn on by Michael Uslan in his narrative : The noise … again the noise ! Men singing  men laughing ! Men ! Men ! Stop them ! Shut them up ! Tear their faces off ! Make them stop ! The sound of life  man’s life ! Light … happy … turn it off ! Kill the light ! End the life ! To the castle … Castle Hrothgar … the mead-hall … spill the blood ! These lines evidently recall lines 86–101 of the Old English poem, which tell of Grendel’s anguished response to the sound of feasting and song in Heorot : Ða se ellengæst  earfoðlice þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad, þæt he dogora gehwam  dream gehyrde hludne in healle.  Þær wæs hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes.   (lines 86–90a) Then the fierce spirit who dwelt in the shadows suffered a long time, that every day he heard the sound of joy loud in the hall. There was the harp’s sound, the clear song of the poet. The poem goes on to describe the song of the poet, which celebrates the creation of men (‘frumsceaft fira’, line 91a) and the delightful landscape of an Edenic world (‘wlite­beorhtne wang’ or ‘gleaming plain’, line 93a). The song conflates the innocence 13 DC Beowulf, 1.2 (July 1975), p. 3.

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of this pre-lapsarian paradise with the experience of fellowship and joy in the hall before the beginning of Grendel’s attacks, maintaining deliberate ambiguity as to whether the ‘feond on helle’ (line 101b) is the serpent of the biblical Genesis narrative, or the character of Grendel within the Beowulf story itself. Michael Uslan, in his text for the DC comic, also draws on a range of textual and cultural allusion at this point, but selects a set of references which root his Grendel firmly within twentieth-century literary tradition. In the back-matter to issue 2 in the series, Uslan discusses the literary influences which shape his depiction of Grendel in the text. The result was a mixture influenced by two sources : John Gardner’s book, ‘Grendel’, the B E OW U L F story told from the viewpoint of the beast … And an old favorite of mine, William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. In the latter, a group of children lost on an island become savages. It was their behavior and chants that were to be ingrained in the character of Grendel. The savage kids chanted : ‘Kill the pig ! Bash him in ! Slit his throat ! Spill his blood !’ Grendel’s calling became ‘Shut them up ! Tear their faces off ! Make them ST O P’, referring to Grendel’s intense frustration at being forced to listen to the happy sounds of feasting coming from nearby Castle Hrothgar.14 Throughout the series, the use of back-matter at the end of the main comic narrative plays an important role in attempting to establish the credibility of the text. In each issue, this single page of solid texts represents a reflection on the comic-book material, including in issue 1 the essay ‘Beowulf : an epic comes home’ by Allan Asherman, in issue 2 ‘The Source of the Saga’ by Michael Uslan, and in later issues the inclusion of a page of ‘Legendary Letters’, often including a surprising level of serious engagement with the text and its source materials. In issue 2, for example, a letter from Richard Clark in Indiana comments on ‘the early medieval history of Northern Europe’ and offers various points of information, while issue 5 includes a letter from Steven Metsker in Colorado, who observes additional resonances with John Gardner’s Grendel, asks why the ‘original author’ of the Old English poem is not credited, and makes a charge of ‘graceful plagiarism’.15 The response on the same page by Allan Asherman, Assistant Editor, deals playfully with the issue of authorship and the debates surrounding the origins of the Old English Beowulf, remarking that ‘if you happen to know who D I D W R I T E the original poem B E OW U L F, we’d appreciate hearing from you so we C A N credit him’. Whilst evidently part of a strategy to build an identity  and assure a future  for this continuing series, the back-matter in the DC Beowulf comics also reflects the ambition of the authors for this title, and the selfconsciousness and seriousness with which they tackle the challenge of ‘adapting an epic poem like B E OW U L F to a visual medium like comic books’.16 14 DC Beowulf, 1.2, back-matter by Michael Uslan, facing p. 18. 15 DC Beowulf, 1.5 (January 1976), ‘Legendary Letters’, facing p. 18. 16 DC Beowulf, 1.2, back-matter by Michael Uslan, facing page 18.

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Although the bold pseudo-scholarly claims of this back-matter may not always be entirely persuasive, there are indeed moments of resonance with the Anglo-Saxon poem throughout the Beowulf series. A striking single-frame image from page 5 of issue 1 offers a strong echo with the Old English text, as well as a compelling image of the warrior masculinity modelled by the narrative. In a close-up image of his face as he travels by ship to Denmark, Beowulf says : ‘Lof ’, or fame as some call it, is the most permanent of all things in an impermanent world ! That fame will keep the ‘spirit of Beowulf ’ alive centuries after I am dust ! Clearly, this quest for ‘lof ’ echoes the well-known final lines of the Old English Beowulf, which reflect on Beowulf ’s ambivalent nature as          wyruldcyning[a] mannum mildust  ond mon(ðw)ærust, leodum liðost ond lofgeornost.  (lines 3180b–2) the gentlest of earthly kings and most gracious of men, kindest to his people, and most eager for glory. In the comic-book image here, Beowulf looks up defiantly from under his horned helmet, his long red hair swept by the wind, his huge fur wrapped across his shoulders and his square jaw set in determination. This is undoubtedly a representation of the heroic, hyper-masculine warrior, fitted with the identifiable, recognisable traits of male physical prowess and power. Throughout the DC Beowulf series, the narrative presents a masculinity based on physical strength and size, competition with other men, combat roles and skills and physical superiority. Significantly, many of the advertisements embedded within the DC Beowulf narrative also contribute to this particular model of masculinity. Issues 1 to 3 include full-page advertisements for Karate (‘Destroy any attacker with Super Self-Defense Techniques !’),17 ‘The Physio-Mental Powers of the Ninja’,18 the new ‘Daisy’ ballbearing gun (‘Outgrown your old Daisy ? Maybe Dad can help you pick a new one’),19 and, facing the page showing Beowulf ’s sea-voyage to Denmark, ‘Catch more fish, bigger fish’.20 A sample one-page collection of smaller advertisements in issue 2 includes notices for the ‘Super Muscle System’, ‘Kung-Fu’, ‘Free Karate Secrets’, ‘Free Muscle Secrets’, ‘Trim your Waistline in only 3 days’, ‘Learn at Home  Customizing Vans and Cars’, as well as ‘Learning Magic’, ‘Live Seahorses’, and ‘X-Ray specs’.21 In general, these advertisements suggest a young male audience, perhaps of Junior High 17 DC Beowulf, 1.1, advertisement facing p. 4. 18 DC Beowulf, 1.3, advertisement facing p. 8. 19 DC Beowulf, 1.3, back cover colour advertisement. 20 DC Beowulf, 1.1, advertisement facing p. 5. 21 DC Beowulf, 1.2, small advertisements facing p. 11.

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or High School age (that is, around 12–18). They present images of aspiration and fantasy, and make claims about opportunities to play out the kind of masculine roles presented in the main Beowulf narrative. The full-page advertisement inside the back cover of issue 3 shows ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of a man whose physique has been transformed by ‘the super bodybuilding system’. With the huge heading ‘I M P O S SI B L E  ?’, the advertisement implicitly picks up on the potential insecurities and anxieties which might be generated by the images of hyper-masculinity throughout the main comic-book narrative. The text reassures its readers that the ‘super bodybuilding system’ can make this physique a reality, urging readers to ‘be better than the best, be dynamic !’ Again, despite its explicit address to ‘men’, this advertisement seems to play on the emergent desires and possible insecurities of an adolescent male reader, observing that : Very few men are satisfied with the way they look at present. They know themselves that they wouldn’t mind having a R E A L LY M A S C U L I N E B O DY  one that will ‘turn on’ the girls and make the guys envious.22 The text notes specifically that ‘regardless of your age, height or present build, we’ll help you build a fabulous body’, and returns again to the assurance that subscribers will develop the kind of body ‘girls love to be held in’. These advertisements offer a model of masculinity consonant with the images of warrior heroism in the main Beowulf narrative. Yet, as I will discuss later, these masculine activities are located within clearly-defined spheres of leisure, sport, play, and pre-maturity. The DC Comics’ addition of Nan-Zee, Beowulf ’s feisty female side-kick, seems worth further attention at this point. With her exaggeratedly curvy physique, long blonde hair and revealing costumes, she obviously fulfils a function as the object of the sexual desires acknowledged in the ‘super bodybuilding’ advertisement. Beowulf ’s romantic interest as well as his sparring partner, Nan-Zee represents a contradictory mix of empowered warrior prowess and flirtatious femininity. At her initial meeting with Beowulf she is mocked for her martial ambitions (‘You ? ! ? A warrior ? A woman warrior ?’) and punches him into the mud. After being knocked into the mud in return (‘Wench !’) she acknowledges : You’re pretty clever  for a man ! Clever enough, I pray, to ask a lady if she’d like a lift home !23 Here the narrative’s vision of the mythic medieval past seems to merge with the dating etiquette of 1970s America. In the back-matter of issue 2, Michael Uslan reflects on the introduction of Nan-Zee and her role in the adapted Beowulf narrative. Nan-Zee was a necessity of 1975. The poem showed a general disdain for women, giving the only female role of importance to Hrothgar’s Queen 22 DC Beowulf, 1.3, advertisement inside back cover. 23 DC Beowulf, 1.1, pp. 14–15.

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Wealtheow. Even the Queen’s role as a peace-maker was only a minor one. It was agreed that such a concept was outdated for today’s audience. And so was born Nan-Zee, a beautiful female warrior (named after the author’s wife, Nancy), who could wield a sword as well as her compatriot, B E OW U L F. She is also equally quick to parry his rapid-fire verbal put-downs.24 Whilst subsequent feminist criticism of Beowulf would challenge the notion that female roles are marginal and ‘minor’ in the poem, Uslan clearly regards the addition of Nan-Zee as a concession to the growing women’s movement in 1970s America. Yet Nan-Zee represents a rather mangled version of second-wave feminism : this strong female role model struts through the story frames in a succession of skimpy outfits, conveniently admitting a visual dimension of sexuality into the Beowulf narrative. The inclusion of Nan-Zee might be interpreted as a ‘necessity’ for the comics’ readers on many levels : the (hetero)sexual dimension which she represents mitigates possible anxiety about the intensely homosocial world of the Old English poem, and deflects potential concerns about the close attention invited by the DC narrative (as well as its paratextual material) on naked, muscular male bodies. Uslan’s explanation of NanZee in the back-matter, though, evidently demonstrates a sensitivity to  and perhaps an anxiety about  the upheaval and renegotiation of gender roles and relations current at the time of the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the peak of second-wave feminism.25 The US withdrawal from Vietnam is an implicit presence throughout these DC Comics, and the heroic warrior setting which they evoke perhaps represents a response to the troubling politics of war and social division which colour their immediate historical context. Providing a space of escape and retreat from the complexities and ambiguities of contemporary social concerns, the DC Beowulf comics can be aligned with the marked popularity of other series in the early 1970s which imagine mythic, pseudo-medieval worlds.26 Successful ‘Sword and Sorcery’ series such as the various Conan and Kull lines (Marvel Comics, from 1970 and 1971 onwards), Savage Tales (Marvel, 1971–5), and many others, construct imaginative worlds which assimilate an eclectic range of mythologies and historical allusions, but which are predominantly influenced by popular notions of Europe’s early-medieval past.27 These 24 DC Beowulf, 1.2, back-matter facing page 18. 25  For some perspectives on second-wave feminism in the 1970s, see Jane Gerhard, Desiring Revolution : Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Sexual Thought (New York, 2001) ; Judy Evans, Feminist Theory Today : An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism (London, 1995) ; and the succinct overviews of second-wave contexts and issues in Public Women, Public Words : A Documentary History of American Feminism, vol. III, ed. Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew (Madison, WI, 2007), especially pp. 3–6, 159–66, and 370–4. 26  Roger Sabin, Adult Comics : An Overview (London, 1993), p. 33. 27  Several of these series draw on characters created in the early twentieth century by Robert E. Howard. The phrase ‘sword and sorcery’ is now used conventionally to describe this genre, and is already used regularly in readers’ letters to these comics in the 1970s. See for example Kull the Conqueror 1.10

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narratives present straightforward warrior codes based on honour, vengeance and the quest for power, without the interference of political complexity, moral dilemmas or the need to justify violence. Their heroes live by brutal and simple tenets : Conan the Barbarian declares, for example, that ‘we of Aesgaard have a saying : “If the wolf be not at home when you come to call … Then slay its pups !”’ and the narrator remarks that ‘Revenge is the life-song of the bleak north !’28 Throughout these series, gender roles and physical attributes are clearly defined : muscular, hyper-masculine men encounter barely-clad, highly-sexualized women who are variously seductresses, enchantresses or ‘play-things’.29 As with the DC Beowulf comics, the advertising in these series is dominated by products and services which apparently enable readers to achieve the models of masculinity presented in the main narrative (‘Free ! Muscle course that can add 3 inches to your arms fast !’ ; ‘You can have a He-Man Voice’, and so on).30 Whilst many of these advertisements suggest a younger readership, some are clearly directed at older adolescents or men (for example, ‘Live and work in “Man Country”’ or advertisements for correspondence courses and opportunities to finish High School at home).31 Older male readers evidently form one audience group for these various comics, and many of the advertisements in the DC Beowulf series specifically offer opportunities for returning Vietnam veterans, reflecting the employment challenges awaiting many returning GIs. Indeed, many of these advertisements are marked with a circular badge stating ‘Approved for G.I.’s and Veterans Under New G.I. Bill’.32 Many of these adverts are for correspondence courses associated with institutions such as the ‘La Salle Extension University’, the ‘Cleveland Institute of Electronics’, the ‘Wayne School’ and the ‘North American School’ of drafting, accounting, motorcycle repair and so on. In issue 1, an advertisement for ‘A Big Income Career in Accounting’ presents a montage of photographs and drawings of men in office situations and announces ‘Accounting  The Most Direct Road To High Level Positions in Business’.33 An ad(September 1973), letters page (unnumbered). In the slightly later series The Saga of Thane of Bagarth (Charlton Comics, 1985), Beowulf himself features as a central character, along with a re-imagined heroic world of the Geats and Swedes. 28  Conan the Barbarian, 1.1 (October 1970), p. 9 ; Conan the Barbarian, 1.20 (November 1972), p. 11. A Conan ‘collectors medallion-coin’ advertised in Kull the Destroyer reads on the reverse ‘Barbarism is the natural state of mankind … And barbarism must ultimately triumph.’ Kull the Destroyer 1.14 (June 1974), advertisement before p. 10. 29  See for example Kull the Destroyer, 1.12 (February 1974), p. 3 ; Kull the Destroyer, 1.10, Kull the Destroyer 1.15 (August 1974), pp. 13–14. 30  Conan the Barbarian, 1.3 (February 1971), inside back cover ; Kull the Destroyer, 1.14, small advertisement after p. 23. 31  From an advertisement for training to become a park ranger or similar, Kull the Conqueror, 1.10 ; Kull the Destroyer, 1.14, advertisement before p. 6. 32  See for example the advertisement for the ‘High Pay Job in Drafting’, DC Beowulf, 1.1, half-page advertisement facing p. 13, discussed below. 33 DC Beowulf, 1.1, half-page advertisement facing p. 12.

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vertisement for training in drafting includes the heading, in red capitals, ‘High Pay Job in Drafting’, and, alongside an image of a smiling draftsman at his work, states ‘Coast-to-Coast Shortage of Trained Draftsmen Opens Thousands of Big Salary Jobs for Beginners !’34 Other advertisements include ‘Now you can Finish High School at home’35 and ‘Learning Electronics’.36 Particularly striking is a full-page advertisement for the La Salle Extension University in issue 2, facing page 10. With the bold heading ‘Look who’s smiling now !’, the advertisement presents a large photograph of a beaming man in a collar and tie. Next to this image, the text states : Sometimes a man sets his ambitions high enough to make skeptics smile. But how often he gets the last laugh ! One outstanding LaSalle graduate writes : ‘At the time I started studying with LaSalle, I was working as a factory clerk. Before completing the course I was transferred to cost accounting and my salary was increased by $1800. Now, having completed the course, I’m in charge of the department and on my way. LaSalle’s course helped me pull myself out of a boring and ill-paid job into a position of opportunity.’ This case study resonates with the paradigm of male rivalry and competition in the main Beowulf narrative and transposes it from the mythic heroic past into the modern professional world. The unnamed graduate tells his own story of success and victory over his sceptical peers, framing the concept of education and training in the ‘masculine’ terms constructed and endorsed by the comic’s text.37 Below this testimonial, the list of diverse courses offered by La Salle includes ‘Business Management’, ‘Interior Decorating’, ‘Computer Programming’, ‘Dental Office Assistant’, ‘Motel/Hotel Management’ and ‘Secretarial’. Whilst many of these advertisements for training and education do mention ‘men and women’ somewhere in the copy (usually within a substantial text paragraph, in a smaller font size), their main target audience is clearly male. The pictures of successful applicants are almost all male, and the badge for ‘G.I.’s and Veterans’ obviously seeks to attract this particular group. Examining the full range of material in the DC Beowulf comics, including both the main narrative and the frequent advertisements embedded within the text, a striking disjunction emerges between the different versions of masculinity being presented to the reader. On the one hand there are the alluring images of traditional warrior masculinity constructed by the main narrative and by one set of advertisements (for body-building, karate and so on), and on the other there is the aspirational image of the mature, professional, modern working male  at his desk or busy in the hospitality industry  promoted by the education and training advertisements. The possible inference here that returning veterans had to re-adjust their skills and their own 34 DC Beowulf, 1.1, half-page advertisement facing p. 13. 35 DC Beowulf, 1.3, advertisement facing p. 12. 36 DC Beowulf, 1.2, advertisement facing p. 12. 37  See for example Beowulf ’s confrontation with Unferth (DC Beowulf, 1.1, pp. 17–18), loosely based on lines 499–606 of the Old English poem.

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identities as men in order to be validated within society resonates with some perspectives on masculinity in post-Vietnam America. The conservative social commentator, John Wheeler, at the time Chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, writes in his influential 1984 study Touched with Fire : The Future of the Vietnam Generation, Part of the price of women’s progress has been a new double standard. The double standard operates against men. Under it, America has learned to celebrate both the femininity and the professional accomplishments of women. The duplicity is that men are not affirmed in their masculinity, but only in their professional lives.38 Wheeler’s comment reflects, perhaps, his own implicit resentment of the women’s movement and the changes affecting gender roles in 1970s America.39 But it clearly reveals one reaction to the social transitions in the period, and, in particular, the way in which changing masculinities and gender relations could be read by some observers as the marginalization and de-valuation of traditional manhood.40 The DC Beowulf comics do offer evidence of changing masculinities and the changing ways in which male identities are legitimated and affirmed in the postVietnam period. Through the main narrative and the accompanying paratextual material, traditional masculine roles  such as fighting, pursuing physical prowess or strength, engaging in physical activity or competition  are relegated to the spheres of leisure, play and pre-maturity. In post-Vietnam society it appears that the professional lives within which men are affirmed, validated and rewarded  the desk jobs, clerical and manual work  present a stark disjunction with the hyper-masculine world offered in the Beowulf narrative and the advertisements for leisure pursuits and recreational activities. What stands out above all in these DC comics is the infantilization of traditional masculinities. For its adult male readers, the Beowulf narrative offers an escapist, nostalgic world of traditional gender roles which contrast with contemporary social reality. For its younger male readers, the comic-book narrative plus the advertisements for body-building, karate and competitive physical hobbies offer a space to test out and perform traditional masculine roles within the safe and appropriate confines of pre-maturity, pre-adulthood, or the private sphere of play and recreation. To make such an observation, however, is not necessarily to support the views of commentators such as Wheeler who argue that masculinity in 1970s America 38  John Wheeler, Touched with Fire : The Future of the Vietnam Generation (New York, 1984), p. 142. 39  In another article, Wheeler includes ‘the ascendancy of the women’s rights […] movement’ in the category of ‘traumatic changes at home’ during the Vietnam period. See John Wheeler, ‘Vietnam : The Retrospect : Coming to Grips with Vietnam’, Foreign Affairs 63 (1985), 747–58, at p. 747. 40  For studies which engage with  and critique  the controversial notion of a revision or ‘crisis’ of masculinity in America and Western Europe in the 1970s and beyond, see for example Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (London, 2005), especially pp. 7–24, Anthony W. Clare, On Men : Masculinity in Crisis (London, 2000), especially Chapter 2, and Chris Haywood and Maírtín Mac an Ghaill, Men and Masculinities : Theory, Research and Social Practice (Buckingham, 2003), especially pp. 124–42.

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is ‘marginalised’ and ‘de-valued’. Instead, the DC Beowulf comics offer evidence, as we might expect, that the performance of different masculinities is legitimated and valued at different historical moments, at different points within the individual life cycle, and in different social spheres. An illuminating article by Ellen Jordan and Angela Cowan reflects on the contemporary educational processes by which young boys are taught to recognise that the ‘warrior narratives’ which characterize their early experience of masculinity must be limited to the realm of ‘private desire’, learning to replace them with a ‘public masculinity’ of ‘rationality, responsibility and decorum’.41 Jordan and Cowan outline the social contract through which boys mature into adult masculinity : Although they learn that they must give up their warrior narratives of masculinity in the public sphere, where rationality and responsibility hold sway, they also learn that in return they may preserve them in the private realm of desire as fantasy, as bricolage, as a symbolic survival that is appropriate to the spaces of leisure and self-indulgence, the playground, the backyard, the television set, the sports field.42 The DC Beowulf comics reflect this social process. Traditional warrior masculinity is associated with pre-maturity and play, or spheres which allow the re-enactment of pre-adult activities such as leisure and recreation  including reading of the fictional Beowulf narrative itself. The mature roles offered to men in the advertisements present instead a world of ‘rationality and responsibility’ through which they are accepted and affirmed. Vietnam veterans, returning from a brutal conflict and the real performance of warrior roles, must go through the difficult process of ‘maturing’ once again into validated professional roles and working lives. The reading of conservative commentators such as John Wheeler is more simplistic, informed by a reaction against the changing social and gender politics of 1970s America. ‘Masculinity went into eclipse in the Vietnam era’, Wheeler protests. ‘In rejecting the war we rejected the warrior.’43 In the final part of this essay, I want to return to the Old English poem Beowulf. As 41  Ellen Jordan and Angela Cowan, ‘Warrior Narratives in the Kindergarten Classroom : Renegotiating the Social Contract ?’, Gender and Society 9 (1995), 727–43, at pp. 727–8. Jordan and Cowan refer specifically to Beowulf as one of these shaping ‘warrior narratives’, commenting that ‘By “warrior narratives” we mean narratives that assume violence is legitimate and justified when it occurs within a struggle between good and evil. There is a tradition of such narratives, stretching from Hercules to Beowulf to Superman and Dirty Harry, where the male is usually depicted as the warrior, the knight-errant, the good guy.’ 42  Ibid., p. 741. 43  Wheeler, ‘Vietnam : The Retrospect’, pp. 752–3. In The Remasculinization of America, Susan Jeffords argues that conservative reactions to Vietnam and the women’s movement led to the construction of a new mythology of warrior masculinity in popular culture, for example in the Rambo film series (pp. 128–30). For further discussion see Evan Carton, ‘Vietnam and the Limits of Masculinity’, American Literary History 3 (1991), 294–318, esp. pp. 296–7.

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a medievalist, what have I gained from this experiment in looking at the DC Beowulf comics and their context ? What new light might a study of these 1970s comics cast back on the Old English text ? At the most basic level, an analysis of the DC comics is a reminder of just how susceptible the Beowulf story is to being re-worked and transformed, and invested with new valencies in different historical moments. As I acknowledged at the opening, any reading of any version of Beowulf (including the Old English poem in the Nowell Codex) must be an exercise in thinking about reception and the ways in which different historical moments negotiate and appropriate the narrative. More specifically, my work on the DC Beowulf series has enabled me to return to the Old English Beowulf, and current themes in Beowulf scholarship, thinking about representations of masculinity in new ways. It is now a commonplace of Beowulf criticism that questions of masculinity and male heroic identity are central to the poem. Whilst the extant Old English text, like the narrative of the 1970s DC comics, locates its male warriors in a mythic heroic past, distanced from contemporary social politics, its perspective on traditional masculinities is not nostalgic. As Clare Lees comments, ‘there is nothing sentimental about its ambiguous and ambivalent gaze on men’.44 In particular, questions of masculinity in the Old English poem seem to gather around moments of transition and change, whether through the movement of characters from youth to age and maturity, the politics of succession and government, or the wider cultural shifts from secular heroic to Christian values which underpin the narrative perspective. In the Old English Beowulf we see that masculinity, rather than being stable and monolithic, is subject to modification and re-negotiation in the transition from youth to age. The text explores the different masculine roles which are legitimate in different social contexts and moments, as well as the limits and failings of traditional masculinities in heroic society. Hrothgar’s ‘sermon’, of course, is the locus classicus for the discussion of ideologies of masculinity, youth and age in the poem. On the sea-shore of Denmark, before Beowulf sails away to return to Hygelac and the Geats, Hrothgar addresses him with the authority of one who is ‘wintrum frod’ (‘wise through winters’, 1724b), having won wisdom and the right to advise the hero through age and experience. Hrothgar’s advice reflects the traditional roles of youth and age in Old English literature, which emphasise the necessity for the young man to be educated and guided into maturity. The Exeter Book Maxims state that :                 Læran sceal mon geongne monnan, trymman ond tyhtan þæt he teala cunne,  oþþæt hine mon atemedne hæbbe.45 The young man must be taught, encouraged and trained so that he knows proper behaviour, until he has been tamed. 44  Lees, ‘Men and Beowulf’, p. 146. 45  Maxims I (A), lines 45b–6 in Bernard J. Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, 2 vols. (Exeter, 1994), I, 252.

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Whilst at this point in the poem Beowulf is in his prime as a warrior, rather than an untested boy, the words of the Maxims resonate with the relationship between youth and age constructed by Hrothgar’s speech. In particular, the subsequent comment in the Maxims that ‘Styran sceal mon strongum mode’ (‘A strong spirit must be steered’, line 50a) reinforces the association between (relative) youth and physical strength with impetuosity, wilfulness and the need for guidance. In his speech, Hrothgar acknowledges Beowulf ’s physical prowess and strength as a warrior, but warns him against arrogance and urges him to mature into greater wisdom and recognition of the transitory nature of power and glory. In his presentation of gumcyst or ‘manly virtue’ (line 1723a), Hrothgar famously uses Heremod as a negative exemplum of the disastrous consequences of warrior masculinity without measure or regulation. Notably, Heremod’s failure as a king and masculine role-model is associated explicitly with his failure to grow and mature as expected and desired. Hrothgar comments that ‘ne geweox he him to willan’ (‘he did not mature as [the Danes] wished’, line 1711a). Geweox is emphasised here by alliteration and metrical stress : Heremod’s defining weakness is a failure to mature into the measured masculinity demanded by his role as a king and protector of his people, and he forms the direct anti-type to Scyld Scefing, introduced as the model of a good ruler at the start of the poem, who ‘weox under wolcnum’ (‘grew [or flourished] under the sky’, line 8a).46 Hrothgar concludes his speech by addressing Beowulf once again as ‘secg bet[e]sta’ (‘greatest warrior’, line 1759a) and ‘mære cempa’ (‘famed hero’, line 1760a), acknowledging his physical strength and power as a warrior in his prime. The phrase ‘Nu is þines mægnes blæd / ane hwile’ (‘Now is your strength’s glory for a while’, lines 1761b–2a) perhaps exploits word-play between the masculine noun blæd (long vowel, ‘glory’) and the neuter blæd (short vowel, ‘leaf ’, ‘blossom’), suggesting the brief flourishing of Beowulf ’s physical power and prowess during this phase of his life. However, despite these words of advice from Hrothgar, and the emphatic model of Heremod as a man who ‘ne geweox’, Beowulf never does successfully negotiate the transition from the younger male role of warrior hero to the alternative, mature masculinity of ruler, advisor and protector. The poem remains deeply ambivalent in its portrayal of Beowulf, fifty years after the battles with Grendel and Grendel’s mother, as king of the Danes. Whilst the poem describes him as ‘frod cyning, / eald eþel(w) eard’ (‘wise king, old guardian of the homeland’, lines 2209b–10a), Beowulf still seeks out combat with the dragon  perhaps understandable as the only way to protect his people, but alternatively readable as the continued pursuit of fame and blæd even at the cost of leaving his people without a leader.47 As Wiglaf comments :

46  Edward Irving comments that here and throughout the Heremod passage ‘we have the energetic clash of powerful opposites : growth, potentiality for good, and the people’s will on one hand ; murder and destructiveness on the other’. E.B. Irving, A Reading of ‘Beowulf ’ (New Haven, CT, 1968), p. 3. 47  See John Leyerle, ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, Medium Ævum 34 (1965), 89–102.

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Oft sceall eorl monig  anes willan wræc adreogan,  swa us geworden is.   (lines 3077–8) Often, through the will of one man, many must suffer misery, as has happened to us. Depending on our reading of the final lines of the poem, one moral vulnerability of Beowulf may be that he remains ‘lofgeornost’ (‘most eager for glory’, line 3182b) until the very end, clinging always to the desires and pursuits associated with the young male warrior. Yet the older Beowulf is a complex and ambiguous figure and does in some ways grow into the expected role of advisor and protector. For example, when Hygelac dies and Hygd offers the kingdom to Beowulf rather than their son, Beowulf skilfully negotiates a potentially volatile situation by deferring to Heardred and supporting him with ‘freondlarum’ (‘friendly advice’, line 2377b)  a term which suggests both the wisdom of experience and a subtle grasp of the politics of government. Yet Beowulf never stops being Heardred’s potential rival and competition, and soon takes over the throne on his death. Perhaps most crucially, many scholars have commented on Beowulf ’s failure to fulfil the mature role of king and patriarch by producing an heir for his kingdom. Clare Lees notes that ‘Beowulf concentrates on the crucial sites in genealogical or patrilineal succession’, commenting that ‘by the end of the poem the Geats are lordless, without an obvious successor because Beowulf leaves no direct heir, as he himself acknowledges’.48 David Rosen regards the failure of Beowulf to produce an heir as symptomatic of the failure of the ideal of the lone warrior hero, arguing that ‘because he is alone and puts his trust in his role and skill and in the order of society, having repressed his own natural fecundity and affections, the society fails, his people die’.49 Yet Beowulf ’s failure as a patriarch does not necessarily reflect the failure of the entire ‘order of [heroic] society’. Beowulf ’s failure to secure a future for his people may be another result of his inability to make the complete transition from those masculine roles legitimate for the young warrior to those necessary for the king, protector and provider. Just as in the DC Comics Beowulf series, then, the Old English Beowulf presents a range of different masculinities appropriate to different moments in the life cycle and different social roles. Beowulf can be understood to transgress these normative roles, failing to navigate the transition from youthful to mature masculinity : like Heremod, to a certain extent, he is a man who ‘ne geweox’. In relation to Beowulf ’s failure to produce an heir, several critics see wider questions relating to transition and change in Anglo-Saxon society, reminding us that the poem reflects cultural shifts and upheavals  particularly relating to the move from secular heroic to Christian values. Frederick Biggs argues that the poem is acutely interested in the politics of succession and in different models of king-making, engaging with issues such as the transition from secular Germanic to Christian 48  Lees, ‘Men and Beowulf’, p. 141. 49  David Rosen, The Changing Fictions of Masculinity (Chicago, 1993), p. 19.

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models of succession and the problem of having either too many or too few potential heirs.50 For David Rosen, the traditional secular heroic model of warrior masculinity emerges as a potential threat to the future of human community and society. Rosen reads traditional warrior masculinity in Beowulf as an anachronistic, dangerous relic of secular Germanic culture which has no place in a Christian society. He argues that Even during the events the story recounts, Beowulf ’s society is passing away, and the particular roles in which men find themselves trapped have become dysfunctional  they are unable to ensure the survival of the society.51 Traditional warrior masculinity in Beowulf, then, can be read not only as a social role which the individual must leave behind in the transition to old age and maturity, but also as a metonym for an outdated, anachronistic secular heroic society beyond which late Anglo-Saxon culture must also progress. As with the DC Beowulf comics, the Old English Beowulf is produced in a period of cultural transition and the re-negotiation of social roles and values. The ambivalent figure of the young warrior hero exemplifies the contradictions and ambiguities in its treatment of the imagined secular heroic past from the perspective of the Christian present. Rosen’s concept of ‘dysfunctional’ masculinity in Beowulf offers us an opportunity to draw together some final connections between the early-eleventh-century Old English poem of the Nowell Codex and the 1970s DC comics. Clearly, the idea of a ‘dysfunctional’ masculinity is dependent on normative roles constructed according to different historical and social conditions, cultural values and the age and situation of the individual. In the Old English Beowulf and the DC Beowulf series we see that a masculinity becomes ‘dysfunctional’ when it transgresses the usual pattern of the life cycle or the requirements of specific roles within the community, and also when it fails to adapt and evolve with newly emergent social norms and cultural values. The DC Beowulf comics are complex and multi-layered texts, presenting divided, contradictory masculinities which must be negotiated by their adolescent and adult male readers. Through the narrative frames themselves, as well as through the accompanying advertisements and paratextual material, the comics construct a range of masculine roles which are appropriate to different spheres : pre-maturity, play and private fantasy, or adulthood, mature masculinity and the public role of wage-earner and professional. Without any explicit prescription (as we find, for example, in the Old English Maxims), the DC comics shape their readers’ understanding of normative male roles and implicitly censure deviation or transgression. The Beowulf narrative itself emerges as a clearly-circumscribed space for the ‘symbolic survival’ of warrior masculinity ; the ‘private realm of desire as fantasy’ where certain aspects of

50  Frederick M. Biggs, ‘The Politics of Succession in Beowulf’, Speculum 80 (2005), 709–41. 51 Rosen, The Changing Fictions of Masculinity, p. 21.

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a perceived traditional masculinity can be enacted and contained within the spheres of pre-maturity or play.52 The Old English Beowulf, too, presents normative masculinities which are dependent on age and social role. Yet the Old English poem also offers direct examples of men who transgress or in some way fail to meet these norms. Heremod is the archetype of the man who ‘ne geweox’, and Beowulf himself in certain key ways fails to make the transition from the masculinity appropriate for a young warrior hero to that necessary for a king, patriarch and protector. Both produced in periods of cultural change and social transition, the Old English Beowulf and DC comics demonstrate the ways in which masculinity can be re-negotiated and re-made at different historical moments. The DC Beowulf comics are valuable in their own right as a re-working of the Beowulf narrative in a particular historical and cultural context. Close analysis of the comics facilitates important questions about appropriation, reception, and the ways in which different audiences can make use of a text. This comparative process also enables us to return to the Old English poem and established themes in Beowulf scholarship with nuanced and newly-sharpened critical perspectives. 52  See the discussion of Jordan and Cowan, p. 177 above.

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10 P.D. James Reads Beowulf John Halbrooks

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n perhaps the most familiar moment in early Anglo-Latin literature, Bede describes a meeting in which the Northumbrian King Edwin’s chief councillors weigh the merits of the new Christian faith. One councillor famously compares ‘the present life of man on earth’ to ‘the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting hall’ : In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall ; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms ; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while ; but of what went before this life or what follows, we know nothing.1

That Christianity offers a cosmology which illuminates the void outside the metaphorical hall, which offers light rather than darkness or winter storms after death, is of course one of the new faith’s attractions, and Edwin and the Northumbrians eventually convert, largely because of this great promise. The equally familiar and elegiac account of Scyld Scefing’s death in Beowulf offers, of course, a benighted obverse moment : the mourning Danes have no sense of Scyld’s destination as they watch his funeral ship drift out to sea with the tide. Both texts, then, offer an epistemology of death through Christianity  explicitly in Bede and by implication in Beowulf  and the compelling possibility of a spiritual reality beyond this life. This Christian cosmological paradigm likely owes its impressive centuries-long endurance to the comfort it provides in the cold reality of death  a reality which the crime novelist P.D. James has dwelled upon and anatomized (sometimes literally) in 1 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Leo Sherley-Price, rev. R.E. Latham (London, 1990), II.13 (pp. 129–30). The Latin text of this passage is quoted in Joshua Davies’s essay in this volume.

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a literary career spanning nearly a half-century and some twenty books. While she has explored the relationship between religion and death in other novels, perhaps most memorably in A Taste for Death, in her 2001 novel Death in Holy Orders she offers a meditation on the English Christian institutional history of this relationship, going all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon Middle Ages  an historical connection she emphasizes through numerous references to Beowulf throughout the narrative.2 She sets the novel at the fictional St Anselm’s College, a conservative Anglican seminary located in a sparsely populated area on the coast of East Anglia, where her serial detective Adam Dalgliesh investigates the strange death of a young seminarian.3 During his stay, other mysterious deaths occur, deaths which become bad publicity for a school in danger of being shut down by the Church of England because of its diminishing enrollment and its old-fashioned theology. The fate of this troubled seminary, however, also raises questions about the continuing relevance of the Church as a whole. James’s Author’s Note which precedes the novel seems playfully to elide these larger questions. It reads in part : In setting this story of murder and mystery in a Church of England theological college I would not wish to discourage candidates for the Anglican priesthood, nor to suggest for one moment that visitors to such a college in search of rest and spiritual renewal are in danger of finding a more permanent peace than they had in mind.   (Death in Holy Orders, unnumbered page) The apology may remind us of Puck’s plea at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the irony in this case is that James is making the wrong apology to the Church. I doubt that many, if any, readers would be afraid for their lives at a seminary, even after having finished the novel. However, the book that the reader is about to begin presents a devastating vision of a Church no longer able to provide answers or even comfort to the people it is meant to serve. The problem is not so much a ‘death in holy orders’, but rather a slow, inevitable death of holy orders. This vision of a Church in crisis suggests that the novel serves as a kind of bookend for English institutional Christianity, with Beowulf standing at the beginning of the shelf. More important than the specific parallels to the poem, which are striking and unmistakable, is the extent to which the novel projects a cultural change comparable to the Anglo-Saxon conversion to Christianity. James contemplates an England for which the flight of Bede’s sparrow is once again through the light of the hall back into unknowable darkness. The pathos of mortality in Beowulf has returned to haunt the twenty-first-century descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. She depicts the decline and 2  P.D. James, A Taste for Death (London, 1986) ; Death in Holy Orders (London, 2001). References to page numbers in Death in Holy Orders cite the paperback edition (London, 2002, repr. 2007). Hereafter, references to James will appear in the text. 3  In addition to the two already mentioned, Adam Dalgliesh appears in twelve other novels (to date) by James.

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growing isolation of an English Christian institution which finds itself less and less able to justify its existence. The novel unmasks a violent human darkness which begs for answers that the Church cannot provide. Beowulf, for James, then, is a ‘distant mirror’, an inverted image of the present and a poem of existential crisis which resonates in a postmodern world that lacks answers beyond the reason and humanity of her hero-detective, Adam Dalgliesh (whom we may call manna mildust ‘kindest of men’), who seeks his own answers in his work, his poetry, and in his tentative gestures toward personal relationships.4 James focuses the Beowulf analogy by having Dalgliesh read Heaney’s translation of the poem on the night of the book’s most brutal murder  and the timing (he reads the first part of the poem on the night of the killing) makes it seem that he may reach the point of Beowulf ’s fight with Grendel at the very moment of the slaughter. And, of course, this correspondence heightens the essential difference between the warriorhero and the detective-hero : the latter’s absence from the scene of violence. While Beowulf himself constructs his narrative through heroic resolve and violent action, Dalgliesh must reconstruct narrative through reason in the aftermath of violence.5 Of course Beowulf also shapes narrative through his oral performances both before and after combat, most notably in his promises and in his long account of the Danish episode to Hygelac. It is an established tenet in detective fiction, going all the way back to Poe and Conan Doyle, that the detective creates the narrative through reason : the absent killer must be imagined and created before he or she may appear as a killer. In reading Beowulf at the moment of the murder, it is as if Dalgliesh is taking lessons from the Beowulf-poet on how to construct a killer, for the creation and invocation of Cain, the police-team’s code-name for the murderer. This choice of name refers not only to the biblical Cain but also to the poem’s explanation that Grendel is ‘Caines cynne’ (‘kin of Cain’, line 107). To figure Dalgliesh as creator of narrative is to invoke one of the deceptive comforts of detective fiction : that the problem of mortality might be resolved by reason in narrative form, that we might be able to solve death like a puzzle. James has Dalgliesh contemplate this desire for resolution in his profession as well : The last time he remembered having prayed with passion and with the belief that his prayer was valid had been when his wife was dying, and it had not 4  I borrow the phrase ‘a distant mirror’ from Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror : The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978). ‘Manna mildust’ is the first of four superlatives used to describe Beowulf in the last two lines of the poem. See Klaeber 4th edn, p. 109, line 3181. Hereafter, references to the poem will appear in the text. 5  There is a long history of commentary on the structure of detective narratives. For a classic essay, see W.H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962), pp. 146– 58. Auden claims that the detective’s proximity to violence is the point which differentiates the murder mystery from the thriller. See also Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot : Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA, 1984), who makes the point that the role of the detective is to ‘repeat, go over again, the ground that has been covered by the criminal’ (p. 24).

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been heard  or, if heard, had not been answered. He thought about death, its finality, its inevitability. Was part of the attraction of his job the illusion it gave that death was a mystery that could be solved, and that with the solution all the unruly passions of life, all doubts and all fears, could be folded away like a garment  ?  (Death in Holy Orders, p. 197) In his rejection of prayer in favor of detection, Dalgliesh inverts the pathos the Beowulf-poet feels for the pre-Christian Scyldings and their inability to imagine the Christian promise as they send Scyld’s funeral ship over the water : ‘Men ne cunnon / secgan to soðe, selerændende, / hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng’ (lines 50–2 : ‘No man can tell, / no wise man in hall or weathered veteran / knows for certain who salvaged that load’).6 If for the Scyldings the Christian promise has yet to appear, for Dalgliesh it has run its course, and once again neither wise man nor weathered veteran can provide answers. In the post-Christian, or nearly post-Christian, world, the other players in James’s novel have turned for existential stability to those same comforts to which the Danes and Geats turn : family, community, money and, finally, heroic performance. But the novel reminds the reader incessantly of the fragility of each of these possibilities, and Dalgliesh, as the poetic consciousness who not only shapes the narrative in his role as detective but also interprets it through his ruminations, has rejected each of them before the novel begins. It is in these transitory sources of comfort that we find parallels to Beowulf that are more significant than mere plot references. The lonely widow Margaret, the college’s nurse whose son was killed in an IRA attack several years before, and who is murdered because she discovers something relevant to the current case, does not struggle with Cain but allows herself to be killed. ‘I don’t think Margaret cared very much whether she lived or died after her son was killed’, explains the venerable Father Martin. ‘She wasn’t morbid about it, it was just that she wasn’t enough attracted to life to fight for it’ (Death in Holy Orders, p. 75). Her persistent apathy in the years after her son’s death recalls that of King Hrethel, the death of whose favorite son Herebeald at the hands of his brother Heathcyn in an apparent accident with a misfired arrow is recalled by Beowulf in his long speech before the dragon fight. As Dorothy Whitelock has argued, the question of Heathcyn’s intention is troubling because the poem’s heroic code offers no good answers in either case.7 If the shooting is an accident, then we have yet another reminder that wyrd (fate) is unexplainable and inexorable. Beowulf ’s proverb early in the poem that states that fate will often save the ‘undoomed’ man does not hold here.8 In this case, Herebeald’s 6  Seamus Heaney, trans., Beowulf : A Verse Translation (New York, 2002), p. 4. Despite some reservations regarding its accuracy, I have used this translation throughout this essay, unless otherwise noted, because James refers specifically to it in the novel. Hereafter, references to Heaney’s translation will appear in brackets in the text. 7  Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of ‘Beowulf ’ (Oxford, 1951), pp. 17–19. 8  The word is unfægne in the original. See Beowulf, lines 572–3.

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fate is not only unavoidable but also unanswerable. His society offers no answers or recourse to the problem of Herebeald’s death, and thus Hrethel, like Margaret, no longer finds any kind of joy in life :          Swa Wedra helm æfter Herebealde  heortan sorge weallinde wæg ;  wihte ne meahte on ðam feorhbonan  fæghðe gebetan ; no ðy ær he þone heaðorinc  hatian ne meahte laðum dædum,  þeah him leof ne wæs. He ða mid þære sorhge,  þe him sio sar belamp, gumdream ofgeaf,  Godes leoht geceas ; eaferum læfde,  swa deð eadig mon, lond ond leodbyrig,  þa he of life gewat.   (lines 2462–71) Such was the feeling of loss endured by the lord of the Geats after Herebeald’s death. He was helplessly placed to set to rights the wrong committed, could not punish the killer in accordance with the law of the blood-feud, although he felt no love for him. Heartsore, wearied, he turned away from life’s joys, chose God’s light and departed, leaving buildings and lands to his sons, as a man of substance will.   (Heaney, p. 62) As with Hrethel, Margaret does not feel that justice has been done in her son’s case, as the IRA-associated killers are released from prison under the Good Friday agreement. Her friend Ruby says : ‘Watching her, all those months afterwards, it was like someone being tortured in hell and not being able to make a sound. Her eyes got immense but the rest of her seemed to shrivel up’ (p. 96). Ruby’s infernal simile serves to contextualize Margaret’s suffering : it can be merely ‘like’ torture in hell, because hers is mortal rather than immortal suffering. In a world in which the promise of heaven no longer seems like a possible reward for a life lived, neither does hell stand as a promise or threat of justice for sinners. The novel reminds us of the medieval vision of hell through the painting of the Doom, which is displayed in the church and which has been robbed of its power by modernity : ‘The Doom, originally more prominently displayed, was designed to terrify medieval congregations into virtue and social conformity literally through fear of hell. Now it was viewed by interested academics or by modern visitors for whom the fear of hell no longer had power, and who sought heaven in this world, not in the next’ (p. 68). Of course, if modern fiction consigns something to academics, the implication is that it cannot matter much. As with Hrethel the pagan, death for Margaret the

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post-Christian promises oblivion and relief from earthly suffering rather than fear of immortal suffering. Such a reading of this part of Beowulf, however, must account for Beowulf ’s strange claim that Hrethel ‘chose God’s light’ (line 2469 : ‘Godes leoht geceas’), a claim which does not seem to consign him to oblivion. This clause, an apparently Christian reference in a pagan context, has troubled generations of scholars, going back all the way to F.A. Blackburn, who believed it to be an interpolation by a Christian copyist. Tolkien considered it the poem’s greatest flaw. More recently, Linda Georgianna has interpreted the construction as deeply ironic because neither Beowulf nor Hrethel, both pagans, may ‘choose God’s light’.9 Georgianna’s claim is not compatible with readings that hold that Beowulf has some kind of foresight, or at least an intuitive sense of his fate  that we reach what George Clark has called a ‘non-ironic equipoise’ as we near the end of the poem (a reading which I discuss in more detail below).10 More compelling to me is Dorothy Whitelock’s seventy-year-old argument that this construction was a kind of euphemism for death that had become so ingrained that it would not have been considered in a literal sense.11 As with Ruby’s simile of Margaret’s earthly hell and desire for oblivion, Whitelock’s reading of Hrethel strips reference to the afterlife of an imagined future for the soul. In both texts this desire for oblivion at least in part derives from a profound yet ultimately misguided yearning for the past, and specifically for an ideal communal past radically distinct from the existential loneliness of the present. What Tolkien called the poem’s heroic-elegiac quality reflects this sense of loneliness and resonates strongly with James’s self-aware nostalgia for a communal past that never really existed in the imagined ideal state. I say ‘self-aware’ because, like the Beowulf-poet, James provides us with a communal structure whose inevitable destruction is imagined even with the narrative of its creation. Famously, the poem invokes Heorot’s ‘laðan liges’ (‘barbarous burning’, line 83 ; Heaney, p. 5) in the same breath with which it describes its creation. For James, the fate of the college both echoes Margaret’s death-wish and resonates with its foundation in a communal past. In her diary, Margaret writes : ‘The sea is eating away the sandy cliffs year by year, and sometimes I stand on the edge looking out to sea and can imagine a great tidal wave rearing up, white and glistening, racing towards the shore to crash over the turrets and towers, the church and the cottages, and wash us all away’ (p. 6). The doublings and the alliteration of this passage recall the rhythms of Old English elegiac poetry, and, as if to 9 See F.A. Blackburn, ‘The Christian Coloring in the Beowulf ’, PMLA 12 (1897), 205–25 ; J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936), 245–95 ; and Linda Georgianna, ‘King Hrethel’s Sorrow and the Limits of Heroic Action in Beowulf ’, Speculum 62 (1987), 829–50. 10 George Clark, ‘The Hero and the Theme’, in A ‘Beowulf ’ Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln, NE, 1997), pp. 271–90. 11  Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Beowulf 2444–2471’, Medium Ævum 8 (1939), 198–204. I discuss what seems to be new evidence in support of Whitelock’s argument in the Appendix, below.

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intensify the resonance, she posits this imagined bleak future in the same paragraph in which she describes the foundation of the college by the universally esteemed Victorian patroness. Moreover, throughout the novel the probable closing of the college seems more and more imminent, and this source of anxiety becomes central to the workings of the mystery plot. The remaining pillars from the ruins of an Elizabethan gatehouse, in glaring synecdoche, ‘gave out their silent, ambiguous messages : crude phallic symbols, indomitable sentinels against the steadily advancing enemy, obstinately enduring reminders of the house’s inevitable end’ (p. 105). When we press harder into the college’s past we realize that even in its finest moments, St Anselm’s as a community has never been ideal, and it has always, like Heorot, contained the seeds of its own destruction. A series of allusions to the theological and political squabbles of Trollope’s Barchester Towers reminds the reader that the high-church Anglicanism espoused by St Anselm’s has been subject to stringent criticism and attack since the time of the college’s Victorian founding. James, therefore, never allows for unexamined nostalgia. The ideal past is always a construction determined by the desires of the present. We are never allowed to view institutional or personal corruption as the result of an historical adulteration of first principles. The high-powered businessman who is the father of the book’s first victim and is contemptuous of the college’s mission extends institutional corruption all the way back to the council of Nicea in 325 : ‘It was a council of men, wasn’t it ? Powerful men. They brought to it their private agendas, their prejudices, their rivalries. Essentially, it was about power, who gets it, who yields it. You’ve sat on enough committees, you know how they work. Ever known one that was divinely inspired ?’ (Death in Holy Orders, p. 23). The problem with institutional Christianity is defined not by its absence, as it is in Beowulf, but by its inescapable humanity and philosophical failures. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the novel is that the most thorough critique of such failure is offered by Cain, the killer. Just as the Grendelkin and the dragon expose the weaknesses of the heroic societies of, respectively, the Danes and the Geats, their monstrous human counterpart in the novel exposes both the political and philosophical vulnerabilities of St Anselm’s. His crimes and the bad publicity they incite hasten the demise of the college, and his confessional letter describes a world in which the theological structures of such institutions can no longer keep out what he calls ‘the barbarians’ : People who, like us, live in a dying civilization have three choices. We can attempt to avert the decline as a child builds a sand-castle on the edge of the advancing tide. We can ignore the death of beauty, of scholarship, of intellectual integrity, finding solace in our own consolations. And that is what for some years I have tried to do. Thirdly, we can join the barbarians and take our share of the spoils. That is the popular choice, and in the end it was mine.   (Death in Holy Orders, p. 421)

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Joining ‘the barbarians’ and sharing in ‘the spoils’ brings us back to the world of Scyld Scefing, that ‘wrecker of mead benches’ : ‘oð þæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra / ofer hronrade hyran scolde, / gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs god cyning.’ (lines 9–11 : ‘In the end each clan on the outlying coasts / beyond the whale-road had to yield to him / and begin to pay tribute. That was one good king’, Heaney, p. 3). James calls upon the reader to ask uncomfortable questions similar to those aroused by the poem : what, exactly, distinguishes the heroic from the monstrous ? does the monstrous simply express the desires and anxieties of the rest of us on a larger scale ? can community or theology offer an alternative ?12 Both the poem and the novel seem to respond to these questions with ambivalence, or with answers that are necessarily qualified. Both offer in response to monstrosity heroic performances, but the efficacy of such performance is ambiguous in both narratives. We recall the poem’s assessment of the uselessness (or worse, the curse) of the dragon’s treasure, for which Beowulf has given his life. We recall the apocalyptic mourning of the Geat woman ‘bundenheorde’ (line 3151 : ‘with hair bound up’ ; Heaney, p. 78), despite the vanquishing of the dragon, for more human threats are lurking on the troubled borders. The killing of monsters cannot save us from the monstrous in the human. This monstrous aspect of the human accounts for the code-name Cain, assigned by Dalgliesh’s team. If James were a more heavy-handed writer, she could have given us the more obvious choice : Grendel, whom the poet identifies as the kin of Cain. It is through the reference to Cain, however, that the Beowulf-poet most clearly establishes the relationship between the monstrous and the human, as well as the human tendency to resort to violence as an end itself rather than simply a means to a desired object.13 In much classic British detective fiction, the killer is often as logical as the detective, only more selfish. Murder is a logical means to a selfish end : an inherited fortune, a desired lover, a position of power.14 With the solution to such murders, we understand the motivation, even though we do not approve of it. The killer has served his or her structural purpose, and the detective through narrative solves the problem of his or her existence. Cain, however, in his final letter, reveals that although he had such motivation, a darker reality is also at work : ‘My mental process was unambigu12  Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Of Giants : Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1999) suggests that, despite the threat monsters pose to heroes in medieval texts, ‘closer examination reveals that the monster is also fully within, a foundational figure ; and so the giant is depicted as the builder of cities where people live and dream, the origin of the glory of empire, the base of heroism, an interior trauma that haunts subjectivity’ (p. xii). See also Monster Theory : Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis, 1996). 13  Complicating this multivalent choice of name is the fact that the detective is named ‘Adam’, which is, of course, the name of Cain’s biblical father. This correlation is highly suggestive of the detective’s role as creator of the narrative and thus in a sense the father of the killer. 14  Perhaps the most perfect examples of this tendency may be found in the mystery novels of Agatha Christie, whose plots often hinge upon the disputed wills, jealous loves, and secret offspring of her mostly British upper-class and upper-middle-class characters.

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ous ; I need this man dead ; this is the most effective way to kill him. I had intended a single blow, two at most, but it’s after the first strike that the adrenalin surges. The lust for violence takes over. I went on striking without conscious will’ (pp. 422–3). But such lust for violence also compels the question that more comfortable mystery novels avoid : which is more monstrous, a visceral response to violence or the human tendency to act logically on entirely selfish motivation regardless of the effect on others ? The sarcastic question the biblical Cain asks of God (‘Am I my brother’s keeper ?’) continues to hang in the air for James. It is this question, at least in part, that the Christian community is meant to resolve, and we are presented with some stark answers. If we do not want to yield to the darkest aspects of our nature, then we had better care for our brothers and sisters, and if the Christian community no longer provides a philosophical basis for us to do so, then we had better find some other means. In response to such an apparently intractable philosophical problem, James provides humanist narrative gestures rather than fully developed answers through Dalgliesh, although her detective understands that mere detection is not sufficient. And it is in Dalgliesh’s efforts to seek some kind of ‘sufficiency’ that we find perhaps the novel’s most interesting resonances with Beowulf. In making Dalgliesh the novel’s central consciousness, James has created a protagonist who reflects aspects of both the Beowulf-poet and Beowulf himself  the latter through his idiomatic version of heroic performance and the former through his self-consciousness. Dalgliesh is himself a poet, and this emphasizes his double role as self-aware hero who creates, participates in, and comments on the action. While he plays this role in several of James’s other novels as well, here it becomes central with the narrative’s focus on the trajectory of his life and career. James makes this focus possible by setting the novel at a college where Dalgliesh spent summers in his youth. As with Beowulf, we are given an account of a kind of youthful ‘swimming contest’ of doubtful heroic value, undertaken on a dare : ‘Even in August the North Sea was cold, but the shock of chill was only temporary. What followed was terrifying. It felt as if strong hands were seizing him by the shoulders and forcing him backwards and under’ (p. 30 ; cf. Beowulf, lines 506–81a). He thinks back on this with mild embarrassment, but as a youthful, unselfconscious attempt at self-definition, it becomes a recollection of an illustration of the inescapable contingency of such efforts. Only in death, which is, of course, James’s and arguably the Beowulf-poet’s primary subject, is there any sort of escape from contingency, and it is largely the desire to evade this truth that motivates Cain to commit his crimes. Dalgliesh is keenly aware of this truth, as his impromptu poem makes clear : Epitaph for a Dead Poet Buried at last who was so wise, Six foot by three in clay he lies. Where no hands reach, where no lips move,

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Where no voice importunes his love. How odd he cannot know nor see This last fine self-sufficiency.   (p. 296) This self-awareness marks the novel’s climactic ‘swimming contest’ between Dalgliesh and Cain. The moments leading up to this climax strongly recall Beowulf ’s moody speech before the dragon fight and the poet’s description of his mental state. Presumably, James is working with the translation by Heaney, whose rendering of these lines is beautiful though problematic : Gesæt ða on næsse  niðheard cyning ; þenden hælo abead  heorðgeneatum, goldwine Geata.  Him wæs geomor sefa, wæfre ond wælfus,  wyrd ungemete neah, se ðone gomelan  gretan sceolde, secean sawle hord,  sundur gedælan lif wið lice ;  no þon lange wæs feorh æþelingas flæsce bewunden.  (lines 2417–24) The veteran king sat down on the cliff-top. He wished good luck to the Geats who had shared his hearth and his gold. He was sad at heart, unsettled yet ready, sensing his death. His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain : it would soon claim his coffered soul, part life from limb. Before long the prince’s spirit would spin free from his body.   (Heaney, p. 61) These lines are difficult to translate idiomatically and deserve close attention, because they speak to Beowulf ’s degree of self-awareness in the last part of the poem  which is vital to establishing James’s analogy between Dalgliesh and Beowulf as they reach their respective crisis points. First the philological evidence : the ambiguity of the passage depends largely upon how one chooses to translate three words : sefa in line 2419b, and wæfre and wælfus in 2420a. According to Klaeber, sefa can mean ‘mind’, ‘heart’, or ‘spirit’ ; BosworthToller adds ‘understanding’ as a possible meaning.15 If we choose to construe it as ‘understanding’, then it would not make idiomatic sense in modern English (‘his understanding was mournful’), but this sense of the word seems to imply some kind of knowledge of his state. But the word, along with its synonym mod, is just as often used to convey mood as it is knowledge, and so it cannot bear the entire weight of an

15  See Klaeber 4th edn, p. 421. The glossary in this new edition is drawn mostly from Klaeber’s third edition. Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘sefa’.

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interpretation that claims that Beowulf is aware of his fate.16 The use of geomor here, however, lends credibility to this interpretation ; he is certainly not ‘mournful’ or ‘sad’ before his other fights, and an awareness of his impending death would seem a likely cause of this difference. The construction of line 2419b appears at two other points in the poem, the first of which reflects an association between mournful minds and the death of Scyld Scefing, as the dead king’s retainers send his funeral ship out to sea, and the second of which conveys Wiglaf ’s anxiety concerning the dragon fight. In the first occurrence, as in 2419b, the context suggests the profound uncertainty of wyrd : ‘him wæs geomor sefa, / murnende mod. Men ne cunnon / secgan to soðe, selerædende, / hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng.’ (lines 49–52 ; I translate : ‘Their minds were mournful, / Hearts saddened. Men do not know / How to say in truth  not hall-counsellors, / Not warriors under the heavens  who pulled in that cargo’). The problem is not simply that they lack the eschatological vision of the Christian poet but also that they seem to understand that they lack such vision, that they struggle with the question. The fact that hall-counsellors do not know what will become of the dead suggests anxiety over the question and a context for the ‘mournful minds’. Furthermore, as has been noted often, the treasure of the funeral ship provides another analogy to the later moment, as the connection between hoarded booty (Scyld’s treasure / the dragon hoard) and the death of a king (Scyld / Beowulf) implies a grim commentary on the ultimate efficacy of such worldly goods. The final instance of the construction does not suggest an immediate contemplation of death ; however, it does combine Wiglaf ’s memory of earlier heroic action with anxiety for the future. Significantly, the clause occurs also in Cynewulf ’s Elene in a context that describes contemplation of death and the division between earth and heaven.17 The two adjectives that modify Beowulf ’s sefa in the following line  wæfre and wælfus  suggest a similar kind of apocalyptic contemplation, though they present some difficulties for the lexicographer. The former occurs only in Beowulf and Daniel, and the latter only in Beowulf. Wæfre occurs three times in the poem and, according to the OED, is probably related to modern ‘waver’. According to Bosworth-Toller it is probably a cognate of Icelandic vafre (‘to hover about’).18 The two other instances of the word in the poem are in undoubtedly violent contexts. The present context is different, however, and gives more of a sense of moral restlessness similar to that of The Wanderer or The Seafarer, though the word does not occur in these poems. In Daniel it describes the ‘quivering’ or ‘flickering’ quality of the fire.19 Wælfus is a compound of wæl (‘slain’) and fus (‘ready’). Klaeber translates it as ‘ready for death’ and J.R. Clark 16  For example, in line 2180b, the poet tells us that Beowulf ‘næs him hreoh sefa’, which seems to mean something like ‘an angry temper was not in him’ (my translation). 17  See George Philip Krapp, ed., Elene, in The Vercelli Book, ASPR 2 (New York, 1932), p. 83, line 627. 18  Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘wæfre’. 19  See George Philip Krapp, ed., Daniel, in The Junius Manuscript, ASPR 1 (New York, 1931), p. 117, line 240.

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Hall as ‘awaiting death’, but it could also carry the sense of ‘eager for slaughter’, which would accord with the more aggressive reading of wæfre. Bosworth-Toller defines it as reflecting an extraordinary passivity, at least in the grammatical sense : ‘ready to be slain’.20 Again, it seems that the sense of mournfulness would favour Klaeber’s reading. Perhaps our unknown poet is being deliberately ambiguous, using vocabulary that could refer to blood-lust before battle but that takes on a different resonance in the more somber context. In a 1911 article Klaeber suggests another context for the meaning of wæfre that complicates the picture even further. He posits that it could carry a meaning similar to Latin vagans, and he quotes an illustrative passage from Gregory the Great : ‘Immundi spiritus, qui e coelo aethereo lapsi sunt, in hoc coeli terraeque medio vagantur’ (‘Unclean spirits, who have been cast out of the ethereal heavens, wander in the middle skies of the earth’).21 Klaeber uses this passage to interpret another occurrence of wæfre to describe Grendel’s mother as a kind of ‘wandering middle-spirit’ (‘wælgæst wæfre’, line 1331) who hovers in this world between life and death. Although Beowulf obviously is not literally a middle-spirit, this is what Heaney calls the ‘revenant’ quality that the hero carries in the latter part of the poem (Heaney, p. xxxi). This restless ‘middle state’ resonates with Dalgliesh’s heroic moment, and there is certainly no ironic distance in the novel’s analogous moment ; here again, Dalgliesh is both hero and poetic consciousness. Dalgliesh and Cain face each other on a groyne over the water as Cain contemplates suicide by swimming out to sea rather than face the earthly consequences of his crimes : For two minutes they stood in silence, regarding each other, and it seemed to him that that brief stretch of time covered half a lifetime of transitory selfknowledge. What he felt now was something new, an anger stronger than any he could remember […] He neither liked it nor distrusted it, but simply accepted its power […] If [Cain] went into the water, so would he. He had no choice. He could not live with the memory that he had stood and watched while a man swam to his death. And he would be risking his life not out of compassion and humanity, but out of obstinacy and pride.   (pp. 410–11) If we read wæfre as ‘angry’ (as opposed to Heaney’s ‘unsettled’), then Dalgliesh’s state of mind here resonates both with Beowulf ’s anger and with an ironic reading of this anger. He accepts that he will engage in what, according to narrative structure, must be called ‘heroic action’, but at the same time he acknowledges the questionable motivation and likely inefficacy of such action. He will, after all, rescue a man from death (from ‘choosing God’s light’ or oblivion) only to subject him to the hell of lifelong 20  Klaeber 4th edn, p. 451 ; J.R. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th edn, with a supplement by Herbert D. Meritt (Cambridge, 1960 ; repr. Toronto, 2002), s.v. ‘wælfus’ ; Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘wælfus’. 21 Frederick Klaeber, ‘Die christlichen Elemente im Beowulf ’, Anglia 35 (1911), 111–36, 249–70, 453–82 ; see p. 256 for the quotation from Gregory (my translation).

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incarceration. Dalgliesh’s competing motivations of compassion, humanity, obstinacy, and pride recall the four superlatives used to describe Beowulf in the poem’s last two lines : ‘manna mildust ond monðwærust, / leodum liðost ond lofgeornost’ (lines 3181–82 : ‘he was the man most gracious and fair-minded, / kindest to his people and keenest to win fame’, Heaney, p. 78). Dalgliesh sets the qualities of compassion and pride in opposition, which creates a crisis not in his actions but in his mind. And thus the playfulness of James’s initial apology in her Author’s Note by the end of the novel has transformed into something like a modernist lament. We have seen Dalgliesh, who in the earlier novels effectively detaches himself from his work, reach a moment of existential crisis, in which he realizes that the narrative structures he has created have lost meaning and that he is subject to the same contingencies which face the killers whose narrative roles he has summoned into being. Rational detection is no more a solution to the problems of mortality and contingency than are heroic action or theology. James does not, however, leave Dalgliesh in a state of total despair. At the end of the novel for the first time since the creation of the character, James provides Dalgliesh a potential relationship outside the narrow confines of his career, and in a final Beowulfian analogue, he and his prospective romantic partner watch the smoke ascend from a bonfire on the beach : ‘Heofon rece swealg’ (line 3155 : ‘Heaven swallowed the smoke’, Heaney, p. 78). Unlike Beowulf, Dalgliesh has lived through his heroic exploit, and he may live to find meaning elsewhere.

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Appendix : Choosing God’s Light The problem of Hrethel’s, a pagan’s, anachronistically choosing ‘God’s light’ deserves more attention than the body of this paper will allow, particularly in connection to a rarely discussed analogue, which provides more evidence for Dorothy Whitelock’s argument that the phrase is a euphemism for death that would not have been taken literally by the poem’s first readers. This problem, however, also bears on my claim above that both Hrethel in Beowulf and Margaret in James’s novel look forward to oblivion rather than any kind of Christian promise of an afterlife. The analogue in question is the skaldic poem Sonatorrek, preserved in the thirteenth-century Egil’s Saga, which claims that the eponymous hero of the saga composed the poem after the deaths of his sons Gunnarr and Bǫðvarr, which would date the poem to about 960. We have no real reason to doubt this attribution other than the natural scepticism stemming from the length of time between composition and preservation, made more difficult by a complicated manuscript history. This difficulty is a common one in saga scholarship. But as Joseph Harris notes, ‘the sagawriter is evidently in touch with a deep oral-literary past, and significant analogues to Beowulf pervade both the late prose and the relatively early verse’.1 The title means ‘lament for my sons’ or ‘the problem of avenging sons’. In the context of the saga, Egill has locked himself in his bedchamber, overcome with grief and determined to starve himself. His daughter tricks him into drinking milk and then convinces him to compose a poem on the death of Bǫðvarr. The poem that follows is extraordinary for the extent to which it explores the psychology of Egill’s grief. At some points Egill’s perspective resonates with that of Hrethel, and at other points his modes of expression recall Beowulf ’s speech. Perhaps the most apparent comparison to make, and the one upon which Harris focuses, is that both poems seem obliquely to refer to the death of Baldr, son of Óðinn. As Harris notes, Hrethel and Egill correspond to Óðinn, ‘the bereaved father’, who cannot avenge his son’s death.2 But more interesting to me than this structural correspondence are the ways in which the two poems describe the grieving mind, and the ‘middle’ or ‘wavering’ state in which life holds no savor and death approaches or even beckons. Egill describes his despondency : ‘máka ek upp / í áróar grímu / rýnnis reið / réttri halda’. (‘I cannot hold up the land of the face [head], the chariot of thought, since the vicious fire of sickness seized my son from the world’).3 At this point, Egill’s mental state reflects that of Hrethel, or the Old Man of the extended simile (depending on whether 1  Joseph Harris, ‘A Nativist Approach to Beowulf : The Case of Germanic Elegy’, in A Companion to Old English Poetry, ed. Rolf H. Bremmer (Amsterdam, 1994), pp. 45–62 ; see p. 53. Harris seems to have been the first to identify the analogue. 2  Ibid., p. 56. 3  ‘Sonatorrek’, in Scaldic Poetry, ed. and trans. E.O.G. Turville-Petre (Oxford, 1976), p. 38, strophe 19.

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you choose to interpret the Old Man’s Lament as an extended simile or as a description of Hrethel himself), who ‘Gewiteð þonne on sealman, sorhleoð gæleð / an æfer anum ; þuhte him eall to rum, / wongas ond wicstede’ (lines 2460–2 ; my translation : ‘goes to his bed, sings a song of sorrow, / ever alone, it seems to him all too large, / the lands and his dwelling-place’). Also like Hrethel he feels unable to act, feels frustration that he cannot avenge his son, suffers from the void left by the dead, and regrets what his son might have become. However  and this is vital, I think, in understanding the nature of this analogue  at certain essential moments the analogy to be drawn is not between Egill and Hrethel, but rather between Egill and Beowulf, and these moments are particularly significant because of how they affect our reading of Beowulf ’s restlessness on the cliff and our understanding wæfre and wælfus. In the opening strophes of Sonatorrek Egill explains that his grief makes it difficult to compose poetry, and his effort to do so, to unlock his word-hoard, so to speak, is to go further back in time, as Beowulf does in his speech, to the deaths of his prede­ cessors : Þó mun ek mitt ok móður hrør fǫður fall fyrst um telja ; þat ber ek út úr orðhofi mærðar timbr máli laufgat. But yet I will first tell of the death of my mother and the fall of my father ; I bear these timbers of praise, adorned with the foliage of speech, from the temple of words.4 In order to understand their sorrows, both Beowulf and Egill must place them in an historical context. While Beowulf ’s historical recollections are more extensive than Egill’s, it is notable that he recollects someone who faced a grief similar to that of Egill, and this parallel has the effect of creating a kind of doubled analogue. The effect on a medieval reader may have been a recognition of this trope of looking back on sorrow in order to look forward, intensified by that keenest of pains, the death of a son. Furthermore, there is another possible parallel in two curious idioms that the respective speakers use to describe death. My conclusions must remain tentative on this point, but this parallel may help to provide an interpretive context for the problem of Hrethel’s choosing ‘God’s light’. This moment resonates strongly with a passage in Sonatorrek in which Egill tells of Bǫðvarr’s death : 4  Ibid., p. 31, strophe 5.

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grimmt er fall frænda at telja ; síðan er minn á munvega ættar skjǫldr aflífi hvarf. it is cruel to tell of the fall of kinsmen ; since the protector of my race passed lifeless on to the paths of joy.5 Bernard Scudder’s translation seems even closer to Hrethel : my kinsmen’s deaths are harsh to tell, after the shield of my family retreated down the god’s joyful road.6 Again, the analogue is not exact, but these two metaphors for death certainly resonate with one another. Both recall the head of a family who has died, and both suggest a joyful choice to follow the divine. It may be that Whitelock’s analysis is only half of the story. Yes, Hrethel’s choosing God’s light is an anachronistically Christian concept, but like so much in Beowulf, it may look backwards and forwards at the same time  back to the idea of the path to Valhalla and forward to Christian light. Even if this doubleness was not the intention of the poet, it is likely to have resonated that way for a tenth-century audience that may have been familiar with skaldic verse or analogous English oral traditions. This kind of doubleness suggests what James Earl has called the ‘partially apprehended reality’ of the poem.7 From the elevated position of the cliff before the dragon fight, Beowulf ’s ‘restlessness’, his ‘wæfreness’, suggests a limited foresight. And it is to this cliff-top moment that I would like to return for a final parallel with Sonatorrek. The cliff-top description of Beowulf ’s mental state resonates with the final strophe of Egill’s poem : Nú er mér torvelt, Tveggja bága njǫrfa nipt á nesi stendr ; skal ek þó glaðr 5  ‘Sonatorrek’, ed. Turville-Petre, pp. 33–4, strophe 10. 6  Bernard Scudder, trans., Egil’s Saga, in The Sagas of the Icelanders, ed. Örnólfur Thorsson (New York, 2001), pp. 1–184 ; see p. 154, strophe 10. 7  James Earl, Thinking About ‘Beowulf ’ (Stanford, CA, 1994), p. 41.

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með góðan vilja ok óhryggr Heljar bíða.

Now it goes hard with me : the sister of Tveggi’s enemy stands on the headland ; but yet happy, in good heart and fearless, I shall await the goddess Hel.8 Scudder’s translation dispenses with the metaphor of the goddess Hel and gives her the allegorical title of ‘Death’ : Now my course is tough : Death, close sister of Óðinn’s enemy, stands on the ness : with resolution and without remorse I will gladly await my own.9 This sounds like a conflation of Beowulf on the headland, on the ‘ness’ as fate hovers near, and the resolution that he reaches after his Hrethel-speech, as he gives himself up to wyrd even as he prepares to fight the dragon alone. As they face sorrow and struggle toward foresight, both Beowulf and Egill look to the past to find perspective on the future and turn to lament in order to find resolution  resolution which evades both Hrethel and Margaret, who have given up ‘life’s joys’ and have resigned themselves to oblivion. 8  ‘Sonatorrek’, ed. Turville-Petre, p. 41, strophe 25. 9 Scudder, Egil’s Saga, p. 158, strophe 25.

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11 Ban Welondes : Wayland Smith in Popular Culture Maria Sachiko Cecire

T

he English legendary character Wayland Smith is primarily a craftsman known for his artistic skill and, in one version of his tale, his cunning. He not only fits into the children’s fantasy tradition of glorifying Englishness through the use of medievalisms but has also been adapted to a postReformation, post-industrialization conception of English virtue as bound to work. There is a tension between these roles, with the former often celebrating an idealized pastoral feudalism and the latter approving capitalism with its accompanying class mobility. This chapter argues that Wayland’s hybridity  as both an anachronism and an embodiment of contemporary standards of working virtue  makes him problematic for projects of medievalism because he holds the potential to disrupt their frameworks of nostalgia and desire. Authors who explicitly integrate him into their works must employ strategies to contain the contradictions of Wayland Smith’s figuration. This often takes the form of keeping him within the bounds of a narrative organization that denotes him as a workman to assist a more aristocratic hero. Meanwhile, contemporary representations of Wayland often relegate him to the backdrop of circumstantial medievalisms that permeate popular culture. From within these derivative spaces, however, some alternative Wayland Smiths appear, including hypersexualized and satirical renderings that reopen discussions about the places of work and craft in Anglophone identity. Following an overview of the versions of the English Wayland Smith legend, this chapter will progress chronologically, beginning with the Old English sources that refer to his tale. Using Peter Clemoes’s and Nicole Guenther Discenza’s discussions of cræft in Alfred’s translations as a bridge, I touch on the elevation of work and trade to a moral good in Western Europe after the Reformation. With such a history in mind, this chapter considers representations of Wayland Smith as he appears in popular literature influenced by nineteenth-century medievalisms, the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the rise of children’s fantasy in the twentieth century. 201

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By the time Alfred the Great translated Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae in the ninth century, the legend of Wayland Smith must have already been well known to the Anglo-Saxons.1 Alfred deviates from the original at the line ‘the bones of the faithful Fabricius’, with the king instead reflecting upon the bones of a more native faber, or smith. ‘Hwæt synt nu þæs foremeran ⁊ þæs wisan goldsmiðes ban Welondes ?’ (‘Where now are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith Weland ?’), and adds his thoughts on on the importance of craft to a man : (Forþi ic cwæð þæs wisan forþy þa cræftegan ne mæg næfre his cræft losigan ne hine mon ne mæg þonne eð on him geniman ðe mon mæg þa sunnan awendan of hiere stede.) Hwær synt nu þæs Welondes ban, oððe hwa wat nu hwær hi wæron ? (I said wise because the craftsman can never lose his skill nor can it easily be taken from him any more than the sun can be moved from its place.) Where now are the bones of Weland, or who knows now where they were ?2 This rumination refers to Wayland’s life story as it is laid out in the Old Norse Vǫlundarkviða, probably composed c.900–1050, the story of a craftsman whose talent enables him to escape a dire life situation.3 In this poem, the gifted smith Vǫlundr lives with his two brothers and their swan-maiden wives until the three women desert them, driven by their migratory natures. Vǫlundr’s brothers leave in search of their wives, but he remains behind and waits instead, obsessively making copies of the gold ring that his wife gave to him. The greedy King Níðuðr captures him while he is thus alone, and his queen convinces Níðuðr to hamstring the smith to prevent him from escaping. Níðuðr then imprisons Vǫlundr and forces him to work as a royal craftsman. In the second half of the poem, Vǫlundr exacts his revenge on Níðuðr by killing the king’s sons when they visit to view his chest of treasures, and sends beautiful objects made from their body parts to their unwitting family. Later, Níðuðr’s daughter Bǫðvildr brings Vǫlundr a gold ring to repair (his own ring, taken from him and given to her), and he drugs and rapes or seduces her, impregnating her. Vǫlundr then rises to the air, boasts of his revenge to Níðuðr, and flies away.4 Although

1  Malcolm Godden asserts that Alfred may not, in fact, have written most if any of the texts ascribed to him in his ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything ?’, Medium Ævum 76 (2007), 1–23. However, given the importance of the nineteenth-century ‘cult of Alfred’ to the rise of Anglo-Saxon medievalisms in England, irrespective of whether or not he was the actual author, I shall refer to Alfred as the author of the Old English translation of Boethius. 2  Malcom 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, 2009), I, 283, translation in II, 30. 3  John McKinnell, ‘The Context of Völundarkviða’, in The Poetic Edda, ed. Paul Acker and Carolyne Larrington (New York and London, 2002), pp. 198–212 at p. 200. 4  For the text, see Ursula Dronke, ed. and trans., The Poetic Edda, Volume II : Mythological Poems (Oxford, 1997), pp. 239–300. The Old Norse Þiðreks saga, dated to the thirteenth century, follows

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Vǫlundarkviða is in Old Norse, John McKinnell has argued that it was composed in Yorkshire and thus is of English origin.5 Other sources also attest to the popularity of this version of the Wayland Smith legend in Anglo-Saxon England. The Franks Casket, dated to the seventh century and carved with Anglo-Saxon runes, obviously depicts scenes from the story above, although some elements have more in common with the related Þiðreks saga.6 Meanwhile Deor (possibly late ninth century) from the Exeter Book recounts Wayland’s tale as an example of misfortunes passing away. The opening stanza of this Old English poem mentions the ‘swoncre seonobende’ (‘supple sinew-bonds’) placed upon ‘Welund’ by ‘Niðhad’, and the second stanza discusses the sorrow of ‘Beadohild’ when she discovers that she is with child by Weland : a pain that surpasses the knowledge of ‘hyre broþra deaþ’ (her brothers’ deaths).7 Meanwhile a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon charter mentions Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow in north Berkshire which still retains that name, as a boundary marker.8 Sawyer 564, dated to 955, names the boundary of land that King Eadred gives to his kinsman and minister Ælfheah as running : ‘andlang fyrh oþ hit cymð on þæt wide geat be eastan welandes smiððan (‘along the driven furrow until it comes to the wide gate to the east of Wayland’s Smithy’).9 Other characters from versions of Wayland’s story are also remembered in place names from the area around the Smithy : Lotte Motz notes that ‘Hwituccas hlæw  “Wittuck’s Mound” may refer to Widia, his son, the name Beadhildes byrigels for a boundary marker to Beaduhild on whom his son was begotten, and Weades beorg, a hill, to his father Wade.’10 The legend now associated with Wayland’s Smithy, however, is that a supernatural smith resides (or once resided) there who will shoe your horse in exchange for a coin.11 This tale matches a number of Germanic smith a similar narrative (without the swan-maiden wife) about a smith called Velent. See Guðni Jónsson, ed., Þiðreks saga, 2 vols. (Reykjavík, 1951). 5  McKinnell, ‘Context of Völundarkviða’, p. 200. 6  See, for instance, Philip Webster Souers, ‘The Wayland Scene on the Franks Casket’, Speculum 18 (1943), 104-11. 7  Deor, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry : An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. Bernard J. Muir, 2 vols. (Exeter, 1994), I, 283–5. 8  This area is now part of Oxfordshire. 9  S 564, in P.H. Sawyer, ed., Anglo-Saxon Charters : An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1986). Now superseded by http ://www.esawyer.org.uk/. 10  Lotte Motz, The Wise One of the Mountain : Form, Function and Significance of the Subterranean Smith : A Study in Folklore (Göppingen, 1983), p. 132. See also L.V. Grinsell, ‘Wayland’s Smithy, Beadhild’s Byrigels and Hwittuc’s Hlæw : A Suggestion’, Transactions of the Newbury and District Field Club 8 (1938), 235–6, at p. 236. 11  The earliest written description of the association of the legend to this place is in the Berkshire section of William Camden’s Britannia, first published in 1586. See William Camden, Britannia ; or, A chronological description of the flourishing kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the islands adjacent ; from the earliest antiquity, 3 vols. (London, 1789), I, 155. See also H.R. Ellis Davidson, ‘Weland the Smith’, Folklore 69 (1958), 145–59 at pp. 146–9.

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legends, and Motz suggests that settlers to the Berkshire/Oxfordshire region may have brought it with them when they came (the first Germanic implements and graves in the area have been dated to the fifth century).12 Other medieval allusions to Wayland usually refer to him as the craftsman of exquisite metalwork. H.R. Ellis Davidson lists several, including Beowulf ’s coat of mail (hrægel), which is called ‘Welandes geweorc’ ; Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini refers to a goblet made by Guielandus (Wayland) ; a version of Adémar’s Chronicle includes a sword Durissimus, fashioned by ‘Walander the Smith’, and the chansons de geste Raoul de Cambrai, Le Chevalier Ogier, and Fierabras all mention swords ‘de la forge Galant’ (‘from Wayland’s forge’).13 Likewise, in the fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript’s version of the Horn legend, Horn’s lover Rimnild gives him a sword crafted by Wayland, and tells him that when he wields it, ‘Is nouȝt a kniȝt in Inglond / Schal sitten a dint of þine hond’.14 Wayland’s skill as a metalworker is central to his identity in every source that mentions him, from accounts of his story as seen in Vǫlundarkviða and Þiðreks saga, to the folk legend connected with Wayland’s Smithy, to offhand references to his name in a range of texts. The concept of Wayland as a craftsman is thus key to the interpretation or reading of his character, and it is this potentially ambiguous trait that I will pause to interrogate before considering how it influences nineteenth-century and modern accounts of Wayland Smith. When Alfred turns his translation away from Boethius’s original, he initially writes of Wayland the goldsmith, but then goes on to refer to all craftspeople : ‘þa cræftegan ne mæg næfre his cræft losigan’ (‘the craftsman can never lose his skill’).15 Peter Clemoes asserts that cræft was one of Alfred’s favourite words, and that his regular translations of the Latin virtus as cræft departed from the Mercian tradition of glossing and prose that usually translated virtus as mægen, a word that Alfred often used to denote more physical capability than the individualistic intelligence that he associated with cræft.16 Nicole Guenther Discenza adds that ‘Using cræft for virtus was unprecedented’,17 and Alfred’s translations pushed the meaning of cræft towards the more positive connotations that it now retains. This approach to craftsmanship was unique to Alfred ; Bede, for instance, explicitly criticizes a talented monastic craftsman (‘fabrili arte singularis’) whose drunken life is tolerated because of his

12 Motz, The Wise One of the Mountain, p. 135. 13  Ellis Davidson, ‘Weland the Smith’, 157. 14  Maldwyn Mills, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild : ed. from the Auchinleck MS, National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1 (Heidelberg, 1988), p. 91, lines 400–8. 15  Old English Boethius, ed. Godden and Irvine, I, 283 ; II, 30. 16  Peter Clemoes, ‘King Alfred’s Debt to Vernacular Poetry : The Evidence of ellen and cræft’, in Words, Texts and Manuscripts : Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss, ed. Michael Korhammer, Karl Reichl, and Hans Sauer (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 223–6. 17  Nicole Guenther Discenza, ‘Power, Skill and Virtue in the Old English Boethius’, Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997), 81–108, at p. 90.

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skill.18 But Alfred treated this kind of ability as a potential bridge to morality : Clemoes suggests that for Alfred, ‘a cræft was basically a talent to serve a moral purpose and its sine qua non was the wisdom to understand the appropriate end and to render the talent effective accordingly’.19 Discenza asserts that ‘Alfred can use imagery drawn from occupations because he treats this sort of labour as comparable to more spiritual strivings ; both fulfil the responsibilities given one by God.’20 This connection between work and morality anticipates the theories of Max Weber and Albert Hirschman, both of which seek to explain the foundations of modern capitalism. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (published in German in 1905) looks to Protestantism as a driving force in the rise of capitalism, citing its focus on fulfilling worldly duties through one’s occupation. Like Alfred’s conception of cræft as a moral good, Weber suggests that in the wake of the Reformation ‘the fulfillment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God’.21 This mindset allows for and even approves the acquisition of money through work. Weber focuses his argument through close analysis of the tenets of Calvinism, through which only the pre-ordained elect achieve heaven. Although no individual can know whether or not he or she has been chosen for salvation, ‘in order to attain that self-confidence intense worldly activity is recommended as the most suitable means. It and it alone disperses religious doubt and gives the certainty of grace’ (p. 112). Weber suggests that the religious underpinnings of this Protestant work ethic may no longer be present, but that the widespread belief of dedication to a career as an inherent good  and indeed a moral issue  remains in much of Western society and has spread with capitalism.22 Albert Hirschman’s 1977 work considers the same phenomenon of how the formerly ‘immoral’ practice of moneymaking came to be considered acceptable and paved the way for capitalism, but from a more secular angle. He contends that following the downplaying of honour and glory which had been ‘exalted by the medieval chivalric ethos’ (as seen in works by writers such as Cervantes and Racine),23 ‘interest’ came to replace and restrain ‘passion’ with the aid of reason in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The meaning of ‘interest’ narrowed to the acquisition of wealth, and in this Hirschman cites Adam Smith’s contention that such a desire is natural : ‘An 18  Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, eds., Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), pp. 502–5. 19  Clemoes, ‘King Alfred’s Debt’, p. 230. 20  Discenza, ‘Power, Skill and Virtue’, p. 99. 21  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York, 1993), p. 81. 22  Ibid., pp. 181–2. For recent studies on Weber, his historical context, and the impact of his thesis, see, for instance, William H. Swatos, Jr and Lutz Kaelber, eds., The Protestant Ethic Turns 100 : Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis (Boulder, CO, and London, 2005). 23  Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests : Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), p. 10.

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augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition. It is the means the most vulgar and the most obvious’ (p. 40). A close analysis of Weber’s and Hirschman’s theories is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, I wish to draw on a suggestion that both make, namely that the dramatic shift in attitudes toward work, the accumulation of money, and concomitant upward social mobility are features of more fundamental changes in notions of individual identity and morality. It was against this shift in attitudes, and the cultural reconfigurations that underwrote it, that the Arts and Crafts movement reacted with its medievalism. The resulting cultural tensions, as I will argue below, help to explain the troubled reception and representation of Wayland Smith in the popular culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In spite of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ that Weber saw dominating the West during this time, industrialized society in Britain brought with it both disappointment and disillusionment. Brian Stock notes how [a]s industrialization gradually affected larger and larger groups of people, whole segments of medieval utopian thinking were rudely revived and pressed into service. The Middle Ages began to be associated with a lost state of innocence : for the moralist, they were paradise without sin ; for the socialists, without private property.24 Medievalisms  that is, reimaginations of the Middle Ages  entered into nearly every aspect of popular culture in the nineteenth century, and were represented in art and literature as well as political and religious movements. The ‘medieval’ could denote anything related to the period after the Roman occupation of Britain and before the Renaissance : for instance, a ‘Cult of Alfred’ produced everything from ‘serious Anglo-Saxon scholarship and textual studies to popular histories, music, magazines, and children’s books’,25 while reprints of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in 1816 and 1817 inspired writers and artists such as Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites.26 During this period, Sir Walter Scott brought Wayland Smith back into the public consciousness through his 1821 novel Kenilworth. Scott’s novels played an important part in Britain’s rising interest in its medieval past : for instance, Clare Simmons contends that Ivanhoe (1819) ‘inspired the beginning of nineteenth-century popular interest in Saxons and

24  Brian Stock, ‘Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism’, in his Listening for the Text : On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 52-74, at p. 66. 25  Philip Edward Philips, ‘King Alfred the Great and the Victorian Translations of his Anglo-Saxon Boethius’ in Global Perspectives on Medieval English Literature, Language, and Culture, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr, and Richard Scott Nokes (Kalamazoo, 2007), pp. 155–73 at p. 157. See also Simon Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’, Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), pp. 225–356. 26  Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot : Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London, 1981), p. 42. See also Michael Alexander, Medievalism : The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, 2007).

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Normans’.27 Unlike Ivanhoe, Kenilworth is set in the Tudor period and ‘was a main source of the cult of Elizabethanism that was to flourish in nineteenth-century Britain’.28 It does, however, draw upon the tale of Wayland as an invisible roadside smith for part of the plot early in the novel. As both a diligent worker and a medieval legend, Wayland seems ideally suited to be a heroic or at least sympathetic character for an early-nineteenth-century audience. Instead, Scott paints his Wayland as tastelessly rough and ultimately debunks the myth of Wayland’s existence in Kenilworth, pinning the name and physicality of the smith onto a mortal man who exploits the local lore for his living. While on an urgent journey, the gentleman Tressilian’s horse throws a shoe in Berkshire near Wayland’s Smithy. In his search for a smith, Tressilian encounters an obnoxiously pedantic schoolmaster and a superstitious old woman, whom Scott seems to use to ridicule both the institutional and oral transmission of legends. The scholar, who constantly uses unnecessary Latin, tells Tressilian that ‘this faber fera­ rius, or blacksmith, takes money of no one’. The woman adds, ‘And that is a sure sign he deals with Satan […] since no good Christian would ever refuse the wages of his labour.’29 This entangling of Christianity and paid work (alluding to Luke 10 : 7) echoes Weber’s diagnosis of a modern work ethic in which industry serves as a form of piety. It is the woman’s young son Hobgoblin who finally leads Tressilian to the smithy in exchange for money. At the smithy, the boy describes what Tressilian must do to have his horse shod, but Tressilian ignores the instruction to ‘look neither to right nor to left for ten minutes, or so long as you shall hear the hammer clink’ (p. 163) and surprises the smith at his work. The narrator describes Wayland as ‘in a farrier’s apron, but otherwise fantastically attired in a bear-skin dressed with the fur on, and a cap of the same, which almost hid the sooty and begrimed features of the wearer’ (p. 167). Scott does not idealize this apparently supernatural being or capitalize on the medieval origins of the legend. Instead, he explains away the myth as a lie recently devised by the very mortal smith (actually named ‘Lancelot Wayland’) and Hobgoblin  whose profit-based craftiness is thus aligned with the smith’s trade  to make money. When Tressilian offers Wayland the opportunity to leave this life of deception and become his servant instead, Wayland Smith eagerly embraced the proposal, and protested his devotion to his new master. In a very few minutes he had made [a great] alteration to his original appearance, by change of dress, trimming his beard and hair, and so forth.  (p. 178) In his treatment of the Wayland legend, Scott swiftly reins in a folk belief that might 27  Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest : History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, nj, and London, 1990), p. 11. 28  John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott : A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1995), p. 247. 29  Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth (London, 1904), p. 155.

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challenge the inherent authority of the nobility, privileging the maintenance of class hierarchy over the allure of medievalisms when they conflict with it, as happens in this case. When Wayland agrees to go with Tressilian, the furious Hobgoblin blows up his hideout beside the barrow with a small tub of gunpowder, and the gentleman and his new servant leave town by way of an inn full of gossiping townsfolk, heading towards Devon. These last events more or less fit into the larger narrative of the novel (which is focused around a love-plot and political ambitions in Tudor England, not faerie or the supernatural), but also closely agree with a poem written by Job Cork, a local Uffington shepherd who died in 1807. Part of the poem reads : ‘At last he was found out, they say. / And blew up the place and vlod away. / To Devonshire he then did go’.30 Scott’s turn away from (and indeed, often overt parody of) a medievally rooted legend may be unexpected coming from an author so enamoured with the Middle Ages, and one who contributed so much to the medievalization of Victorian culture. However, John Sutherland points out that ‘by 1819 [Scott] was on most matters a diehard reactionary’ and responded to the uprising of Northumberland miners and weavers in west Scotland in that year with ‘military zeal’.31 Sutherland notes that Scott ‘was all for beating them down mercilessly (at the same time that as an author he was cheering on the Saxon peasants storming Torquilstone Castle [in Ivanhoe])’ (p. 233). For Scott, perhaps the potential threat of a powerful worker figure like Wayland, unrestrained by class hierarchy, was best neutralized by cynically debunking his myth and making him a willing servant of nobility in Kenilworth, a book which Sutherland calls Scott’s ‘celebration of English nationhood’ (p. 247). Indeed, Scott is careful to distinguish between the dishevelled Wayland and the more inspiring, socially acceptable Saxons of legend.32 His Robin Hood in Ivanhoe is an example of the Victorian tendency towards updating their historical heroes, as are Tennyson’s golden-haired Arthur and the much-touted Sir Galahad and Saint George, who were constantly held up for Victorian boys as the paragons of Christian chivalric perfection.33 While such models deployed aristocratic medievalisms, nineteenth-century socialist thinkers also idealized the Middle Ages, but as a golden period of prosperity and pleasure when workers lived unalienated from the products of their labour. Indeed, Marx and Engels both considered late-medieval structures in highlighting the importance of the cooperative nature of guild production, although neither of them

30 For the full poem, see the appendix to Thomas Hughes’s The Scouring of the White Horse (Gloucester, 1989), pp. 157–8. 31 Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, p. 232. 32 Similarly, Tennyson’s Arthur was the Arthur of romance, rather than the more problematic Arthur of history. See Stephanie L. Barczewski, Myth and National Identity in Ninteenth-Century Britain : The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood (Oxford, 2000), p. 54. 33  See, Girouard, Return to Camelot, pp. 163–76.

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romanticized this past.34 The late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement was born within this context under the guidance of such artists and thinkers as William Morris, who ‘formally allied himself to Socialism in 1883’.35 As Gillian Naylor writes, ‘[f]undamental to the British Arts and Crafts philosophy, especially in the first stages of its development, was the conviction that industrialization had brought with it the total destruction of “purpose, sense, and life”.’36 This aesthetic movement glorified the handiwork of the unique artisan, and attempted to turn back the tide of advancing technology in the pursuit of socialist goals. This ideological stance led to a ‘rugged individualism’ in design practice amongst those artists who subscribed to the movement, recalling Alfred’s definition of cræft as reliant on concepts of individual talent and ability.37 Although Wayland fits well into this ideology, his most prominent appearances from this period are in largely conservative political contexts such as Kenilworth and Rudyard Kipling’s children’s collection Puck of Pook’s Hill. In these, Wayland’s medieval ancestry contributes to the medievalism of the works, but Scott and Kipling do not represent him as a hero or model in his own right. In both, he ultimately uses his skill to aid more aristocratic characters : he plays a supporting role, reminding the reader of the subordinate position that workers hold in relation to the nobility under the tenets of feudalism, England’s medieval socio-political system. Thus both authors use Wayland to situate their texts in the medieval history and folklore of England, but do so in a way that reinforces the ‘natural’ place of class hierarchy in the English identity, an especially significant positioning in light of the political struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Puck of Pook’s Hill was originally published between 1906 and 1910 as a serial for children with related poems flanking the chapters, and celebrates the layers of history that have contributed to the formation of English nation. ‘Puck’s Song’, the poem that opens the novel, points out physical landmarks in the English countryside, tying them to historical events in order to arouse a sense of pride in the nation’s physicality and past. The poem culminates in a stanza that differentiates England from the rest of the world : She is not any common Earth, Water or wood or air, But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye, Where you and I will fare.38 34  Chris Waters, ‘Marxism, Medievalism, and Popular Culture,’ in History and Community : Essays in Victorian Medievalism, ed. Florence S. Boos (New York, 1992), pp. 137–68, at p. 142. 35  Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement : A Study of its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory (London, 1971), p. 109. 36  Ibid., p. 8. 37 Ibid. 38  Rudyard Kipling, ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’ and ‘Rewards and Fairies’, ed. Donald Mackenzie (Oxford and New York, 1993), p. 6.

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Kipling refers to England as ‘Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye’, drawing upon Arthurian lore and the archaic term ‘gramarye’  a medieval word for occult and magical learning revived by Scott in 1805  to define England in terms of history, legend, magic, and learning.39 The novel begins when the young siblings Dan and Una unknowingly call up Puck, the oldest and last of the People of the Hills, by performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times in a fairy ring on Midsummer’s Eve. Such an invocation suggests that even the relatively late writings of Shakespeare can function as magical spells  and, indeed, throughout the rest of Puck Kipling refers to works of medievalism without attempting to differentiate them from the truly medieval.40 With Puck’s guidance, the children meet several characters from England’s past over the course of the novel, who relate their experiences during formative periods in the nation’s history from the Roman rule of Britain to sea exploration in the late Middle Ages. The story culminates in a return to the thirteenth century for the triumphant signing of the Magna Carta. In the opening chapter, titled ‘Welund’s Sword’, Puck recounts Kipling’s reimagining of Wayland’s tale, which merges the Old Norse source with the Berkshire legend. According to Puck, Wayland literally arrives in a Viking ship : Puck sees him lying ‘in the bows of a black thirty-two-oar galley that they had just beached’ at Brunanburh, the site of a battle in which the Anglo-Saxons defeated invading Norsemen allied with Irish and Scots kings.41 The poem celebrating this event is preserved in Old English in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Tennyson made the battle famous through his 1880 translation of the poem.42 Puck, who has seen gods rise and fall in his land due to subsequent waves of invasion, tells Wayland, ‘Smith of the Gods, […] the time comes when I shall meet you plying your trade for hire by the wayside.’ And indeed, although ‘the pirates conquered the island, and for centuries Weland was a most important God’,43 his power finally wanes until ‘a year or two before the Conquest’ Puck comes across a farmer : ‘when he came to the Ford he dismounted, took a penny out of his purse, laid it on a stone, tied the old horse to an oak, and called out, “Smith, Smith, here is work for you !” Then he sat down and went to sleep.’ As Puck watches, a ‘white-bearded, bent old blacksmith in a leather apron crept out from behind an oak and began to shoe the horse. It was Weland himself.’ Wayland tells Puck, however, ‘I’m not even Weland now’  Weland being the Anglo-Saxon name for Wayland, and for Kipling representative of his earlier incarnation  ‘They call me Wayland-Smith’ (pp. 16–17). Labelled with his trade, Wayland loses his former glory and gains a ste39  OED, s.v. ‘gramarye’. 40  Another notable example is the way in which Una keeps associating the Norman knight character with John Everett Millais’s 1857 painting Sir Isumbras at the Ford, conflating the medieval with nineteenth-century medievalism. Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 26. 41 Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 15. 42  Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Battle of Brunanburh’, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969), pp. 1234–9. 43 Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, p. 15.

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reotypically English surname that remains a marker of English heritage, if one that no longer indicates the name-bearer’s vocation. Both Kipling’s and Scott’s Waylands are far from heroic (‘white-bearded’, ‘bent’, and creeping in Puck) and practise their trade out of necessity. Unlike Vǫlundr, who tricks, shames, and escapes the king that he serves, these Waylands eagerly relinquish their free-market existences and commit themselves to aiding English nobility. While in Kenilworth this involves the explicit transition to a serving-man, the Wayland in Puck performs the more traditional service of using his craft to produce a beautiful object as a gift. In Puck, the Saxon novice Brother Hugh sets Wayland free from his requirement to shoe horses for money by thanking him for his past work and wishing him well. Wayland forges a magnificent sword covered in runes for Hugh in gratitude, and Hugh eventually passes this sword to the conquering Norman knight whom he befriends and marries to his sister. Indeed, the majority of ‘Welund’s Sword’ focuses on the integration of Norman and Saxon people in the years after the Battle of Hastings, with the gift of the sword (and the ‘gift’ of Hugh’s sister) serving to represent the inevitable momentum towards total assimilation. The Norman overlord De Aquila’s prediction and hope is that ‘In fifty years there will be neither Norman nor Saxon, but all English’ (p. 68). In this text, it is the wisdom and strength of the gentry that guide the unwilling commoners towards peace, and Wayland’s role as a craftsman is to facilitate this motion by providing the noble heroes with a weapon and symbol of authority. In spite of the resilience of the nationalism that medievalisms such as those in Puck of Pook’s Hill helped to construct, by the early twentieth century widespread investment in Britain’s medieval past lost momentum. Several critics argue that the First World War shattered generations of accumulated myth, and after the slaughter of its young men in the trenches, Britain largely turned away from the medievalisms that dominated the nineteenth century.44 It was not only the effect of modern warfare that brought about this change ; Brian Stock suggests that once ‘so many of the institutions and authors that had kept Romantic ideas alive had passed from the scene […] it could not be helped that the Middle Ages, as a foundation on which cultural myths had been erected, should begin to show signs of old age’.45 But although it had passed out of the larger public consciousness  or perhaps because it had  medievalism found refuge in fantasy literature, and particularly in fantasy literature for children. Just as old and shabby furniture deemed no longer suitable for adults is sent off to the nursery, so fantasy and the medieval was hustled away into the realm of children’s literature, considered (as it is still largely considered) not ‘serious’ or ‘mature’.46 Here it 44  See, for instance, Sandra Martina Schwab, ‘What Is a Man ? Refuting the Chivalric Ideal at the Turn of the Century’, in Beyond Arthurian Romances : The Reach of Victorian Medievalism, ed. Jennifer A Palmgren and Loretta M. Holloway (New York, 2002), pp. 217–31, at p. 229. 45  Stock, ‘Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism’, p. 68. 46  The nursery metaphor is borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien, who uses it to describe the treatment of fairy stories in his ‘On Fairy Stories’, in The Tolkien Reader (New York, 1966), pp. 33–99 at p. 58.

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continued to employ medievalisms in the production of nostalgic, nationalistic texts that tend to glorify Britain’s medieval past while buttressing conservative cultural mores.47 Particularly relevant to this chapter is the propensity to approve class hierarchy, exalting feudal loyalties and showing resistance to the kind of class mobility that can threaten this tradition. Writing in the 1970s, the Oxford-educated children’s fantasy author Susan Cooper introduces Wayland Smith as a supporting character in The Dark Is Rising, the second novel in the series of the same name. Wayland is the first supernatural being that Will Stanton, the novel’s protagonist, encounters when he wakes into his role as the last Old One on Midwinter Day. On his eleventh birthday, Will steps outside and finds himself whisked back into an earlier time. As he walks, he hears a rhythmical, off-key tapping, like a hammer striking metal. It came in short irregular bursts, as though someone were hammering nails. As he stood listening, the world around him seemed to brighten a little ; the woods seemed less dense, the snow glittered, and when he looked upward, the strip over Huntercombe Lane was a clear blue. He realized that the sun had risen at last out of the sullen bank of grey cloud.48 The sound of the smith’s hammer is enough to ameliorate nature, marking Wayland as powerful and good.49 Like Scott and Kipling, Cooper describes Wayland as a ‘broadshouldered man in a leather apron’ (p. 24), and it is only after some minutes that Will recognizes the man, turning the universalized ancient smith figure into a specific one. Will knows him as a farmhand on his neighbour Farmer George’s land named John Smith. John Smith continues to go by this name (as if he were an everyman smith) throughout the book, but Will unthinkingly refers to him as ‘John Wayland Smith’ just after the episode above, and then pauses, wondering : ‘Wayland ?’ Will said, perplexed. ‘That’s an odd name. That’s not part of John’s name. What made me say that ?’ ‘Minds hold more than they know,’ the tall man said. ‘Particularly yours.’  (p. 37) The ‘tall man’ who replies to Will is Merriman Lyon, Will’s mentor and the Merlin character in the series, who guides much of the action. His suggestion that cultural memory continues to be relevant in the present day fits into Cooper’s technique of 47  For more on this, see my work on what I call the Oxford School of Children’s Literature, a school of magical, medievalized children’s fantasy arising out of the University of Oxford, which I argue went on to serve as the foundation for contemporary children’s fantasy norms. These arguments are outlined in my ‘Harry Potter and the Poetics of Paranoia’, Journal of Children’s Literature Studies 5 (2008), 88–109. 48  Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising (New York, 1973), p. 23. 49  The Dark Rider, on the other hand, whose horse the smith is shoeing, causes the opposite effect when Will meets him : ‘The brightness went out of the snow and sky, and the morning darkened a little, as an extra layer of the distant cloudbank swallowed the sun’ (ibid., pp. 23–4).

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weaving a range of British myths into the plot of the series. Merriman later drops the ‘John’ when speaking of the smith, and refers to him as simply ‘Wayland Smith’ in the context of his work for the Light at the end of the novel. At that point, Wayland uses his craft to join together the six signs that Will has collected over the course of the narrative, thereby creating one of the Things of Power necessary in the Light’s fight against the Dark (p. 237). The structures of both the Light and the Dark in The Dark Is Rising are largely built on hierarchical power relationships, and the Arthurian-inflected Light puts special emphasis upon bloodlines. In the context of the Anglo-Saxon Wayland’s destruction and shaming of a king’s family and in the light of nineteenth-century socialism’s interest in medieval artisans, Wayland Smith is a potentially problematic character for such a universe. Cooper addresses this tension by raising it in order to dispel it. Although her John Wayland Smith is most closely associated with the less controversial Berkshire legend of the roadside smith,50 in his initial encounter with the boy he tells Will that ‘in this time I belong to the road, as my craft belongs to all who use the road’ (p. 26). Wayland’s admission that his ‘craft belongs to all who use the road’ raises questions about the loyalties of medieval craftsmen, and indeed Merriman explains to Will that Wayland would be in danger should the Dark discover that he is an Old One, for ‘the craft of a smith is outside allegiance’ (p. 103). Cooper’s Wayland Smith reassuringly rejects the possibility of rebellion against feudalistic ideals by unreservedly siding with the Light, a role he has presumably been born into in the same way as Will. Thus, like Scott and Kipling, Cooper downplays the subversive elements in the Anglo-Saxon version of Wayland’s tale and instead highlights his medieval roots and the quaint associations of his craft. In doing so, all three authors are able to include him in their novels as an exemplary worker character while promoting nationalistic narratives that privilege class hierarchy. Other twentieth-century and contemporary incarnations of Wayland Smith tend, as with Cooper’s Wayland, to serve as generalized medievalisms. Each manifestation remains, crucially, a smith  but with little (if any) mention of the misfortunes and revenge that are so central to the Anglo-Saxon understanding of Wayland’s life. In Mary Stewart’s The Hollow Hills (1970) he is a mythical smith who, in a conflation with Arthurian myth, forges Excalibur ; the popular 1980s British television series Robin of Sherwood includes a set of episodes titled ‘The Swords of Wayland’ (1985) about the search for seven swords crafted by Wayland ; and in Anglo-Saxonist Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthurian children’s novel At the Crossing-Places (2001), Arthur fights a knight but cannot throw him because he is ‘as strong as Wayland the Smith’.51 There are brief mentions of Wayland and sometimes Vǫlundr in works by authors

50  The Dark is Rising takes place in Huntercombe, Buckinghamshire, an area that is now part of Berkshire. In the novel Wayland is associated with ‘Smith’s Gate’ in Huntercombe. 51  Kevin Crossley-Holland, At the Crossing-Places (London, 2001), p. 58.

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such as Neil Gaiman and Christopher Paolini,52 but Wayland Smith most frequently serves as part of the medievalized backdrop in fantasy rather than as a developed character in his own right. One exception to this trend is Raymond E. Feist’s horror-fantasy Faerie Tale (first published in 1988), which includes Wayland Smith as one of many medievalisms, but does so by incorporating overt sexuality into his characterization of the smith. Unlike The Dark Is Rising, Faerie Tale is not a children’s book and does not appear to have any particularly nationalistic elements. The plot involves the unsettling appearance of British mythological beings in modern-day upstate New York. Wayland’s primary characteristic in Faerie Tale (beyond his facility with metalworking) is the ability to arouse animalistic sexual urges in others, seemingly by his presence alone. In the primary episode with Wayland, the teenage girl Gabbie encounters him in the forest just after her horse has lost a shoe. Unlike the unkempt Waylands of Kenilworth and Puck of Pook’s Hill, or the stoic (and married) John Wayland Smith of The Dark is Rising, Feist’s Wayland is distractingly attractive. In his description of Wayland, Feist focuses on the man’s size and muscularity, using clichés to describe him like a hero from a historical romance novel : The man was brawny but young-looking and, under the soot and smoke smudge, strikingly handsome. He stood easily six foot two or more and his arms were heavily muscled. His beard was black, as was the hair that hung below a broad-brimmed hat. He wore an old-style linen shirt, with the long sleeves rolled up over his biceps.53 Feist’s account of Wayland focuses on his physical presence, and Gabbie’s thoughts stray towards the explicit as she watches him shoe her horse. At one point, the omniscient narrator states ‘She was becoming aroused as she watched Wayland Smith beat hot iron against the anvil’ (p. 100). Here, the potentially violent masculinity of the romance novel merges easily with the rapist tendencies of Vǫlundr, whose story appears to be an intertext for Feist in the overwrought Wayland–Gabbie episode. Like Scott and Kipling, Feist fuses the various legends around Wayland Smith : his Wayland tells Gabbie that he used to have a permanent forge in White Horse (the Uffington landmark next to Wayland’s Smithy), and adds, ‘I’d have stayed in White Horse, I’m thinkin’, t’ this day, but my master came for me […] I’d fled his service and not followed him’ (p. 99). This master may be Níðuðr, or may refer to the alchemist whom Scott’s Wayland serves before setting up his own business in Kenilworth.54 One of the scholar characters in Faerie Tale cites Deor, Vǫlundarkviða, and Kenilworth in his research into Wayland Smith and the unusual goings-on in the novel, indicat52  Neil Gaiman mentions swords forged by Wayland in the short story ‘Chivalry’, in Smoke and Mirrors (London, 1999), and in his novel Stardust (London, 1998). Christopher Paolini names a dwarfish war hammer ‘Völund’ in his fantasy novel Eragon (London, 2003). 53  Raymond E. Feist, Faerie Tale (London, 2001), p. 96. 54  See Ellis Davidson, ‘Wayland the Smith’, p. 148.

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ing Feist’s familiarity with the various incarnations of Wayland’s story, including his seduction/rape of Níðuðr’s daughter in the process of escaping the king.55 Perhaps because it is outside the space of children’s literature, which traditionally shies away from explicit sexuality, Faerie Tale has the room to experiment with Wayland’s identity by means of his sexuality and masculinity. Notably, in this context Feist joins his predecessors in rewriting Wayland as having full use of his legs. Neither Scott, Kipling, Cooper, nor Feist includes the hamstringing that is so central to the Anglo-Saxon and Norse versions of his tale. This choice may be attributed to the lack of a specific indication that the roadside Wayland Smith had any disability, but in Feist’s case Wayland’s physical capacity  much more as a muscular man than as a skilled artisan  is essential to his character. In addition to completing ‘each pump of the bellows, each strike of his hammer’ (p. 100), Feist’s hypersexualized Wayland must be dangerously strong, able to lift Gabbie into her horse’s saddle ‘as easily as if she were an infant’ (p. 101). Although Vǫlundr’s immobile legs prove no hindrance to his impregnating Bǫðvildr in Vǫlundarkviða and the Anglo-Saxon version, Feist’s conflation of workmanship, masculinity, and medievalism demands a muscular man, even ‘brutish’, with ‘an aura of power surrounding him, basic, almost primitive, and very sexual’ (p. 98). This interpretation of Wayland Smith takes the opportunity to reflect on modern-day performances of masculinity in post-industrialized societies as deficient in comparison : while watching Wayland, Gabbie giggles as she realizes that ‘Pumping iron was nothing next to forging iron’ (p. 100). Wayland Smith’s occupation is part of his sexual appeal in Faerie Tale, and in a novel unconcerned with bolstering nostalgic images of feudalism his itinerant status only contributes to his successful performance of sexualized masculinity. In stark contrast to Feist’s Wayland Smith is the character that would likely be the most immediately recognizable of all the Waylands in this chapter to a general audience. Although he is not a smith, not British, and certainly not medieval, The Simpsons character Waylon Smithers is defined by his work in ways that satirically reflect on modern-day careers and masculinity, especially in the context of the traditional Wayland Smith legends. Now in its twenty-first season, the highly popular Simpsons is aimed at both children and adults, and parodies contemporary middleclass American life through its depiction of the fictional town of Springfield. In this universe, Waylon Smithers is the mild-mannered personal assistant to Montgomery Burns, the aged and unscrupulous owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Much of the comedy around Smithers has to do with his relationship to his employer : Smithers appears to have no life beyond his slavish dedication to his job and to Mr Burns. There has been widespread speculation that he is a closet homosexual, and while the Toronto Star suggested that Smithers’s ‘sexual orientation is about the worstkept secret in Springfield’,56 the series and Simpsons film director David Silverman 55 Feist, Faerie Tale, p. 163. 56  Ben Rayner, ‘We’ll have a gay old time’, The Toronto Star, 20 February 2005, p. CO3.

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states that Smithers ‘seems to be focused on one particular human, as opposed to anything beyond that. [Rather than being gay], he’s sort of “Burns-sexual.” ’57 In return, Mr Burns regularly scorns his invaluable assistant, ignoring Smithers’s veiled advances and overlooking his hope of becoming Vice-President of the plant. Smithers is a man so defined by his job that he literally falls in love with it, but this devotion reads in the contemporary setting of The Simpsons as emasculating and isolating. His position as the executive assistant to a character that usually represents the evils of corporate America is comprised of ‘about 2,800 smaller jobs’58 rather than a single, definable skill such as metalworking. As such, Smithers belongs to the inscrutable corporate machine that Burns represents, and his emasculation complies with Rita Felski’s contention that women’s visible labor and technologization is a symbol of modernity ; the white-collar information-worker like Smithers may be read as a modern-day (feminized) version of the early-twentieth-century ‘typewriter’, a woman typist whose job description conflated her with the machine that she used.59 Smithers is laughable because he approaches his career with the commitment and fervour of a vocation. Although there is not space to enter into a full discussion of Waylon Smithers’s character in light of the Wayland Smith legends and the development of Western attitudes towards work, nation, and masculinity, Smithers’s situation is worth noting for the contemporary context that he provides. It is a long way, indeed, between the magical forger of English metal and the stammering, yellow-faced owner of the world’s largest collection of Malibu Stacy dolls.60 Where now are the bones of that famous and wise goldsmith Weland ? Scattered widely, it would seem, in the detritus of popular culture. Representations of Wayland are inflected by the spirit of capitalism that approves work for its own sake but now, perhaps, begins to ridicule it, often caught up in the nationalistic impulses of most nineteenth-century and children’s fantasy medievalisms, and tied indelibly to appraisals of class and sexuality. The unique tensions created by Wayland’s amalgam identity as individual craftsman and medieval legend, subversive rebel and stalwart worker open up the space for rich readings of the post-industrial texts that reimagine him in any detail. It is ironic that a character whose distinctiveness and solitude played such an essential role in the preservation of his memory in Anglo-Saxon England (in Alfred’s suggestion of cræft as denoting individualistic morality and intelligence, and in the recounting of his lonely misfortunes and triumph in Deor) has largely faded into the wash of circumstantial medievalisms that abound in popular 57  Larry Carroll, ‘Simpsons Trivia, From Swearing Lisa to “Burns-Sexual” Smithers’, MTV Online, 26 July 2007. Available at http ://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1565538/20070725/story.jhtml. Accessed 2 June 2009. 58  John Swartzwelder and Steven Dean Moore, ‘Homer the Smithers’, The Simpsons, Fox Network, 25 February 1996, No. 17, season 7. All episodes available online at http ://www.snpp.com/episodes.html. 59  Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 20. 60  Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, and Jeffrey Lynch. ‘Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy’, The Simpsons, Fox Network, 17 February 1994, No. 14, season 5.

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media. In many ways, however, the unsettling relevance of the Anglo-Saxon Wayland legend in the context of a capitalist society demands that he be hamstrung if he is to be used in the service of texts that look back nostalgically to Britain’s medieval past. And for those artists who feature him in their works without any such aims, rewriting Wayland Smith can provide the opportunity to comment incisively on how history, cultural mythology, and accepted morality intersect with craftsmanship and popular work ethic in the production of stereotypes about gender performance, sexuality, and other aspects of identity.

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12 ‘Overlord of the M5’ : The Superlative Structure of Sovereignty in Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns Hannah J. Crawforth

Introduction

G

eoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) tell of Offa, ‘presiding genius of the West Midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eighth century until the middle of the twentieth (and possibly beyond)’.1 The AngloSaxon Chronicle entry for 757 (B-Text) informs us :

⁊ þy ilcan geare man ofsloh Æþelbald Myrcna cing on Secggandune, ⁊ his lic liþ on Hreopandune ; ⁊ Beornred feng to rice ⁊ hit lytle hwile heold ⁊ ungefealice ; ⁊ þy ilcan geare feng Offa to rice ⁊ þæt heold .xxxix. wintra. And in that same year men killed Æthelbald, the Mercian king, at Seckington, and his body lies at Repton ; and Beornred took power and held it miserably for a little while ; and that same year Offa took power and held it for 39 winters.2 The grammatical construction is such that Offa literally takes to power or the realm (‘feng Offa to rice’ in the Old English), much as a modern monarch is said synecdochically to take to the throne. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’, writes 1 Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (London, 1971), ‘Acknowledgements’. All citations (henceforth given in the text) are taken from this un-paginated first edition. Hill’s notes take up the last five pages. They are not reprinted in his New and Collected Poems, 1952–1992 (Boston, 1994) or the recent Penguin Selected Poems (London, 2006), so I include a list of the sources Hill refers to there as an appendix to this essay. I am grateful to C. Dan Blanton, Kathleen Davis and Luke Sunderland for their comments on drafts of this essay, to Chris Jones, Kathryn Murphy and Graham Pechey for their thoughts on Hill, and to the organizers of the Oxford ‘Bone Dreams’ conference, David Clark and Nicholas Perkins. 2  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : A Collaborative Edition, IV : MS B, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge, 1983), p. 26 (translation my own).

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Carl Schmitt in March 1922.3 The noun-state of the ‘Sovereign’ is constituted, to Schmitt’s view, out of the act of designating another noun, deciding upon ‘the exception’. By a process of what Giorgio Agamben describes as an ‘inclusive exclusion’ it is this relation to the other which allows the assumption of the name of ‘sovereign’ : ‘The exception does not subtract itself from the rule ; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.’4 As power, ‘rice’ is synonymous with Offa taking it up, so sovereignty as elaborated by Agamben, following Schmitt, constitutively constructs and maintains itself in relation to the other by denominating the exception. In this essay I will show how the Mercian Hymns work through and across the theoretical and linguistic distance that separates these two versions of sovereignty. I will also suggest the need to revisit the multiple historical contexts of Hill’s poetic sequence, and to take seriously his treatment of Anglo-Saxon sources in particular. Those quick to brand Hill’s poetics difficult have been slower to pursue the hints offered to us by the author himself, in the form of the notes to the Hymns. Hill’s relation to certain foundational texts is crucial to his writing process : ‘I tend to read myself into a particular epoch while the composition of the sequence is progressing.’5 ‘I find that certain works from a very wide range of periods seem to exert an almost magnetic hold on my mind’, he writes elsewhere, elaborating ‘I want to be able to describe their bone structure, their complexion, their texture, and to achieve occasionally the kind of definition which seems to tell me that I and that work exist in a kind of amiable and mutually respecting relationship.’6 This counters those who attribute Hill’s allusions merely to a desire to show off his own erudition, or to ‘amplify the humour’ of his verse.7 One of the few critics to examine in any detail Sweet’s ‘Mercian Hymns’ as a source for Hill, Jon Silkin describes overcoming his initial skepticism that the reference might be ‘some elaborate, heavy-witted joke’ on the poet’s part.8 Silkin is 3 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology : Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 5. Further citations are given in the text. 4  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer : Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, 1995), pp. 21, 18. Further citations are given in the text. 5  W.S. Milne, An Introduction to Geoffrey Hill (London, 1998), p. 99. 6  Carl Philips, ‘The art of poetry LXXX : Geoffrey Hill’, The Paris Review 154 (2000), 272–99, at p. 294. 7 Milne, Introduction, p. 97. C.H. Sisson considers Hill’s notes to Mercian Hymns as important as T.S. Eliot’s appendations to The Waste Land, deriving ‘from a depth of scruple which […] watches over the whole of Hill’s work’. C.H. Sisson, The Avoidance of Literature : Collected Essays (Manchester, 1978), p. 470. 8  Hill states in his acknowledgements that the title of the sequence was suggested by Sweet’s AngloSaxon Reader in which we find, amongst other ‘Examples of Non-West-Saxon Dialects’, a selection of six ‘Mercian Hymns’. These are compiled from the Vespasian Psalter (London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A. i), which includes an Anglo-Saxon vernacular gloss, added during the first part of the eighth century at Lichfield, ‘the most extensive (and probably the purest) text in the Mercian dialect that has survived to modern times’. See Sherman M. Kuhn, ed., The Vespasian Psalter (Ann Arbor, MI, 1965), p. v.

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forced to ‘give grudging assent to their obliquity’ with respect to form, describing the mode of the biblical texts with obvious resonances for Hill’s own sequence, which likewise is ‘not merely rhythmical prose, but prose versions of poetry, although rendered, one feels, partly through the repetitions of parallelism, with emphatic and subtle rhythms’.9 Nicholas Howe builds brilliantly upon this insight, suggesting that the form owes something to the Anglo-Saxon inscription of poems ‘from margin to margin, across the page’, thus ensuring that lineation ‘must be fixed by internal metrics’, most notably the caesura, ‘rather than by layout on the page’.10 Critical neglect of the textual landmarks according to which Hill orientates his own poetic project in relation to the writing of the past has meant that the very matter which might best help us understand the poems is often overlooked. By systematically tracing each of the references pertaining to Anglo-Saxon history and poetry provided by Hill I seek to chart the space between its eighth-century sovereign and twentieth-century conceptions of sovereignty, and thus to map the landscape of Mercian Hymns.

Sovereignty and the Anglo-Saxon Overlord

It is only in reaching the end of Hill’s first hymn that one is given some of the coordinates by which it is possible to begin locating the poem. ‘“I liked that,” said Offa, “sing it again”’ (I, line 9). We embark upon a second, retrospective reading equipped with the knowledge that the words on the page are audible, they are being sung ; that the subject and object of the opening address are one and the same, addressed to and being about Offa ; and that we are being interjected between this single subject and his objective or historical existence. Overhearing the hymn in an apparently unmediated way, the reader both occupies the subject position of Offa himself, and simultaneously is placed outside of this position when hearing Offa speak (a position comparable to that of the sovereign himself, perhaps, in that it is constituted according to Agamben’s terms, in the maintenance of a relation to an exteriority). But most readers are prompted into re-reading the words on the page earlier still. In only the second line of the entire sequence the eye catches upon a startling anachronism, when Offa is addressed as ‘King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sand-/stone : overlord of the M5’ (I, lines 1–2). Almost as soon as the poems begin, we are forced to look to

9  Jon Silkin, ‘The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill’, Iowa Review 3 (1972), 108–28, at pp. 122–3. Hill himself describes the particular formal quality of the Mercian Hymns as ‘versets of rhythmical prose […] far more of a pitched and tuned chant than I think one normally associates with the prose poem’. John Haffenden, Viewpoints : Poets in Conversation (London, 1981), p. 93. 10  Howe productively compares Sweet’s Mercian text to Hill’s poems, which ‘combine a canonical text with a dialect gloss, and thus become elegies of place that summon up the voices of all who have lived there across the run of time’. Nicholas Howe, ‘Praise and Lament : The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn’, in Words and Works : Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson, ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto, 1998), pp. 293–310, at pp. 303, 304.

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the past, seeking to reconcile its ‘overlord’ to the present moment characterized by ‘the M5’. In reading himself into Offa’s history it seems unlikely that Hill neglected F.M. Stenton’s canonical account of Anglo-Saxon England, in which he describes the concept of the ‘overlord’ in detail.11 Briefly, each kingdom of what is now England had its own ruler, but at various intervals in Anglo-Saxon history these monarchs were subordinated to a single ‘overlord’ who would reign over all lands that fell south of the Humber. As Stenton explains, the very nature of overlordship itself was evolving during the years preceding Offa’s reign, with the result that ‘the overlord begins to appear as the patron rather than the leader of his dependents, and the association of the southern English peoples gradually assumes a political character’.12 The overlord has the power ‘to transfer provinces’ amongst his kings, to decide upon the exceptional circumstances which will merit the suppression of the usual laws relating to property rights.13 We might recall that Bede refers to the Anglo-Saxon overlords as holding ‘imperium’, which can most closely be translated as ‘sovereignty’.14 There is something of a tautology in the title of ‘overlord’ as applied to one who rules the rulers, who lords over those who themselves lord over.15 Indeed, the position of the ‘overlord’ could be defined as superlative, a term that is itself etymologically tautological, denoting something above the lifting up.16 Schmitt cites the historically accepted definition of sovereignty as ‘the highest, legally independent, underived power’, which he considers both overly formulaic and at once ‘infinitely pliable’, noting amongst his objections that it ‘utilizes the superlative’ even though ‘[i]n political reality there is no irresistible highest or greatest power’ (p. 17). The superlative is for Schmitt a practical impossibility in part, I would suggest, because of this tautological implication. Given his reading into the period, Hill may well have been aware of the peculiarly ambiguous nature of the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Bretwalda’, which lurks behind the ‘overlord’ of his opening lines, a term that is much misunderstood. The second component, thought to be a contraction of ‘anwealda’ (as in the Chronicle MS C variant,

11  ‘The syllabus I took for my BA in English at Oxford finished at 1832. It began with Anglo-Saxon  or Old English.’ Philips, ‘Geoffrey Hill’, p. 278. 12  F.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943, repr. 1971), p. 35. I cite Stenton as a source Hill himself is most likely to have been familiar with. 13 Ibid. 14 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Judith McClure and Roger Collins (Oxford, 1969), p. 78. 15  In Stenton’s words ‘dealing with his subject kings very much as he dealt with the hereditary nobility of his own country’, Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 35. 16  Literally ‘super-’, above, + ‘lat-’ (for ‘*tlat-’), past participle stem of ‘tollere’, to take up, lift up, to raise. OED, s.v. ‘superlative, a, and n’ (using the definition of the second edition). Hill’s review of the second edition of the OED displays his finely attenuated etymological mindset. See ‘Common Weal, Common Woe’ in Geoffrey Hill : Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Hayes (Oxford, 2008) pp. 265–79.

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‘Bretenanwealda’) means ‘sole ruler’.17 Hence, in a rather misleading section of his history, Stenton credits the chronicler with the ‘preservation of the English title applied to these outstanding kings’, the vernacular denomination ‘Bretwalda’, which he claims ‘should probably be translated “Britain ruler”’, like the style ‘Rex Britanniæ’.18 Other scholars have dismissed this view, pointing out that the phrase occurs only in the Parker manuscript and was in all probability coined by the ninth-century Chronicle author(s).19 The practical inapplicability of a term used to express sovereignty thus once again seems to stem from the self-negating nature of its formulation. Stenton’s error in awarding an authority bestowed by later historians to a term unknown in the eighth century results in anachronism. Hill’s readers have frequently commented on the atemporal shock of his opening reference to the ‘overlord of the M5’, yet have failed to note the history of anachronism and anachronistic history built into his appropriation of the concept of the overlord. Against such an elaborate backdrop of referentiality, the presence of the M5 seems more readily assimilable ; running as it does throughout what would have been the Mercian territories and beyond, continuing through southern England down into Cornwall, its modern sprawl apparently imitates the growing sphere of Offa’s influence. Numerous contradictions therefore complicate our understanding of the word ‘Bretwalda’, which stands in relation to the notion of the Anglo-Saxon overlord like an accompanying shadow. Its subtly differing senses both contradict and coexist alongside one another in a kind of negative excess of signification akin to the state of tautology already mapped out here. Hill appears to recognize the inherently contradictory nature of this title in the multiplicity of roles he attributes to Offa in the opening poem of his sequence. The ‘overlord of the M5’ is at once ‘King of the perennial holly-groves’, ‘architect of the his-/toric rampart and ditch’, ‘guardian of / the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge’, ‘contractor / to the desirable new estates’, ‘saltmaster’, ‘money / changer’, ‘commissioner for oaths’, and ‘martyrologist’ (I, lines 1–8). This concatenation of roles leads one to question whether Offa can fulfill any one of them individually, doubts that culminate in the ironic final clause, ‘friend of Charlemagne’.20 Whilst Offa and Charlemagne maintained an outward display of courtesy towards one another, in fact 17  Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘án-wealda’. 18  The epithet takes varying forms in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, see Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 34 n. 2. 19  ‘No such title was ever used in practice’, say McClure and Collins in their notes to Bede, Ecclesiastical History, p. 377. Bosworth and Toller state that ‘the true meaning of bryten-walda, compounded of walda a ruler, and the adj. Bryten, is totally unconnected with Brettas or Bretwalas, the name of the British aborigines ; for bryten is derived from breotan to bruise, break, to break into small portions, to disperse ; and, when coupled with walda, wealda a ruler, king, means no more than an extensive or powerful king, a king whose power is widely extended. Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘bryten-walda’. See also Simon Keynes’s entry on ‘Bretwalda’ in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge et al. (Oxford, 1999), p. 74. 20  It is plausible that Hill derives this clause from Eleanor Shipley Duckett’s Alcuin, Friend of Charlemagne (New York, 1951).

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‘the relations between the kings were never easy’.21 The ‘friend of Charlemagne’ Offa almost certainly was not, and this culmination of the assimilated rhythmical clauses defines Offa’s sovereignty according to the old rule rejected by Schmitt, operating in the realm of the superlative. As I have already described, the superlative is undermined by its own tautological implications, its secondary meaning literally ‘exaggerative, hyperbolical’.22 Many definitions of sovereignty  Schmitt’s included  owe their origins to the two central tenets of Jean Bodin’s formulation : ‘Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth.’23 First, the notion of ‘absolute’ power leads Bodin and many subsequent thinkers (erroneously) to consider sovereign power indivisible.24 Second, the idea that such power is ‘perpetual’ enforces the contiguity of sovereignty throughout both normal and exceptional states. Schmitt’s theologization of sovereignty (reflected in the title of his book) is his most striking departure from the work of his predecessor. Hence Bodin’s state of emergency is reinterpreted by Schmitt as ‘the exception’, akin to ‘the miracle’, and his idea of indivisibility becomes that of the ‘omnipotent lawgiver’ (p. 36). The singing of Offa’s many roles in the opening poem of Hill’s Mercian Hymns recalls Schmitt’s expression of this notion of omnipotence : ‘There always exists the same inexplicable identity : lawgiver, executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution […] the state acts in many disguises but always as the same invisible person’ (p. 38). The omnipotence of the sovereign rests upon the power of the decision on the exception, which no other person can make because the sovereign alone is at once within and without the jurisdiction of the law. The legal system as regularly constituted cannot encompass that which is outside of, excepted from, itself, hence the decision to suspend that legal system can only be taken by that which is outside of it. Thus, while Schmitt devalues the common definition of the sovereign according to the terms of the superlative, he reinstates what is fundamentally a replication of the tautological structure whose usefulness he dismisses. The sovereign position is that of a superlative exception, and this is the source of its omnipotence. There is of course a dangerous implication to all of this, in that a decision taken alone that cannot be appealed against begins to sound more like tyranny than sov21  A dispute between Charlemagne and Offa over the proposed double marriage of their respective sons and daughters led to the closure of Frankish ports to English trade in 789, and intercourse between the two countries was completely suspended around 790 when Offa insisted that he be formally recognised as the equal of Charlemagne. S.E. Kelly, ‘Offa (d. 796), king of the Mercians’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford, 2004), 41, pp. 545–8 ; Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 219–220. 22  OED, s.v. ‘superlative a and n’, A.1.b. The citation historically closest to Schmitt’s use of the term is from a speech by Churchill to the House of Commons, 21 March 1906. As Milne has suggested, the spectre of Churchill, ‘threaten[ing] mal-/efactors with ash from his noon cigar’, haunts XIV, lines 2–3. Milne, Introduction, p. 103. 23  Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge, 1992), p. 1. Originally published as Les Six Livres de la République (Paris, 1576). 24 Bodin, On Sovereignty, p. xiii. See also pp. xviii, xx, xxii.

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ereignty.25 Bodin’s theorization of the indivisibility of the sovereign ultimately led him to condone absolutist rule. Schmitt’s assertion of the rights of the sovereign to suspend normal law in the event of the exception infamously resulted in his support for the emergency provision of the Weimar constitution in article 48, which permitted the Reichspräsident to use military force against his own citizens in certain exceptional circumstances, thus underwriting Hitler’s dictatorship.26 Geoffrey Hill has spoken of his own peculiarly ambiguous relation to Offa, whom he perceives as ‘a tyrannical creator of order and beauty’, and ‘a rather hateful man who nonetheless created forms of government and coinage which compel one’s admiration’.27 Offa’s symbolic power rests for Hill in his ‘murderous brutality […] as a political animal’, which serves a useful poetic function as ‘an objective correlative for the ambiguities of history in general’.28 Hill’s difficulties seem to lie in the assimilation of these many, often conflicting, aspects into a single entity ; they emblematize the superlative nature of the sovereign and the struggle to reconcile the significatory excess therein with the capacity of a single man. As such, I suggest, it is crucial to Hill’s poetic project to preserve this sense of irresolution rather than make judgments about Offa’s supposedly tyrannical nature. This is emblematized in Mercian Hymns XI, where we uncover Coins handsome as Nero’s ; of good substance and weight. Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face. […] Swathed bodies in the long ditch ; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil.   (XI, lines 1–4, 9–12) On view here are two alternate sides of the sovereign (which is of course both a ruler and a coin). One, ‘of good substance’, typifies the civilizing force of Offa’s governance, the exquisitely fine craftsmanship executed under the overlordship of ‘Offa Rex’ ; the other, dominated by ‘the king’s anger’, is a brutal image of mass execution, the delicate silver coin substituted for a single ‘eye upstaring’ from its grave-like ditch. Parallelism is again crucial to Hill’s poetic construction ; the touching and retouching of the seasons replicates the repeated striking of the moneyers, whose potential to ‘alter the king’s face’ imitates the natural progression of the seasons across a changing 25  Whilst Schmitt makes clear the extremism of Donoso Cortès’s theory (p. 56) his repeated reiteration of such statements has a cumulative effect that causes them gradually to acquire the force of his own opinion. 26  See Schmitt’s discussion of Article 48 of the German constitution, p. 11. 27 Haffenden, Viewpoints, p. 94. 28 Ibid.

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landscape. The irresolvability of these opposing faces of King Offa, and the tautological excess of signification therein, will be central as we move now to the second section of this essay, and examine further the Anglo-Saxon genealogy of Mercian Hymns.

Homo Sacer : Agamben and Ceolred

Hill’s seventh hymn shows us Offa’s most brutal side. Despite the apparently ironic protestation that ‘Ceolred was his friend and remained so’, Offa punishes him for losing a toy biplane that spins out of his control and ‘through a hole / in the classroomfloorboards’ (VII, lines 6, 9–10) : After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named Albion.  (VII, lines 12–16) That Offa ‘flayed’ Ceolred does not merely indicate violence but in fact derives from the Anglo-Saxon flean, meaning ‘to pull off the skin’ of one’s victim.29 Such an act belongs to the domain of ritual punishment.30 The issue of Ceolred’s identity has been under-explored. Hill’s choice of this name for Offa’s schoolboy companion is not incidental, nor can the appellation be dismissed as referring coincidentally to an Anglo-Saxon advisor to King Offa, as has been proposed.31 One of Offa’s precursors as Mercian ruler, Æthelbald, had ascended the throne upon the death of the previous king in most unusual circumstances. This king’s name was Ceolred, and he had committed two mortal sins according to ecclesiastical law, as we learn from the letters of Saint Boniface, namely ‘the adulterous violation of nuns and the destruction of monasteries’.32 In a letter warning him against replicating the licentious, destructive behaviour of his predecessor Boniface tells Æthelbald how divine retribution was visited upon Ceolred, who while he sat feasting amidst his companions was suddenly stricken in his sins with madness by an evil spirit, who had seduced him by his persuasions into rash defiance of the law of God. So without repentance or confession, raving mad, talking with devils and cursing the priests of God, he passed on, without doubt, from this life to the torments of hell.33 Hill does not record any familiarity with Boniface’s letters, but the parallels are none29  Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘flean’. 30  ‘The most ancient recorded forms of capital punishment […] are actually purification rites and not death penalties in the modern sense’, notes Giorgio Agamben (p. 81). Is Offa’s punishment intended to ensure his friend’s salvation by purifying him of his guilt ? 31 Milne, Introduction, p. 96. 32  The Letters of Saint Boniface, trans. Ephraim Emerton (New York, 1940), p. 129. 33  Ibid., pp. 129–130.

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theless resonant.34 Ceolred is ‘suddenly stricken’ in Boniface’s version of events, just as in Hill’s poem Ceolred is swiftly transformed from ‘friend’ to tortured victim ‘After school’ ; he is ‘seduced’ by an evil spirit in the former, ‘lured’ by Offa in the latter ; and his raving, ‘talking with devils and cursing’, is in turn evoked by the ‘sniggering with fright’, of the seventh hymn. Hill’s poetic gesture of ‘leaving Ceolred’ once his punishment has been inflicted seems to reiterate Boniface’s narrative conclusion, ‘he passed on, without doubt’. Ceolred’s personal journey into ‘the torments of hell’ departs from that of continuing life in the letter, just as Offa ‘journeyed for hours, / calm and alone’ in Hill’s imagining, after indulging his fantasy of violence. The ‘lost fighter : a biplane, already / obsolete and irreplaceable’ (VII, lines 7–8) evokes the conflict of Hill’s own boyhood, World War II (Hill was born in 1932). The image of it falling into the ‘rat-droppings and coins’, suggests not only the devaluation of what has been lost, its ‘heavy / snub silver’ now lying amongst animal excrement, but also inculcates into the passage a world in which the very concept of worth itself has gone awry : the coins are down there too (VII, lines 8–9, 11). This is a loss inextricable from a sense of youth, the fighter pilots killed on a daily basis barely themselves out of the classroom, scarcely beyond playing with toy replicas of the machines that would take them to their deaths. Ceolred becomes in a sense one more casualty amongst the mass killings of the War. Giorgio Agamben explains the role of homo sacer in his work of that name : ‘The sacred man [homo sacer] is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime’, he writes, quoting the Roman grammarian Festus’ description, ‘“It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide” […] This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred’ (pp. 74, 71). Offa’s flaying of Ceolred in the Mercian Hymns does not, to this logic, represent an act of homicide. Nor can sacrificial meaning be attached to his death ; the crime for which Ceolred has been judged, both modern and Anglo-Saxon in its resonances, does not result directly in his death but does not, at the same time, preclude it. As such Ceolred’s death, the death of homo sacer, cannot be allowed to signify anything approximating to a genuine atonement, for the loss of a generation of fighter pilots, for instance. He simply passes on, as does Hill’s poem. It does not then seem insignificant that ‘Ceolred’, of the Mercian Hymns, is named after the monarch who broke with a longstanding upholding of ecclesiastical laws by Mercian kings and was made to suffer retributively as a result. Crimes that merit sacratio, according to Agamben, included ‘terminum exarare, the cancellation of borders ; verberatio parentis, the violence of the son against the parent ; or the swindling of a client by a counsel’ (p. 85). The historical Ceolred, in breaking with the pre-existing standards of his predecessors, both crosses a line and inflicts violence upon his forefathers ; the Ceolred of Mercian Hymns, who allows the biplane to slip through the floor, represents both a failure to respect the borders of the space he shares with Offa and an act 34  Stenton’s canonical Anglo-Saxon England also recounts this episode (pp. 203–5).

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of aggression towards the one who takes the position of father towards him in inflicting punishment. Let us turn to the sixteenth hymn : Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over ? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter. […] Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them ? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim ; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes.   (XVI, lines 1–3, 11–14) Hill’s poem re-enacts, in the fragmented linguistic shards of its opening, the landing of an invasion, an assault conducted under the veil of diplomacy, by ‘Ambassadors, pilgrims’, who seek to translate their own sovereign power across oceans. The ‘Frankish gift’ is ‘two-edged’ ; in the ‘slaughter’ it unleashes it evokes the doubly exceptional status of homo sacer who can be killed but not sacrificed. Hill’s pun upon ‘regaled’ here emphasizes this doubleness, eliciting both the ‘regal’ nature of kingship, and the casual violence it can involve, the tales of slaughter narrated for Offa’s entertainment. Attribution and retribution are both misapplied, judgements made too quickly and considered with inadequate care. The ‘In-/dulgences’ of a system that attempts to assign concrete value to things are exposed in the equation of ‘an expenditure’ with ‘a hissing’ ; amidst the anonymity of slaughter there is no tenable estimation of value to be made. As ‘wine’ turns to ‘urine’ so human lives turn to ‘ashes’, a meaningless loss in which the individual passing is insignificant. One of Agamben’s starkest arguments is made against terming the Nazi atrocities against Jews a ‘Holocaust’, which he terms ‘an irresponsible historiographical blindness’ in its seeking ‘to lend a sacrificial aura’ to their deaths, explaining : The Jew living under Nazism is […] a flagrant case of homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing therefore constitutes, as we will see, neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere ‘capacity to be killed’ inherent in the condition of the Jew as such. The truth  which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils  is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life.   (p. 114) Hitler, for whose government Carl Schmitt worked between 1933 and 1936, embodies the deadly extremism implicit in the decisionism of the sovereign to Agamben (p. 142). Most horrifically, the concentration camp ‘is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (p. 168). Modern genocide turns its victims into homines sacri, the dreadful analogy to lice here suggests that their sheer

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number overwhelms any possibility of attaching a meaning to each individual death via the processes of mourning, and they become anonymous as ‘Swathed bodies in the long ditch’ (XI, line 9). The incomprehensible mass of this horror forecloses upon the capacity of each loss to signify. Hill’s twentieth hymn bears a note directing his reader to Anthony Conran’s Penguin Book of Welsh Verse as one source for his litany of places fought over : ‘“Ethan­ dune”, “Catraeth”, “Maldon”, “Pen-/gwern”’ (XX, lines 6–7). ‘The Eagle of Eli’, one of the poems Hill demands that we pay particular attention to, evokes the bird that feasts on the corpses of Cynddylan, lord of Pengwern (in modern-day Shropshire), along with his men. They were said to have been killed by an Northumbrian force avenging Cynddylan’s support for Penda of Mercia against the Northumbrians at the battle of Maserfield (c.642) : Eagle of Eli, it cried out tonight, It swam in men’s blood.    There in the trees ! And I’ve misery on me.   Eagle of Eli, I hear it tonight.   Bloodstained it is. I dare not go near it     There in the trees ! I’ve misery on me. Eagle of Eli, that watches the seas, In the estuaries fishes no longer. In the blood of men it calls its feast.35 The eagle has no need to fish its usual estuaries, feasting and bathing instead in slaughtered men’s blood, and emerging ‘Bloodstained’. The appalling imagery of this massacre is reinforced by the incantatory repetitions of the stanzaic form, sounding again and again certain notes as it circles around its subject like the ravenous bird that hovers over the corpses. The poet laments the scale of the catastrophe rather than any particular personal loss : ‘I’ve misery on me.’ In the bloodbath that swallows up the value of an individual life, the death of each man has been rendered insignificant (literally, it cannot signify). Every corpse is symbolically joined in blood with each of the others in a macabre mockery of the mass, in which all share in the blood of Christ and are thus transformed into part of the larger single body of the Church. A mockery because Cynddylan’s men have died the death of homo sacer, killed but not sacrificed ; there is no redemptive meaning in the ‘blood of men’, unlike the promised salvation with which the blood of Christ is imbued. Whilst it would be wrong to suggest the ‘Eagle of Eli’ describes events in any way comparable to the Holocaust of the twentieth century, I do believe that in this respect the poem provides an imaginative 35  Anon., ‘The Eagle of Eli’, in The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse, ed. and trans. Anthony Conran (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 92–3. For the historical context, see T.M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Wales and Mercia, 613–918’, in Mercia : An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr (London, 2001), pp. 89–105.

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precursor for Hill that adds to, rather than detracts from, his poetic rendering of the horror of mass death. As Hill’s sequence progresses and the gathering storm-clouds of World War II become ever more threatening, ‘curfew-time’ is imposed upon the games of young boys, whose imaginations have been captured by the ‘battle-anthems and the / gregarious news’ that boom out of the wireless and who play at making their own ‘war-band’ (XXII, lines 3, 5–6). Hymn XXII contains a ghostly pre-figuring of the premature deaths of the real biplane fighter pilots, as the boy narrator sits out a bombardment in ‘the earthy shelter’, which recalls the dragon’s lair of Beowulf, ‘huddled with stories of dragon-/tailed airships and warriors who took wing im-/mortal as phantoms’ (XXII, lines 7, 8–10). They are, in a sense, already dead.

The King’s Two Bodies : The Anointing of Ecgfrith

The double exclusion of homo sacer from both life, in his capacity to be killed, and death, in his inability to be sacrificed, for Agamben reflects the originary political sphere of sovereignty in which religious and profane dimensions are held in a relation of double exception to one another.36 This leads him to a lengthy discussion of the doctrine of the King’s two bodies, as expounded by Ernst Kantorowicz, according to which the sovereign exists simultaneously in a religious, or sacrificial, sense in the royal dignitas and also as a profane, physical organism that is capable of being killed. These two elements are most commonly described in the terms of the body politic and the body natural. Kantorowicz traces this concept to the medieval notion of the persona mixta, which itself derives from the figuration of Christ as a gemina persona, human and divine, and thus attributes the origin of the two bodies doctrine to Christian theology, an assertion Agamben contests.37 He is nonetheless fascinated by Kantorowicz’s aside on the funeral practice that creates an effigy of a deceased king and treats this model as substitute for the sovereign himself until the mourning rites have been fully completed and the new king installed.38 In such a ritual the king 36  Agamben seeks to establish the larger point that homo sacer defines the relation of every individual to political life as such (pp. 83, 85). 37  Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies : A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), pp. 42, 49. Further citations are given in the text. Kantorowicz makes clear that these medieval figurations, whilst analogously related to the two bodies doctrine to which they bear ‘similarities’, are not an exact syntagm and that ‘some perplexing “physiological” difference prevails between the mediaeval “geminate” king […] and his two-bodied Tudor descendant’ (p. 46). 38  Agamben thinks that this ritual may be based upon the Roman ceremony of consecratio, in which a wax imago of the dead king is purported to bear sovereign power for seven days following the emperor’s death, before ‘dying’ itself. He argues that Kantorowicz, wishing to link the use of the effigy symbolically to the perpetual character of sovereignty (as identified by Bodin), deliberately represses this pagan precedent, not merely in the interests of attributing the king’s two bodies doctrine to Christian origins but also because of the dangerous implications of an act ‘in which the political body of the king seemed to approximate  and even to become indistinguishable from  the body of homo sacer, which can be killed but not sacrificed’ (pp. 92–4). Whilst quick to accuse Kantorowicz of deliberately exclud-

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is already dead, yet his political body continues to live. It is in this respect that the resemblance to homo sacer becomes pronounced : he can be killed, the effigy will die its own death, but not sacrificed, because at a semantic level the sovereign has already undergone all that death can mean. The ritual of prolonging sovereign ‘life’ in that of the effigy is tautological, and as such reflects the originary construct of sovereignty itself. Agamben writes that the king’s body must also and above all represent the very excess of the emperor’s sacred life, which is isolated in the image and then, in the Roman ritual, carried to the heavens, or, in the French and English rite, passed on to the designated successor. However, once this is acknowledged, the metaphor of the political body appears no longer as the symbol of the perpetuity of the dignitas, but rather as the cipher of the absolute and inhuman character of sovereignty.  (p. 101) The excess of sacred life attaching itself to the sovereign derives, I would argue, from what I have already identified as the superlative structure of sovereignty, in the sense re-claimed by Schmitt. Sovereignty is ‘inhuman’ in the sense of being beyond the human, superlatively human. Homo sacer, as we have seen, is in a meaningful sense already dead. The sovereign, in replicating this structural sacredness, must be considered in similar terms. In the first of a series of four poems subtitled by Hill ‘The Death of Offa’, with which his sequence ends, we are told : ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen : papal legate and rural dean ; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries ; a shuffle of house-carls. He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs.   (XXVII, lines 1–7) The reported speech here may indicate that the King is dying, figuratively between life and death, or this ‘ritual phrase’ (as Hill terms it in his notes to Mercian Hymns) can be understood to echo the two bodies doctrine that may owe its origins not only to the pagan precedent Agamben emphasizes, but also to Old English theories of sovereignty and succession.39 As such, Offa is both ‘alive and dead’ in the terms of his ing the Roman precedent, Agamben is equally myopic in his treatment of those sources which further Kantorowicz’s case, to which I suggest some Anglo-Saxon additions ; see note 39 below. 39  As such, the history of the two bodies doctrine is perhaps more complex than Agamben allows. I am grateful to Kathleen Davis for this insight, who has importantly shown the Anglo-Saxon roots of modern theorizations of sovereignty in Periodization and Sovereignty : How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008).

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political existence ; at the moment of the king’s death the excess of sacred life which passes to his successor assures the continuing life of his sovereign authority. Hill acknowledges Christopher Brooke’s The Saxon and Norman Kings as the source of this seemingly paradoxical phrase : ‘On 1 December 1135 King Henry was “alive and dead”, in Lyons-la-Fôret in Normandy.’40 As above, the expression appears to denote one of two possibilities : either a dying monarch, or that Henry I’s natural body has died but that his sacred life still lives, awaiting its conferral upon his successor. This latter suggestion has added force because Henry I looked to have designated his daughter Matilda his rightful heir, only to change his mind on his deathbed in favour of his nephew, Stephen of Blois, who was crowned on 22 December. In the intervening three weeks, Stephen journeyed to England and convinced the Archbishop of Canterbury that he was Henry’s chosen successor, with no documented evidence to support his claim. Brooke explains the interlaced matrix of factors involved in the transferral of medieval sovereignty to one who claims the right of succession, which requires in varying proportions the right of inheritance, election by those who assist the king in his governance, and, ideally, designation as favourite to succeed by the preceding ruler.41 Once the king enters the state of being ‘alive and dead’, this excess of signification must pass to his heir, who demonstrates that he has been invested with the sovereign authority in the corresponding excess of threefold proof. This transfer of sacred life is reflected in the crowd that gathers to oversee the succession in Hill’s poem ; ‘they were / all there, the funereal gleemen’, who must endorse Offa’s designated heir by their election. As Brooke has written, ‘The word “elect” was used in contexts where no element of choice can have been involved’ ; rather the Old English ceosan and Latin eligere (both meaning ‘to choose’) as used in the sources ‘may hide discussion and arrangement ; what they actually describe is a formal process of acknowledgment and acclamation’.42 Hence, in the case of the Mercian succession depicted by Hill there is no real act of choosing but rather a symbolic gesture of acclamation. ‘He was defunct. They were perfunctory’, not merely in the tautological excess of the required tripartite claim, but most particularly in the case of Offa because his successor had in fact been anointed some nine years prior to his death. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that in this year a stormy (‘geflitfullic’) synod was held at Chelsea at which, or shortly thereafter, Offa’s son Ecgfrith was anointed King (‘to cinninge gehalgod’).43 He is ‘gehalgod’, from halgian, meaning ‘To hallow, make holy, consecrate, sanctify’.44 The excess of the sovereign’s sacred life had thus been invested in Offa’s designated successor almost a decade before his death. 40  Christopher Brooke, The Saxon and Norman Kings (London, 1967), p. 39. 41  Ibid., p. 24. 42  Ibid., p. 33. 43  Chronicle MS B, ed. Taylor, p. 27. This is the entry for the year 785 ; scholars believe Ecgfrith was actually anointed in 787. 44  Bosworth and Toller, s.v. ‘halgian’. Each of these synonyms leads back to the Latin consecrare, ‘dedicate, devote as sacred’. OED, s.v. ‘consecrate’.

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The anointing of Ecgfrith prior to the demise of Offa’s natural body, ‘remarkable in any case as the formal association of a son in his father’s kingship, had a wider interest as the first recorded consecration of an English king’.45 In 781, Alcuin had set a precedent when he anointed two sons of Charlemagne, and it is thought probable that Offa’s gesture was one of imitation, motivated by a desire to keep up with developments at the Frankish court.46 The founder of the Carolingian dynasty, King Pippin, had in the early eighth century instigated the coronation ceremony in what we would consider a recognizable form, featuring a crown, orb and sceptre, and  most crucially  including the anointment of the monarch with holy oil for what seems to have been the first time. Pippin sought legitimation, having applied to the Pope for special permission to dispatch with the charade of maintaining a Merovingian puppet king and to assume the throne himself.47 In this context the presence of ‘Merovingian car-dealers’ at Offa’s Death seems not to be coincidental (XXVII, line 3). The fact that the Merovingians were noted for their lack of any formal ceremony upon the royal succession serves further to ensure that our attention is drawn to the anointing of Ecgfrith in the context of Hill’s Hymn.48 The historian Percy Schramm explains the political significance of the anointing, remarking that ‘The holy oil separated the king from his subjects, made him like the priest, conjoined him with other kings, and gave him precedence over those who did not enjoy the right.’49 As such the moment of anointing divides the body of the King into its natural and politic elements. In Psalm 151, upon which the first of the ‘Mercian Hymns’ in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader is based, its supposed author David describes an angel who took him from his duties as a shepherd ‘ond smirede mec in mildheartnisse smirenisse his’ (‘and anointed me with his anointing oil’).50 The repetition of verb and noun here reiterates the doubleness of such anointings. It is not insignificant that Hill chooses Offa for the subject of his poem, the king who instigated the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of sacral kingship in its most explicit form by anointing Ecgfrith, the first time an English monarch had been publicly consecrated. Ecgfrith’s doubled legitimacy has structural importance in 45 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 217. 46  See Brooke, Kings, p. 35 and Percy Schramm, A History of the English Coronation (Oxford, 1937), p. 15. For a more recent account, see Janet Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 283–308. 47  Because all the early Frankish kings were from the Merovingian family, biblical precedent for this break with tradition was sought, and found, in Samuel’s anointing of David king after Saul lost divine favour. David’s own successor, Solomon, ‘was chosen, not by primogeniture, but by “Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet”’, Brooke, Kings, pp. 35–36. As at every coronation of an English monarch since that of George II, Handel’s setting of this Old Testament text was used in the 1953 crowning of Elizabeth II, to which Hill’s third Hymn alludes : ‘On the morning of the crowning we chorused our re-/mission from school’ (III, lines 1–2). 48 Schramm, History, p. 14. 49  Ibid., p. 115. 50  Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, 13th edn, rev. C.T. Onions (Oxford, 1950), p. 170. I am grateful to Nicholas Perkins for reminding me of this connection.

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Hill’s sequence, contrasting revealingly with Ceolred’s illegitimacy. Further, I would like to suggest the Mercian Hymns gloss this moment of separation of king from subjects, this making sacred of the sovereign, as a crucial Anglo-Saxon antecedent to the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, a concept whose explicit theorization begins to gain currency during the Tudor dynasty.51 In his essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’ Hill writes of the dangers of obscuring the Machiavellian schism between politics and morality. His words are understatedly shocking when he juxtaposes the antifascist campaigner Cesare Pavese’s comment that ‘the political body does not die and so does not have to answer for itself before any God’ with the fact of its being written on ‘14 June 1940’.52 This observation is crucial, not merely in its suggesting Hill’s passing familiarity with the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, but to his poetics as a whole. The issue of the morality of the sovereign, as Schmitt has demonstrated to such horrific effect, cannot be sidestepped, and the inhuman implications of the sovereign’s exceptional state must not be allowed to stray into tyranny. The Mercian Hymns take this as their central concern. And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk towards us   he vanished he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud.  (XXX) Offa at once walks towards us and vanishes from our view ; his legacy to us is coins and red mud. In these doublings, human and inhuman, the superlative state of his sovereignty is laid bare. 51  Kantorowicz, following Maitland, finds ‘the first clear elaboration’ of the king’s two bodies in the ‘Duchy of Lancaster Case’ in Edmund Plowden’s Reports. See F.M. Maitland, Selected Essays (Cambridge, 1936), p. 109 and Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports (London, 1816), p. 212a. Cited in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, p. 7. 52  Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit : Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1984), pp. 1–18, at p. 13.

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Appendix : Sources for Mercian Hymns Acknowledged by Geoffrey Hill Editions are those specified by Hill unless indicated by square brackets. B olton, W.F., A History of Anglo-Latin Literature (Princeton, 1967) Brittain, Frederick, The Penguin Book of Latin Verse (Harmondsworth, 1962) Brooke, Christopher, The Saxon and Norman Kings (London, 1967) Christie, A.G.I., English Medieval Embroidery (Oxford, 1938) Conran, Anthony, ed., The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (Harmondsworth, 1970) Dolley, R.H.M., ed., Anglo-Saxon Coins : Studies Presented to F.M. Stenton (London, 1961) Guirand, Felix, ed., Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, trans. and rev. by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames (London, 1960) Hamer, Richard, ed., A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London, 1970) North, J.J., English Hammered Coinage (London, 1963) Ruskin, John, Fors Clavigera : Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, XXIX (London, 1903–12) Shakespeare, William, King Henry V [ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge, 1992)] Smith, A.H., ed., The Parker Chronicle, 3rd edn (London, 1951) Sweet, Henry, ed., Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader, 13th edn, rev. C.T. Onions (Oxford, 1950) Virgil, The Aeneid [trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1999)] Whitehead, F., ed., La Chanson de Roland (Oxford, 1957) Whitelock, Dorothy, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, 1965) Zarnecki, G., Later English Romanesque Sculpture (London, 1953)

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13 The Absent Anglo-Saxon Past in Ted Hughes’s Elmet Joshua Davies

Landscape, from a naïve viewpoint, is a sector of reality ‘out there’. It is made up of fields and buildings. Yet it is not a bounded entity as a tree or a building is. Nor does landscape mean simply a functional or legal unit such as a farm or a township. Landscape, like culture, is elusive and difficult to describe in a phrase. What is culture and how does one delimit a culture area ? The contents of culture can be itemised, although if one is meticulous the list threatens to grow to interminable length. Culture is not such a list. Landscape, likewise, is not to be defined by itemising its parts. The parts are subsidiary clues to an integrated image. Landscape is such an image, a construct of mind and of feeling. Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Thought and Landscape : The Eye and the Mind’s Eye’1

I

n July 1976 Ted Hughes wrote to the photographer Fay Godwin to explore the possibility of the two of them collaborating on a piece of work to be focused on the area of Yorkshire where he grew up. While outlining his hopes for the project, Hughes described the poems that he saw as the starting point for the volume : There are a few old pieces I’ve written from time to time, about that region, and my first idea was to collect those and add more. It all came up when my Uncle came to stay with me  last of my mother’s family except for a much younger Aunt, and a living archive of the Calder Valley, a really remarkable and eloquent fellow, mill-owner and the lot, and very close to me. His whole life at the end  in his eighties  was recounting the life of the whole region.2 Hughes continued to suggest that what he had in mind was ‘an episodic autobiography’ of ‘poems anchored in particular events and things’ that, like his uncle’s

1 In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscape : Geographical Perspectives, ed. D.W. Meinig (New York, 1979), pp. 89–102, at p. 89. 2  Ted Hughes, ‘Letter to Fay Godwin, 4 July 1976’, in Selected Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London, 2007), p. 378.

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stories, would unite the region and the lives lived in it.3 The result of the collaboration between Hughes and Godwin was published in 1979 as Remains of Elmet and republished in a revised edition in 1994 as Elmet.4 Unlike the poems Hughes described in his letter, the majority of the poems included in the books were written to accompany the photographs of the Calder Valley taken by Godwin. Both the photographs and the poems are ‘anchored in particular events and things’ but locate their immediate subjects within a perspective defined by the depths of historical time. The collections were named for Elmet, the last stronghold of the Britons to fall to Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century, which is thought to have been located in and around the Calder Valley. Taking this landscape and its cultural history as their subject, Hughes and Godwin produced an ‘episodic autobiography’ of the region that examines the connection, or disconnection, between the lives people live, the places where they live them and the history that surrounds them. Hughes himself spent his early childhood in the Calder Valley and returned to it throughout his life. He was born in Mytholmroyd, a town in West Yorkshire that lies beside the River Calder, and lived there until the age of seven when the family moved to Mexborough in South Yorkshire. He later owned a house at Lumb Bank near Heptonstall, just a couple of miles to the east of Mytholmroyd, which he leased to the Arvon Foundation in 1975 and later donated to it.5 Hughes remembered his early life very fondly, particularly the adventures he would have up on the moors with his elder brother Gerald, and clarified the connection he felt existed between himself and the landscape in the 1960s when he wrote, ‘The most impressive early companion of my childhood was a dark cliff to the south.’6 This is Scout Rock, which stands above Aspinall Street, where the Hugheses lived in Mytholmroyd (Figure 13.1). In Godwin’s photograph the hill stands high above the tiny houses, as Hughes described it, ‘a wall of rock and steep woods half-way up the sky, just cleared by the winter sun’.7 It is an arbiter of identity, culture and history that cannot be understood simply as a ‘sector of reality out there’ : to look at such a landscape is an internalized, personal experience. As the words of the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan that I have used as my epigraph indicate, to read such a landscape is an intellectual experience as personal as reading a poem. In this essay I will consider how the landscape of the Calder Valley is recreated by Godwin’s photographs and Hughes’s poems, how their work can be related to the historical evidence that exists regarding the kingdom of Elmet and what role an understanding of Anglo-Saxon culture and literature can play in a reading of their text. 3  Hughes, ‘Letter to Fay Godwin', p. 378. 4  Ted Hughes and Fay Godwin, Remains of Elmet : A Pennine Sequence (London, 1979) ; idem, Elmet (London, 1994). I will be treating the later edition as my primary source. 5  See Keith Sagar, ‘Hughes, Edward James [Ted], 1930-1998’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , accessed 30 August 2009. 6  Ted Hughes, ‘The Rock’, The Listener, 19 September 1963, 421–3, at p. 421. 7 Ibid.

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Figure 13.1  Scout Rock, Mytholmroyd. Photograph by Fay Godwin, by permission of Collections Picture Library Ltd.

Hughes is an interesting case for an Anglo-Saxonist to consider as there is little direct evidence to suggest that Hughes found much inspiration in Old English literature or Anglo-Saxon culture.8 He never published any translations from Old English, never adopted or adapted Old English poetic conventions at any length or with any consistency, never wrote an essay concerned with Old English literature or AngloSaxon culture. Indeed, as Chris Jones has noted, ‘it is surprising how little Hughes uses Old English’ in his essay on the metres of Coleridge and Hopkins, ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’.9 In ‘Crowego’, Hughes imagined Crow ‘Drinking Beowulf ’s blood, and wrapped in his hide’,10 but Beowulf is just one of a roll call of mythic figures Hughes calls upon to test Crow against. It is unsurprising then that Hughes has attracted little attention from Anglo-Saxonists. Hughes drew more material from Middle English and Old Norse in his work and had a particular interest in early medieval 8  For an alternative view, see Seamus Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, in his Preoccupations : Selected Prose, 1968–78 (London, 1980), pp. 150–73. 9  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), p. 192. Ted Hughes, ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, in his Winter Pollen : Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London, 1994), pp. 310–72. 10  Ted Hughes, ‘Crowego’, in his Crow : From the Life and Songs of the Crow (London, 1970), p. 61.

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Scandinavian myths.11 As he wrote in a review of E.O.G. Turville-Petre’s Myth and Religion of the North, Hughes believed that ‘this particular mythology is much deeper in us, and truer to us, than the Greek-Roman pantheons that came in with Christianity’, and this in fact might explain the role the Anglo-Saxon world played in his imagination.12 For Hughes saw the Anglo-Saxon usurpation of Elmet as the first in a series of disasters to beset the region and part of the wider cultural problems facing the modern world, and his references to and appropriations of Old English literature play an important part in the creation of his history of the region. Rather than an examination of a specific historical period, then, the Elmet poems examine what the idea of history might mean in day-to-day life. The poems and photographs both refuse to anchor themselves to a single historical moment but are firmly rooted in place, and that place is rooted, although perhaps not firmly rooted, in the Anglo-Saxon past.

The Idea of Elmet

In his ‘Notes’ that prefaced the second edition Hughes described Elmet as ‘the last independent Celtic kingdom in England’ and suggested that it ‘originally stretched out over the vale of York. I imagine it shrunk back into the gorge of the upper Calder under historic pressures, before the Celtic survivors were politically absorbed into England’.13 He provides no qualifications for this statement or any historical evidence to support his theory, and the key word in the passage is ‘imagine’ : Hughes’s Elmet is not a historically verifiable concept. It is ‘a construct of mind and of feeling’. Evidence that a place called Elmet did once exist is provided by a variety of early medieval historical sources. The Anglo-Saxon Tribal Hidage, a seventh-century document that outlines the political and cultural composition of Anglo-Saxon England, includes a record of a people named the ‘Elmetsæte’ (‘Elmet dwellers’)14 and in North Wales a pillar stone that dates from the fifth to sixth centuries and is now built into the wall of a church in Llanaelhaiarn, Gwynedd, contains two lines of Latin inscription that state ‘ALIOrTVS ELMETIACO / HIC IACET’ (‘Aliortus the Elmetian lies here’).15 In the Gododdin the British poet Aneirin names Madog of Elmet as part of 11  The title of Hughes’s collection Wodwo (London, 1971) is taken from Gawain and the Green Knight (line 721). The collection begins with the poem ‘Thistles’, in which Hughes describes thistles as ‘a grasped fistful / Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up / From the underground stain of a decayed Viking’ (Hughes, Wodwo, p. 17). There are, to my knowledge, no overt references to AngloSaxon culture or Old English literature in the volume. 12  Ted Hughes, ‘Asgard for Addicts’, in Winter Pollen, ed. Scammel, pp. 40–2. For a reading of Remains of Elmet that privileges Hughes’s use of myth, see Ann Skea, ‘Regeneration in Remains of Elmet’, in The Challenge of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (London, 1994), pp. 116–29. Stuart Hirschberg, Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes : A Guide to the Poems (Portmarnock, 1981) does not discuss material from Remains of Elmet. 13  Hughes, ‘Notes’, in Elmet, p. 9. 14  See David Dumville, ‘The Tribal Hidage : An Introduction to its Texts and their History’, in The Origins of Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, 1989), pp. 225–30. 15  V.E. Nash-Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff, 1950), p. 88, number 87.

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the army raised by Mynyddog of Edinburgh in his assault on Catterick.16 Two earlymedieval historical accounts also provide evidence of the existence of the kingdom, the early-ninth-century Historia Britonum traditionally attributed to Nennius, and Bede’s eighth-century Historia ecclesiastica. In a passage concerned with the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the sixth and seventh centuries, the author of the Historia Britonum records that ‘Eoguin fillius Alli regnavit annis decem et septem, et ipse occupavit Elmet et expulit Certic, regem illius regionis’ (‘Edwin son of Aelle reigned seventeen years, and seized Elmet and drove out Certic, king of that region’).17 Further evidence can be gleaned from Bede, who records that Hereric, the father of St Hild of Whitby, was killed at the court of King Certic, and David Rollason has suggested that this murder may have served as a pretext for Edwin’s invasion of Elmet.18 Bede also provides evidence as to the possible location of Elmet in his description of a church built by Paulinus, Archbishop of York (d. 644), who worked hard to convert Edwin and his Northumbrian subjects. Bede recorded that in Campodono, ubi tunc etiam uilla regia erat, fecit basilicam, quam postmodum pagani, a quibus Eduini rex occisus est, cum tota eadem uilla succenderunt ; pro qua reges posteriors fecere sibi uillam in regione quae uocatur Loidis. Euasit autem ignem altare, quia lapideum erat, et seruatur adhunc in monasterio reuerentissimi abbatis et presbyteri Thrythuulfi, quod est in silua Elmete. in Campodonum where there was also a royal dwelling, he [Paulinus] built a church which was afterwards burnt down, together with the whole of the buildings, by the heathen who slew King Edwin. In its place, later kings built a dwelling for themselves in the region known as Loidis. The altar escaped from the fire because it was of stone, and is still preserved in the monastery of the most reverend abbot and priest Thrythwulf, which is in the forest of Elmet.19 The region named here as ‘Loidis’ can possibly be identified as modern-day Leeds, and it is certainly a British name,20 but the difference between Nennius and Bede is that one refers to a kingdom and the other refers to a wood. Today the name exists 16  The Gododdin of Aneirin : Text and Context from Dark Age North Britain, ed. and trans. John Thomas Koch (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 50–1. 17  Historia Britonum : The History of the Britons, attributed to Nennius, trans. Richard Rowley (Lampeter, 2005), § 63, pp. 60–1. See also Kenneth Jackson, ‘On the Northern Section in Nennius’, in Kenneth Jackson et al., Celt and Saxon : Studies in the Early British Border (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 20–63, at p. 31. 18 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), IV.23, pp. 410–11. Hereafter cited as EH followed by book and chapter number. See also David Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100 : Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), p. 85. 19 Bede, EH, II.14, pp. 188-9. On the place name Campodonum, see A.L.F. Rivet and Colin Smith, The Place Names of Roman Britain (Princeton, 1979), pp. 292–3. 20 Rollason, Northumbria, p. 86.

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solely in the suffixes of two small towns, Sherburn-in-Elmet and Barwick-in-Elmet.21 Thus it cannot be certain whether Elmet was the name of a lost kingdom or a lost wood, nor when or where exactly it existed. Still, the idea of Elmet remains present, even in the kingdom’s absence. What the accounts given by both the Historia Britonum and Bede also suggest is the ways in which landscape can be used to think about the emergence of AngloSaxon kingdoms in the early seventh century and the religious conversion that was an essential part of their rise to political dominance. The Anglo-Saxon invader of Elmet, King Edwin, ruled Northumbria between 616 and 633 and converted to Christianity in 627. In 625 Edwin had married Æthelberga of Kent, the daughter of King Æthelberht of Kent who had welcomed Augustine to his kingdom and converted to Christianity in 597. As part of the marriage arrangements it was agreed that Æthelberga could continue to practise Christianity so she was accompanied on journey north by Paulinus, just as her mother Bertha had brought her chaplain Liudhard with her to England.22 In the account given by Bede, however, Edwin’s decision to convert is as political as it is personal or spiritual. Indeed, Bede writes that even before his conversion, Cui uidelicet regi, in auspicium suscipliedae fidei et regni caelestis, potestas etiam terreni creuerat imperii, ita ut quod nemo Anglorum ante eum, omnes Brittaniae fines, qua uel ipsorum uel Brettonum prouinciae habitabant, sub dicione acciperet. The king’s early power had increased as an augury that he was to become a believer and have a share in the heavenly kingdom. So, like no other English king before him, he held under his sway the whole realm of Britain, not only English kingdoms but those ruled over by the Britons as well.23 Significantly, too, Edwin only decided to accept the new faith while exiled from his own kingdom at the court of Rædwald, King of the Angles. Throughout his account of Edwin’s conversion Bede intimately links the king’s adoption of the Christian faith with the consolidation of his power and the spread of his kingdom’s dominance. It is Edwin’s adoption of Christianity that allows him to return to his kingdom : in Bede’s narrative the land is converted before its occupants. Access to the heavenly kingdom unlocks the worldly kingdom. Within this scheme, then, the spiritual truths of Christianity are intimately con21  See Margaret Lindsay Faull and S.A. Moorhouse, eds, West Yorkshire : An Archaeological Survey to AD 1500, 4 vols (Wakefield, 1981), I, 157–63 and 171–8 ; G.J.R. Jones, ‘Early Territorial Organisation in Gwynedd and Elmet’, Northern History 10 (1975), 3–27 ; Edmund Bogg, The Old Kingdom of Elmet (Manchester, 1902). 22  On Edwin and Æthelburga’s marriage arrangements, see Bede, EH, II.9, pp. 163–5 ; on Æthelbert and Bertha, see ibid., I.25, pp. 72–5. 23 Bede, EH, II.9, pp. 162–3.

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nected to the physical and political realities occupied by its early adopters. This is best exemplified in the famous scene of the sparrow flying through the hall, which Bede uses to illustrate part of the political process of the conversion. After receiving a vision in exile, Edwin returns to his kingdom and, following conversations with Paulinus, decides to discuss his decision with a group of his closest advisers and friends. After his chief priest admits that ‘I have found that the religion which we have hitherto held has no virtue nor profit in it’, and advises that the new faith should at least be given a chance, Bede continues : Cuius suasioni uerbisque prudentibus alius optimatum Regis tribunes assensum continuo subdidit, ‘Talis’ inquiens ‘mihi uidetur, rex, uita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis temper brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluuiarum uel niuium, adueniens unus passerum domum citissime peruolauerit ; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens mox per aliud exierit, ipso quidem tempore quo intus est hiemis tempestate non tengitur, sed temen paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec uita hominum ad modicum apparet ; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde, si haec noua doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda uidetur.’ Another of the king’s chief men agreed with this advice and with these wise words and then added, ‘This is how the present life of man on earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time ; the fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging ; and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment ; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it.’24 In this scene the hall ceases to be a ‘bounded entity’ and becomes emblematic of the history and culture of the Northumbrians. Transformed by the new faith, a formerly pagan place is translated in the light of Christian revelation, and the physical structure of the hall becomes the barrier between the pagan British past and the Christian 24 Bede, EH, II.13, pp. 182–5.

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Anglo-Saxon future. The landscape and physical space, the spatial forms, of Britain are reimagined as temporal boundaries as the material world is rewritten following Bede’s teleological understanding of history. In many of the poems of Elmet Hughes engages with the Anglo-Saxon usurpation of British territory and places it within what he presents as a repeating cycle of human beings’ attempted mastery over nature. Hughes draws a clear connection between the cultural seizure of the early Anglo-Saxons and the communities that emerged in the nineteenth century following the Industrial Revolution, and suggests that the failures and ultimate destruction of both cultures is dependent on their disconnection from nature. Hughes’s feelings towards nature are well known and documented and are encapsulated in this extract from a book review published in 1970 : The fundamental guiding ideas of our western civilisation are against conservation. They derive from reformed Christianity and from Old Testament Puritanism. They are based on the assumption that the earth is a heap of raw materials given to man by God for his exclusive profit and use […] The story of mind exiled from nature is the story of western man. It is a story of spiritual romanticism and heroic technological progress. It is a story of decline.25 In the case of West Yorkshire, Hughes was not alone in his judgement. Following his nineteenth-century tour of industrial England, for instance, Friedrich Engels judged the Calder Valley to be ‘among the most attractive’ areas in England, but found the lives actually lived within it less impressive : ‘The houses of rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with the blackened buildings of Lancashire, that it is a pleasure to look at them. But on coming into the towns themselves, one finds little to rejoice over.’26 The bleakness is captured eloquently in Godwin’s portraits. For Hughes, the particular problem of West Yorkshire was the way in which industry and Methodism developed side by side. As he wrote in his ‘Notes’ to the volume, ‘The men who built the chapels were the same who were building the mills’, and these ‘massive, stone, prison-like structures’ formed an oppressive ‘combined operation’ of ‘Industry and Religion’ against both the communities and nature.27 Elmet epitomizes what Keith Sagar has described as Hughes’s ‘fiercely dualistic attitude to life’.28 Hughes’s idealized Elmet is a place where nature exists unbattled, while the later civilizations that occupy the landscape are defined by the struggle 25  Ted Hughes, Review of The Environmental Revolution by Max Nicholson, The Spectator 21 March 1970, p. 378 ; cited by Carol Bere, ‘Remains of Elmet’, Concerning Poetry 14 (Spring 1981), 17–26. 26  Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, From Personal Observations and Authentic Sources, trans. Florence Kelley-Wischenwetsky (Oxford, 1993), p. 51. See also Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London, 2005), pp. 199–233. 27  Hughes, ‘Notes’, Elmet, p. 11. 28  Keith Sagar, ‘Hughes and his Landscape’, in The Achievement of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester, 1983), pp. 2–14, at p. 12. See also Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes : A Critical Study (London, 1981), pp. 232–54.

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between the human and the natural world and represent the ‘Evergloom of official titivation’.29 The false order of modern culture that establishes ‘Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel, / And the graveyard park’, is recognised to be as ‘Ugly as a brass-band in India’.30 In this poem, ‘Rhododendrons’, the settling of the landscape is aligned with the establishment of colonial empires. Nature is imagined as if equivalent to a subjugated native and human attempts to tame nature become a kind of imperialism. This idea again leads back to the Anglo-Saxon world, as Alfred Siewers has suggested in his study of the role of landscape in the establishment of Anglo-Saxon hegemony. Siewers writes, ‘The Anglo-Saxon textualised sense of space was orientated not around ancestral monuments and traditions of an Otherworld encompassing nature and the human world both, but around a politically controlled literacy whose linearity cut through native ancestral space with the point of a pen.’ In Hughes’s vision the later civilisations who take occupation of the land, just like the Anglo-Saxons, constitute what Siewers describes as ‘a pattern of cultural seizure of Insular landscape that involves not so much demolition of the indigenous Otherworld that once encompassed it, as a taking possession of that Otherworld in the name of consolidating royal and ecclesiastical power’.31 If the word ‘industrial’ is substituted for the word ‘royal’ the connection becomes clearer still. In Elmet, Godwin’s photograph of Mytholmroyd’s imposing chapel  composed in dark tones and cropped halfway up the building so that it appears squat, solid and imposing  is printed opposite Hughes’s poem which recalls how it stood ‘Above the kitchen window’ of his childhood home, ‘Darkening the sun of every day’.32 In the photograph, the oppressive force of the institution is transmitted powerfully, and the building is cropped so that the photograph does not show any Christian symbol that reveals the building’s purpose. In the poem, the faith that is supposed to ennoble the community simply degrades and subjugates them, and Hughes details the dehumanising effect the religion has on the church’s congregation who are described in terms that bring to mind prisoners or badly treated animals. The very root of the problem is located by Hughes in the false foundations upon which modern society is built. He writes of ‘Women bleak as Sunday rose-gardens’, ‘crumpling to puff-pastry’, ‘cobwebbed with deaths’ and ‘Men in their prison-yard’, and captures the lack of life of their ‘cowed, shaven souls.’ The poem concludes with the ‘bottomless cry’ from the congregation beating ‘itself numb against Wesley’s foundation stone’.33 The ‘bottomless cry’ indicates the primal depths that are unaccommodated within modern culture, while ‘Wesley’s foundation stone’ is less of a safe and sturdy building block 29  Ted Hughes, ‘Rhododendrons’, Elmet, p. 45. 30 Ibid. 31  Alfred K. Siewers, ‘Landscapes of Conversion : Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-building’, reprinted in The Postmodern Beowulf : A Critical Casebook, ed. Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsay (Morgantown, WV, 2006), pp. 199–259, at p. 218. 32  Hughes, ‘Mount Zion’, Elmet, p. 73. 33 Ibid.

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than a false floor, forever maintaining the gap between the community and the land and which Hughes connects to the emergence of Anglo-Saxon dominance over a thousand years earlier.

Reading the Landscape : Nature as Culture

Against the catastrophes of religion and industry, Hughes offers the landscape as a symbol of purity. The moors, Hughes writes, perhaps ironically, ‘Are a stage / For the performance of heaven’. The landscape will continue to exist, as will its beauty, and ‘Any audience is incidental.’34 This does not mean, however, that it is comforting, because, as Hughes wrote elsewhere, ‘Everything in West Yorkshire is slightly unpleasant.’35 The poem ‘Widdop’, for example, concludes with a description of a gull flying ‘Out of nothingness into nothingness’36 that recalls the flight of the sparrow through King Edwin’s hall. In Hughes’s text, however, human life is reimagined as a flight not through a pleasant hall but across an empty landscape. The idea of movement is present throughout the poem, as it begins by creeping fearfully through end-stopped lines but then rushes, ‘blows through / A rip in the fabric’, through a concluding sentence that is spread over four lines. Hughes suggests a unity between the reading of the poem and movement across the landscape which, through the allusion to Bede, becomes associated with life itself. A similar idea is expressed in the poem ‘For Billy Holt’, in which the landscape is described as ‘Badlands where outcast and outlaw / Fortified the hill-knowle’s long outlook’.37 What is striking in these lines is first of all the way Hughes uses compounds, so beloved of Anglo-Saxon poets, to layer ideas about the moral and cultural world that the land represents and its historic development, but also that the ‘hill-knowle’ itself directs the reader back to the Anglo-Saxon world. For the dialect word ‘knowle’, which designates the summit of a hill, is derived from the Old English ‘cnoll’. So as the poem looks out across the hills it is also looking back to its cultural and linguistic history, and re-examining the relationship between the landscape and its occupants. In these poems the landscape is man-made not merely through the marks left on it through time, but in the sense that it has been created and recreated by peoples’ perceptions of it. The first photograph of both books is of Abel Cross on Crimsworth Dean (Figure 13.2). It is a wayside cross, probably post-medieval, raised by the local community to mark the best route over the land. In Godwin’s photograph the two stones stand lopsided beside one another on uneven ground, making it difficult for the viewer to ascertain the scale of the image and, in turn, how large the stones are. The composition of the photograph is unsettling : the stones stand still but at an unknown distance and 34  Hughes, ‘Moors’, Elmet, p. 34. 35  Hughes, ‘The Rock’, p. 422. 36  Hughes, ‘Widdop’, Elmet, p. 93. 37  Hughes, ‘For Billy Holt’, Elmet, p. 51.

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Figure 13.2  Abel Cross, Crimsworth Dean. Photograph by Fay Godwin, by permission of Collections Picture Library Ltd.

of unknowable mass. Again, the moment of interpretation is connected to the negotiation of the landscape. Godwin’s photographs locate Hughes’s poems in a tangible, touchable world, but, in both the poems and the pictures, that world is always kept at a distance. In the poem ‘Stanbury Moor’, for instance, the natural world even seems to refuse interpretation, just like the stones of Abel Cross in Godwin’s photograph. These ‘grasses of light’, these ‘stones of darkness’, the ‘water of light and darkness’, and ‘this wind’, Hughes writes, ‘are not / A poor family huddled at a poor gleam / Or words in any phrase’ or any other comforting symbol. These images are, in Hughes’s vision, The armour of bric-à-brac To which your soul’s caddis Clings with all its courage.38 The image of the ‘caddis of the soul’ which closes this poem again reimagines Bede’s flight of the sparrow through a hall, but this time relocates the image within the modern cultural history of West Yorkshire. For as well as a species of fly, the word ‘caddis’ 38  Hughes, ‘Stanbury Moor’, Elmet, p. 20.

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can also designate a binding of worsted yarn, so Hughes’s image of the ‘soul’s caddis’, as Patricia Boyle Haberstroh has suggested, ‘ironically evokes the looms and mills to which the spirit of the Calder Valley has clung too long [and] offers here, in place of that spirit, a new kind of binding to the earth’.39 In these poems the human and natural worlds are entangled together, culture cannot be divided from nature, and history is used not just to explain the present but to suggest that the connection between the past and the present, and culture and nature, needs to be re-examined.40 The natural world of Hughes’s Elmet is therefore simultaneously distinct from and a reflection of the human cultures that have occupied it, and history and culture are produced through an interaction between the landscape and its human inhabitants. In this aspect, again, a dialogue between Hughes’s work and Old English literature is fruitful. The sheer desolation of some of Hughes’s descriptions of the natural world has led Terry Gifford to term Hughes’s landscapes as ‘post-pastoral’ in opposition to classical descriptions of the Golden Age, but if we read this landscape within the Anglo-Saxon tradition rather than the Classical, Hughes’s desolate world appears perhaps less strange.41 To anyone familiar with the inhospitable landscapes of the Old English elegies or Beowulf, Hughes’s terrain needs no special explanation. As Seamus Heaney has written, a Hughesian landscape is ‘one that the Anglo-Saxon wanderer or seafarer would be completely at home in’.42 What must be emphasized, however, is that the natural world cannot be considered distinct from the human world. Jennifer Neville suggests in her study of the representation of the natural world in Old English poetry that it would be unwise to consider ‘the natural world’ to be a ‘self-sufficient, externally defined entity’, and instead argues that it should be understood as being ‘a reflection of human constructions’.43 A similar conclusion can be drawn from Hughes’s representation of the natural world in Elmet, and his references to Old English literature confirm his characterisation of the natural world, just as his references to the Anglo-Saxon past confirm his eschatological vision of history. And, just as the past is woven through the present, as in The Wanderer or The Seafarer, in Elmet the human world is woven through the natural world. The purposeful obscurity of many of Hughes’s allusions, too, plays an important part in the creation of the collection’s vision. As the historical connections are subtly suggested rather than forthrightly revealed, the reader must pursue the al-

39  Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, ‘Historical Landscape in Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet’, in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, ed. Leonard M. Scigaj (New York, 1992), pp. 205–22, at p. 214. 40  On the entanglement between the human and the natural world see Nicholas Bishop, Re-Making Poetry : Ted Hughes and a New Critical Psychology (London, 1991), p. 206. 41  See Terry Gifford, ‘“Dead Farms, Dead Leaves” : Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet and Elmet’, in Ted Hughes : Alternative Horizons, ed. Joanny Moulin (London, 2004), pp. 39–49. 42  Heaney, ‘Englands of the Mind’, p. 158. 43  Jennifer Neville, Representations of Nature in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1999), p. 16. See also Catherine A.M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 36–67.

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lusions to place Hughes’s Elmet in the landscape of the past, all the time keenly aware that this connection is fragile and transitory.

The Absent Anglo-Saxon Future

In both editions of the collection, a poem entitled ‘Crown Point Pensioners’ is printed opposite a photograph of a solitary man seemingly perched on the edge of a moor. In the poem Hughes writes of a gathering of ‘Old faces’ passing the time but is careful to locate the scene simultaneously in the day-to-day life of the landscape and the recesses of the early medieval past, as these men speak their ‘indigenous memories’. Hughes writes, The maps of their days, like the chart of an old board-game, Spreads crumpled below them. Their yarning shifts over it, this way and that, Occupying the blanks. Attuned to each other, like the strings of a harp, They are making mesmerizing music, Each one bowed at his dried bony profile, as at a harp. Singers of a lost kingdom.44 The group of men are presented by Hughes as the last of a rare breed, unmodern, unique to this region and doomed to extinction. Their oral testimony is intimately connected to their geographical location and as they recount memories and histories they speak the landscape and plot ‘The maps of their days’. It could also be suggested that Hughes associates these men with the Britons who occupied the land before the Anglo-Saxons assumed power, that Hughes again returns to a moment where the Anglo-Saxon past was in the future, and that the ‘lost kingdom’ is indeed Elmet. For the mention of a harp focuses the Anglo-Saxonist’s attention, and draws a clear connection between Hughes’s scene and the medieval past, as the harp occupied an important role in social occasions throughout the medieval period, and in Old English poetry the harp is a recurring motif that suggests the friendship, security and camaraderie of the hall.45 The harp also has a place in Bede’s record of the origin of vernacular poetry : Cædmon, the labourer from the Northumbrian monastery of Whitby named by Bede as the first English poet, only settles in a byre to dream his miraculous vision after he has left a feast afraid to sing his turn when the harp was passed towards him.46 Also, however, the absent harp (which is what we have here) was a potent symbol of the loss of these comforts, as in the Seafarer, in which the narrator speaks of a man’s self-imposed exile from his kin that means that ‘Ne biþ 44  Hughes, ‘Crown Point Pensioners’, Elmet, p. 89. 45  See Robert Boenig, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Harp’, Speculum 71 (1996), 290–320. 46  EH, IV.24, pp. 416–17. Cædmon too was a singer of a lost kingdom.

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him hearpan hyge’47 (‘he will have no thought for the harp’) nor for any of the other comforts of home, or the episode in Beowulf known as the ‘Father’s Lament’, in which it is noted that ‘nis þær hearpan sweg / gomen in geardum, swylce oðær iu wæron’ (‘The sound of the harp is no more, nor joy in the court, such as there once was’).48 As Hughes uses it, the absent harp is a synecdoche that brings with it ideas of a shared past, a community and their means of celebrating and remembering that past. This is confirmed by a consideration of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, for in this poem, as in Hughes’s Elmet, the permanence of the landscape stands in contrast to the transitoriness of human life, culture and man-made structures that is embodied by the harp. Beowulf in fact begins and ends with journeys to land. Scyld Scefing, the Danish king the poem places at the beginning of its royal line, only arrived in the land he would later rule over after he was ‘forð onsendon / ænne ofer yðe umborwesende’ (lines 45b-46, ‘sent forth as a child alone over waves’), and after his death is returned again to the sea. The poem ends, however, with Beowulf ’s remains being placed in the earth underneath the barrow he commanded his people build for him and a ceremonious journey around it :

Þa ymbe hlæw riodan  hildediore, æþelinga bearn,  ealra twelf(e), woldon (care) cwiðan (ond c)yning mænan, wordgyd wrecan,  ond ymb w(er) sprecan ; eahtodan eorlscipe  ond his ellenweorc duguðum demdon   swa hit gede(fe) bið þæt mon his winedryhten  wordum herge, ferhðum freoge,  þonne he forð scile of l(i)chaman (læ)ded  weorðan herge.   (lines 3169–77) Then battle-brave men rode around the mound, nobles’ sons, twelve in all ; they wished to lament their sorrow and mourn the king, work out the song to speak of the man ; they praised heroic acts, deeds of courage, exalted excellence, as it is fitting that a man honours his dearly loved lord and friend who has to leave the body’s shelter. Beowulf, like Scyld, arrives in the poem from across the sea but his deeds secure a lasting memorial for him in the poem’s landscape. The Beowulf-poets indicated the importance of the symbolic landscape of their poem when they juxtaposed the 47  The Seafarer, line 44, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry : An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. Bernard J. Muir, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Exeter, 2000), I, 229–34, at p. 230. 48  Beowulf, lines 2459b–60. All extracts from Beowulf are taken from Klaeber 4th edn, and subsequent references will appear by line number ; translations are my own. There is also perhaps a connection to be drawn between ‘Crown Point Pensioners’ and Seamus Heaney’s ‘On his Work in the English Tongue’, in Electric Light (London, 2001), which is dedicated to Hughes and includes a section of Heaney’s own translation of the ‘Father’s Lament’.

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uselessness of the dragon’s loot  ‘eldum swa unnyt, swa hit æror wæs’ (line 3168, ‘as useless for men as it ever was’)  with the supreme practicality of the hero’s true legacy : the barrow which will direct future seafarers and mark the place of the past in the present.49 Furthermore, there is an interesting parallel between this part of the funeral rites and the scene earlier in the poem that marks the birth of Beowulf ’s reputation. The morning after Beowulf unarms Grendel in Heorot, a group of retainers tracks the monster from the hall back to the mere that he inhabits by tracing a path of blood that the monster left in retreat, and which marks the defeat of their tormentor :

Þanon eft gewiton  ealdgesiþas, swylce geong manig  of gomenwaþe fram mere modge,  mearum ridan, beornas on blancum.  Đær wæs Beowulfes mærðo mæned ;  monig of gecwæð þætte suð ne norð  be sæm tweonum ofer eormengrund  oþer nænig under swelges begong  selra nære rondhæbbendra,  rices wyrða.  (lines 853–61) Then old retainers and many a young man travelled joyfully back from the mere, high and on horseback, soldiers on steeds. There was Beowulf ’s triumph told ; many often said that neither south nor north between the seas, over the whole wide world beneath the skies there was not a superior shield carrier, of a kingdom more worthy. As they ride jubilantly through the now safe landscape, stories are told in praise of Beowulf. The social life of Heorot, the hall that is, as Hugh Magennis puts it, ‘the manifestation of civilisation and community’,50 serves to remap the landscape and rewrite the story of the community : Hwilum heaþorofe  hleapan leton, on geflit faran  fealwe mearas ðær him foldwegas  fægere þuhton, cystum cuðe.  Hwilum cyninges þegn, guma gilphlæden,  gidda gemyndig, se ðe eal fela  ealdgesegena 49  Due to the stark lack of evidence, I am reluctant to postulate a single ‘Beowulf-author’ responsible for the poem. See Robert E. Bjork and Anita Obermeier, ‘Date, Provenance, Author, Audience’, in A ‘Beowulf ’ Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Exeter, 1997), pp. 13–34, esp. pp. 28–31. For a recent reassessment of the analogues to Beowulf ’s funeral rites see Thomas D. Hill, ‘Beowulf ’s Roman Rites : Roman Ritual and Germanic Tradition’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 106 (2007), 325–36. 50  Hugh Magennis, Images of Community in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1996), p. 128.

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worn gemunde,  word oþer fand soðe gebunden ;  secg eft ongan sið Bēowulfes  synttrum styrian, ond on sped wrecan  spel gerade, wordum wrixlan.   (lines 864–74) At times warriors broke into a gallop, racing where the form seemed fair and well known. At times a thane of the king’s, a man laden with words, skilled at recalling songs, remembering scores and ancient stories, devised new words and cast a tale. The man in turn began to recite skilfully Beowulf ’s feat and artfully created a tale in keeping and contrast. Just as in the final scene, here the poem presents a moment in which movement across the landscape sparks storytelling and there is a clear connection between the cultural identity of the people, the land they occupy and the stories they tell. Similarly, when Hughes writes in ‘Crown Point Pensioners’ that ‘Their yarning shifts over it, this way and that, / Occupying the blanks’, there is a unity between language, culture and physical action as the stories are woven into and over ‘The map of their days’, just as when Beowulf ’s story is told by thanes on horseback. History is not recreated but reproduced and reinterpreted as the terrain is negotiated and the landscape occupied. Events are marked on the physical terrain and in the imagination. Memories are rooted in place. The maps of days are spoken. The past will remain past, however ; it can be reimagined only briefly, and will always be recast in the light of the present. The poem that Hughes placed at the beginning of both Elmet collections seems to be a recollection of one of the meetings with his uncle which Hughes told Godwin had started the project, and offers a deeply personal meditation on memory, time and place. Hughes describes how his uncle’s presence brings forth the memory of his mother, makes the past present : ‘Keeping their last eighty years alive and attached to me. / Keeping their strange depths alive and attached to me.’ This is, Hughes writes, ‘my last inheritance’ : Archaeology of the mouth : the home fires’ embers, Fluff, breath-frail, from under the looms of Egypt : Funeral treasures that crumble at the touch of day  The huge fish, the prize of a lifetime, Exhausted at the surface, the eye staring up at me, But on such a frayed, fraying hair fineness  Any moment now, a last kick  And the dark river will fold it away.51

51  Hughes, ‘The Dark River’, Elmet, p. 13.

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Hughes here personalises his cultural history of the Calder Valley. The memories of his uncle bring with them memories of the place and, flowing within the dark river of time, these fleeting moments of recognition map out personal and communal histories. After the initial revelation, the ‘last inheritance’ is delivered and the rhythm of the verse alters with a series of lines which echo but do not reproduce the style of Old English poetry with strong use of medial caesuras and alliteration. Again, then, Hughes’s use of the Anglo-Saxon past does not result in assimilation but instead illustrates ‘the frayed, fraying hair fineness’ of the connection between the past and the present. These ideas are clarified further by the fact that in the first edition of the collection the line ‘Funeral treasures that crumble at the touch of day’ appeared as ‘Treasures that crumble at the touch of day’.52 In the revised version the connection to the Anglo-Saxon past is refocused by the suggestion of a reference to Beowulf ’s funeral and other famous early medieval burial grounds such as Sutton Hoo.53 This serves to locate Hughes’s ruminations within the landscape of the past, just like the presence of the absent harp in ‘Crown Point Pensioners’. Again, however, Hughes refuses to assimilate the present with the past, the burial is re-placed within the cultural history of West Yorkshire, ‘under the looms of Egypt’, and like the kingdom of Elmet, even in its absence the past remains present. Like memory, place is a form of meaning that collapses temporal boundaries, and, like the landscape, in Hughes’s Elmet it is literature and oral testimony that provide the points of connection between people and their personal and communal history : the ‘Archaeology of the mouth’ that keeps the past’s ‘strange depths alive and attached to me’. And as they map the absences of the past, as they outline the places of the past in the present, the poems indicate a possible shape of the future. 52  Hughes, ‘Untitled’, Remains of Elmet, p. 7. 53  See Martin Carver, Sutton Hoo : Burial Ground of Kings ? (London, 2000).

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14 Resurrecting Saxon Things : Peter Reading, ‘species decline’, and Old English Poetry Rebecca Anne Barr

P

eter Reading’s position in contemporary British poetry is paradoxical. Born in Liverpool in 1946, Reading trained as a visual artist before publishing his first collection of poems, Water and Waste, in 1970. In outline Reading’s career is deceptively reputable. As the winner of the Whitbread prize for poetry (1986), two Lannon awards for poetry, someone published regularly in established periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, and who has produced a Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 1995–2003) his output seems both prestigious and prolific. Yet Reading’s poetry, and the persona of ‘Peter Reading, poet’, is based on a fundamental opposition to the bourgeois certitudes of poetry and culture. His work is anomalous in the factionalized population of small presses, performance poets, and so-called ‘mainstream’ or popular poets. Reading is in his own words a ‘nasty man’.1 This statement is echoed deferentially by one critic who calls him an ‘enigmatic, recalcitrant, uningratiating poet’ whose work resists assimilation into mainstream poetry by its refusal to observe social, personal, or poetic niceties.2 Reading’s work deliberately assaults the complacency of transcendence to which contemporary poetry is vulnerable. It also refuses the consolations of righteousness and intellectual solipsism found in British poetry’s academic and political wings. Eschewing avant-gardism, intellectual verse and commercial success, Reading’s work is exilic and misanthropic in a profound sense. His subject-matter is distinct in its disenchantment and preoccupation with ‘repetitive, avoidable violence, suffering and pity’.3 This concern extends from his 1  ‘Making Nothing Matter : Peter Reading talking to Alan Jenkins’, Poetry Review 75 (1985), 4–13, at p. 7. 2  Anthony Thwaite, ‘Skills with sadness,’ The Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1999. 3  John Sears, Review of Faunal, 27 June 2002, http ://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/f/faunal. shtml, accessed 30 April 2009.

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earliest works and is found most recently in the collection −273.15 (2005), which proclaims humanity’s responsibility for imminent global catastrophe.4 Tom Paulin sees in these works a ‘journalistic commitment to the present social moment’.5 This grimy perspective has led to Reading’s being labelled ‘Britain’s number one poet of the unpleasant’, ‘an unofficial laureate of a decaying nation’.6 Yet Reading’s work, for all its relentless modernity, is enmeshed in literary tradition. Reading cultivates similarities between the rebarbative satire of the Augustans and his own brutal documentary style and subject matter, citing Swift and Addison as his literary forebears.7 This chapter seeks to contextualize his extreme misanthropy via ‘Swiftian contempt’ accompanied by ‘an agonised sense of waste’.8 Such literary genealogy proffers a means of rescuing Reading’s work from abject idiosyncrasy. Indeed Reading’s own statements confirm his investment in historical literary forms and concepts : There are certain dictions I’m anxious to resurrect, like the eighteenth century and earlier ones […] the resurrection of these Saxon things […] I find those things extremely and curiously moving by their directness […] They’re not like anything we have now, and I find them, of course, a very useful device for their metaphorical power and their kind of diction. I […] have always found that kind of diction in poetry a necessity, a complete avoidance of the everyday […] these kinds of dictions are all different ways of approaching unordinariness.9 The scope of Reading’s investment in the ‘unordinariness’ of ‘English Literature’ reaches further than the Augustans, extending to the ‘Saxon things’ of Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Ruin. The resources of Old English provide the poet with a powerful means of transforming the contemporary quotidian. For Reading, such archaic diction speaks with more vitality than a degenerate modernity. These pronouncements seem to confirm Old English verse as a form whose ‘strange likeness’ is a resource for reinvigorating poetic language.10 This chapter will examine the function and effect of Old English in Reading’s poetic representations of contemporary existential and environmental crisis. Beginning with Isabel Martin’s suggestive interpretations of Reading’s use of Old English, I will 4  Peter Reading, −273.15 (Tarset, 2005). 5  Tom Paulin, Minotaur (London, 1992), p. 287. 6 Ibid. 7  Quoted in ‘An Interview with Peter Reading’, by Robert Potts, Oxford Poetry, vol. 3, http ://www. oxfordpoetry.co.uk/texts.php ?int=v3_peterreading, accessed 9 May 2009. 8  Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse (Tarset, 1998), p. 125. 9  Reading in interview with Bernard O’Donoghue, in Isabel Martin, Reading Peter Reading (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2000), p. 232. 10  Chris Jones, Strange Likeness : The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 2006), p. 5. The phrase is taken from Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns : ‘not strangeness, but strange likeness’, Collected Poems (Oxford, 1997), p. 133.

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argue that Reading’s appropriation of elegiac Anglo-Saxon sources is designed to illustrate an historical trajectory of linguistic depreciation and to shock the reader by its avowal of the futility of poetic utterance. Unlike poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, and Simon Armitage, for whom Old English operates as a means of negotiating modern England’s alienation through the defamiliarizing effect of history and regional perspective, Reading uses Old English as an existentialist counter-tradition. The ‘resurrection of Saxon things’ cannot save poetry or culture through a transfusion of poetic energies. By tracing Reading’s interest in the illegible, the palimpsest, the rune and the fragment, I will suggest that the reappearance of Old English is no more than a temporary revivification : a spectacular effect of the draining of literary resources in which the sediment of tradition is revealed. Old English’s unordinariness and relative durability simply confirms the diminished power of contemporary language and humanity’s state of perpetual, if concluding, crisis.

‘Not messing about’ : the Consolations of Old English

Though it is not until Evagatory in 1992 that Old English becomes an explicitly identifiable trope, Reading’s modernist pedigree is evident from his early For the Municipality’s Elderly (1974). T.S. Eliot’s influence is palpable in poems such as ‘Embarkation’, with its references to ‘Odysseuses bound daily to commute / with rolled umbrella, suitcase and dark suit’.11 Here Eliot’s influence on Reading is partly a matter of tone, of philosophic resignation to humanity’s desecration of culture. Missing, however, is any sense of poetry’s potential to salvage fragments of dignity or humanity : To see The same future waiting and still to continue Seems our most noble attribute, though I suppose we secretly hope for some permanent Monument left of us, some recognition by those coming after. No chance.   (‘Plague Graves’, 1 : 29) The echo of Beowulf’s ending with its tenuous trust in posterity is countered by Reading’s flatly demotic refutation. Speech ‘dissolv[es] all tangible / trace of us’, time rendering all outcomes equivalent. The result is ‘the same in the final / Analysis  no-one to know them, extol them / Or give them permanence’ (1 : 27). Reading’s early poems engage directly with the material world ; interacting with historically vulnerable objects  graves, municipal benches, fossils, paintings  which augur individual and memorial obsolescence. The degenerative susceptibility of such objects makes poetry’s status as epitaph a much more contingent and tenuous undertaking. Charnel-house anonymity is a more suitable fate for these fallen. 11  Peter Reading, ‘Embarkation’, in Peter Reading : Collected Poems, 1 : 1970-1984 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995), p. 27. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text with volume and page.

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‘Plague Graves’ heralds Reading’s growing preoccupation with language as a commemorative tool. Such early poems assume a modernist diction which produces and contradicts its own erudition in order to assert authority. Early Reading’s espousal of material degradation does not materially affect poetic form ; metre remains stable, poems bear titles, there is little sense of fragmentation, and the past remains chronologically distinct. Lachlann Mackinnon has claimed that the thematic consistency of these early works is proof of ‘very little development’ in Reading’s work, whilst conceding that metrically ‘there is a steady increase in technical skill’.12 Yet by separating form and meaning MacKinnon fundamentally misrecognizes how metrics, form and subject matter are constitutive of meaning for the poet. Throughout the seventies and eighties Reading’s poetry experimented with the alienating effects of history through poetic form. His carefully measured prosody increasingly gives way to textually experimental writing  writing that parodies or mimics found-objects, artefacts mediated by personae, the text often incomplete and illegible. In ‘“Iuppiter ex alto periuria ridet amantum” 15s 6d’ (Nothing for Anyone, 1977) Reading ‘presents’ a composite of nineteenth-century love fragments. Rather than enabling pathos, as in Ken Smith’s ‘The Eli Poems’ where an imagined history unlocks emotional and lyric fluency, Reading’s text problematizes textual permanence and its affective claims.13 This wry and self-reflexive poem gives us hardly any text at all, the ‘owner’ of the lady’s album declaring sections ‘illegible’ (1 : 106), an epithalamium ‘wholly illegible’ (1 : 107) and ending with ‘a cryptic academic hand’ (1 : 108) whose inscription is meaningless and disembodied. The poem parodies textual claims to permanence, and emotional connection, instead foregrounding the poet’s role in mediating and fictionalizing second-hand languages ‘in his possession’. Fiction (1979, 1 : 137–70) and 5×5×5×5×5 (1983, 1 : 249–76) also dovetail theme and formalist experimentation. Oscillating between strict syllabic form (the latter work being entirely in units of five syllables) and prose fragments, these works demonstrate Reading’s increasing interest in stressed metre and alliteration derived from Old English models.14 This turn to the Anglo-Saxon is coterminous, and arguably synonymous, with a problematization of the identity and role of the poet. Polyphonic personae and formal archaisms move toward a form of textual suicide ; a literary game which culminates in Last Poems (1994), where Reading announces his own death through ‘posthumous’ publication and editorial distancing. The turn to Anglo-Saxon sources thus marks a radical development in Reading’s work. The most explicitly influenced by Old English sources are Evagatory (1992) and Last Poems (1994), which employ Old English sources to produce a discontinuous series of poems, personae, and visual images. Frustrating, contrary, and elusive, Reading’s use of texts such as the Exeter Book and Beowulf is not based on familiarity 12  See also Lachlann MacKinnon, ‘Swift for a soiled England’, The Independent, 12 August 1995. 13  Ken Smith, The Poet Reclining : Selected Poems, 1962–1980 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1982), pp. 57–68. 14 Martin, Reading Peter Reading, p. 49.

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with the originals. They are mediated instead by modern anthologies such as Michael Alexander’s The Earliest English Poems, which fascinated Reading :15 ‘I wasn’t very well read, but I was attracted by the vigour of those works, to what isn’t messing about.’16 Alexander’s seminal translations rework Anglo-Saxon into ‘modern’ English whilst incorporating archaic diction in a technique profoundly influenced by Pound’s modernist poetry. For Reading the potent unfamiliarity of Anglo-Saxon is not merely literary, but visual or iconic. Whilst Final Demands (1988) and Perduta Gente (1989) both used collage and photographic reproduction of texts to compound documentary effect, Evagatory is Reading’s first work to combine not only literary and typographic experimentation but also visual or iconic effects. Evagatory is an invented word deriving from the archaic ‘evagation’ meaning a wandering away from a specific location, a digression or a mental wandering. Reading’s neologism depends on etymological history, and implies an almost existential or linguistic dereliction. The collection opens with a precarious pastoral, ‘dusk, pulse of warning light […] Rothko of afterglow […] a.m., a carcinogenic sunrise.’17 Natural beauty is undercut both by imminent destruction and Reading’s reference to the visual arts. The speaker’s reflex to aestheticize the natural is counterpointed by an accumulation of detail that substitutes the noumenal with ‘facts’. Nature is revealed as toxic and aesthetics impotent. The stress-rhythm and alliteration are distinctively Old English, as are the compound words : Reading’s apposition of Rothko/afterglow confirms poetic playfulness despite apocalpyse. The temporal and literary frame is vast, geological ; Old English the furthest literary point from the present  the literary equivalent of the Holocene. ‘Resinous pine shade under an ozone hole / (one of those routine periodic / faunal extinctions [cf. the Cambrian])’ (2 : 224 ; square brackets in original). By superimposing temporal and linguistic perspectives Reading not merely contextualizes doom, but renders ‘species decline’ a natural outcome. Such pessimism might become futile, but Evagatory’s energy derives from a startling set of juxtapositions, which render impersonality a form of moral triumph. These juxtapositions depend upon the anonymous and generic strangeness of Old English to license their moral severity and pessimism. too much is wrong, duff ticker, insomnia,   Ulcer and thyrotoxicosis,      End of the world in one’s lifetime likely, flight of a sparrow brief through the feasting hall.   (2 : 227) The appearance of Bede’s sparrow confirms mortal transience but also a literary form

15  See Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems (London, 1966). Alexander’s renderings of Old English are strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, and the collection is dedicated to him ; see also Alexander’s The Poetic Achievement of Ezra Pound (Edinburgh, 1979). 16  Reading, quoted in Martin, Reading Peter Reading, p. 122. 17  Peter Reading, Collected Poems, 2 : 1985–1996 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996), p. 222. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text with volume and page.

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of eternal recurrence.18 Millenial decay uncovers the ur-texts of human knowledge, the remnants of poetic vision projecting through centuries of literary detritus confirming the repetitive nature of human existence and human utterance. Old English becomes a position from which to articulate existential meaninglessness. The poet is an exiled ‘English elder’ (2 : 227), a wræcca whose lament recalls that of the last survivor of Beowulf. This is his song’s weight, Time’s malice castigates   not only me (whose beard grows snow-hued,   bones become joint-sore, dulled eyes gum-filled),    also fair governments, concepts, zeniths, all which we valued nears expiry.   (2 : 224) Physical decline signals the terminal point of poetry and the poet. Reading autosatirizes his bathetic bibulosity with archaic vocabulary and striking alliterative patterns : tuning a sweet-toned curious instrument,    gulps from a goblet of local merlot,   sings on a theme whose fame was fabled, that of a sad realm farctate with feculence   (patois and translationese alternately).  (2  :  231) Linguistic degeneration mocks the authority of the poet, illuminating modernity’s literary and moral paucity. The poet is obsolete. Though the production of the distant voices of the Seafarer and The Wanderer, Reading depersonalizes his poetic voice : Mine is a sea-borne sorrowful history,   winters of toil through tempests, foam frosts   [. . .]   nothing on earth can abide forever,   illness or age or aggression takes us   striving for fame beyond death is futile (none will be left to celebrate the heroes’ lof ).   (2 : 232–3) The elegiac alliterations recall Auden’s war poems, where Old English inflections evoke the embattled anxiety of conflict. Yet Reading’s poetry is resolutely certain of the finality of the situation, as even elegy is rendered redundant. Lof, the persistence of fame that energizes the heroes of Beowulf, is metaphysically futile given the extinction of posterity. For Isabel Martin, Reading’s transposition of ‘old Saxon pre-texts into the twentieth century’ is part of ‘the entire work of a poet [… in] creating new

18  See Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), II.13, pp. 182–5.

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language, of translating’.19 Yet it is precisely at this point that Reading’s work signals the lack of literary resources. The eruption of Old English in Evagatory may appear invigorating  direct, brutal, ‘not messing about’  but it is juxtaposed with a debased jargon or ‘translationese’ which reads like language in regress. The proximity of these languages confirms the stoic pointlessness of Saxon poetry and vicious patois alike, both fragments of discourse before dissolution. Evagatory is densely intertextual, cannibalizing and recycling early Reading works. Isabel Martin reads this incorporation as part of Reading’s sophisticated ‘auto-cento’ in which cross-referencing organizes the total structure of his work.20 Yet read alongside the governing image of the book this positive gloss seems unsustainable (see Figure 14.1). The image corresponds to Reading’s description of ‘evagation’ as a ‘[p]erilous trek […] / set out from Cranium, through uncharted / swamp, to arrive at Lingua Franca, / thence to this Logaoedic Dependency. / Cranial voice, loquacious/inadequate’ (2 : 227–9). Evagation here is the emptying out of language itself. Reading’s ‘Logaoedic Dependency’, his tendency to prose-like poetry, is a verbal tic both prolific and ‘inadequate’. In this light, the prosodic forms of Old English become a sign of enfeebled articulation, a compulsive repetition confirming deficiency. where are the heroes, word-hoarders, feasting-feats ?  gone back to dark as though they had never been, life is a loan and bank accounts transient,   kindred are skewered on sharp-spiked ash-spears,   all of this world will be Weird-wreaked,                  emptied …  (2  :  233) In a passage closely adapting the well-known ubi sunt section of The Wanderer (lines 93–3 ; 96 ; 108–10), the word-hoard’s resources are expended, the word-hoarders or poets gone into the same dark. Saxon things uncovered by poetic excavation, the emptying out of the world ; intertextuality is a side-effect of the unregeneracy of language, the poet driven to cannibalize his own works. The cranium ‘feebly translating life into language’ (2 : 234, 2 : 238) is a memento mori. Martin’s construction of Reading’s corpus as coherent auto-cento ignores the poem’s deconstructive urges  its momentum toward stark visuality. Reading as text alone fails to account for the non-linguistic elements. Indeed, Reading’s repetition resembles a Beckettian game in which the significance of the utterance can only become available through reference to its non-linguistic components. Old English must be understood in tandem with mise en page, with visual presentation. The superimposed type of Figures 14.1 and 14.2 is an image of compulsive articulation ironically in the process of rendering itself illegible and therefore ‘lightless, silent’, that silence being ‘total, Sibelian’ (2 : 239). 19 Martin, Reading Peter Reading, p. 223. 20 Ibid.

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Figure 14.1  Peter Reading, Collected Poems 2 : p. 239, by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

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Figure 14.2  Peter Reading, Collected Poems 2 : p. 278, by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

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Imagining himself ‘mute’ as ‘force 12s dispersing disbound Collected Works’ (2 : 240), Reading’s drolly reflexive satire locates in Old English the solace of obsolescence. Reading defines the paradoxical attraction of Old English as ‘consolation’, ‘a sense of shared nothing […] that this is the human lot […] a sort of facing the void, which is bleak but I think that there’s this sort of heroic approach’.21 The grim elation of ‘facing the void’ is rendered through Evagatory’s discourses of scientific expansion, Voyager’s mission and solar winds, and the embattled alliteration of Old English. The abstract magnitude of extinction and apocalypse marginalizes poetry itself, Saxon fragments overwhelmed by found scientific text, collages of one-way tickets, and diminishing typeface. Evagatory’s textual diminuendo demonstrates Reading’s use of Anglo-Saxon form as evocative of terminal decline rather than literary renaissance : stumbing through a ‘babel of strange-tongued wanderers’ the voice of ‘the Northman’ (2 : 240) merges with the lost poets of history. The overwhelming bleakness of Evagatory is amplified by Reading’s subsequent work, Last Poems. Only 2001’s Untitled is more consistent in its use of Old English motifs and sources. Presenting the collection as a posthumous document, the foreword at once claims textual authority and distances the author from the productions contained within it : ‘these poems are printed in the order in which they were found (contained in an envelope […] in the author’s hand[)]’ (2 : 246). Self-consciously academic, an editorial persona informs the reader : The poems entitled ‘Funerary’, ‘Fragmentary’ and ‘Exilic’ are evidently ‘versions’ of Anglo-Saxon pieces (respectively, the end of Beowulf, ‘The Ruin’ and ‘The Wife’s Lament’). ‘Fates of Men’ derives from a poem of that title in the Exeter Book.   (2 : 246) These ‘versions’ of Old English poems seem to signal a renovated literariness, their literary and lyrical preoccupations contrasting with the bitter, demotic rants of Reading’s 1980s collections.22 Death appears to have bestowed respectability upon Reading’s excoriating obscenities. Paratext emphasizes the recovered quality of these works, directing readers to the relationship between the expired poet and expired poetry  both forms speaking, as it were, from the grave. Structurally, however, killing off the poet is a means of producing the ‘extreme detachment’ that Reading strives towards.23 Reading’s conception of the producer of poetry is abstract, non-subjective : In a way the writer is a kind of agent who has nothing to do with you  as in Beckett’s From an Abandoned Work, ‘my body going on doing its best without me …’ ; a strange detached quality.24 21 Martin, Reading Peter Reading, p. 224. 22  For examples of Reading’s demotic poetry in the 1980s, see Ukulele Music (1985), Going On (1985), Final Demands (1988), and Shitheads (1989). 23  Reading, ‘Making Nothing Matter’, p. 7. 24  Ibid., my emphasis.

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Displacing agency into expired discourses, into text itself, allows Reading to inhabit the world of Old English fragments. Writing itself is an act of detachment. Evacuating the poet adds power to the Old English as ‘words take significance over their workers and the reporter becomes as dead as the Maldon poet’.25 Anglo-Saxon’s anonymity, its status as dispossessed text, allows the poet to ascribe agency to the form rather than an authorial voice. Just as writing possesses an agency extrinsic to its producer, Last Poems can ‘go on, doing its best’ without either Peter Reading, agent, or Peter Reading, poet. It would be foolish however to think that Last Poems is without humour. The pious pronouncements of the editor are thrown out by the collection’s dialectical structure. The sombre dignity of the Anglo-Saxon versions alternates with contemporary vignettes in demotic speech. ‘Funerary’ mourns the passing of Beowulf and the Geatish kings, and the coming of dismal days : Preparing a pyre,  the people of the Geats hung round it helmets,  halberds and battle-dress ; [. . .] And this is fitting :  for fair men to value with powerful words  their worthy lord when his life, as all men’s  must, departs him. So the men of the Geats,  Great-Hall-dwellers, who’d shared the hearth  with the hero, bewailed, claiming their king  was the kindest of leaders, the mildest of men,  most meriting renown.   (2 : 247–8) This passage adapts Beowulf, lines 3137–40 and 1375–82. The visually enforced caesura, the alliteration and double accentual stress confirm the almost academic faithfulness to Old English verse form. But this poem does not stand alone. The mourning of a king in ‘Funerary’ is immediately echoed in the following poem, ‘Regal’. Temporally juxtaposing the Saxon elegy with 1950s Britain, the opening lines seem unrelated to the previous poem : ‘Mother was holding up a Pyrex pie-dish / (lined with plump apple lumps) in her left hand’ (2 : 248). Yet ‘Regal’ contrasts and complicates the previous poem, not merely in its pun on pyre/pyrex, its use of plosive alliteration (‘flopping the pastry lid on […] trimming the droopy overlaps and jabbing / steam-vents’) and but in its public elegy : She wiped a floured hand on her apron and tuned the wireless  what Roy Fuller calls ‘Some inexplicable, imperial, Elgarian sadness’ filled the scullery : His Majesty, King George VI, is dead.   (2 : 248) 25 Jones, Strange Likeness, p. 115.

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The speaker’s recollection of the communal school outing to watch the climbing of Everest and the coronation of Elizabeth II tells us that ‘The Regal […] was gaudy, had seen better days’. ‘Regal’s mundanity does not merely contrast with the Old English mourning, but problematizes it. The disembodied voice of the wireless a version of ‘Funerary’’s oral fragment, Old English’s sombre rituals parallel those of the twentieth century. Indeed, the thematic juxtaposition of the two poems mocks lapidary form. The collection’s polyphony creates a contrapuntal dynamic that I would characterize as a tension between the conversational and the formal […] there’s a tension between the demotic and formal in speech, as there is between the dignified and the bestial in behaviour.26 The ‘bestial’ seems to be associated with modernity, as the tight, formalistic verse of the Old English versions oscillates with a savage quotidian. Reading acts as ‘afterspeaker’, an elegiast for whom mournful keening is ‘as useless / as all world’s gear is’ (2 : 248). Old English ironically tells us what we already know, that ‘bad times [are] forecast  / terror, killing, captivity, shame.’ Poetry recapitulates the narrative of loss and despair with diminishing vigour. Reading’s next ‘voice’, ‘Euripidean’, tells us bluntly that ‘What we have long foretold will before long be / fully accomplished, the theme of dirges […] nothing remains, no name, no issue’ (2 : 249). Epic barbarities (‘Homeric’), grim stoicism (‘Euripidean’, ‘Ovidian’) are produced alongside the contemporary genocide of Sarajevo (‘Bosnian’), in order to situate Old English as poetic eschatology. The foreword’s careful flagging of the recovered status of some of the poems as ‘versions of Anglo-Saxon pieces’ suggests more when read in context of the collection as a whole. It implies that all poetry, across time, repeats the same refrain. Last Poems is close to novelistic prose in a non-chronological narrative, where voices link with each other, speaking through history. But it is also a kind of dynamic palimpsest. Old English voices emerge and jockey with other forms from literary history. Ultimately, though, their reappearance is brief, their text vulnerable. ‘Fragmentary’ exacerbates the sense of failure found in The Ruin, its Old English source text : ‘Fate fells all. / What of the craftsmen ? Clasped in earth’ (2 : 273). Insofar as these poems evoke the heroism of ‘looking into the void’ they do so by affirming the collapse into non-existence, the susceptibility to corruption and loss. Nicholas Howe has argued that Old English is best ‘placed within the shifting field of literary studies if one holds to a disrupted or fragmented sense of tradition […] Anglo-Saxon materials have had a habit of reappearing’ at times where influence, continuity and identity are being negotiated and reformed.27 Accordingly Reading’s poetry connects Old English 26  Reading, ‘Making Nothing Matter’, p. 6. 27  Nicholas Howe, ‘Praise and Lament : The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn’, in Words and Works : Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson, ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe (Toronto, 1998), pp. 293–310 at p. 294.

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to cultural crisis, of eras of decline and fall, limning the constancy of loss. Contrast Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) for which Old English is both resource and technique : Their spades grafted through the variably resistant soil. They clove to the hoard. They ransacked epiphanies, vertebrae of the chimera, armour of wild bees larvae. They stuck the fire-dragon’s faceted skin.28 The concreteness of Old English litanies and the geographical node that Offa’s Midlands provides in Hill’s work expropriates modernist practices that draw attention to the glittering anachronisms of the poem’s linguistic surface. By contrast, Reading refuses the intimate interaction that Hill employs. Reading retains Old English as a distinct mode amongst competing voices unlike Hill’s muscular linguistic machinery which invigorates his particular poetic voice. Whereas Hill’s scop revels in the transhistorical power of Old English alliterative structures, word-compounding and variation, Reading taxonomizes poetic forms whilst insisting upon their relative status as versions of the same lament. ‘Fragmentary’ maps Reading’s (de)compositional tactics onto the anonymous, partial text of The Ruin. Man-made edifices are ‘Felled by Fate’, Reading marking off the rupture in the source-text by the recapitulation of ‘Untitled’ : ‘[Hiatus, lacuna … / as the city is sunken so is the word-hoard, / faded the fragile fragment of manuscript, / parchment eroded round the sad utterance.]’ (2 : 274 ; square brackets and ellipsis in original). The Ruin is synedochal for the whole work of writing ; marked by lacunae, elegy and loss. Reading’s project is one that uncovers rather than reinvigorates Old English, literalizing Work in Regress (1997). These fragments of poetry are generic representatives whose output is ‘Reiterative’ (3 : 224). The word-hoarder proclaims poetic entropy, as language itself depreciates and runs out of energy. Last Poems frames the collection with clues to the lack of originality that dogs the poet, and the ultimate fate of poet, text and humanity. The opening poem ‘[Untitled]’ (a designation that Reading uses consistently throughout his career, leaving a baffling array of similarly [un]titled poems, claiming to use titles only out of necessity) redeploys an early lyrical piece of Reading’s verse. [wizened anhydrous frail wisps of laurel leaves, Rustle of old gratuitous scrivening, Pages of faded palimpsest hieroglyphs, Half-hidden/half-glimpsed sorrowful utterance, Sepia faded tremulous holograph, […] 28  Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (London, 1971), no. XII.

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Parchment eroded around the sad utterance, Rotted the frail bond, with it the utterance]   (2 : 247 ; enclosing square                      brackets in original)29 The meaning of these ‘faded palimpsest hieroglyphs’ is esoteric at best. Even the evoked encounter with the physicality of text is complicated by the fact that Reading gives no typographical or visual sense of their originals. ‘Sad utterances’ lament their own passing. Literature here is ‘archaeological siftings’, poetry an ‘old depositional tendence’.30 For Reading language is a medium subject to degeneration and loss. The material erosion of text means that the utterance itself is corrupted  the ‘frail bond’ of language constantly posing the possibility of incomprehension. The representation in ‘Untitled’ of ‘half-hidden/half-glimpsed’ forms is recapitulated in the closing pages of the volume (see Figure 14.2) in which the book’s holograph proofs decompose on the page, instancing the erasure of meaning and legibility. Reading posits his poetry and that of his sources as grave goods, ‘trappings […] buried in the barrow’ (2 : 247) : symbolic offerings in an uncertain exchange with posterity. Work in Regress continues this theme in ‘Three’. Its haunting refrain from Propertius, ‘sunt aliquid manes, / letum non omnia finit’ (3 : 16) (‘Spirits do exist, death does not end all’), is itself a textual revenant from an earlier Reading work. Work in Regress traces both the loss of friendship and the difficulty, albeit necessity, of commemoration. Reading’s choice of Propertius is significant : a representative of the historically shortlived genre of Latin love elegy, it is itself an intertextual echo of the dream of Achilles in the Iliad (23.62–107) : moreover this Latin tag represents the voice of the dead, as the departed demand funerary rites. The insistent voice of the dead is classically allusive, but mediated through multiple personae  it ‘speaks’ both as Propertius’s scorned lover Cynthia, as friend and patron George MacBeth, and as Reading’s own recorded, disembodied voice returning to haunt him.31 Reading’s poetic voice is a ‘subject […] absent, speaking from nowhere, from a place beyond the contingencies of here and now’.32 Following his very public retirement from poetry with 1994’s Last Poems, Reading’s subsequent works resurrect the poet’s persona, but they continue to constitute that persona as radically detached, proleptically deceased. Such morbid fascination suggests that poetry’s only converse is with the dead. Last Poems problematizes the status of poetry itself. There is a substrate of palpable contempt for a readership and publishers who support Reading’s output, despite its 29  Versions of this stanza structure Reading’s previous collection, Final Demands ; see Collected Poems, 2, pp. 118, 158. 30  Peter Reading, Collected Poems, 3 : 1997–2003 (Tarset, 2003), p. 170. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text with volume and page. 31  Martin Booth, ‘MacBeth, George Mann (1932–1992)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn (2004) : http ://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/51192, accessed 5 May 2009. 32  Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses : Latin Erotic Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, 2004), p. 2.

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conditions of repetition and despair, and this extends to self-disgust. Linguistic failure is both cultural and personal, the satiric moniker ‘Hom. Sap.’ deriding any claim to taxonomic superiority. ‘Fragmentary’ acknowledges individual impotence : ‘Those men who might have remade’ culture ‘lay dead. / What was once fought for is wasteland now’ (2 : 273). Yet Reading’s poetry passionately denounces our passive oblivion to all that we are losing. Old English’s vigour and its role in literary genealogy cannot change the present, but confirms the terminal diagnosis. The principle of reiteration here becomes threnody and invective, text ‘[churned out in ’76, / the eroded faded text …]’. Later in ‘Reiterative’, ‘the hackneyed text is eroded, / somebody ain’t been listening  / You, at the back, sit up / and fuckingwell pay attention’ (2 : 263–4 ; square brackets in original). Reading confirms his reiteration as a sign of the pointlessness of discourse  Hom. Sap.’s refusal to change means environmental destruction and species extinction. In −273.15 (2005) we find the same admonishment in the midst of a tirade on global warming : We know that Global Warming, rather than causing gradual, centuriesspanning change, will push the climate to the tip, fast […] and consider the urgency of overwhelmed societies, the haves and the have-nots […] the cooling of much of Europe and the U.S. […] the droughts, the dust-bowls and the ashes […] [You, at the back, should’ve sat up and fucking well paid attention]33 Modern science is itself an elegy, a doom-dictating discourse marshalled by the poet. Reading’s outrage recurs, repeats, but in pessimism rather than hope  ‘the struggle naught availeth’ he avers.34 In ‘Reiterative’ the speaker’s self-conscious rebuke to ‘Western Industrial Man’ provokes a humorous aside : ‘[A handful of weighed syllables / has no future (nor has Future).]’ (2 : 263 ; square brackets in original). Elegy  the hope for ‘permanent structures’ to memorialise humanity  is futile, literature itself otiose with its lesson of impossibility. This ‘slick prestidigital art of Not Caring / Hopelessly Caring’ (2 : 226) means that language will run on into nothingness, conscious of its own loss and impotence. Reading’s bitter invectives find no solace in the act of writing. Anglo-Saxon’s production of a poetic eschatology enabled an existential and spiritual teleology for poets such as Auden since ‘To speak is human because human to listen, / beyond hope, for an Eighth Day’.35 Auden’s elegant apothegm echoes the humanist sentiments of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, ‘Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join ; / To err is Humane ; to Forgive, Divine.’36 Reading, by contrast, evinces a Swiftian materialism in his dealing with literary history : there 33 Reading, −273.15, unpaginated. 34  Ibid. See Carrie Etter, ‘The Public Language of Global Warming in Peter Reading’s −273.15’, in Poetry and Public Language, ed. Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu (Exeter, 2007), pp. 69–76. 35  W.H. Auden, ‘Prologue at Sixty (for Friedrich Heer)’, in his Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London, 1976), p. 831. 36  Alexander Pope, ‘Essay on Criticism’, 523–5, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (Oxford, 1973), p. 160.

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are no religious salvos, no life after death. Poets with an academic background in Old English often exploit its almost sacramental approach to language : Hill in his evocation of the residual aura of faith, the centrality of language and history in providing meaning in an agnostic era ; Auden in his prayer for divine translation of spirit into text ; and even Heaney’s aspiration to ‘liturgical power […] primal incantation […] oracular’ in his translation of Beowulf.37 In stark contrast, Reading dismisses the redemptive or sacral in poetry. His work is post-elegiac, questioning its own function in altered circumstances. ‘What after Elegy ?’, he asks, and answers ‘Callous de-/ tachment feigning concern for / Post-Elegiac and Post-/Post-Elegiac H. Sap’, with an ironic invitation to ‘celebrate simply / just Going On, Getting On With It’ (2 : 66). Such pessimism is not acquiescence but the assertion of a poetic and personal eschatology. Old English’s function comprises part of a process that systematically exposes the vulnerability of the poetic voice and its textual remnants. Reading’s textual artefacts are mortal remains in the process of erasure or decomposition into obsolescent and illegible language. The elegiac fragments of the Anglo-Saxon corpus serve to corroborate poetic desuetude and nihilism.

The Savage Economy of Hieroglyphs

I have already noted Reading’s background in the visual arts, and the prominence given to visual renderings of illegible, scratched or composite images in his works. The occurrence of these images in Reading’s works coincides and develops in tandem with his usage of Anglo-Saxon forms. Reading’s images often include textual remnants, trouvailles, often mutilated or manipulated scraps of his own writing. This interest in ‘faded palimpsest hieroglyphs’ forces readers to contemplate signifiers sundered from their epistemic system, their meaning lost or obscure. The dovetailing of Saxon sources and visual images is most pronounced in Reading’s 2001 work [untitled]. Ule Klawitter has recently analysed what he calls the ‘verbovisual experiments’ undertaken in this work.38 Klawitter argues that [untitled]’s collages and torn photographs are used as ‘iconic reinforcements of the theme of decay and oblivion’ but which go beyond mere accentuation and invite post-structuralist interpretation.39 In the participatory and decentred language of postmodernity, Reading’s work can be understood as deconstructing literary authority through its hybridity. Reading these eruptions through the poem’s statement that ‘Removed from the semantic context / the word = the visual’ (3 : 182), Klawitter states that ‘Reading moves the verbal toward

37  Seamus Heaney, ‘The Drag of the Golden Chain’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 November 1999, 14–16, at p. 15. 38 Ule Klawitter, ‘Verbovisual Explorations of Textuality : Peter Reading’s Collection [untitled] (2001)’, in Another Language : Contemporary U.S.-American Poetic Experiments in a Changing World, ed. Kornelia Feitag (Munster, 2008), pp. 187–202, at p. 201. 39  Ibid., pp.187–8.

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the openness of images but contains the visual, which may be seen as a response to the increasing visualisation of our culture.’40 Yet despite noting Reading’s references to palimpsests and ‘historical writing systems’, Klawitter does not explicitly connect these visual compositions to the AngloSaxon forms that dominate this collection.41 Indeed, the opening epigraph is troubled by the coded nature of the six accompanying runic letters, recalling the ridding runes at the end of The Husband’s Message. The image suggests equivalence between English writing and the runic alphabet : ‘(Our runes, like theirs, will be uncipherable : / impartial Time will wipe the slate clean, wordless)’ (3 : facing 149). Yet these works maintain Reading’s thematic pessimism primarily through the return or resurgence of ‘uncipherable’ languages. [untitled] ’s production of Old English as a symbol or icon suggests a faltering dialectic between writing and expression. Moreover, the move from expressive text to word-as-icon divests the written work of the communicative responsibility often ascribed to poetry. Reading’s refusal of that role is expressed in an early work where a ‘little bloke’ from art school called ‘Reading’ snarls : Well I don’t paint To communicate. In fact the reverse  To alienate ; To paint out the clues any audience might otherwise get.   (1 : 109) ‘Painting out the clues’ to meaning is precisely what his poetry does, insisting not on openness, but on estrangement from meaning. Reading’s use of Anglo-Saxon material as a pre-text for radical loss of meaning is directly opposed to Hill’s poetry, in which contemplation of historical writing ‘[i]deally’ produces the poem as ‘an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense, as act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony’.42 The charms of enchantment afforded by historical transcendence are wholly missing for Reading. Figure 14.3 is juxtaposed visually with another ‘[untitled]’, ‘In unmarked graves and splendid catafalques / alike, impartial atoms metamorphose’ (3 : 176). The text constructs the collection as burial mound, the work equivalent to the body/corpus of the poet. The body does not merely rot, here, but metamorphoses ; a momentary gladness. Both time and atoms are ‘impartial’, the body nameless. The collage opposite, however, carries the signature of the poet following  one might say evolving out of

40  Ibid., p. 201. 41  Ibid., p. 187. 42  Geoffrey Hill, ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, in his The Lords of Limit : Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1984), pp. 1–18, at p. 2.

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Figure 14.3  Peter Reading, Collected Poems 3 : facing p. 176, by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

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 the darkened runic, to Faliscan, to typed sheet. Legibility is compromised both by surface marks and deliberate cancellation. ‘I can say no more’ reads the text : each utterance is fractured, Incomprehensible, unfinished  Like its utterer, maimed in its intent. But, you know, There’s another level above mere utterance To which only I have access and understanding The 〈less ?〉 of me the better : […] I await 〈words deleted〉. (3 : 177) This collage produces self-pity as provocation whilst estranging the reader by ‘painting out’ the clues possibly contained in the two sections of text above the photoscript. Reading’s signature compounds the sense of authorial posturing. The obliteration of the two final words, whose length roughly corresponds to the name of the poet, further ironizes the status of the collage  we cannot be certain whether the autograph is the authenticating sign of the poet, or if it restores an erasure. It may simply be a mark made by a third hand. [untitled] interrogates the status of signs, specifically scratched or etched marks, through their relationship with a broken, non-linear history. ‘Graffiti’ notes the defacement of a pre-historic cave painting by a carving of ‘a Zeppelin dick on the same rock  / Still, after 20,000 years, inclined / to score some mark on anonymity’ (3 : 178). The poem’s position directly following the author’s name aligns him with the rebellious youths who ‘score’ a mark on anonymity. The ‘Zeppelin dick’ punctures any primitivist romance that might adhere to the cave paintings. Reading’s use of both image and text is closer to Beckett’s attempts to represent paradoxical opacities that elude semantic expression. The poet’s admiration for Beckett’s work can be seen in his recourse to Beckettian tropes of dark humour, misanthropy and death. In his review of the first volume of Collected Poems Ian Sansom claims that the found objects and images of his recent work, ‘enact the kind of desophistication that Beckett discerned in Joyce’s Work In Progress’. He goes on to quote Beckett, ‘here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.’43 The critic seems desperate to render Reading’s transgressions delightful to a bourgeois audience, saving him from the charge of interminable repetition, of stasis and unremitting despair. Sansom’s application of Beckett’s celebration of Joyce to the black-and-white photographs, collages and torn handwritten notes of Reading is strangely inapposite. Beckett’s eulogy to Joyce’s fantastical grasp of the 43  Ian Sansom, ‘Scared Scratchings’, Times Literary Supplement, 13 October 1995.

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interpenetrative complexities of language is precisely non-applicable to Beckett’s own artistic enterprise. Joyce’s blazing lyricism inhibited and dissuaded Beckett from attempting comprehensive articulation : ‘the more Joyce knew, the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past.’44 Ironically, Sansom’s decontextualized quotation has the effect of bestowing Joycean animus onto Beckett and Reading, both artists of inertia and fragmentary, partial knowledge. Nowhere is this more apparent than in [untitled] where words not merely degenerate physically, but their significance is eroded, run-down : more dying than alive. These typographical and visual artefacts are presented in the same monochrome as text, contributing to the variation of surface effects in the poetry but implying symbolic equivalence as both text and image run out of energy. Indeed, many of the representational effects are less sensational or vivid than eighteenth-century typographical experimentation. The images are at most documentary, grainy montages of a terminal equivalence of meaning. Text and image are on the brink of faltering into oblivion (see Figures 14.3 and 14.4). These icons may provide humour but read within and against the text that surrounds them they operate as instances of the regressive tendencies in inscription. Yet Beckett’s statement about Joyce’s fragments provides a means of reassessing the importance of the non-linguistic. Here form I S content, content I S form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to read  or rather it is not only to be read. Here is a savage economy of hieroglyphics.45 The unity of form and content applies equally to Reading’s construction of a composite of recovered texts, translation and collage. Reading’s deliberate dismemberment of text and image is an instance of his interest in anti-language, in negation of linguistic sufficiency. For Beckett, Joyce’s ‘obscure’ text was actually a ‘quintessential extraction of language and painting and gesture’.46 This idea of text as ‘extraction’ from a potentially infinite whole constitutes the fragment as alchemical compound of linguistic, visual and embodied forms and helps comprehend Reading’s own work both in its manifestation as auto-cento and also as ‘not written’, but reconstructed, recovered, revised utterance. The poet is not only ‘feebly translating life into language’, but translating from ancient language to modern, from writing to writing. This process of sifting, relocating, transposing wears down the materials of poetry, leaving only the sporadic effects of the fragment  ‘the savage economy of hieroglyphs’. The mosaic-like effect of reading Reading’s corpus as a whole further confirms his ability to dismember and 44  Samuel Beckett, in Israel Shenker, ‘Moody man of letters’, The New York Times, 6 May 1956, sec. 2, 3. 45  Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante … Bruno. Vico … Joyce’, in his Our exagmination round his factification for incamination of work in progress (New York, 1972), p. 22, my emphasis. 46  Ibid., my emphasis.

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Figure 14.4  Peter Reading, Collected Poems 3 : facing p. 182, by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

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disperse his early texts throughout his writing. Reading’s work attempts the dissolution of the voice and the text of the poet, fragmenting self to conjure the infinite. The coexistence of non-textual forms levels text to the status of a visual effect, in which literary or deep meaning is uncertain and contingent on the non-linguistic factors. ‘Hommes de Lettres’ again raises the aesthetic effects of script alongside a collage and found object. The punning title reaches back to pre-historic incisions, pictographs, and cuneiform, before asserting what appears to be a paraphrase from Ernest Fenellosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. ‘“Chinese script conformed / with a series of subtle rules / which you could call Poetic Art”’ (3 : 182). Fenellosa’s modernist manifesto contended that verse was amenable to ‘visible hieroglyphs’, and that contrary to expectation ‘poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its entities out of successive impressions of sound could […] assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye’.47 Reading compounds the verbal and visual in the frame of the collage, but also places burnt remnants of a runic dictionary at the foot of the page. Accident and erosion threaten to reduce text to icon, to unreadable palimpsest. On the page opposite ‘Homme de Lettres’ is what looks like an archaeological composite (Figure 14.4), the inscription on a drinking cup in Latin and Faliscan and one of Reading’s own works. These fading conjunctions of text and image have far more troubling connotations than a postmodern deconstruction of poetic authority. Instead these images render runic, Latin, and English all hieroglyphs destined for desuetude, the lapse into unmeaning that all poetry risks. Given the historical heterogeneity of [untitled], where does Old English figure within this economy of the visual ? Reading’s foregrounding of the runic trace of Old English and its status in his work as translated artefact, borrowed, retrieved or echoed in his poetry, demonstrates the abiding elegiac power of Anglo-Saxon as text and technique. Given Reading’s rejection of the aesthetic excesses of rhyme or indeed the comfortable dignity of iambic pentameter, Anglo-Saxon provides a starkly anonymous, unhomed language with which to lambast ‘Grot Britain’ but also the indolence of humanity. The formalist demands of Old English continue to attract Reading’s reiterative poetics, but implicit in their re-use is a refusal to grant AngloSaxon transcendent power as a linguistic system. Thus Reading must emblematize Old English as a lost language, whose vigour is in part achieved through its alien qualities as icon, as ghost, and as structure. For the poet the ‘conceit / of word-hoard’ (3 : 194, boldface in original) is unsustainable. Its treasures are unobtainable : ‘Only in abject despair they glimpse the / solace of Word-Hoard ; / Then the bright casket’s lid slams. [sic] / sealing the treasure inside’ (3 : 45). Whereas Hill envisions the discovery of Old English as a lyric cleaving of both history and imagination, in which the hoard is ‘ransacked’ for goods, Reading’s brief illumination only highlights the poet’s ‘abject despair’. 47  Ernest Fenellosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1968), p. 6, my emphasis.

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The eruption of fragments of Old English texts in a dystopian modernity serves to confirm Reading’s vision of cultural and poetic eschatology. By constructing his own corpus as an auto-cento in which poems are re-worked, reinscribed, and often pared down into illegible fragments, Reading implies not only the impossibility of originality but the ultimate fate of all poetry. Old English is a ‘lost code’, a material that will be subsumed into the quotidian life of things. These ‘Saxon things’ are no longer recognized as text, but as a novelty, a commodity. Thus ‘weird hieroglyphs’ or runes ‘of long-forgotten Saxon origin’ are incorporated into buildings so that ‘all must see it’. This is loss rather than jouissance, ‘Lost utterances  or not yet understood  / half to reveal/half to conceal the truth’ (3 : 173). Reading’s echo of Pope’s Essay on Man here bestows an Augustan balance to Old English : Created half to rise, and half to fall ; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all ; Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl’d : The glory, jest, and riddle of the world !48 Reading’s use of Old English’s authoritative pessimism thus incorporates a vision of poetry’s linguistic desuetude. Language, as much as the species ‘with potential that it has not fulfilled’, is evidence of ‘failed progress’.49 The transformation and loss of the Saxon materials simultaneously reveals and conceals the truth, which is that even while the code may be lost, its literary message is made known through its own material assimilation into a degraded creation. The power of Old English for Reading lies, paradoxically, in the certainty of its own erasure. 48  Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, II.15-18, in Poems, ed. Butt, p. 516. 49  Reading, ‘Making Nothing Matter’, p. 11.

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Index Adémar of Chabannes  204 Adrian and Ritheus  124–5, 127 Ælfric of Eynsham  33, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84 Ælfwald, king of East Anglia  16 Æthelbald, king of Mercia  219, 226–7 Agamben, Giorgio  220, 226–34 Alcuin of York  233 Aldhelm of Malmesbury  76, 80, 81, 115 Alexander, Michael  xi, 5 n., 24, 31, 94, 136, 137, 139, 259 Alfred the Great  3, 7, 33, 34, 76, 202, 206 ; see also Boethius : Consolation of Philosophy (Old English version) Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  86–8, 94, 98, 219–20, 222–3, 232 Cynewulf and Cyneheard episode  33, 34, 55 Anglo-Saxon language ; see English, Old Armitage, Simon  257 Artamonova, Maria  5 Arthur, King  3 Asherman, Allan  168, 170 Athelstan, king of the English  16, 93 Atherton, Mark  2 Auden, W.H.  5–6, 51–69, 73, 89, 269, 270 The Age of Anxiety   59–69 Paid on Both Sides 53–9 Avary, Roger  18–26 Baldr  57–8, 61, 62, 196 Baring-Gould, Sabine  60 n., 63 Barthes, Roland  9, 105 The Battle of Brunanburgh   92–3, 94, 96, 210 The Battle of Maldon   26, 27, 33, 92–3, 95–8, 229 beasts of battle motif  93–4 Beckett, Samuel  273–4 Bede : Historia ecclesiastica  94, 150, 183–4, 241–4, 249, 259–60 ; see also Cædmon (pseudo-)Bede : Collectanea  124, 127 Bennett, J.A.W.  108

Beowulf narratives, places and protagonists in : Beowulf  19, 20, 22–6, 123, 142–3, 148, 149–50, 153–5, 158, 161, 163, 165–82, 191–4, 196–9, 239, 250–51, plates I, II dragon  19, 24, 153 Grendel  19, 23–4, 150–63, 168–9, plates IV, VI Grendel’s mother  19, 22–3, 26, 54, 152, 157 Heorot  17, 20, 21, 149–50, 151–4, 156–7, 161, 188 Heremod  17, 22, 179 Hrethel  59, 186–8, 196–9 Hrothgar  19, 20, 25, 26–7, 151, 155–8, 178–9 Hygelac  21, 148, 149, 180 Nan-Zee  167, 172–3 scop(s) of Hrothgar  17, 148, 152, 154, 156–7, 169–70, 251–2, plate V Scyld Scefing  xii, 21–2, 156, 183, 190, 250, plate IV Unferth  21, 25, 156, 157 Wealhtheow  21, 156, 157–8, 172–3 Wiglaf  25, 142, 179–80, 193 Beowulf (Old English poem)  2–3, 5, 8, 13–29, 33, 34, 36–7, 53–4, 58–9, 76, 81, 82, 98, 113–16, 120, 121, 123–4, 126, 148–52, 155, 165–73, 177–82, 183–95, 196–9, 204, 248, 250–52, 256, 257, 258–9, 260, 264–6 and archaeology  6, 131–41 authorship and date  14–17, 117–18, 170 editions of  129–42 Beowulf (2007 film)  2, 14, 18–26, 28–9 Beowulf and Grendel (2005 film)  9 Beowulf : Dragon Slayer  7, 24, 165–82 Beowulf (graphic novel) ; see Hinds, Gareth Bewcastle Cross  4 n., 115, 117 Biggs, Frederick  180 Blissett, William  102–3 Bodin, Jean  224 Boethius : Consolation of Philosophy (Old English version)  77, 87, 202, 204–5

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Index

Boniface, Saint  102–4, 226–7 Borges, Jorge Luis  9 Boyle, Leonard  15 Bradley, Henry  73 Braidwood, John  3 Breadalbane Brooch  143 bretwalda, debates over  222–3 British Museum  3 Brooke, Christopher  232 Brooke, Stopford  39, 44 Brooke-Rose, Christine  65 Bunting, Basil  8, 111–24, 127 Briggflatts  7, 111–14, 119–24, 127 Burnett, Virgil  134 Byrhtferth of Ramsey : Enchiridion 81 Cædmon  33, 121, 249 Case, Thomas  4 Canu Llywarch Hen  97 ; see also ‘Eagle of Eli’ Catraeth, Battle of  96–7 Cecire, Maria Sachiko  7 Ceolred, king of Mercia  226–7 chansons de geste 204 Charlemagne  223–4, 233 Christ  105, 108, 229 Christie, Agatha  190 n. Clarke, Catherine A.M.  7 Clark Hall, John R.  134 Clemoes, Peter  204–5 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome  190 n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  45 Cooke, Barrie : ‘Then Rain’  129–30 Cooper, Susan  7 The Dark is Rising 212–13 Corcoran, Neil  101 Cork, Job  208 Cowan, Angela  177 Crossley-Holland, Kevin  9, 10, 134, 136–7, 213 Cynddylan, lord of Pengwern  229 Cynewulf : Elene 193 Cynewulf and Cyneheard ; see under Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Dafydd Benfras  95 Davies, Joshua  7 Dawson, Christopher  102–4, 107 DC Comics  7, 165–82 Deor  5 n., 203, 214 Dilworth, Thomas  90 n., 101, 102 Discenza, Nicole Guenther  204–5 The Dream of the Rood   6, 33, 36, 90, 105–7, 121, 123 Dumville, David  14 n.

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‘Eagle of Eli’  97, 229–30 ; see also Canu Llywarch Hen Eanmund of Breedon Hill  16 Early English Text Society  3 Ebbsfleet, East Kent  11 Ebbsfleet, North Kent  10–12 Ecgfrith, king of Mercia  232–4 Echard, Siân  5, 6 Edda, Poetic  51, 98 Edda, Prose ; see under Snorri Sturluson Edwin, king of Northumbria  241–4, 246 Egils saga  196–9 ; see also Sonatorrek Eiríkur Magnússon  51 Eliot, T.S.  89, 92, 257 Elmet, possible kingdom of  238, 240–42 Emig, Rainer  52 English, Old  156 dialects of  33–4, 85–8 editing of  3, 19, 33–40, 131–2, 139–42 history and philology  33, 40–42, 75–9 poetic style and metre  2, 5, 27, 32, 35, 54, 64–6, 167–8, 221, 246, 253, 259 ; see also beasts of battle motif teaching of  3–5, 42–4 Exeter 10 Exeter Book ; see under manuscripts Exeter Book Riddles  10, 36 Riddle 51  111–12, 124–7 Exeter riddle sculpture  10 Fairfax, John  10 Fairfax, Michael  10 The Fates of Men   264 Feist, Raymond E. : Faerie Tale 214–15 Fenellosa, Ernest  276 The Fight at Finnsburg   150 Flieger, Verlyn  75 Frank, Roberta  135–6, 144 Franks Casket  203 Frantzen, Allen J.  8 Frazer, James : The Golden Bough 98 Gaiman, Neil  9, 18–26, 140, 214 Gardner, John : Grendel (novel)  8, 147–8, 152–61, 163, 170 gender and sexuality  1–2, 7, 22–3, 123–4, 160–61, 165–82, 202–3, 214–17 Geoffrey of Monmouth : Historia regum Britanniae 94 Vita Merlini 204 Gísla saga Súrrssonar 56–7 Glover, Julian  137 ‘Gnomic Verses’  36, 38–9 ; see also Maxims Godden, Malcolm  28

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Y Gododdin 96–7 Godwin, Fay : Elmet (and Remains of Elmet)  7, 237–53, figures 13.1, 13.2 Gokstad ship  131–2 Goldenthal, Elliot : Grendel (opera)  8, 147–8, 155–63, plates IV–VI Goodman, Nelson  117 Gorrie, Bruce  9 Gregory of Tours  21 Gregory the Great : Pastoral Care (Old English version)  126 Grigsby, John  23 Grimm, Jacob  22 Grisewood, Harman  96 Gummere, Francis  142, 144 Halbrooks, John  8 Hamðismál 54 Hanf, Brigitte  134 Harris, Joseph  196 Hávamál 97–8 Heaney, Seamus  xi, 5, 89, 95, 257, 270 Beowulf translation  xii, 3, 6, 8, 26–7, 129–30, 140–42, 185–95 ‘Bone Dreams’  1–3 ‘Helmet’  8, 14, 26–9 North  xi, 1, 7 helmets  26–8, 130–38, 140, 141–2, 143, 145, figure 7.3, plates I, III Hengist/Hengest and Horsa  11, 74, 94 heroism  7–8, 20, 26, 142, 93–4, 98–9, 142, 143–5, 152, 155–61, 165, 171–82, 185, 190, 191, 194–5, 207, 211, 213–14 Hiatt, Charles  162 Hill, Geoffrey  48, 257, 270, 276 Mercian Hymns  xi, 8, 219–35, 267 Hinds, Gareth : Beowulf (graphic novel)  142– 4, plates I, II Hirschman, Albert  205–6 historicism  15–17, 21, 28 Hodgkin, R.H.  96, 99, 107 Hopkins, Anthony  2, 20 Horn (Auchinleck version)  204 Howe, Nicholas  221, 266 Hrafnkels saga freysgoða 55–6 Hughes, Ted  238–9 Elmet (and Remains of Elmet)  7, 237-53, figures 13.1, 13.2 Wodwo  240 n. The Husband’s Message   271 Huxley, T.H.  37 The Iliad   268 Irving, Henry  162

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Index 281 Isidore of Seville : Etymologiae  80, 125 James, P.D. : Death in Holy Orders  8, 183–95, 196, 199 James, Henry  162–3 Jefferson, Thomas  4 Jolie, Angelina  2, 22–3, 26 Johnson, Anna  6 Jones, Chris  2, 8, 31–2, 52–3 Jones, David  6–7, 8, 89–109 The Anathemata   6, 89–90, 91, 100–102, 104–9 In Parenthesis  6, 89–104, 108–9 letter forms  105–7 Jordan, Ellen  177 Joyce, James  62, 89, 100, 274 Kantorowicz, Ernst  230–34 Keeping, Charles  134 Kennan, George  40 Kiernan, Kevin  15 Kipling, Rudyard  7 Puck of Pook’s Hill 209–12 Klaeber, Friedrich  131–2, 194 ; see also Beowulf (Old English poem), editions of Klawitter, Ule  270–71 landscape and nature  1–2, 6, 8, 10–12, 36–41, 56, 62, 92–3, 142, 144, 151–3, 155–7, 169–70, 188–9, 212, 237–53 Langland, William : Piers Plowman 105 Lapidge, Michael  15, 47 La Salle University  175 Lees, Clare A.  7, 180 Lejre 15 Leonard, William Ellery : translation of Beowulf  132–5, 139, 141 Leyerle, John  112, 113–19, 139 Lindisfarne Gospels ; see under manuscripts Liuzza, Roy M.  18 n., 141–2 Locke, John  41 London University  4 The Mabinogion   94 MacBeth, George  268 Mackie, Sheila  139–40, plate III MacKinnon, Lachlann  258 MacLean, Simon  17 n. Manning, Robert : Chronicle 118 manuscripts : Dijon, Municipal Library MS 168  136–7 Exeter, Dean and Chapter MS 3501 (The Exeter Book)  10, 258–9

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Index

manuscripts (cont.) : London, BL MS Cotton Nero D.IV (The Lindisfarne Gospels)  112, 113–19, 121–4, 126–7, 139 London, BL MS Cotton Vespasian A.I (The Vespasian Psalter)  8, 85, 220 n. London, BL MS Cotton Vitellius A.XV (incl. The Nowell Codex)  13, 14, 17, 20, 28, 139–40, 166 Vercelli, Cathedral Library MS CXVII (The Vercelli Book)  90, 107 Martin, Isabel  260–61 masculinity ; see heroism, and gender and sexuality Maxims  178–9 ; see also ‘Gnomic Verses’ McClatchy, J.D.  155, 159–60 Milton, John  35 modernism  xi, 53, 67, 91, 113, 119, 120, 257, 259, 276 Montelius, Oscar  132–3 Moore, Alan : Watchmen series  160–61 Morgan, Edwin  95 Morris, William  9, 209 Müller, Max  40 Napier, A.S.  5 nationalism and national identity  3–7, 11–12, 19–20, 33, 51, 91, 94–104, 119–20, 206–12, 216–17, 222–3, 238, 240, 244 Nennius : Historia Britonum  91, 241–2 Niles, John D.  20 n., 140–42, 143 Norse, Old (mythology and literature)  6, 51–69, 75–9, 196–9, 202–4, 214–15, 239–40 ; see also runes Ragnarök 59–64 poetic style and metre  5–6, 53, 64–9 Nowell Codex ; see under manuscripts Nowell, Laurence  72 Ó Carragáin, Éamonn  107–8 O’Donoghue, Heather  5 O’Driscoll, Dennis  26 Óðinn/Odin  51, 57–8, 64, 66, 77, 97–8, 102, 104, 196 Offa, king of Mercia  8, 219–34 Öland archaeological finds  132–4, figures 7.1, 7.2 Orchard, Andy  115 Orosius (Old English text)  84–5, 87 Osborn, Marijane  134, 138–40, 141 Oseberg Ship  139 Oxford English Dictionary  3, 222 n. Oxford University  4–5, 52

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Paolini, Christopher  214 Paulin, Tom  256 The Phoenix   36 Pippin/Pepin, Carolingian king  233 Podhoretz, John  160–61 Pope, Alexander  269, 277 Pound, Ezra  2, 31–2, 89, 259 n. The Cantos 32 ‘The Seafarer’  31–2, 45–7 Powell, F. York  4 n. Propertius 268 Queen’s University Belfast  3 Reading, Peter  7, 255–77, figures 14.1–14.4 Robin of Sherwood (television series)  213 Robinson, Fred C.  31 Rosen, David  180, 181 The Ruin   256, 264, 266 runes  106–7, 143, 203, 211, 271–3, 277, figures 14.3, 14.4 Ruthwell Cross  4 n., 10, 107–8, 115, 117, 123 Sagar, Keith  244 Saussure, Ferdinand de  32 Sawles Warde 52 Schmitt, Carl  219–20, 224–5, 228 Schramm, Percy  233 Scott, Walter  7, 206 Kenilworth  206–8, 211, 214 The Seafarer   xi, 31–2, 33, 39, 45–9, 74, 193, 248, 249–50, 260 Searle, W.G. : Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum 80 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  44–8 Siewers, Alfred  245 Silkin, John  220–21 Silverman, David  215–16 Simmons, Clare  206–7 The Simpsons   7, 215–16 Skinner, Richard  10 Smith, Ken  258 Snartemo Sword  136 Snorri Sturluson  57, 63 Prose Edda  60–61, 63, 75 Sonatorrek  196–9 ; see also Egils saga Staffordshire Hoard  6 Stanley, Eric  11 n., 23, 35–6 Stenton, F.M.  222 Stjerna, Knut  134, 141 Stock, Brian  206, 211 Stewart, Mary : The Hollow Hills 213 Strickland Brooch  136 Sutcliffe, Rosemary  9

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Sutherland, John  208 Sutton Hoo  28, 115, 136 Sutton Hoo helmet ; see helmets Sweet, Henry  31–49 Anglo-Saxon Reader  xi, 2, 8, 31–49, 98, 220, 233 ‘Shelley’s Nature Poetry’  44–8 ‘Words, Logic, and Grammar’  37–8, 40, 41 Swift, Jonathan  256, 269–70 Taylor, Paul  51 Taymor, Julie  147, 159–62 Tennyson, Alfred  9, 206 The 13th Warrior   9 Thommasini, Anthony  147, 159, 161 Thórkelin, Grímur Jónsson  131 Thorpe, Benjamin  33 Tolkien, Christopher  83, 84, 85 Tolkien, J.R.R.  5, 8, 11, 51–2, 71–88, 114, 130–31, 144 Annals of Beleriand  75, 82–8 Annals of Valinor  71–2, 75, 82–8 Elvish languages  73–4, 78, 81–6 Notion Club Papers 88 Quenta Noldorinwa  75, 82, 87 Trench, Archbishop Richard  41 Tuan, Yi-Fu  237, 238 Tylor, Edward Burnett  37–8, 41 Þiðreks saga 204 Uslan, Michael ; see Beowulf : Dragon Slayer Vespasian Psalter ; see under manuscripts Victoria and Albert Museum  3–4

Anglo-Saxon Culture.indb 283

Vietnam War  165–6, 173–7 Vikings  3, 9 n., 99, 120, 135, 143 Villamonte, Ricardo ; see Beowulf : Dragon Slayer Vinaver, Eugène  118 Vǫlundarkviða  202–3, 214–15 Vǫlundr ; see Wayland (the) Smith Vǫluspá  59, 61 Wallinger, Mark  10–12 The Wanderer   xi, 33, 35, 39, 52, 74, 193, 248, 256, 260, 261 Ward, Lynd  134–5 Wayland (the) Smith  7, 76, 201–17 Wayland’s Smithy  11 n., 203–4 Weber, Max  205–6 Wheeler, John  176, 177 Whitelock, Dorothy  34, 39, 188, 196, 198 The Wife’s Lament   254 Wilcockson, Colin  107 Winstone, Ray  2, 22, 25–6 Wóden  76, 77 World Trade Center, New York  27 World War I  8, 89–94, 96–102, 104, 108–9, 211 World War II  8, 227–8, 230 Wrenn, C.L.  35 Wright, David  24 n. Wulfstan the homilist  75, 76 Yeats, W.B.  62, 68–9 Zemeckis, Robert  2, 18–26 ; see also Beowulf (2007 film) Zukovsky, Louis  113

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ASCulture:ASCultureModernImagination 03/08/2010 12:39 Page 1

ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE AND THE MODERN IMAGINATION

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com

Front cover: ‘Beowulf ’s Journey’, by Gavin Bone (1907–42), from his Beowulf in Modern Verse with an Essay and Pictures (Oxford, 1945) by permission of Wiley-Blackwell. Bone taught at St John’s College, Oxford, where his students included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Back cover: Exeter Riddle Sculpture, by Michael Fairfax (2005), used with permission.

Clark and Perkins (eds)

Britain’s pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, and from high modernism to the musclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They offer fresh insights on established figures, such as W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such as Geoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P.D. James, and Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beowulf into Grendel – as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment.

ANGLO-SAXON CULTURE and the MODERN IMAGINATION

EDITED BY DAVID CLARK & NICHOLAS PERKINS