MS Junius 11 and its Poetry (York Manuscript and Early Print Studies, 6) 9781914049132, 9781800109186, 1914049136

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York Manuscript and Early Print Studies Volume 6

MS Junius 11 and its Poetry

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2023) Peter Biller, Emeritus (Dept of History): General Editor Tim Ayers (Dept of History of Art): Co-Director, Centre for Medieval Studies Henry Bainton: Private scholar K. P. Clarke (Dept of English and Related Literature) K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology) Shazia Jagot (Dept of English and Related Literature) Holly James-Maddocks (Dept of English and Related Literature) Harry Munt (Dept of History) L. J. Sackville (Dept of History) Elizabeth M. Tyler (Dept of English and Related Literature): Co-Director, Centre for Medieval Studies Hanna Vorholt (Dept of History of Art) Sethina Watson (Dept of History) J. G. Wogan-Browne (English Faculty, Fordham University) Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Dept of Archaeology) All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, Department of History, University of York, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD (E-mail: [email protected])

York Manuscript and Early Print Studies Series Editors

Orietta Da Rold (Cambridge) Holly James-Maddocks (York) A description of the series and a list of published titles may be found at the end of this volume.

MS Junius 11 and its Poetry

Carl Kears

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

© Carl Kears 2023 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 The right of Carl Kears to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2023 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press 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 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN 978-1-914049-13-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-800109-18-6 (ePDF) 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 Cover image: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, p. 225 (By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, CC-BY-NC 4.0)

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vi vii ix



Introduction 1

1

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A

34

2

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B

67

3

Reading, Misreading and the Red Sea: the Journey to Ræd in Exodus

102

4

Rise and Fall Again in the Old English Daniel

135

5

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle

163

Afterword Bibliography Index

197 211 223

Illustrations 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 2: portrait of Ælfwine 30 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page ii and page 1: frontispiece of the creator enthroned alongside the opening lines of Genesis A 40–1

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, pages 2 and 3: description of Lucifer’s high throne in poetry with image of the creator and attending angels alongside a full-page image of the fall of the rebel angels 50–1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 13: beginning of Genesis B with illustration of Adam and Eve in Eden Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 20: depiction of Satan’s messenger

68 96

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 143: the beginning of Exodus

103

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 213: the beginning of Christ and Satan

164

The ‘punches’ of Franciscus Junius

201

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 171: the end of Exodus 133

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 225: rosette illustration 175 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11, page 35: circle of hell imprint from page 36

208

Full credit details are provided in the captions to the images in the text. The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements

I

have been thinking about Junius 11 for far too long and it is a manuscript that resists me still. It has a way of making us go around in circles, just like the devils that frequent its poems and pictures. Thankfully, the many people to whom I owe gratitude here have been more straightforward in their generosity, and much less cryptic, than my subject matter. First and foremost, I thank two mentors who have guided me into and through the early stages of my work in the discipline. I owe so much to Clare Lees, not only for her boundless ræd and direction but for her ever-evolving, creative and ground-breaking scholarship. And to Josh Davies: thank you for your wisdom, patience, and work – and for always being at the end of a line during my first years in a job at King’s College London. The English Department at King’s has been such a vibrant and supportive environment. I am especially thankful to Richard Kirkland, Janet Floyd, Anna Snaith, Luke Roberts, Emrys Jones, Hannah Crawforth and Jon Ward for their insights and guidance. To my medievalist colleagues at King’s and the Centre of Late Antique and Medieval Studies I am truly indebted for the community you foster and the support you create. Sarah Salih and Lawrence Warner are a huge part of this: thank you for being such unique and imaginative scholars. I look up to those early career medievalists I was fortunate enough to work with at King’s when they were here: Bethany Whalley, Victoria Walker, Rebecca Hardie, Kathryn Maude, Hana Videen – I am in awe! Many Old English and Junius 11 scholars have shared their work and discussed this old, mysterious manuscript with me. Thanks to Roy Liuzza and Susan Irvine for their invaluable advice on developing this project when it was in its early stages. Thanks to Daniel Anlezark, Andrew Scheil, Peter Lucas, Paul Remley, David Johnson, Daniel Donoghue, Scott Smith, Andrew Rabin and Jill Fitzgerald. Your enthusiasm and willingness to answer my questions have been important reminders of the kindness that flows through Medieval Studies. Thanks to Robert Hampson, too, for offering direction in the realms of old and new poetries. I am grateful to Daniel Wakelin for inviting me to present on Junius 11 in its current home city, at the University of Oxford’s Medieval English Research Seminar, where discussions helped clarify some of this book’s key interests. My approach to Old English will continue to find inspiration in the research of those with whom I have been lucky enough to collaborate on things other than Junius 11: James Paz, Francesca Brooks

viii    Acknowledgements

and Francesca Allfrey always remind me of the great possibilities of the early medieval past in the present. I am so fortunate to have been able to learn from them. Friendship is what gets one through a book project. George Legg, from those early British Library undergraduate days till now, has been my great accomplice and the real ‘best man’ (here’s to many more BL ‘sit-downs’). Thanks Zach Hines and Phil Cockburn for being there through thick and thin. I cannot say ‘thank you’ enough to Nigel Wright, and to Jo Carroll and the Stag’s Head itself: without your help and your hospitality, I would not have stuck this out. To Yvonne Perry, Anna Söderström and Terry Jones: thanks for saving me – I will never forget it. I thank Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer for her willingness to help this project become what it needed to be (and for her wit and her emails, which have brightened even the bleakest of football seasons). Holly James-Maddocks, Orietta Da Rold and Peter Biller at York Medieval Press have been so sharp, receptive and considerate – thanks to them. I cannot begin to outline my debts to the anonymous reader for YMP, whose detailed comments and encouragement on the first draft of this project brought what I was really looking for in Junius 11 into view, helping me improve it in every department. I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and to Oxford University Press Archives, for their permission to use images. Thank you to Gillian Escott and Steven Kears for their love and support. Thanks, too, to Malcolm Jackson for everything he’s done for us, and to Dionne Graham, Dunny G and the rugrats for making home feel like it was never too far away. To Henry Escott Snr, the true poet, the next book will be for you and Sarah Escott (and the north!), but this ‘orange’ is for Charlotte (and the south!) because she has lived with Junius for so long, her love and lightning getting me through the long process of (re-)patching it all together.

Abbreviations ASC

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, gen. ed. D. M. Dumville and S. Keynes (Cambridge, 1983–) ASE Anglo-Saxon England ASPR The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, ed. G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie, 6 vols. (New York, 1931–42) BL London, The British Library B-T Bosworth, J., An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph BosworthToller, ed. T. Northcote Toller (Oxford, 1882) Councils and Synods Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church. Volume I: A.D. 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1981) DOE Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. A. Cameron, A. C. Amos, A. diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto, 2018) EETS Early English Text Society OS  Original Series SS  Supplementary Series EHD English Historical Documents c. 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents 1, 2nd edn (London, 1979) JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen N&Q Notes & Queries OE Old English PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–64) PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association RES Review of English Studies S Sawyer, P. H., Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968) UL University Library

Introduction

O

ver one thousand years ago, a collaborative bookmaking project was commissioned in the south of England. It was one of many to be set in motion around the time of the first millennium and it was ambitious: compilers, scribes and artists amassed material that would allow them to construct a manuscript of illustrated vernacular poetry, one that represented the cycle of salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. These particular book-crafters were innovative. They set about their work on what would be a visually arresting object that could sit on display, perhaps at the altar. Poems collected in this compilation, preserved and archived as part of a new assembly, could also be read for guidance and instruction. Poetic accounts of fallen figures and prideful tyrants failing in their endeavours would highlight the perils of poor rulership in dramatic terms, offering the potential for rumination. Those reading and viewing these poems, such as the manuscript’s patrons or recipients, maybe even counsellors or ministers, would be able to trace connections across pages while reflecting on the disasters that had come to those striving to match the immensity of God. The project was never fully realised. There are signs now that some of its production was interrupted. Yet, the work that was set down has survived and it is bound in leather and known by various titles, most commonly by its shelf-mark: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11.1 Despite, or perhaps because of, this manuscript’s seemingly unfinished state, names, places, half-truths, legends and events have gathered around its contents over the centuries. Cædmon, the divinely inspired, illiterate cowherd that Bede tells us miraculously sang Christian poems in English, was once thought to have been the composer of the manuscript’s verse. 2 Although it is a myth now dispelled by philology, the tie with Cædmon has its strongest roots in the For a facsimile, see A Digital Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, ed. B. J. Muir, Bodleian Digital Texts 1 (Oxford, 2004). 2 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 4.24. See C. E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001), p. 187. The work of Franciscus Junius meant that the Cædmon connection persisted into the twentieth century. Continuation can be seen in The Cædmon Manuscript of Anglo-Saxon Biblical Poetry, ed. I. Gollancz (Oxford, 1927) and into more recent times with The Cædmon Poems: A Verse Translation of Anglo-Saxon Christian Poetry, trans. D. Love (Ely, 2014). But, as Paul Remley writes, ‘the fact remains that we have no 1

2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

work of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677), the collector who gives Junius 11 its more common title. Junius entitled his edition of the manuscript (the first edition of an Old English poetic codex) Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum in 1655.3 In linking this early medieval book and its origins with Cædmon, Junius represents an early reader attempting to unite the poems of the manuscript as the work of one poet. This desire for unity persists. But attempts to view Junius 11 as a unified or straightforward poetic narrative of history have always been in tension with endeavours to understand the empty spaces left for illustrations and with the lack of consensus on how to read it as a ‘whole’. Likewise, the illuminations that were set down in Junius 11 clash with some of the manuscript’s other piecemeal, faded drawings that prove difficult to link with events depicted in the poetry. When compared to the other major surviving manuscripts of Old English poetry – the Beowulf Manuscript (London, BL, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv), the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501) and the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII) – Junius 11 stands out as the only collection to have an extensive, planned sequence of illuminations.4 Images corresponding to events from the poetry of Genesis reach page 88 (where there reliable means to determine who composed any of the Junius poems’, Old English Biblical Verse: Studies in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel (Cambridge, 1996), p. 5. 3 See Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum, ed. F. Junius (Amsterdam, 1655) and the facsimile, Franciscus Junius, Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica Genesios ac praecipuarum sacrae paginae historiarum, ed. P. J. Lucas (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 2000). On page i of the manuscript, someone has written ‘Cædmonis Paraphrasis Poetica’. The manuscript was given to Junius by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (1581–1686), a collector. How Ussher himself came to possess the manuscript remains a mystery. He was involved with the University of Dublin, particularly in the gathering of books for their library, and may have found Junius 11 somewhere on his travels. See W. O’Sullivan, ‘Ussher as a Collector of Manuscripts’, Hermathena 88 (1956), 34–58. 4 The Junius images have attracted much critical attention. See G. Henderson, ‘The Programme of Illustrations in Bodleian MS Junius XI’, in Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice, ed. G. Robertson and G. Henderson (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 113– 45; P. Z. Blum, ‘The Cryptic Creation Cycle in MS Junius xi’, Gesta 15.1/2 (1976), 211–26; B. Raw, ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48; T. Ohlgren, Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Catalogue c. A.D. 625 to 1100 (New York, 1986), pp. 141–8; Karkov, Text and Picture; H. R. Broderick III, ‘Metatextuality, Sexuality and Intervisuality in MS Junius 11’, Word & Image 25 (2011), 384–401; Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 235–46; A. S. Mittman and S. M. Kim, ‘Locating the Devil “Her” in MS Junius 11’, Gesta 54.1 (2015), 3–25.

Introduction  3

is an image of Abraham and his followers reaching the walled city of Egypt), although an illustration of a scene between two men, possibly Abraham receiving a message, is found on page 96 in a later hand.5 There are forty-eight pictures in total, but there are also additional partly finished drawings, designs and almost-hidden markings. Junius 11 is also unique among these poetic books because its individual poems – known now by their editorial titles as Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan – were arranged to resemble a long narrative. While some illuminated manuscripts containing translations of the Old Testament into vernacular prose, such as the Old English Hexateuch (London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv), were commissioned in the eleventh century, Junius 11 remains the only example of a collection of Old English poetry with an overarching scheme that corresponds roughly to the cycle of salvation history as it was understood in early medieval England.6 It appears that something more than the framework and order of biblical history underlined the project, however: the poems that were copied into Junius 11 combine and merge with one another in ways that suggest an alternative representation of a linear Heilsgeschichte (that idea of history as the work of God’s salvific power) was being crafted by the manuscript’s makers. Sometimes, events mentioned or detailed in the Old Testament and its apocrypha are told more than once, often in much greater detail and in vernacular terms that reflect early medieval cultural or socio-political interests. Some poems return to or echo events from others. In its current state the codex generates warnings and impressions that arise from and are particular to the combination of Old English poetry it contains, suggesting that the interests of compilers and their manuscript project can be usefully defined by the language and the concerns of the poems themselves.7 Muir (Digital Facsimile), in his note on this image, writes that it is ‘not relevant for a discussion of Anglo-Saxon illustration’. However it is yet another sign of interaction with the manuscript long after its inception. 6 For the Hexateuch see B. C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2007). 7 Two edited collections on the Junius 11 poetry pave the way. See The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New York, 2002), in which many past essays on Junius 11 were reprinted, and Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. M. Fox and M. Sharma (Toronto and London, 2012), in which one section is devoted to the Old Testament parts of Junius 11. Old Testament Narratives, ed. and trans. D. Anlezark (Cambridge MA, 2011), offers accessible translations of the Old Testament poems of Junius 11. The book-length study of Junius 11 as a manuscript of poems that would have appealed to a variety of audiences is J. 5

4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

This book examines Junius 11 as a compilation of poetry, one made over time, in which poems with their own histories work together to provide a range of models of what to follow and of what to avoid for manuscript audiences. While it seeks to represent salvation history, the manuscript makes possible, and perhaps even demands, the forming of connections across its folios – and these ask us to consider the relations or similarities between those fallen or saved within this course of history. Reasons that communities or individuals fell to ruin, the manuscript wants us to acknowledge, were related across the ages. As the poetry of Junius 11 returns frequently to a similar set of thematic preoccupations and reiterations as one moves through it, so too it continues to invoke what R. T. Farrell in his work on the Old English Daniel called ‘thematic vocabulary’: recurring words that refer to concepts or ideas and signal a major theme.8 MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that thematic connections across the codex occur on the level of language. Examining such thematic language in conjunction with the subject matter of these poems draws us to a consistent interest across the Junius poetry in the application of good counsel and in warning readers about the perils of ill-counsel and misinterpretation. By extension, the manuscript itself seeks to offer its own advice and counsel by encouraging contemplation of its portrayals of those who failed in their struggles against heaven. This book is just one version of a long process of reading and re-reading Junius 11 today, being shaped as it is by my own reflections on what seems to keep emerging and re-emerging from this poetry as I return to it again and again.9 But MS Junius 11 and its Poetry also suggests that reading the Junius poems in granular detail leads us towards surviving early medieval literary and political texts for aid and context because the language of the manuscript text itself often echoes a variety of documents and treatises from that period, demanding we acknowledge parallels and find in sources beyond Junius 11’s pages signs of how the codex itself came to be. S. Ericksen, Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 (Toronto, 2021). Cathy Hume has demonstrated that Middle English biblical poetic works from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries such as the Canticum de Creatione and Iacob and Iosep have been overlooked as creative works with political impact, and that these texts can be read more productively as indebted to romance (rather than as mere ‘biblical’ paraphrases). See C. Hume, Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition (Cambridge, 2021). 8 Daniel and Azarias, ed. Farrell (London, 1974), pp. 34–5. 9 Writing about the work of Benjamin Thorpe and Bede, who both ruminate on the ‘unknowability of Cædmon’s life’, Joshua Davies reminds us that ‘the moment of composition is not the only moment that defines a text’. See J. Davies, Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester, 2018), p. 19.

Introduction  5

As we work through Junius 11, its poems can be studied closely and individually, but is that how they were meant to be viewed? Whether they were or not, it is difficult to escape the fact that the manuscript contains different kinds of poetry. Each poem brings something important to the compilation, and each one is worthy of its own study, and yet the arrangement of the poems asks us to see them as part of a larger, poetic version of history where distinctions between the works of individual poets may be less significant than the accumulation of concerns produced across the book that houses them. Keeping a hold on the fact that different poems have been brought to Junius 11 remains important, however: it leads us to acknowledge that the manuscript’s poetic cycle has been crafted through processes of combining diverse works for the purposes of a larger or more extensive project that allows these poems to echo one another’s interests and views. A close reading of the poetry or of all the poems in the Junius 11 sequence can point us to these shared interests on the level of Old English poetic diction, which can reveal in more specific ways the importance of these poems for those who copied and compiled them. My examination of Junius 11 from such a perspective has led to this study being informed by two Old English concepts that also represent key themes in the codex: OE ræd and OE unræd. On the opening, foundational pages of the manuscript, the introductory section of the poem known as Genesis A tells us that a lack of ‘ræd’ (‘counsel, advice’) underlies Lucifer’s choice to pursue a rebellion in heaven (Genesis A, l. 24a).10 Throughout the manuscript, OE unræd (‘evil counsel, ill-advised course, bad plan, folly’),11 and a variety of related, vernacular semantic groupings that evoke a lack of good counsel or lawlessness (such as OE unriht) are pervasive and they characterise the actions of those figures from biblical history who fall or come to disaster. OE ræd and OE unræd evoke early medieval cultural ideas about successful and unsuccessful governance, but also suggest how these were linked to interpretation and misreading in political thought: as Nicholas Howe points out, the related OE verb rædan has meanings that range from suggesting ‘the giving of counsel’ to ‘the explanation of something obscure’,12 and Bosworth-Toller’s definition outlines the word’s multivalency and its connection to political action (the verb can also mean ‘to read a riddle’ and ‘to resolve after deliberation, to decide’ or ‘to rule, govern, B-T, s.v. ræd, I and III. All quotations from Genesis A are from Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised, ed. A. N. Doane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 435 (Tempe AZ, 2013), cited by line number. 11 B-T, s.v. unræd, I. 12 N. Howe, ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New Haven CT, 2002), pp. 1–23 (pp. 4–5). 10

6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

direct’),13 while the role of reading, interpretation and counselling in lawmaking is further suggested by the frequent use of OE gerædnes (‘an ordinance, a decree’) to refer to the outcome of a meeting of a king and his counsellors. Ræd and unræd are words that occur frequently in the Junius poetry: they define the opposition between good and bad angels in the manuscript’s poetic version of Genesis, for example, while the pursuit of everlasting ræd defines the version of the Israelite migration we find in Junius 11’s episodes drawn out from the biblical Exodus. The consistent interest of the poems in counsel (and in related subjects of good and bad rule, rightful and wrongful interpretation) across a manuscript might also suggest that Junius 11, by implicitly and sometimes explicitly inviting rumination on such events, also seeks to offer ræd. That Old Testament-related subject matter inherited by early medieval culture should be concerned with political themes of counsel and ill-counsel on a large scale is perhaps less surprising when we consider that the Bible had a profound effect on authorities and kings who sought to promote wisdom and reform across the period. Surviving material associated with King Alfred is a good example of this: Asser’s Vita offers many insights into the king’s pursuit of Solomonic sapientia, while Alfred’s Domboc (his compilation of law completed in the late ninth century) begins with translations of the Ten Commandments and sixty-six segments of Mosaic law (drawn from Exodus 20–23.19), demonstrating, in Patrick Wormald’s words, that Alfred was ‘willing to adapt Holy Writ itself if he thus conveyed a clearer message to his audience’.14 Old English poetry, and particularly Old English poetry that resources the biblical and extra-biblical (outside of Junius 11, we might think of poems such as Andreas, Elene or Judith), often adapts and reworks its source material to a much greater and more dramatic extent than, say, the translation of Exodus into the prose Domboc, yet the Junius poems and their emphases – which often turn to narratives of political strife in heaven and on earth, the work of divine or earthly rule, or the pitfalls of the ill-counselled or deceived – may also have provided versions of scriptural history that were able to become rich storehouses of political guidance. The role of vernacular poetry in generating advice within political environments in Pre-Conquest England is suggested by another example from the literature associated with the court of King Alfred: the verse Preface to the Old English Boethius. The Preface presents Alfred as a king that ‘cræft meldode / leoðwyrhta list’ (made known his craft, his skill as a poet) before telling 13 14

B-T, s.v. rædan, VIa, III, IV. P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999, repr. 2001), p. 421.

Introduction  7

us that Alfred had a great desire to ‘leoð spellode / monnum myrgen’ (speak verse, entertainment for men; ll. 4b-5a) and thus the voice associated with Alfred proclaims ‘Ic sceal giet sprecan / fon on fitte, folccuðne ræd / hæleðum secgean. Hliste se þe wille’ (‘I must yet speak, engage in poetry, tell well-known good counsel to men. Let him listen who will’; ll. 8b-10).15 Writing about this passage, Karmen Lenz argues that these lines emphasise ‘that poetic teaching cultivates the intellect’ and that ‘poetry will edify the mind with its comprehensive teaching’.16 Poetry was important to the distribution of wisdom and, as the Alfredian Preface suggests, of ræd. Although the Junius poems offer examples of those who fall because of the nature of their bad counsel (including Lucifer, Cain, the builders of the Tower of Babel and the Israelites at Jerusalem) and of those who rise because they adhere to law and rightfully interpret it, these accounts themselves could also offer ræd and instruction to the careful reader. Connections between the poems across the manuscript, particularly those that occur on the level of poetic language, present the potential for readers to trace examples of ræd and unræd back and forth and, as Janet Schrunk Ericksen writes, ‘to look for non-sequential connections, overlaps’, and re-read, challenging their own ability to rædan while doing so.17 I will return to how each poem in Junius 11 presents accounts that might have offered counsel to those in need of ræd, or to those engaged in providing ræd, in more specific terms later. But first it will be important to overview the compilation itself, as well as critical attempts to explain it, to think further about the ways the manuscript might have been arranged to encourage meditation on its poetry and to promote re-reading, as well as reading back and forth, for the purposes of receiving useful advice.

The make-up and making of Junius 11

Although the illustration cycle of Junius 11 remains unfinished, the manuscript certainly had early if not contemporary readers. Its pages show signs of contact and interaction in the decades following its initial production (the I have used the prosimetrical ‘C-Text’ (London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho A.vi) of The Old English Boethius from The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, ed. M. Godden and S. Irvine, with a chapter on the Metres by M. Griffith and contributions by R. Jayatilaka, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009). MS Cotton Otho A.vi is a ‘composite manuscript containing a tenth-century copy of the OE translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in verse and prose, ff. 1–129’, p. 18. 16 K. Lenz, ‘Ræd’ and ‘Frofer’: Christian Poetics in the Old English Froferboc Meters, with a Foreword by K. Otten (Amsterdam, 2012), pp. 10–11. 17 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 67. 15

8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

drawing on page 96, for instance). It was re-bound and was still being read in the twelfth century, when many other manuscripts containing Old English works suffered crueller fates. One of the signs that the manuscript was not completely abandoned after the initial phase of its production began to slow down is the structure of the compilation itself, which scholarship often divides into two sections or books known as ‘Liber I’ and ‘Liber II’.18 The first is made up of the Old Testament poems known as Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus and Daniel, all written out by one scribe. The poetry of ‘Liber II’, which takes up the last eighteen pages of the manuscript as it stands, is the work of at least three different scribal hands, and it contains the poem known as Christ and Satan, which itself is a composite of narrative and homiletic poetry, including accounts of Christ’s triumphs at the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement.19 The script of Christ and Satan appears a little more erratic than the work of ‘Liber I’ – it is ‘faded in parts’ and its appearance suggests ‘scribes were hurrying to complete their task’.20 Janet Schrunk Ericksen also notes that these pages ‘appear rather splotchy, stained and worn, with margins of varying sizes; while the two or three hands are still beautiful, none of the scribes is the single scribe of the preceding poems’.21 Those who sought to include ‘Liber II’ as part of this collection seem to have been moved by an urgency to offer an ending of some kind to the other material in the book. This is suggested by the last line of text in the manuscript, at the end of Christ and Satan, which reads ‘Finit Liber II. Amen’. As Robert T. Farrell notes, the copyist of the first, Old Testament portion of Junius 11 might not have thought of their work as a ‘first book’ in the way that those writing out Christ and Satan were viewing it.22 The lack of a ‘Finit Liber I’ or equivalent has contributed to the idea that Christ and Satan The foundational examination of the structure of the codex is B. Raw, ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 13 (1984), 187–207. Raw points out the two notes in hands dated to the twelfth century (on pages 212 and 219) and two twelfth-century drawings (a lion-like beast at the bottom of p. 31 and the two men talking on p. 96), which suggest that there was medieval interest in the codex at least up until the twelfth century. 19 There are seventeen gatherings. A bifolium appears to have been lost between pages 148 and 149 and one leaf is missing between page 164 and 165. Genesis takes up the first eleven gatherings; Exodus twelve and thirteen in addition to three of fourteen; Daniel takes up the end of fourteen through to the first page of seventeen; Christ and Satan occupies the remainder of gathering seventeen. 20 Christ and Satan: A Critical Edition, ed. R. E. Finnegan (Waterloo ONT, 1977), pp. 4–5. 21 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 140. 22 Daniel and Azarias, ed. R. T. Farrell, pp. 32–4. 18

Introduction  9

was a much later addition to the compilation, though it seems to have been integrated into the manuscript by a group of scribes with good knowledge of the ‘Liber I’ material they were expanding. This is evident in the way the poetry of ‘Liber II’ re-generates many of the concerns present in ‘Liber I’, doing so from a Christological perspective and offering variations on Lucifer’s plight as well as presenting us with salvific events in which Christ exercises his power over devilry. As I will discuss in this book, Christ and Satan also looks back and refers to events contained in the Genesis poems (such as the fall of Eve) as well as to commentaries on reading and interpretation present in the poetic Exodus. Key words, key passages, are echoed and repeated, including those that seem particular to these poems. One of the immediate things a reader of Junius 11 must contemplate, then, is a material object that was produced in stages in which poems keep returning to similar events, cataclysms and themes. What we are left with is a voluminous book made up of different, related poems and of images ranging from the dazzling and violent to the faint and roughly drawn. The pages on which these are written out show signs of unfinished business, of failure and of later intrusion.23 Yet, these pages of the manuscript, and especially of ‘Liber I’, betray what Daniel Donoghue calls ‘a carefully structured text in which both sense and meter are clearly signposted’ – that is, the Junius 11 poetry is marked very consistently at half-lines with a metrical point, larger sections within the poems are not only emphasised by section numbering but also ‘a more emphatic triangle of three points, a punctus versus, or a punctus elevatus’.24 This suggests, perhaps again in tension with some of the manuscript’s more piecemeal features (Christ and Satan, for instance, or the interpolation of Genesis B into Genesis A), that Junius 11, at least at some stage, had ambitions of being read as a sequence with sections that could be pondered in relation to others. Donoghue highlights how Junius 11 might be understood as a ‘textual production’ because its metrical pointing ‘foregrounds’ to some extent ‘scribal

The gaps for illustrations left throughout the poems Exodus and Daniel invited Peter Lucas to propose a scheme of illustrations for them. For the images that might have illustrated Daniel, see Lucas, ‘On the Incomplete Ending of Daniel and the Addition of Christ and Satan to Ms. Junius 11’, Anglia 97 (1979), 46–59. For those proposed for Exodus, see Exodus, ed. Lucas, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1994). B. Raw, ‘Probable Derivation’, has demonstrated that many of the Junius 11 illustrations, particularly those of Adam and Eve and the fall of the angels, parallel those in the Bamberg, Grandval and Vivian Bibles in addition to those in the Utrecht Psalter, all of which were produced in continental Europe in the late ninth century. 24 D. Donoghue, How the Anglo-Saxons Read their Poems (Philadelphia, 2018), p. 73. 23

1 0    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

conventions’.25 And so we struggle to reconcile the content and presentation of Junius 11 with its gaps and missing pieces, its first ‘book’ with its second. Barbara Raw and M. D. Clubb argued for the writing out of ‘Liber II’ as a project that took place after the work on the first portion of the manuscript slowed down, but, in Raw’s words, the addition of Christ and Satan was ‘a fairly early afterthought’.26 A. N. Doane writes that the blank spaces left for illustrations as well as the ‘cessation of decorated initials’ seen as one moves through Junius 11 suggest ‘that services on this manuscript were being gradually withdrawn’.27 While Leslie Lockett’s cross-disciplinary study of Junius 11 marked out a date for ‘Liber I’ as c. 960–c. 990, her brief remarks on the three scribes of ‘Liber II’ note that they use a minuscule ‘characteristic of the early eleventh century’ (including ‘Caroline a and a teardrop-shaped a of nonSquare ductus, adoption of the tall s, less frequent use of tall e in ligature, and laterally compressed proportions’).28 Emily V. Thornbury has also detailed how Christ and Satan is probably the work of at least two poets and the second, or later, might be best understood as ‘the Renovator’ who reworked, added to and expanded ‘a damaged exemplar’ and utilised his attentiveness to thematic and verbal consistencies in order to do so.29 Those involved in bringing ‘Liber II’ to the manuscript may have had similar skills and intentions. It does seem likely that a group of collaborators involved in producing ‘Liber II’ picked up the unfinished project of ‘Liber I’ at a later stage, probably after a substantial gap or imposed pause in production, and thought it was important the work achieved on what we call ‘Liber I’ continued. The history of Junius 11 criticism has been punctuated by studies that address the manuscript made up of ‘Liber I’ and ‘Liber II’ as having ‘unity’ but do not always examine the poetry in literary terms, or the specifics of individual poems in close detail; and others that address individual poems, or groups of poems, without a focus on how they might combine with the other verse in the manuscript to create large-scale evocations. Tackling Junius 11 as a literary scholar demands that these areas of study be brought into the same realm. Because Christ and Satan was integrated into the manuscript at some point after work had halted on the first portion, and because it is understood to be How the Anglo-Saxons Read their Poems, p. 76. Christ and Satan: An Old English Poem Edited with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. M. D. Clubb (New Haven CT, 1925), p. xii; Raw, ‘Construction’, p. 203. 27 Genesis A: A New Edition, ed. A. N. Doane, p. 19. 28 L. Lockett, ‘An Integrated Re-examination of the Dating of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 31 (2002), 141–73 (p. 158). 29 E. V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2014), p. 182. 25 26

Introduction  1 1

more of a patchwork poem (once having been several different poems), arguments for Junius 11 as a deliberately constructed sequence with an organising principle have been made on theological grounds or with swift recourse to a ‘biblical’ or ‘liturgical’ framework. An influential essay by J. R. Hall, first published in 1976, for example, claimed that the manuscript was a unified, theological ‘epic of redemption’ and that Christ and Satan was a necessary conclusion to the Old Testament-based narratives that precede it.30 Such readings offer neat summaries of the manuscript’s structure and arrangement. As such, Hall’s overview of the manuscript reads Junius 11 as a progression through salvation history, from the fall of the angels to Christ’s victory over Satan. Hall’s reading is informed by catechetical and theological traditions exemplified by works such as Augustine’s De catechizandis rudibus. Catherine Karkov develops Hall’s work, but thinks in more detail about how the arrangement of poetry and images presents something different to linear narrative or straightforward epic, arguing that while a ‘general unity of the manuscript’ presents the reader ‘with an epic of fall and redemption’, the narrative of Junius 11 ‘in and between the poems is non-linear and cyclical – the story moves forward while at the same time circling back on itself, certain episodes are told (and depicted) more than once, but always with variation’ which unites the poems by ‘bringing out recurring themes, words and voices’ across the compilation.31 In line with Karkov’s view, Janet Schrunk Ericksen argues for the collection working in a similar way, but suggests that this would have made the manuscript, which represents the ‘multidimensionality of reading’ in early medieval England, appeal to a variety of audiences: The poems in the manuscript echo each other’s concerns, lending weight to thematic developments, at the same time as they participate in larger topical discussions that reach well beyond this single manuscript, so that an informed reader could create a set of thematic connections quite distinct from those that emerge within Junius 11 on its own. Perhaps most of all, the literary and material disruptions within Junius 11 encourage reading against or at least alongside thematic and chronological coherence.32

What do these ‘thematic connections’ really look like on the level of poetry? Can they be defined by the language of the Junius poetry itself ? Both J. R. Hall, ‘The Old English Epic of Redemption: The Theological Unity of MS. Junius 11’, Traditio 32 (1976), 185–208, repr. in The Poems of MS Junius 11, ed. Liuzza, pp. 20–52. See further J. R. Hall, ‘“The Old English Epic of Redemption”: Twenty-Five Year Retrospective’, in The Poems of Junius 11, ed. Liuzza, pp. 53–68. 31 Karkov, The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 236. 32 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 31. 30

1 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Karkov and Ericksen acknowledge that the combination of poems in Junius 11 creates various thematic threads and connections within an overarching, occasionally disrupted and not always linear scheme of salvation history and this encompassing plan has often been read as ultimately and theologically redemptive. Though when it comes to approaching the manuscript as Hall, Karkov and Ericksen have done, close, detailed readings of the poems, individually but also in relation to each other, risk battling for space with discussions of the images (there is, after all, a great deal of poetry to cover if the manuscript is studied in its entirety). Furthermore, the manuscript presents a more complicated picture of redemption than Hall’s influential study has set out. Might a close reading of the poems that is aware of them as works that have their own shadowy histories and interests and attentive to them as part of a compilation offer us an alternative way of addressing the manuscript’s ‘unity’? With this question in mind, and alongside its attention to Junius 11’s thematic interests and verbal art, this book approaches Junius 11 as a compilation that works like Old English poetry – as a manuscript that often makes its interests known by doing the kinds of things associated with early medieval vernacular poetry, but on a larger scale, and these include employing variation, verbal echo, digressions, interlace and wordplay, all the while challenging and teaching methods of rightful interpretation or providing counsel. The manuscript does have a complex togetherness and interconnectedness, although understanding Junius 11 as a poetic book rather than only as a ‘biblical’ or ‘theological’ one can highlight that the ways the poems deviate from or expand on what we understand as Old or New Testament narratives were important features of the compilers’ project.33 But it might also suggest that early medieval understandings of biblical history and redemption could be represented most forcefully through Old English poetry. Because the poems share interests in the way biblical figures fail or succeed in both earthly and spiritual terms, and because they often define the reasons or motivations for such rising or falling in language that resonates with early medieval law and politics, the poetry of Junius 11 represents a body of work that was not isolated in time, but could be reworked and regenerated (the later addition of Christ and Satan being one example of this) in order to offer ways of thinking through recurring early medieval cultural crises, or through different periods of rule. 33

For a conservative overview of Junius 11 that presents the codex as a collection of Old Testament and New Testament-based poems see D. Scragg, ‘Old English Homilies and Poetic Manuscripts’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume I, ed. R. Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 553–62.

Introduction  1 3

Christ and Satan itself suggests that the manuscript does not necessarily want to represent a distant, closed narrative of history, but instead construct one that would move whoever was to read it to heed its advice in their own time. The poem instructs its readers more frequently and explicitly than its partners in the manuscript through its more homiletic passages and by calling out to the present of its viewers. Given the prevalence of J. R. Hall’s idea that Junius 11 is a theological epic of redemption, one might expect the end of the manuscript poetry to bring the narrative of salvation history to an orderly end with closure to the historical narrative. But, looking more closely at the poetry on the last pages of Junius 11 as they stand, we see that they are blighted by the very material of the manuscript and by the situation in which the final scribe of Christ and Satan worked. Moreover, the poetry on these pages gives us an episode without source, one that takes place outside of historical time, in which Christ commands Satan to ‘measure’ the expanse of hell. With the closing lines turning away from any conclusive re-establishing of equilibrium, eternal peace, or redemption, they give voice to devilry, turning dread and damnation on the ‘now’ of the reader: Þa him þuhte  þæt þanon wære to helleduru  hund þusenda mila gemearcodes,  swa hine se mihtiga het þæt þurh synne cræft  susle amæte. Ða he gemunde  þæt he on grunde stod. Locade leas wiht  geond þæt laðe scræf, atol mid egum,  oððæt egsan gryre deofla mænego  þonne up astag. Wordum in witum  ongunnon þa werigan gastas reordian and cweðan: ‘Laþ us beo nu on yfele!  Noldæs ær teala!’34

34

All quotations from Christ and Satan are from Christ and Satan: A Critical Edition, ed. R. E. Finnegan, cited hereafter by line number. All translations from Old English and Latin in this book are mine unless otherwise noted. The lines quoted here are the last surviving lines of Christ and Satan, but it should be noted that there is a break before this, just after line 717, suggesting something is missing. Finnegan reads this last line as ‘La, þus beo nu on yfele!’ not ‘Laþ us beo nu on yfele’. Looking at the manuscript here, on page 229, and following the lead of Mary Clayton, one can see that the corrector has indicated that MS laþus should be ‘laþ us’ with a small, upward curving mark at the point of breakage between the two words. The corrector has signalled other sensible word-divisions elsewhere (page 223, l. 478, for instance). See M. Clayton, ‘Christ and Satan, line 729’, N&Q 59 (2012), 1–2.

1 4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Finit Liber II. Amen (Then it seemed to him [Satan] that there was a hundred thousand miles marked out from there to the door of hell, just as the almighty had commanded him because of sinful craft to measure torment. Then he remembered that he stood on the abyss. The lesser being looked throughout that hostile cavern, the terror with his eyes, until the terrifying horror, with a multitude of devils, ascended upwards. With words in torture, the weary spirits began to speak and say: ‘May you be hostile to us now in your evil! You never wished righteously before!’ ll. 719–29)

These last surviving lines of Junius 11 ask the reader to peer through Satan’s eyes and contemplate a vast abyss. The manuscript comes to an end with lines that ‘present insuperable metrical and alliterative problems’,35 and with the atmosphere of hell turning on to the reader’s contemporary moment. Lingering as they do on page 229 (missing a line or two around l. 717), and being fractured as they are in metrical terms, these lines present us with something that is difficult to take as conclusively redemptive. Although the scribe has written ‘Finit Liber II. Amen’, the voices of devils that call out to the reader in the lines preceding that announcement suggest that hell is present – rather than finished or ended like ‘Liber II’ – in the ‘nu’ of those viewing these words. Although they might encourage the pursuit of redemption, in addition to a lack of closure (at least for those reading or viewing the manuscript) at the end of Christ and Satan there is also the possibility that the final pages of the manuscript as it stands, and ‘Liber II’ more broadly, could move readers to re-assess their mode of engagement with ‘Liber I’. If, as Daniel Anlezark suggests, Christ and Satan offers a possible way of thinking through ‘how the thematic unity of the book was understood by its earliest known reader’,36 then the content and arrangement of that poem might also suggest what kinds of warnings or statements those adding ‘Liber II’ wanted to reinforce based on their knowledge of the other poems in the codex. Ending with the voices of devils would be a fitting way to remind readers of the manuscript that their work was not done and, in order to avoid this scræf of hell calling out to them, they should re-read and re-navigate the compilation from the perspective of Christ and Satan (and with the additional knowledge this poem had given them), ‘look’ (OE locian, at line 724) throughout it, for good models, for advice and for guidance that applied to their ‘now’. 35 36

Christ and Satan, ed. Finnegan, p. 120. D. Anlezark, ‘Lay Reading, Patronage and Power in Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, in Ambition and Anxiety: Courts and Courtly Discourse, c. 700–1600, ed. G. E. M. Gasper and J. McKinnell (Toronto, 2014), pp. 76–97 (p. 87).

Introduction  1 5

When was the ‘now’?

It is difficult to say when ‘Liber II’ was added to ‘Liber I’, and thus hard to pinpoint exactly when the ‘nu’ would have been for whoever put that final ‘Amen’ on page 229. While there has yet to be a consensus on the dating of Junius 11, Leslie Lockett’s argument for c. 960–c. 990 for ‘Liber I’ is frequently cited, no doubt because it focuses at length on Junius 11 and examines the book across a spectrum of features, including script, punctuation, codicology and colour. Lockett’s proposal has been considered an ‘early’ date (and that was its aim, itself being a response to the influential proposal of ‘s. x/xi’ by N. Ker, which favoured somewhere between 975–1025 for the first stage of the Junius project).37 As Peter Stokes writes, the first scribe of Junius 11, who wrote out ‘Liber I’, displays features that might be considered ‘unusual’ in later English Vernacular minuscule, such as ‘undotted y, low s, the particular shape of square a, horizontal-backed d but with the tip angled sharply downward’, but does so in ways that ‘are not unprecedented, and most of them very common individually’ at the later part of Lockett’s range.38 Stokes also mentions that the ‘transitional period’ between Square and Vernacular minuscules, beginning in the 990s and moving into the early 1000s, might be a more appropriate – or at least a more ‘conservative’ – date for the work of the first scribe of Junius 11.39 ‘Liber II’ displays script characteristic of the eleventh century. This indicates that ‘Liber I’ was set in motion in the decades leading up to the first millennium and the addition of ‘Liber II’ began some time after this was halted, possibly in the first quarter of the eleventh century. This is broad, but the range affords us productive ways of reading this compilation of Old English poetry precisely because it is broad. A range such as this suggests that the manuscript poetry, itself composed before it came to be copied into Junius 11, had important things to say over a long period of time – and particularly over a period ranging from the late tenth to the early eleventh centuries, during times of intense upheaval, strife, reform and disaster in early medieval England. In addition to this broad dating range covering the writing out of ‘Liber I’ to the later work on ‘Liber II’, the poetry of Junius 11 has a variety of affinities with literary and legal texts over an even longer period, ranging from the Alfredian or immediately post-Alfredian age (Genesis B, for example, may have been transliterated in such a milieu) to the tenth-century Benedictine Reform Lockett, ‘An Integrated Re-Examination’, pp. 143–4. See N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), no. 334, p. 406. 38 P. A. Stokes, English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 – circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014), p. 127. 39 English Vernacular Minuscule, p. 128. 37

1 6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

and through to the reign of Æthelred II: David F. Johnson has outlined how the prologue to Genesis A resembles accounts of origins in the proems to both Bishop Æthelwold’s New Minster Charter (London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A.viii) and a grant of land in the Peniarth Diploma (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 390), the first datable to Edgar’s reign, the second to Æthelred’s.40 I will return to these connections later in this book. The synergies between Junius 11 and these kinds of political documents also suggest that an expanded reading of the manuscript poetry, beyond Genesis A, could reveal more instances of biblical history and apocrypha being reworked to reflect or respond to early medieval socio-political ideologies or interests, which themselves might have motivated the act of compilation itself. Literary approaches to surviving Old English poetic manuscripts as ideologically motivated compilations have not always combined close reading with cultural history. Difficulties determining date and provenance, along with other unknowns that overshadow these old codices, mean that locating the poetic manuscripts with historic precision can be limiting. There are indications, however, that the study of a manuscript of Old English poetry that examines poetic language, as well as the particular arrangement of poems, might also inform us about the cultural motivations for such a compilation. In his study of Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501, Patrick W. Conner outlined how the tenth-century Benedictine Reform caused ‘extensive changes’ to be ‘wrought in poetry’ as vernacular verse turned to ‘the Bible, the Sanctoral, and similar sources for literary subject matter’ so that ‘basic Christian texts and myths became the privileged sources in literary composition’ – ‘tastes in literature’, Conner argues, can be ‘traced through the Exeter Book’ in the emphases and language of its poetry, which present ‘a record of responses to the intellectual challenges of the tenth century’.41 John D. Niles, drawing on the work of Brian O’Camb, has proposed the benefits of studying the Exeter Book as a ‘single literary site’ and as an intellectually coherent anthology best approached by tracing words, phrases and themes across the manuscript, a method that reveals the shared interests of the poems in processes of reflection that ‘can fruitfully be placed within the cultural landscape of late tenth-century England’.42 In addition, Simon D. F. Johnson, ‘The Fall of Lucifer in Genesis A and Two Anglo-Latin Royal Charters’, JEGP 97 (1998), 500–21. 41 P. W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993), p. 150. 42 J. D. Niles, God’s Exiles and Old English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter, 2019), p. 4. See the foundations of this book in B. O’Camb, ‘Toward a Monastic Poetics: Exeter Maxims and the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’, 40

Introduction  1 7

C. Thomson’s focus on the ‘communal creativity’ of the Beowulf manuscript reflects the ways new understandings of works in the Nowell codex in particular can develop when attention moves away from the view that it is an ‘imperfect record of texts’ and towards a reading ‘in which what seem to be flaws can offer evidence of contemporary interpretations or approaches’.43 When it comes to Junius 11, these studies offer useful models for the combination of the close reading of individual poems in their manuscript context with comparative, cross-manuscript study, while they also suggest that poetic manuscripts – and the way the parallels might emerge between poems or a certain set of ideas might recur in the same material book – can be understood from the perspective of early medieval cultural and political projects and movements.

The politics of poetry and poems that work together: rise and fall, ræd and unræd

Studies of some of the individual poems in Junius 11, particularly Genesis A, have shown that the adaptation of apocryphal narratives such as the fall of the angels into Old English poetry reworked the narrative in terms that echo early medieval legal disputes about territory.44 On a more expansive scale, the assembly of poems in Junius 11 crafts a cycle of history comparable with those found in work by early medieval historians and chroniclers who depicted fluctuations in rulership and fortune taking place within a scheme of divine influence and intervention. Old English poetry – and the positioning of poems in relation to others – could represent such cyclical history as well as political change in these histories themselves. The ABC manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, where the two poems concerning the rule of King Edgar (the entry for 973 known as ‘The Coronation of Edgar’ and then the annal for 975, ‘The Death of Edgar’) are situated side by side, represent the rise-and-fall nature of cyclical history and highlight

(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009). For a discussion of the relationship between the work of Niles and O’Camb here see T. Beechy, ‘Review of God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, John D. Niles. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019’, Modern Philology 118.1 (2020), E4–E8. 43 S. C. Thomson, Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf Manuscript’: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex (Leiden and Boston, 2018), p. 5. 44 See J. Fitzgerald, Rebel Angels: Space and Sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2019).

1 8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

the way it was often tied to kingship – and to the role of the king in history itself – in political thinking in early medieval England.45 In the five chapters that follow this Introduction, I approach Junius 11 as a manuscript that sets its conflicts – especially those between good and bad counsel, rightful and wrongful interpretation, successful and unsuccessful leadership – within the cycle of salvation history and, in doing so, encourages its audiences to gain awareness of the kinds of actions and errors that doomed peoples and places through time. Parallels across the episodes and narratives of Junius 11 also ask audiences to become aware of the good advice and adherence to law that led to earthly and spiritual success throughout the ages. Moving through the manuscript, this book addresses each poem in order of appearance. This arises out of an attempt to read Junius 11, moving from one page to the next, and eventually from ‘Liber I’ to ‘Liber II’, but I hope it will also illustrate how such a reading method makes us more aware of those moments of disorder and interruption that punctuate the compilation and our attempt to read through it in any kind of linear way. Empty pages between passages of Exodus, for example, seem at odds with evidence of poetic and scribal ingenuity such as the embedding of Genesis B, the poem translated into Old English from Old Saxon in the second half of the ninth century,46 into Genesis A, or the seamless narrative movement of the poetic Exodus into Daniel over pages 171–3 of Junius 11, which, despite a blank page 172, works as a kind of bridge between the two poems. However, each poem in its current state has both verbal and thematic connections with its partners in the manuscript and these connections circulate around ideas associated with good and bad ræd. This becomes more apparent as we build knowledge by moving through the codex as readers and viewers. We can see how compilers attempted to have these poems read together, to have them form a resemblance of history, but also how their material sometimes resisted them, or faced external hardships. The B-manuscript of the Chronicle (London, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius A.iii, fols. 1–35) ends with the death of Edward and is written in a late tenth century hand, leading scholars such as Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Mercedes Salvador-Bello to date it to 977–9. See M. Salvador-Bello, ‘The Edgar Panegyrics in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Edgar, King of the English, 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 252–73 (pp. 254–5); K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, 1990), p. 125. The B manuscript exists as what Scott T. Smith calls a ‘near-contemporary’ witness to the coronation and death it depicts in the two poems. S. T. Smith, ‘The Edgar Poems and the Poetics of Failure in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, ASE 39 (2011), 105–37 (p. 107). For the coronation poem see ASC MS B, ed. Taylor, pp. 55–6. 46 See further A. N. Doane, ‘The Transmission of Genesis B’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. E. Story (Tempe AZ, 2011), pp. 63–81. 45

Introduction  1 9

In Chapter One I propose that the beginning of the manuscript restructures the foundations of biblical history through its response to the story of creation. An illustration of the creator in majesty, often called the ‘frontispiece’ to Junius 11, occupies page ii (as numbered by Bernard J. Muir). Alongside the image, however, on the facing page, is a full page of poetry: the beginning of the extra-biblical prologue to Genesis A, which details Lucifer’s attempt to manufacture a rival kingdom. As mentioned previously, the rebel angels are described as no longer working for their own ‘ræd’ (good counsel; l. 24a), while Lucifer begins to create ‘unræd’ (bad counsel; l. 30a). This prologue provides the foundation for the resulting poem as well as the manuscript by setting out the terms of a central opposition between those possessing ræd who obey God, the divine ruler, and those who strive against him because of their pride and ill-counsel, so that when the poem begins to present stories from Genesis after the prologue, verbal echoes mean that figures can be compared to Lucifer depending on how their actions resemble either his or those of the more faithful angels. But the terms themselves, by being specifically early medieval cultural and political concepts, would have had the potential to raise in audiences certain expectations about what responses were required for actions defined by OE ræd or OE unræd. On page 4 of Junius 11, the poetry of Genesis A elaborates on how the creator toppled the angelic rebellion. This follows the full-page visual narrative of the angelic fall on page 3. The poetry reads as if expanding on the events following the visual cue:       þa he gebolgen wearð, besloh synsceaþan  sigore and gewealde, dome and dugeþe  and dreame benam his feond, friðo  and gefean ealle, torhte tire,  and his torn gewræc on gesacum swiðe  selfes mihtum strengum stiepe.  hæfde styrne mod, gegremed grymme,  grap on wraðe faum folmum,  and him on fæðm gebræc yr’ on mode.  æðele bescyrede his wiðerbrecan  wuldorgestealdum. (When he became swollen in rage, he smashed the sinners from victory and rule, from glory and prosperity and stripped his enemy of joy, peace and all gladness, radiant honour, and for his grief took vengeance on his adversaries by his own might with a crushing severity. He had a stern mind, grimly enraged, he gripped them in anger with hostile hands, and broke

2 0    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

them in his grasp, angry in mind; he completely severed his enemies from the homeland, the glorious dwellings; ll. 54b–64)

The apostate angels break the frið (peace) within a kingdom and thus face a severe form of divine ‘gewræc’ (vengeance; l. 58b). In his rage God has already manufactured a ‘wræclicne ham’ (exilic home; l. 37a) for the rebels earlier in the prologue. Wordplay connects ‘gewræc’ and ‘wræc’, forging a link between the necessary revenge on the rebellion and the exile it brings to those who first transgressed. What is striking about the relation of events in Genesis A’s prologue is that the elaboration on the punishment that comes to the angels accentuates the dreadful nature of their crime, which the poet frames as one that concerned regulators in early medieval England: that of unredeemable treachery against a lord or ruler.47 As David Pratt has acknowledged, the ‘charge of hlafordsearu’ – of ‘treason against a lord’ – ‘appears to have become increasingly important in the fractious politics of the mid tenth century’.48 The murder of King Edward, which cast Æthelred II’s subsequent reign in a nefarious light for many pro-reform writers as well as later homilists looking for explanations for England’s misfortunes under the king’s rule, was described in this way.49 Moreover, as scholarship by Scott T. Smith and Jill Fitzgerald has documented, the first 111 lines of Genesis A are informed by the legal procedures followed in Anglo-Latin tenurial discourse ‘active at the time of Junius 11’s compilation’,50 which saw disobedient subjects stripped of their estates, and this is evident in the idea in the poem that God ‘æðele bescyrede / his wiðerbrecan wuldorgestealdum’ (severed his enemies from the homeland, the glorious dwellings; ll. 63b–64).51 The prologue to Genesis A offers a good example of how accounts of divine punishment coming to those who, out of unræd, betray God may also have served to offer guidance, or ræd, to those in earthly ruling positions about what to do in the face of such serious crimes. Evidence that accounts of the angelic fall could be utilised by early medieval political thinkers is seen in proems to charters that, as David Johnson Alfred 4, for example, outlines that he who commits treason against his king will forfeit his life and all that he owns. Æthelred V puts it in similar terms. Unless otherwise noted, references to the early medieval laws are from Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. in 4 (Halle, 1903–16), cross-referenced with D. Whitelock, EHD. 48 D. Pratt, ‘The Voice of the King in King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’, ASE 41 (2013), 145–204 (p. 192). 49 See S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘The Unready’: A Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980), p. 167. 50 S. T. Smith, ‘Faith and Forfeiture in the Old English Genesis A’, Modern Philology 111.4 (2014), 593–615 (p. 594). 51 J. Fitzgerald, Rebel Angels, p. 10 and pp. 23–71 for Genesis A. 47

Introduction  2 1

has outlined, have very particular connections to Genesis A.52 The proem to the illustrious, gold-scripted New Minster Charter documenting the expulsion of the secular clergy from the Minsters at Winchester for 966 describes Lucifer’s movement against God, the crushing of the apostate angels and the subsequent forging of earthly creation.53 The event that took place at the royal city of Winchester in 964, referred to briefly in the ASC MS A entry for that year, saw the re-instating of Benedictine monks in place of the exiled clerics.54 David Johnson notes too that the proem to the New Minster Charter describes a ‘radical’ conception of replacement – the concept that humankind would inherit the places of the fallen in heaven that has its roots in Augustine’s and Gregory’s writings – in order to offer a parallel to the event.55 This proem, Johnson points out, reflects a politics of origins that also emerges in Genesis A. Informed by Johnson’s work, Chapter One of this book highlights the importance of the prologue to Genesis A for the poetic reshaping of the story of Genesis and, on a larger scale, for the poetic cycle of Junius 11 itself. The first act of divine creation in the poetic cycle of the Junius manuscript is God’s creation of hell, which he makes to house the angels exiled from the kingdom (ll. 29–46), and which the poet describes as a ‘rædleas hof ’ (l. 44b) – a place without good counsel. The poem’s detailing of the creation of hell before the creation of the world, at least in terms of its length of description, is unique among surviving material from early medieval England. Given the possible connections between the prologue to Genesis A and specific political documents, our best way of understanding that prologue’s unparalleled details and ‘radical’ conception of replacement might be to examine it from the perspective of its political resonance. We might also ask the following question: if the closest resemblances to Genesis A’s description of the beginnings of the world are found in two royal diplomas, might the larger poetic project of Genesis A also be understood as having the capability of speaking to, and informing, early medieval political action as well? In Chapter One I For hell in the proems to early medieval charters see P. Hoffman, ‘Infernal Imagery in Anglo-Saxon Charters’, Ph.D. dissertation (University of St Andrews, 2008). For the proem to the New Minster Charter in relation to Genesis A see Johnson, ‘The Fall of Lucifer’. 53 For a text and translation of the charter, see Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and Its Minsters, ed. and trans. A. R. Rumble (Oxford and New York, 2002), pp. 65–97. 54 ASC MS A, ed. Bately. 55 Johnson, ‘The Fall of Lucifer’, p. 510. For the replacement doctrine, see D. Haines, ‘Vacancies in Heaven: The Doctrine of Replacement and Genesis A’, N&Q 44.2 (1997), 150–4.

52

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re-read Genesis A’s interest in defining the well-counselled and ill-counselled alongside materials concerning creation and rulership from early medieval England, such as those literary and historical reformist texts associated with Bishop Æthelwold like the New Minster Charter but also hagiographies of Æthelwold himself that express long-running interests in reformist ideals long after Edgar’s death.56 Doing so, this chapter examines Genesis A, so often labelled a mere ‘paraphrase’ of the biblical book, as a poem that reforms its own biblical and apocryphal subject matter to outline in specifically Old English vernacular terms the reasons the ill-advised receive divine vengeance. At line 235 of Genesis A, as God maps out the rivers and land of the earth, there is a change in poetic style. This is where the poem known editorially as Genesis B has been interpolated into Genesis A at some point before ‘Liber I’ was written out. Translated from an Old Saxon Genesis between the years 850 and 900, Genesis B takes the manuscript cycle back to the story of the angelic rebellion and Lucifer’s fall, while also detailing the fall of man. The transition into Genesis B in the manuscript, despite its return to events covered in Genesis A’s prologue, is no error on the part of scribe or compiler. Instead, the poem functions as an important segment of the compilation, intensifying some of the warnings about ill-advised pursuits of rebellion outlined by the Genesis A poet. In Chapter Two I argue that Genesis B is an important intrusion into the manuscript cycle. The poet of Genesis B utilises a verbose and damned Satan – a collage of fallen martial heroism and broken Carolingian kingship (that from the time of Hincmar of Rheims in the midninth century had presented kings as legitimised by God, their only superior) – in order to represent an extreme misreader of divine rule. In Genesis B, Satan speaks of his desire to gain ‘wrace’ (vengeance, l. 393b) against mankind who he views as having had ‘ræd gescyred’ (‘counsel shared out [to them]’; l. 524b). But as Satan had already pursued rebellion in heaven and received just punishment, his demand for vengeful repayment misappropriates the early medieval system of compensation, in which crimes outlined in the laws of early medieval kings required payment by or on behalf of the transgressor in

For intellectual developments of the reform, see M. Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999). For the reform in Edgar’s reign see J. Barrow, ‘The Chronology of the Benedictine “Reform”’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. Scragg, pp. 211–24; A. R. Rumble, ‘The Laity and the Monastic Reform in the Reign of Edgar’, in Edgar, King of the English, ed. Scragg, pp. 242–52; C. Cubitt, ‘The Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform in England’, Early Medieval Europe 6.1 (1997), 77–94.

56

Introduction  2 3

amounts deemed tantamount to the crime.57 Genesis B explores what a ruler in a position of extreme power must not do. In the context of Junius 11 itself, the poem’s model of disastrous rulership, presented through a fallen, speaking Satan who holds to an unlawful pursuit of violent compensation, expands and furthers the manuscript’s concern with fallenness from the perspective of earthly politics. Through its use and expansion of the story of Lucifer’s fall and crimes, Genesis B interrogates how the misunderstanding and misreading (that other kind of OE unræd) of earthly and divine law can destroy both the earthly kingdom and one’s eternal soul.58 In Exodus, the poem that follows the poetic Genesis in Junius 11, reduction and misreading of God’s law are exemplified by the Egyptians. With an alteration to the narrative of the biblical book, the poet suggests another cause for the pursuit of the Israelites: Pharaoh and his army seek reparation and blood-revenge for the kin they lost during the Tenth Plague. They engage in an act of reading divine signs, but they do not read carefully, instead viewing the plague as something for which they require reparation. The punishment they receive – described in a long, violent sequence that expands the much shorter biblical passage (Exodus 14.27–8) in extremis – releases the waves of the Red Sea upon them as a ‘payment’ of divine vengeance. Exodus has gained attention in criticism for its nature as what Roberta Frank called an ‘alien’ poem, one so full of compounds, expansions on the biblical story and heightened tension that any attempt to understand it with aids to reading scripture, such as commentaries by the Fathers, soon reach their limits when it comes understanding its emphases, digressions and violence.59 While Stephen C. E. Hopkins is right to suggest that ‘too much focus on S. Rubin, ‘The Bot, or Composition in Anglo-Saxon Law: A Reassessment’, The Journal of Legal History 17.2 (1996), 144–54. For early medieval kingship and its ideals of order and regulation see T. Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2017), pp. 202–38. For further evidence of violence as compensation in early medieval England see V. Allen, ‘When Compensation Costs an Arm and a Leg’, in Capital and Corporal Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. J. P. Gates and N. Marafioti (Woodbridge, 2014), pp. 17–33. 58 For discussion of how even the earliest medieval legislation placed fines on criminals while suggesting the spiritual implications of their actions see L. Oliver, The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto, 2002) and, drawing on this in relation to Alfred’s Domboc, N. Marafioti, ‘Crime and Sin in the Laws of Alfred’, in Languages of the Law in Early Medieval England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver, ed. S. Jurasinski and A. Rabin (Louvain, Paris and Bristol CT, 2019), pp. 59–87. 59 R. Frank, ‘What Kind of Poetry is Exodus?’ in Germania: Comparative Studies in the Old Germanic Languages and Literatures, ed. D. G. Calder and T. Craig (Cambridge and Wolfeboro, 1988), pp. 191–205 (p. 191). 57

2 4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

personal hermeneutic exercise can obscure Exodus’s more radical rhetorical strategy’,60 the poem also portrays the Israelite journey towards the beneficial gifts of a long-lasting form of ræd, which in the poem is associated with both deep reading and salvation, and Chapter Three argues that Exodus is a poem about interpretation itself. The poem develops the kinds of concerns evident in its companions within the manuscript, therefore, but it offers further elaboration on OE ræd and OE unræd, positioning ræd as connected to reading the text of the world for spiritual significance. Exodus offers a long account of what it means to achieve ræd, which involves unlocking the meaning beneath the world and gradually coming to divine guidance through the teaching and faith of God’s ordained earthly leaders. Important work by Nicholas Howe demonstrated that the journey of the Israelites in Exodus is one example of the ‘migration myth’ at work in early medieval writings.61 Evident in a range of texts, from those by Bede to those associated with Alfred, and in vernacular poetry, the ‘migration myth’ allowed early medieval thinkers to promote the history of their immediate ancestors as well as their contemporaries as following the course of a ‘chosen people’ akin to the Israelites of the Old Testament.62 The placing of Exodus in the Junius 11 compilation, alongside other poems concerned with the importance of maintaining ræd and good wisdom, however, suggests that its emphases on the rightful interpretation of scripture, poetry and law were of utmost importance to compilers. At the end of Exodus, following the destruction of the Egyptian host, the poet points out that ‘gastes cægon’ (the keys of the spirit; l. 525b), likely to refer to Christian reading practices, or to scholarship of the learned (the poet calls them the ‘boceras’, the wise, at line 531a), can be used to unlock the ‘ginfæsten god’ (good stronghold; l. 525a), referring to a text possibly scriptural in nature, so that ‘ræd forð gæð’ (good counsel will go forward; l. S. C. E. Hopkins, ‘Snared by the Beasts of Battle: Fear as Hermeneutic Guide in the Old English Exodus’, Philological Quarterly 97.1 (2018), 1–26 (p. 1). 61 N. Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven CT, 1989). 62 See also N. Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven CT, 2008). For further work on the migrations and places of the Old Testament represented in Junius 11, see P. Battles, ‘Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon “Migration Myth”’, ASE 29 (2000), 43–66; A. P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor MI, 2004); F. L. Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006); A. P. Scheil, ‘Sacred History and Old English Religious Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. C. A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 406–26; S. Zacher, Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (London, 2013). 60

Introduction  2 5

526b). This comes towards the end of the poem. This ‘key’ passage encourages readers to revisit the earlier parts of the poem from the perspective of this idea of ‘unlocking’ good counsel through deeper reading. As Janet Ericksen has written, the ‘key’ passage of Exodus ‘functions as a summative evaluation of the enduring value of the poem’ and ‘might well change how a reader understands what has come before and encourage a repeat reading because it asks the reader whether the mysteries of the poem have indeed been understood’.63 The presence of this instructional passage and its emphasis on ræd (a theme of the other poetry that sits in the same book) suggests too that such ‘repeat’ or re-reading might serve the manuscript more broadly – that Junius 11 was designed to be re-read in the same way. In Chapter Four, I focus on Daniel, the poem that follows Exodus in Junius 11 and continues to trace the fortunes of the Israelites. Daniel contributes to the manuscript’s cycle of rise and fall significantly: in the extra-biblical introduction to the poem, the Israelites who were saved in Exodus fall into ‘unriht’ (a combination of law-breaking and unrighteousness; l. 23b) through drunkenness, pride and misrule, and face punishment in the form of the devilry of the Chaldeans and the tyranny of Babylon.64 Interests of the Junius 11 poetry in poor interpretation, in unræd, and in law-transgression continue through the Daniel poet’s representation of the mind of Nebuchadnezzar, who is at times what Andrew Scheil calls ‘a manifestation of God in his more vengeful aspect’,65 but also a powerful king who fails to understand the role of the earthly ruler in relation to the divine, and thus falls further into the kind of mental as well as external chaos that grows out of a lack of regulation. The political relevance of Daniel for the compilers of Junius 11 lies in the poem’s representation of rulership of cities and of translatio imperii (or, the transfer of rule). Chapter Four demonstrates that Daniel shares similarities with texts outlining the measure and learning a king or ruler should pertain to for success, such as the Old English Boethius and the early medieval translation of the Regula Pastoralis. But this chapter also suggests that the interest of the poem in the mind (OE mod) is one tied to its interest in the city (OE burh): employing a mind-as-city metaphor throughout, and especially in the psychological portrait of Nebuchadnezzar, the poet establishes how the intricate political, mental and spiritual ties between a ruler and their realm result in a kind of co-dependence. Those who remembered King Edgar favourably Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 109. Quotations of Daniel from Daniel and Azarias, ed. R. T. Farrell. 65 A. P. Scheil, Babylon Under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth (Toronto, 2016), pp. 77–8. 63 64

2 6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

during and after the ‘anti-monastic’ reaction, including Byrhtferth of Ramsey for example, defined him against tyrannical figures like Nebuchadnezzar. However, the Old English Daniel is unique amongst the Junius 11 poems because it presents us with a tyrannical ruler who can return from his punishment, restore himself and accept God’s divinity. The poetic depictions of the casting out of the Israelites from Jerusalem and the exile of Nebuchadnezzar from his city contribute significantly to the poem’s warnings against ill-counsel in times of prosperity, while the hope offered by the account of the king’s spiritual recovery reiterates the need for those in positions of power to do what it takes to learn the practices required to understand divine instruction. The reasons for Junius 11 coming to a halt some time shortly after the copying of Daniel are open to speculation. While scholarship’s proposed dating range for the manuscript (anywhere from the second half of the tenth century to the first decades of the eleventh for ‘Liber I’) and the associated historical record offer us some suggestion, including declines in fortune and the spread of disaster associated with a growing Viking presence during Æthelred’s reign, the addition of Christ and Satan suggests that there was an attempt to reinvigorate work on the manuscript, and reinforce the messages of the poems already copied in ‘Liber I’. Why would it have been necessary to add this poetry to a stalled or unfinished codex? As previously mentioned, the scribes involved in the copying of Christ and Satan might well have thought it important to bring the cycle of salvation history to some kind of resolution in Christ, and had found poetry that, at least for them, did so. The poem is interested in penance and amends, and in reinforcing the dangers of poor interpretation, and so it is useful to examine the poem and its inclusion in the manuscript from the perspective of cultural changes that might have increased the need for the copying of poetry of this kind – or, at least, to view the inclusion of Christ and Satan in Junius 11 as motivated by similar anxieties about the approaching end of time. Highlighting the poem’s synergies with the early medieval literature of penance, and particularly with the historical documents that represent movements by Æthelred II and others to encourage confession and the currying of diving favour during times of political crisis, offers some explanation of how and why the poetry of Christ and Satan, with its homiletic passages stressing the need for the audience to amend their sinful practices, could have intensified the messages that are mostly implicit in the Old Testament-based poems. Chapter Five approaches Christ and Satan not only as a construction that takes the manuscript back to earlier accounts of ‘Liber I’, but as a rough, unsteady poetic tessellation that stresses the need for penance through its accounts of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell (which structurally sits at the centre

Introduction  2 7

of the poem) and of the Last Judgement. It is disordered poetry with missing parts, it is non-linear with a lack of narrative closure (we might recall those devils calling out to the ‘now’ of the reader), but it also has a symmetry that draws certain passages into comparable relation as the Harrowing sits alongside the Judgement, for example. There are other connections between the poetry of Christ and Satan and ‘Liber I’ of Junius 11 on the level of vocabulary, suggesting that those working on ‘Liber II’ sought not only to re-emphasise the counsel of the other poetry in the manuscript but also to encourage re-readings of the Old Testament poems with and through Christ’s victories. In the account of the Harrowing at the centre of Christ and Satan, for example, Eve confesses her originary crimes as she looks up to see the heroic Christ entering hell:       hæfde drihten seolf feond oferfohten.  Wæs seo fæhðe þa gyt open on uhtan  þa se egsa becom. Let þa up faran  eadige sawle, Adames cyn,  and ne moste Efe þa gyt wlitan in wuldre  ær heo wordum cwæð: ‘Ic þe æne abealh,  ece drihten, þa wit Adam twa  eaples þigdon þurh næddran nið,  swa wit na ne sceoldon.’ (the lord himself had overthrown the enemy. The feud was still open at daybreak when the terror came. Then he let the blessed souls travel upward, Adam’s kin, but Eve might not yet gaze on the glory before she spoke words: ‘Once I angered you, eternal lord, when we two, Adam and I, ate of the apple because of the adder’s hostility, as we never should have done.’ ll. 402b–410)

Eve is not able to ascend until she confesses her crime. Although the account of Christ’s Harrowing in Christ and Satan shares verbal similarities with other Old English texts, including the Exeter Book Descent Into Hell and Blickling Homily VII (found in Princeton UL, MS W. H. Scheide 71), highlighting the presence of a descensus tradition in early medieval England, the mention of a ‘fæhðe’ (Christ and Satan, l. 403b) is not found elsewhere: here, in Christ and Satan, it is described as ‘still open’ in the hours before dawn when Christ comes to plunder hell, suggesting that he is about to close it. In the account of temptation in Eden in Genesis A, thousands of lines before Christ and Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript sequence, the poet offers a much-expanded insight into the cause and ramifications of Eve’s transgression. Her confession suggests that, following the restoration after the rebellion of angels in heaven, things have fallen again, and strife has been created on earth:

2 8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

‘Me nædre beswac  and me neodlice to forsceape scyhte  and to scyldfrece, fah wyrm þurh fægir word  oð þæt ic fracoðlice feondræs gefremede,  fæhðe geworhte’ (‘The adder deceived me and eagerly prompted me to that sin and to greediness, the hostile worm through fair words, until I shamefully performed that enmity, created the feud’; ll. 897–900)

In the Vulgate Genesis, Eve’s remark is brief: ‘serpens decepit me et comedi’ (the serpent deceived me and I did eat; Genesis 3.13). Similarly, the Old English prose Genesis has Eve tell us that ‘seo næddre beþeahte me and ic æt’ (the serpent deceived me and I ate).66 Eve’s admission in the speech in Genesis A, that she ‘feondræs gefremede’ (with the –‘ræs’ here being connected to OE ræs and OE ræswung, both suggesting counsel or deliberation, giving ‘feondræs’ connotations of evil or devilish counsel),67 and that she ‘fæhðe geworhte’, evokes original sin through the concept of devilish counsel, enmity and cyclical violence. The deceptive words of the serpent lead Eve to ‘create’ or ‘work’ fæhþ. Because fæhþ does not occur again in Junius 11 after Genesis A until the Harrowing in Christ and Satan, there is a cross-manuscript connection between Eve’s disobedience, which creates fæhþ – that concept of violence, of hostility, as an act requiring recompense – and the moment when that creation of foundational strife is repaired through compensation. This compensation takes the form of Christ’s descent and Eve’s penance, which amend the transgression, and ‘close’ the cycle of conflicts between peoples, and between people and God, set in motion by Satan’s deception in Paradise. The use of OE fæhþ to define the conflict at these two important moments highlights further the way the Junius 11 poetry reshapes biblical and apocryphal events through vernacular terms that had substantial political resonance. It is fæhþ that often marks or defines earthly conflicts in the legislation; it is fæhþ that early medieval kings must seek to suppress, or manage, through good counsel and governance.68

The Old English Version of the Heptateuch: Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament, and His Preface to Genesis, ed. S. Crawford, repr. with transcriptions by N. R. Ker (London, 1969), p. 89. 67 DOE, feondræs; B-T, ræswung. 68 DOE, s. v. fæhþ. For the significance of this word and its reflection of reciprocal violence and revenge in Old English literature and early medieval culture see J. D. Niles, ‘The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England’, JEGP 114.2 (2015), 163–200. As Niles notes, the word has either the form fæhþ or fæhþu, monosyllabic or disyllabic (p. 169). 66

Introduction  2 9

Although such verbal echoes mean that cross-codex connections were there to be made, and that salvation history was an important ideological tool for encouraging the amends of misdeeds, Junius 11 does not end with the Harrowing, nor with the Judgement, which the Harrowing prefigures. Instead, it ends with the threat that we are all at risk of repeating our errors eternally. Satan, in the final passages of the manuscript as they stand, repeatedly measures and encircles hell in a parody of the creator he attempted to match, the creator who fashions boundaries and encompasses place and time (see Christ and Satan, ll. 690–722). This echoes aloud if read from the perspective of, or as a warning against, early medieval political strife because of the fear, implicit in Æthelred II’s laws for instance, that a king and their populace may have fallen into repeating past mistakes to disastrous, doomed ends. Viewed from the perspective of the manuscript’s concern with good and bad counsel and with reading and interpretation, there is an implicit warning in Satan’s purposeless circling around for ever. One could do the same thing with the occasionally digressive Junius poetry. With its depictions of Satan’s plight and its demonic voices that call out from hell, Christ and Satan encourages revisiting the poetry of ‘Liber I’ again, but in a way that puts the counsel it has provided to work, so that certain narratives that were read for literary pleasure become increasingly more instructive.

A manuscript made over time and in place

As a project of poetic compilation undergone in stages, and over what seems to have been a long time, the Junius 11 codex likely reflects the aims and endeavours of a variety of people, and it is possible that not all these bookmakers working on the manuscript were from the same place or involved in the same period. But those copying and compiling the poems of ‘Liber I’ and ‘Liber II’ shared an interest in drawing poems together. In doing so, they created the potential for verbal connections to be sought across a manuscript. Those writing out Christ and Satan shared with their predecessors who worked on ‘Liber I’ a need to represent a cycle of salvation history through the drama of Old English poetry, one that presented the falls and failures as well as the successes of biblical figures in ways that resonated with early medieval conceptions of rulership. Scholarship on the provenance of Junius 11 has speculated on what some of the more localised political situations associated with the manuscript might have been and such criticism encourages us to think more about the ways biblical and apocryphal narratives were reshaped to offer guidance to those in positions of power in early medieval England. Debate about where Junius 11 was made has a long history. In his 1927 facsimile of the codex, The Cædmon Manuscript, Israel Gollancz suggested

3 0    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Figure 1.  MS Junius 11, page 2, portrait of Ælfwine. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

that Junius 11 had been produced at Winchester, identifying the portrait of a man in robes within a double-framed medallion on page 2 of the manuscript (within which ‘Ælfwine’ is written) as the Ælfwine who became abbot of Newminster at Winchester in 1035 (see Fig. 1), who might have been a possible owner, scribe, or patron associated with the codex.69 This was strongly refuted by scholars such as Barbara Raw, who argued that the portrait actually depicted a layman;70 by those who favoured a Canterbury origin because the second artist of Junius 11 seems to be the same artist who illustrated some of the psychomachia in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 23;71 and by Peter Lucas, who made a detailed case for the Junius illustrations resembling Cædmon Manuscript, ed. Gollancz, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. Raw, ‘Probable Derivation,’ p. 135. 71 Karkov, Text and Picture, writes that the ‘hand of the second artist has been identified in several of the drawings in the Psychomachia (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 23), also traditionally attributed to Canterbury, though again the attribution has been questioned. Neither the Winchester style whose influence is evident in the work of the first artist, nor the more strongly Reims-influenced work of the second artist can be linked to a specific location, as both were popular across the south of England during the second half of the tenth century’ (p. 35). 69 70

Introduction  3 1

the carved scenes on the voussoirs of the entrance arch on the south porch of Malmesbury Abbey, which could well have taken inspiration from the Junius 11 artwork.72 Returning to the possibility of Winchester long after Gollancz, David F. Johnson, in an overview of this criticism on the manuscript’s provenance, has suggested that many of the claims are ‘circumstantial’ (as places like Canterbury and Malmesbury only really propose that Junius 11 could have been there long after its initial production).73 Johnson’s own case for provenance returns to the possibility that Junius 11’s relationship with Winchester is worthy of further study. In addition to the aforementioned close ties between the ‘radical’ form of the replacement doctrine found in the prologue to Genesis A and Æthelwold’s New Minster Charter, Johnson has also tentatively suggested that the benefactor found in the Peniarth Diploma, in a grant of land from Æthelred II to his scriptor and minister, might be a good candidate for the Ælfwine drawn in a medallion on p. 2 of Junius 11. Johnson writes further: The attestation of an ‘Ælfwine minister’ appears on a number of diplomas, including ‘Edgar’s Privilege,’ where in fact two such ministers attested the document. If we assume that one of these is the same Ælfwine who signs a great number of diplomas during the reigns of Edgar and Æthelred, it may not be unreasonable to speculate as well that he was the recipient of the land grant in Oxfordshire recorded in the Peniarth Diploma. That he was a scriptor as well is particularly suggestive within the context of this discussion. In summary, then, the combination of evidence presented thus far renders it possible that a royal minister named Ælfwine, who was active in the second half of the tenth century and present at Winchester, may have been the patron, commissioner, or intended recipient of the Anglo-Saxon vernacular manuscript that bears his portrait and name.74

David Pratt writes that as ‘a lay royal scribe’, the beneficiary of the charter from King Æthelred would be ‘a striking candidate’ for Junius 11’s ‘original While there are some similarities between images in Junius 11 and the carvings (both show Noah’s ark with a paddle), the scenes were not chipped into stone until c. 1170, as Lucas acknowledged. More significantly, Lucas did not elaborate on how the poetry of Junius 11 itself might have related to his proposed place of origin. See P. J. Lucas, ‘MS Junius 11 and Malmesbury’, Scriptorium 34 (1980), 197–220 and ‘Junius 11 and Malmesbury (II)’, Scriptorium 35 (1981), 3–22. 73 D. F. Johnson, ‘Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Date and Provenance of MS Junius 11’, in The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick Conner, ed. E. J. Christie (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 27–62 (p. 28). 74 ‘Winchester Revisited’, p. 61. 72

3 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

patron’.75 In addition, the medallion on page 2 of Junius 11 could also represent a key person in the making of the book, whether that was someone involved in commissioning it or receiving it as a gift. If a figure like Ælfwine scriptor was associated with the manuscript in such a way, then it suggests that poetry akin to what we find in Junius 11 could have been appealing, or useful, to those involved in diplomatic and political activities throughout the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Its specific connections with Genesis A and Junius 11 aside, the New Minster Charter offers an example of how the angelic fall and the fall of man have what Janet Schrunk Ericksen writes is ‘historical and political value’ that ‘was particularly strong at the late tenth-century New Minster’ at Winchester.76 By studying the surviving manuscript books that were produced or associated with that New Minster library, Ericksen also suggests that Winchester seems a more ‘companionable and more purposeful home, or at least birthplace, for Junius 11’ and that ‘New Minster was perhaps even a place to which a politically active lay patron would purposefully have turned for such a book.’77 The connections between Junius 11 and Winchester demonstrate that the poetry of the manuscript and its adaptations of biblical history would not be out of place at a such a site. Daniel Anlezark, reading Junius 11 alongside accounts of early medieval lay patronage which saw the commissioning of several vernacular versions of Old Testament books (the most famous being those supported by ealdorman Æthelweard, patron of Ælfric), has suggested that the Junius manuscript might have been intended to instruct a lay ruler and have been commissioned for that purpose.78 Johnson, Ericksen and Anlezark all point to the way the manuscript’s collation of poetry pays being read in comparison with early medieval political movements or productions because these resemble the language and concerns of the poetry overall more than, say, the Vulgate. Although it is partly a result of the texts in Junius 11 being composed in Old English, the poetry that the manuscript holds together does not result in an order or sequence like the Old Testament prose of, say, those texts collected in the Hexateuch.79 Arranged as it is, the sequence of events in Junius 11 does not follow that of the Old Testament of the Vulgate and indeed the Junius D. Pratt, ‘Kings and Books in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 43 (2014), 297–377 (p. 328). 76 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 186. 77 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 154. 78 Anlezark, ‘Lay Reading’. 79 See B. C. Withers, Hexateuch, and Withers’s earlier piece on the preface, ‘A “Secret and Feverish Genesis”: The Prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch’, The Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999), 53–71. 75

Introduction  3 3

compilation, because of interpolation and variation, does not correspond clearly to any other vernacular version of the Bible. The selection of poetry copied and compiled into Junius 11 creates a cyclical and sometimes jarred, ruptured version of the history known from the Old and New Testaments and their apocrypha. Variations on the same events across the manuscript, such as Lucifer’s fall or God’s punishment of the proud and ill-advised, and the reinforcement of the need for good counsel though poetic narrative, also mean that the guidance offered by Junius 11 against unræd is cumulative as a reader works through it. Junius 11 has always been an important artefact for understanding how the Old Testament in particular offered stories and scenarios that could be adopted or reshaped by early medieval religious writers for the purposes of thinking through their own contemporary crises. But the Junius 11 book is more than a tome of evidence for the interest of early medieval culture in Old Testament history. It has more specific and perhaps even more localised connectivity to early medieval social and political happenings across time (the Ælfwine portrait is one sign of this). Junius 11 rewards a reading of its poetry that attends to multivalency and wordplay. It is also a poetic object that reflects the craft of Old English verse as a form that could do significant cultural work. After all, this is an ambitious manuscript, one informed and propelled by the creative potential of poetic art, as well as by the force of verse as a political tool, and much of what it teaches us lies in the language and the ingenuity of the anonymous poets it has brought into contact with each other. The very design and arrangement of Junius 11 suggests that a reader’s movement through it could go back and forth, or up and down, even across it, and that more ræd could be gathered with each journey through its sequence of poems. As a manuscript of poetic counsel, one that often warns or instructs by offering models of either exemplary or disastrous behaviour, Junius 11 demands that its audience engage with it not only as human beings imbricated within the history it maps out in a multi-layered and not-always-linear fashion, but also as readers able to return to it again and again, gaining more from the parts or poems they read each time, applying its counsel not only to the texts as they return to them, but also to their individual and communal journeys towards good rule and rightful interpretation Junius 11’s poetry seeks to inspire.

1 Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A

T

he opening folios of MS Junius 11 shape and direct our reading of the poetry found on them, while setting in motion the story the codex seeks to tell. Despite the blank spaces where illustrations were never drawn, which suggest that some of the goals of the manuscript makers were never fulfilled, Junius 11 did have at least some contemporary readers. Revisers reveal themselves across the book: from the corrector amending vocabulary to later West Saxon in Genesis B and Christ and Satan, possibly for the purpose of re-copying, for example, to the artwork of a second artist and other, later illustrators. Those who took up the manuscript-making project after a possible slow down or halt in production on ‘Liber I’ and saw through the writing out of Christ and Satan might also have performed an act of response to the poems and images set down before they came to work on Junius 11. This is suggested by the ways ‘Liber II’ echoes or returns to events, such as the fall of the angels, or themes, such as the might of the creator, that were prominent in ‘Liber I’.1 ‘Liber II’ also offers audiences the chance to re-read the other poetry in the manuscript with its impressions of the impending Judgement as well as its exhortation and the counsel it offers in mind. Christ and Satan will detail the laments of the fallen angels after the rebellion in heaven, the event that also structures the beginning of the manuscript, where the most prevalent thematic oppositions that will recur through the codex are first explored – specifically, these are the themes that circulate around those Old English words ræd and unræd, and it is the conflict relating to these in the opening passages of Junius 11 that lays Chapter Five addresses the inclusion of Christ and Satan in more detail. A. N. Doane has argued that blank spaces left for illustrations in the manuscript suggest that the scribe of ‘Liber I’ ‘was following an exemplar that contained the Old Testament texts in the same order, including Genesis B, but not Christ and Satan, which was added in a remodelled quire as much as a generation after the work of the first scribe’. He also gestures towards the creativity of the initial project-makers of Junius 11 here, suggesting that scribe and illustrator ‘may have had a partially illustrated exemplar, extrapolating extra material into this copy as they proceeded’. See Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised, ed. A. N. Doane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 435 (Tempe AZ, 2013), p. 19.

1

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   35

the foundations for the compilation’s representation of salvation history in vernacular poetry. Genesis A, the first poem in Junius 11, adheres to the sequence of events found in the biblical Genesis up to the account of the rescue of Isaac from sacrificial flames (Genesis 22.13).2 But this poem, like its partners in the manuscript, reworks biblical material through Old English poetic diction. Moreover, Genesis A begins with an extra-biblical prologue (lines 1–111) describing the rebellion of Lucifer and his sect of angels. In this prologue we are introduced to a key opposition defined in Old English vernacular terms that the manuscript poetry will revisit time and again: the conflict between the ill counsel that gives birth to strife and the good counsel that is blessed by divine, creative power. As the rebel angels follow Lucifer towards the promise of a new kingdom, the Genesis A poet describes the uprise as one that moves away from ‘ræd’ (l. 24a) towards ‘unræd’ (l. 30a). In response to such transgression, God grows angry and manufactures hell, a ‘rædleas hof ’ (l. 44b) and thus the poet brings a lack of OE ræd into association with eternal damnation. In this originary narrative, hell is not only God’s first creation but is also described as being made and shaped, having architectural features and housing those inimical qualities (like OE unræd) that led Lucifer to ruin. In the Introduction to this book, I suggested that the conflict between OE ræd and OE unræd and the wider associations of these words (including counsel and ill counsel, right and wrongful interpretation, successful and disastrous rule) are preoccupations of the Junius 11 poetry and, as such, were principal concerns of those who put the manuscript together. By associating Lucifer’s betrayal of his lord and his desire to divide a kingdom with unræd at the start of the poem, the poet of Genesis A crafts a foundation to their reworking of Genesis that explains what led to the earthly creation in language that allows the angelic rebellion to have relevance within the sphere of early medieval political thought. Although the fall of the angels was a popular topic in early medieval England, David F. Johnson has demonstrated that the prologue to Genesis A features details that make it difficult to source within either the hexameral or the catechetical narratio traditions.3 While the poet is likely to have been When the poet comes to Genesis 3–5 and 8–22, events are followed closely, meaning that a form of the biblical narrative with these chapters in sequence is likely to have served as a source. See C. D. Wright, ‘Genesis A ad litteram’, in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. M. Fox and M. Sharma (Toronto and London, 2012), pp. 121–72 (pp. 149–50). 3 See Johnson, ‘Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Date and Provenance of MS Junius 11’, in The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick Conner, ed. E. J. Christie (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 27–62. 2

3 6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

familiar with a diverse body of work on the subject in both Latin and Old English, the account in the poem is substantial and it departs from influential Augustinian theory by clearly marking out the angelic fall as the cause of the earthly creation. This is an unusual version of the doctrine of replacement (the idea that humankind would inherit the empty thrones left behind by the exiled angels), a doctrine that had a ‘sparse, but prestigious ancestry’, as Dorothy Haines notes, with beginnings in Augustine’s Enchiridion ad Laurentium 62 and in De civitate Dei (22.1).4 As Johnson outlines further, the idea of replacement in the prologue to Genesis A has few parallels, but it does share similarities with documents tied to early medieval kings and their reformist aims. Such parallels are found in the proems of two Anglo-Latin charters from the second half of the tenth century: the New Minster Charter, otherwise known as ‘King Edgar’s Privilege to New Minster, Winchester’ (London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A.viii) and, in the Peniarth Diploma, a Burton Abbey charter from the reign of King Æthelred II (Unræd) written at Winchester (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 390). These charters utilise the fall of the rebel angels story to situate their political action within the scheme of salvation history. In the New Minster Charter, the exile of the clerics from Winchester asks to be read in relation to Lucifer’s expulsion and in the ‘Peniarth Diploma’, the grant of land from Æthelred to his scriptor, Ælfwine, is written with deference to God’s superiority. The fall of the angels story may well have offered a reminder of how a ruler should act in the face of rebellion by those who would break the terms of such a land grant. Lucifer’s tragedy may also have served as a warning against attempting to fabricate or possess new spaces in ways that opposed a king either earthly or divine. Because the angelic fall is such a prominent poetic and visual component of Junius 11, being told and retold from different perspectives across the poetry of Genesis A, Genesis B and Christ and Satan, and because major early medieval political documents retell the story to mark key power-shifts, it is likely that the Junius manuscript demonstrates an interest in speaking to, or understanding, the crises and nature of rulership, rebellion and restoration that preoccupied early medieval kings such as Edgar and advisors or bishops like Æthelwold. As the New Minster Charter shows us, for example, the account of Lucifer’s apostasy could drive and also perhaps curtail the movement of political and religious reformers while it helped place their work within the grand plan of divine creation. Such interest in the plight of the rebel angels likely informs the Haines, ‘Vacancies in Heaven: The Doctrine of Replacement and Genesis A’, N&Q 44.2 (1997), 150–4. Gregory uses the replacement concept in his Homiliarum in evangelia, highlighting the parable of the ten coins (Luke 10), stating that as many humans shall reach heaven as angels that remain there.

4

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   37

beginning of Junius 11 and the prologue to Genesis A, a poem that re-founds and shifts the beginnings of biblical history, locating the cause of the world in an account of Lucifer’s fall. Details in the prologue, especially on the level of poetic language, reflect further early medieval ideas and ideals about kingship, rule, counsel and the regulation of crime. This chapter will examine the prologue to Genesis A and argue that the beginning of the poem is an important foundation for the Junius 11 manuscript’s poetic cycle because it sets up key thematic oppositions that will remain prominent throughout the codex, such as the conflict between OE ræd and OE unræd. By beginning with the fall of the angels and an arresting account of God’s violence towards the rebellion, the poet of Genesis A offers something against which those figures found in parts of the poem that follow the biblical Genesis more closely can be measured: throughout Genesis A’s reworking of the Old Testament, transgressive figures including Cain and the builders of the Tower of Babel have their failures explained as acts of bad counsel and overreaching that have damaging consequences. As the opening pages of Junius 11 describe the building of hell by God, the hell-home itself functions as an important reference-point as the poem moves forward: those who are connected to Lucifer through verbal echo can be interpreted as recycling and repeating his ill-advised transgressions against creation. The prologue, then, is integrated into Genesis A more purposefully than studies that consider the poem a paraphrase of the biblical book have acknowledged and this chapter will address some of these scholarly views before arguing that a close reading of the prologue reveals that Genesis A is no mere ‘paraphrase’ but in fact the foundation of the Junius 11 book. At the beginning of Genesis A, the might of the divine creator is unleashed upon readers and viewers, directing Junius 11’s audience to pay attention to the manoeuvres and qualities that led Lucifer to damnation.

The beginning of the poetry in MS Junius 11

The 111-line extra-biblical prologue to Genesis A is part of the poem’s overall design. It serves as the foundation of those subsequent 2,825 lines that correspond closely (at least in the linear course of events) to the narrative of the biblical Genesis up to Abraham’s test of faith. As A. N. Doane and Paul Remley have discussed, the poet certainly relied on a Latin Genesis for a large portion of the poem, possibly on a combination of what we know as the Vulgate and fragments of an Old Latin Bible, but it is difficult to trace a source because hardly ‘any manuscripts of continuous biblical texts other

3 8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

than Psalters and Gospels have come down to us from the Anglo-Saxon period’.5 With the integration of the prologue, which does not have a biblical precedent, and additions to other chapters of the biblical book, the poet brought Genesis into Old English poetry, reworking the Old Testament in ways that allowed for such biblical material to provide examples of conflicts and crimes that were understandable in the realm of early medieval society, early medieval history, and in the social and legal worlds of this culture more broadly.6 Despite this, critical terms like ‘biblical poetry’ and ‘paraphrase’ have often been used reductively to describe the work of the Genesis A poet. In his study of verbal patterns throughout Genesis A, Larry N. McKill suggests that ‘paraphrase’ has been used ‘disparagingly’ to refer to Genesis A ever since Franciscus Junius gave the heading ‘Paraphrasis’ to the manuscript in which the poem is found. McKill argues that the poem has a reputation as ‘a crude and slavish metrical versification of the Vulgate, devoid of structure and unity, and lacking in imagination or artistry’.7 Focus on how the poem sticks to the biblical source and yet somehow fails as a paraphrase or translation has been influential.8 Genesis A has a critical history punctuated by dismissive readings of its poetry. Genesis A: A New Edition, p. 77. P. G. Remley suggests that ‘It is still far from clear, however, that this (the Vulgate) was the only Latin source known to the poet, who includes varying amounts of detail even in the most literalistic sections of the poem’. Old English Biblical Verse: Studies in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel (Cambridge, 1996), p. 114. The poem’s status as a paraphrase of the Vulgate began with the work of A. Ebert, ‘Zur angelsächsischen Genesis’, Anglia 5 (1882), 124–33 and E. Hönncher, ‘Über die Quellen der angelsächsischen Genesis’, Anglia 8 (1885), 41–85. 6 Wright, ‘Genesis A ad litteram’, argues that the poet approached the biblical narrative in a historical manner that ‘rendered both allegory and typology peripheral to his concerns, and that he [the poet] does not, as a rule, prompt meditation on extra-literal meanings’ (p. 123). Although Wright does not assess the prologue to the poem in detail, he writes that ‘[from] the opening description of the fall of the wicked angels, the poet evaluates the central figures of biblical history according to their conformation to or rebellion against the will of God’ (p. 153). 7 L. N. McKill, ‘The Offering of Isaac and the Artistry of Old English Genesis A’, in The Practical Vision: Essays in Honor of Flora Roy, ed. J. Campbell and J. Doyle (Waterloo ONT, 1978), pp. 1–11 (p. 2). 8 See, for example, W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (London, 1955), who stated that ‘[Genesis A is] interesting as giving the average literary taste and the commonplace poetical stock of a dull educated man’ (p. 256). See further C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (New York, 1967), pp. 101–2. Samantha Zacher’s study, Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (London, 2013), which did not assess Genesis A, did mention the poem, in an overview of Junius 11, as a ‘faithful and even slavish translation’ (p. 5). 5

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   39

Several scholars, however, including Jill Fitzgerald, Scott Smith and Karin Olsen, have suggested that Genesis A is an innovative poem with early medieval socio-political resonance. This work can help combat views that consider the prologue of Genesis A an add-on to the ‘translation’ of the Vulgate Genesis.9 Thinking beyond the parameters of a reading-as-paraphrase approach, attentiveness to the ways the prologue is echoed verbally throughout the poem, in the ways Olsen has highlighted, as well as the way this poetic language resembles the tenor of early medieval charters and spatial politics, as Smith and Fitzgerald have shown, allows us to assess the poet’s engagement with the biblical book as more of a poetic and culturally conditioned enterprise. This has implications because it brings into focus the nature of the Genesis A poet’s work as more in keeping with the other Junius poems and the way they, too, reach beyond simple retelling and translation, representing the interests of the early medieval compilers in poetic material based on biblical history that had strong and dramatic potential to offer guidance and counsel for their audiences. What sits at the beginning of the poetic Genesis and on the opening pages of Junius 11 is likely to have been part of the poem for some time, if not from its first composition. The prologue to Genesis A is not, therefore, a præfatio such as the one found at the beginning of the Heliand, the biblical epic with which the Junius Genesis B shares many similarities, or a preliminary such as Ælfric’s late tenth century ‘Preface to Genesis’ which was copied into the opening of the illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv) in the first quarter of the eleventh century.10 Unlike these ‘pre-views’, which link their biblical-themed vernacular works to authoritative and authorial figures (the Heliand’s praefatio to Louis the Pious, the use of the ‘Preface to Genesis’ to Ælfric and his strong feelings about the interpretation of scripture), the prologue to Genesis A, not based on the biblical Genesis, is made up of a dramatic narrative about the rise of Lucifer’s ‘oferhygd’ (l. 22b) and his move towards ‘unræd’ (l. 30a). This is integrated into the long poetic project of remaking the first book of the Old Testament into Old English poetry and K. Olsen, ‘“Him þæs Grim Lean Becom”: The Theme of Infertility in Genesis A’, in Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, ed. A. Harbus and R. Poole (Toronto: 2008), pp. 127–43; S. T. Smith, ‘Faith and Forfeiture in the Old English Genesis A’, Modern Philology 111.4 (2014), 593–615; J. Fitzgerald, Rebel Angels: Space and Sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2019), pp. 23–71. 10 For the role of Ælfric’s preface in the later Hexateuch manuscript, see B. C. Withers, ‘A “Secret and Feverish Genesis”: The Prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch’, The Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999), 53–71. 9

Figure 2.  Junius 11, page ii and page 1 (right), frontispiece of the creator enthroned alongside the opening lines of Genesis A. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

4 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

the prologue assists its audience’s interpretation of the biblical narrative itself by imprinting upon them some important key ideas and terms, such as those associated with ræd and unræd, and providing them with an explanation of what motivated the creation of the world. Before the tale of Lucifer’s rebellion, the opening lines of the poem impel the audience to praise the creator, offering the first piece of guidance in the Junius 11 poetry. The poet will, very soon, turn to Lucifer’s errors and demonstrate the consequences of refusing to work as a community to build praise for God. Reading these opening lines of Genesis A in the manuscript also involves viewing the work of the first artist positioned before them and alongside them. The first image in Junius 11, often called its ‘frontispiece’, is an image of the creator enthroned in majesty, riding wavy lines that represent the chaotic void before creation (on page ii, as numbered by Muir). It is frequently reproduced as a single, one-page illumination indicating the continental influence on the artwork of Junius 11.11 However, if the manuscript is open to this image, it is not a stand-alone illumination: the ‘frontispiece’ sits alongside a full page of poetry (the beginning of Genesis A, lines 1–32, on page 1; see Fig. 2a and b). If we were looking at the open book, we would face the frontispiece on our left-hand side and the poetry on our right. The opening lines of that poetry call on readers to perform: Us is riht micel  ðæt we rodera weard, wereda wuldorcining,  wordum herigen (It is a great duty for us that we praise with words the guardian of the heavens, the glory-king of hosts; ll. 1–2)

These lines will be echoed throughout Junius 11, as fallen or wicked figures like Lucifer’s rebels, the Egyptians in Exodus, or the Chaldeans in Daniel serve as reminders of doomed or lost communities that did not unite in praise for the creator. In these first two lines of Genesis A, the poet states that it is ‘riht micel’ that the ‘rodera weard’ is praised in ‘words’ by ‘us’ – by anyone about to go ahead and read the manuscript, which will provide many examples of why praising the divine ruler is a good idea. ‘Riht’ is multivalent, and an important word for the Genesis A poet. It is commonly used in early medieval legislation, where, as Bosworth-Toller suggests, its meanings connote ‘what is in accordance with

11

For connections between this image and the Utrecht Psalter, see B. Raw, ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48, p. 143. See also B. Reinhard, ‘The Opening Image of MS Junius 11’, Old English Newsletter 42 (2010), 15–25.

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   43

law, human or divine’.12 The Genesis A poet’s use of the term here encompasses the moral or spiritual elements of ‘riht’, as well as meanings that might pertain more to local, earthly law or taxation: it is ‘righteous’, ‘right’ and lawful (and in keeping with God’s ‘right’ or law) that we should praise God.13 The object of the praise referred to sits alongside these lines in the manuscript in illustrated form. Sitting on a throne and holding a scroll, the creator floats on high surrounded by seraphim and personifications of the winds. Catherine Karkov has linked these to descriptions of the throne in Revelation 4. 6–8, noting the visionary nature of the image, as well as its ability to draw Old and New Testaments together: the image’s ‘cruciforous nimbus also helps to signify the preexistence of Christ logos with the Father’.14 Around the outer edges of this page is an architectural frame, which Muir suggests ‘depicts the vault of the heavens’, asking us to enter.15 At the top of the page ‘Genesis in anglico’ is written, possibly by a later reader, directing us to the poetry – a Genesis in English – while the poetry itself gestures towards the image, a visual depiction of the ‘rodera weard’ (guardian of the heavens; l. 1b). Roberta Frank writes that the first two lines of Genesis A offer a ‘threefold play on “word”’ (weard [l. 1b], wereda [l. 2a], wordum [l. 2b]) and ‘this English sound correspondence would have seemed to the poet to reflect a theological reality, the mysterious identity of Deus and Logos, weard and word, as formulated in John 1.1: In principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum.’16 Such wordplay in Old English brings the beginning of the Latin Genesis into conflation with the first verse of John, which, Frank notes, is in keeping with early medieval patristics. Poetically, this concern with word and creation and with ‘riht’ firstly represents the manuscript as the compilers’ own work of praise and acknowledgement of the omnipotence of the divine creator and, secondly, sets out the guidance that, as the remainder of the prologue will detail, the rebel angels did not follow. All angels before the rebellion in heaven, the poet highlights, used to work for ‘riht’, but many are turned away from this by Lucifer:       elles ne ongunnon ræran on roderum  nymþe riht and soþ ær ðon engla wearð  for oferhygde B-T, riht. With thanks to A. Rabin for this. 14 C. E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001), p. 47. 15 A Digital Facsimile, ed. Muir, note to p. ii. 16 R. Frank, ‘Paranomasia in Old English Verse’, in The Poems of MS Junius 11, ed. R. M. Liuzza, pp. 69–99 (pp. 72–3). 12 13

4 4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

dæl on gedwilde.  noldan dreogan leng heora selfra ræd. ([they] began to raise up in the heavens nothing else but duty and truth, until a portion of angels fell into error because of pride. They no longer wanted to work for their own good counsel. ll. 20b–24a)

There are immediate echoes of the opening lines of poetry in the manuscript: as it was ‘riht’ to praise the ‘rodera weard’ (ll. 1–2), here we learn that the angels in heaven ‘ræran on roderum nymþe riht and soþ’: they raised up in the heavens what was rightful, lawful. They praised God, while adhering to, and performing, the law within his kingdom. Later in Genesis A, when God decides to destroy the earth with the Flood, the poet states that God ‘geseah unrihte eorðan fulle’ (saw the earth full of unrighteousness; l. 1292), highlighting that without the upholding of ‘riht’, things move towards their own destruction, as the earth did in Noah’s time. There is an idea here about the order of the universe: it is ‘riht’ for God’s subjects, part of his divine plan, to engage in praise within his creation. Abandoning that ‘riht’ within a kingdom pushes against created order. The heavenly kingdom at the beginning of the poem breaks apart and God must act or ‘work’ (to think of that OE verb dreogan used of the angels above) as the ‘oferhygde’ of the high-ranking angels (perhaps Lucifer is already thinking of himself as on a par with the creator here) leads a portion of the angels away from ‘ræd’. In this moment of turning away from heavenly ‘riht’, ‘ræd’ encapsulates meanings of good counsel and advice but also benefit and success, which are all interlinked and dependent on one another. On the one hand, the angels’ wish to abandon ‘ræd’ is one identified as a dangerous lack of measure: ‘oferhygd’ suggests superbia but also an overgrowth of the mind. On the other, no longer seeking ‘ræd’ is tied to obscurity and miscreation. Christopher A. Jones has demonstrated that the OE word gedwilde, which in Genesis A’s prologue describes the ‘error’ of the rebel angels, is related ‘at its base’ to OE dwolma, a word which glosses chaos ten times in the corpus.17 The angels ‘begin’ a process of reversal, of anti-creative action, that not only opposes the striking images of the creator at the front of the Junius 11 manuscript and, through verbal echo, the opening instruction to praise him, but also suggests the dreadful consequences of not working for ‘ræd’ as it relates to both the stability of a kingdom and the relationship of that kingdom to the divine creator. As the situation in the heavenly kingdom changes, God is called to action. In what follows in the prologue the poet details the severe punishment that C. A. Jones, ‘Early Medieval Chaos’, in Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, ed. A. Harbus and R. Poole, pp. 15–39 (p. 29).

17

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   45

comes to those who sought rebellion, as the manuscript shows readers and viewers the damnation that awaits those who devise unrest and seek to overthrow their rightful ruler.

Foundations: the rebellion

As the prologue develops, the Genesis A poet outlines how a portion of the angelic host fell under the influence of Lucifer’s machinations:       him þær sar gelamp, æfst and oferhygd  and þæs engles mod þe þone unræd  ongan ærest fremman, wefan and weccean. (sorrow came upon them there, envy and pride and the mind of the angel who first began to act, to weave and awaken the ill counsel. ll. 28b–31a)

This turning away from God’s intimacy is a movement towards ‘unræd’.18 The poetry of Junius 11 will return to this idea. Indeed, both Exodus and Daniel make clear that to operate through unræd obscures God-as-creator as he exists within the text of the world. In the account of Cain slaying Abel in Genesis A, Cain is described as having ‘unræden / folmum gefremede’ (performed an ill-counselled act with his hands; ll. 982b–983). In an expansion on the biblical episode, which states ‘Cain adversus Abel fratrem suum et interfecit eum’ (Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and slew him; Genesis 4.8), the poet outlines that unræd led to the miscreation Cain causes with his hands, describing in an extra-biblical passage how worldly strife spread across the earth from its roots in the blood of Cain’s crime of fratricide. As the poem details it, ‘ræhton wide / geond werþeoda wrohtes telgan’ (the branches of that strife spread widely throughout the nations; ll. 990b–991). This episode, 18

The use of the verb hweorfan (to turn, to move away) signals exile from God’s protection elsewhere in the poem. Adam, for instance, is condemned to ‘on wræc hweorfan’ (turn into exile; l. 928b) following his inability to follow the rules that came with dwelling in Paradise. Adam and Eve must, therefore, from ‘hweorfan / neorxnawange on nearore lif ’ (turn from Paradise to a narrow/oppressive life; ll. 943b–944a) and must seek a ‘wynleasran wic’ (a joyless dwelling; l. 928). Cain, God commands, in the episode that follows on from the expulsion of Adam and Eve and the slaying of Abel, ‘scealt geomor hweorfan, / arleas of earde þinum’ (must turn to misery, without the honour of your dominion; 1018b–1019a). He must also ‘on wræc hweorfan’ (turn away into exile; l. 1014b). K. Cherewatuk, ‘Standing, Turning, Twisting, Falling: Posture and Moral Stance in Genesis B’, NM 87 (1986), 537–44, has shown the importance of the vocabulary and imagery of ‘turning’ in relation to ‘falling’ in Genesis B. Such terminology is equally as important in Genesis A.

4 6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Charles Wright notes, finds parallels in a variety of apocrypha, Jewish texts and in the prose Solomon and Saturn, where the earth is described as being cursed because it swallowed the spilt blood, and the episode also has close links with Aldhelm’s Carmen de virginitate.19 But the poet’s innovations mean that the severity of Cain’s crime is doubled in early medieval vernacular terms: killing a ‘freomæg’ (kinsman) in Genesis A is rendered as a violation of ‘one of the most basic of Germanic laws’ (not to kill kin, but to protect them).20 Unræd forms the root of growing disorder and tragedy throughout the world. Yet, the prologue to the poem has also tied acts of destructive unræd to Lucifer and to hell, adding additional weight to Cain’s transgression within the parameters of the poem, allowing it to echo Lucifer’s failure. In the prologue to Genesis A, the folly and misinterpretation evoked by unræd are bound up with Lucifer’s ‘first’ act of creative agency: his weaving and waking. This extends his influence over a great host of angels while ‘waking’ a new kind of overblown idea about rule and possession. ‘Unræd’ at line 30a of Genesis A ignites Lucifer’s desire to craft and carve out something new, but this ambition is built on a distorted interpretation of a working hierarchy. The creative impulse of the soon-to-be devil is captured by the poet’s use of the verb wefan, a word that suggests physical crafting and knotting, as well as a more metaphorical contriving and planning.21 Writings by Ælfric of Eynsham suggest that OE unræd had more associations with devilry, as well as with nefarious plotting, in the early medieval literary cultures of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Ælfric’s understanding of creation and cyclical history might have developed out of his education with Bishop Æthelwold and, more specifically, out of his time in the royal city of Winchester (where we know the New Minster Charter, composed by Æthelwold and featuring the fall of the angels in the proem, was produced). Ælfric was one of Æthelwold’s most influential pupils, and it is very likely that he was in Winchester during the rebuilding and refoundation propelled by his tutor (c. 964–70).22 It is also likely that Ælfric wrote his work De initio creaturae soon after his time there,23 a work, alongside his Letter to Sigeweard, C. D. Wright, ‘The Blood of Abel and the Branches of Sin: Genesis A, Maxims I and Aldhelm’s Carmen de uirginitate’, ASE 25 (1996), 7–19. 20 B. A. Brockman, ‘“Heroic” and “Christian” in Genesis A: The Evidence of the Cain and Abel Episode’, Modern Language Quarterly 35.2 (1974), 115–28 (p. 117). 21 B-T, s.v. wefan. 22 J. Hill, ‘Ælfric: His Life and Works’, in A Companion to Ælfric, ed. H. Magennis and M. Swan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 35–65 (pp. 44–51). 23 M. Fox, ‘Ælfric on the Creation and Fall of the Angels’, ASE 31 (2002), 175–200 (p. 198); Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, Text, ed. P. Clemoes, EETS SS

19

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   47

that turns to the subject of the angelic fall. Michael Fox has pointed out that De initio creaturae has some very specific connections with Genesis A, including the ‘highly unusual detail’ that there is a slight delay while God creates hell following the rebellion (although the details of God manufacturing hell before earth are only found in the prologue to Genesis A).24 While this detail in De initio creaturae does not expand on hell as the first creation the way the Genesis A poet does, Ælfric, like the poet of Genesis A, does describe Lucifer’s influence over those who follow him as a form of bad counsel that leads them to hell: Þa gefæstnode he þisne ræd wið þam werode þe he bewiste. and hi ealle to ðam ræde gebugon; þa ða hi ealle hæfdon þisne ræd betwux him gefæstnod. þa becom godes grama ofer him eallum […] hwile þe he smeade hu he mihte dælan rice wið god. þa hwile gearcode se ælmihtiga scyppend him and his geferan hellewite25 (Then he fastened this counsel against the host over which he ruled, and they all bowed to that counsel. When they all had fastened this counsel among themselves, God’s anger came over them all […] while he meditated how he might share power with God, the almighty creator prepared helltorment for him and his associates)

Ælfric’s text, like Genesis A, is explicit about the bad ræd that originates with Lucifer and motivates his desire to fracture and, as Ælfric has it here, ‘dælan rice wið god’ (divide the kingdom, or share power, with God). The same impulse underlies the transgression of the angels in Genesis A as they ‘hæfdon gielp micel / þæt hie wið drihtne dælan meahton / wuldorfæsten wic’ (had the great boast that they could divide the glory-fast dwelling with the lord; ll. 25b–27a). Michael Fox also shows that the disfigured form of Lucifer’s ‘ræd’ reoccurs in several of Ælfric’s other writings as something that ‘binds’ and ‘fastens’ (we see the verb gefæstnian in the Letter to Sigeweard): ‘instead of binding himself to God’, Fox writes, Lucifer ‘chooses to seek a “seat” or “security” in his own power’.26 Ælfric picks out the way the host of angels submit to and are bound by Lucifer’s ‘ræd’ throughout his works concerned with the beginnings of things, including his Exameron. In De initio creaturae, too, Ælfric writes that God hi geworhte to wlitegum engla gecynde, and let hi habban agenne cyre. and hi næfre ne gebigde ne ne nydde mid nanum þingum to þam yfelan 17 (Oxford, 1997), p. 174. Fox, ‘Ælfric on the Creation and Fall’, p. 198. 25 Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes, pp. 179–80. 26 M. Fox, ‘Ælfric on the Creation and Fall’, p. 191. 24

4 8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

ræde. ne næfre se yfela ræd ne com of Godes geþance. ac com of þæs deofles, swa swa we ær cwædon.27 (God had made them of the beauteous nature of angels, and let them have their own will, and would never have inclined nor forced them in any way to that evil counsel; for the evil counsel never came from God’s conception, but came from the devil’s, as we said before.)

The poetry of the prologue to Genesis A expands on and dramatises a related idea (where the interest in the origins of things is very much an interest in the origins of strife and ill-counsel): unræd begins with Lucifer and incites illusory dreams of a newly established, alternative kingdom and throne. By tying poor counsel – or, more specifically, the origins of unræd – to devilish geþanc, Ælfric offers a damnation of those who pursue ill-advised, disastrous action. Later manuscripts of Ælfric’s De initio creaturae (especially London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian A.xxii, dated to around 1200) suggest an interest in intensifying this idea: as Stephen Pelle has written, the text of De initio creaturae from c. 1200 shows expansions and edits as it continues to play on OE ræd, replacing it with OE unræd, ‘to strengthen Ælfric’s point’ about ‘the utter futility of Lucifer’s plan’.28 The prologue to Genesis A suggests that the Junius compilers, in including Genesis A, had looked to put to their readers a related and intense warning regarding devising plans or uprising against rulers earthly and divine. The dangerous move of Lucifer away from ‘ræd’ and towards an idea of his own throne increases his distance from God, as the prologue to Genesis A continues:       þa he worde cwæð, niþes ofþyrsted,  þæt he on norðdæle [end of page 1 of Junius 11] ham and heahsetl  heofena rices [beginning of page 2 of Junius 11] agan wolde. (then he, [Lucifer], spoke in a word, thirsted for strife, [said] that in the northern part of the heavenly kingdom he would possess a home and a high throne. ll. 31b–34a)

The break between page 1 and page 2 of Junius 11 separates Lucifer’s conception of a ‘northern part’ of heaven from his idea of a throne that will allow him to rule in such a part of a kingdom. The word ‘norðdæle’ is the last word on page 1 and, if we were to view the open manuscript here (looking at p. ii and p. 1 27 28

Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Clemoes, p. 180. S. Pelle, ‘Ræd, Unræd, and Raining Angels: Alterations to a Late Copy of Ælfric’s Homily “De Initio Creaturae”’, N&Q 57.3 (2010), 295–301 (p. 297).

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   49

together), it is the word furthest from the image of the creator in majesty (the ‘frontispiece’) in the opposing corner of the facing page. Lucifer’s choice of the ‘northern part’ of heaven for his new kingdom draws on the tradition emerging out of Isaiah 14.13 that placed Lucifer’s throne in the north. As a result, Charles Wright notes, the location of hell in the north became commonplace in the Christian tradition.29 However, in Junius 11 the idea of a ‘norðdæl’ also functions as a marker of Lucifer’s growing distance from heaven in his own mind, and as an example of the manner in which unræd causes segregation: this ‘northern’ place is an illusion of Lucifer’s own making, emerging out of a desire for fracture. That ‘norðdæle’ here could evoke the sense that Lucifer’s desire has created nothing but division is suggested by OE dæl, which forms part of this compound and connotes meanings of part, portion, or a divide. The verb dælan will become prominent in the account of earthly creation later in the poem, when God does the real work of dividing land, water, sky and earth (ll. 146–53).30 As if to accentuate that Lucifer’s abandonment of ‘riht’ and ‘ræd’ have split the kingdom and separated the rebel host from their lord, a viewer or reader would have to turn the page, over to page 2, to read that Lucifer planned to possess (‘agan’) a home and a high throne in his new realm: the separation between the illusory place (‘norðdæle’) and what Lucifer intends to do there (possess a throne) created by the page-break disconnects Lucifer’s ill-advised ambitions from their unreachable end product. By referring to Lucifer’s desire to possess a ‘high’ throne, Genesis A’s account of the strife in heaven portrays the primordial situation as one that earthly early medieval kings may ponder or ruminate upon: Lucifer is a threat to rule, representing political rebellion. The pursuit of his own ‘ham and heahsetl’ is described in poetry that sits alongside the full-page illustration of the fall of the rebel angels in the manuscript and, at the top of that full-page illumination, Lucifer’s followers bring him crowns in a ceremonial procession (see Fig. 3). The illustration of Lucifer’s crowning ceremony in Junius 11 combines with the passage of poetry concerning the rebels’ straying towards ideas of new governance from Genesis A, working in an interchange, a conversation, to stress the rebel angels’ misunderstanding of divine rule and royal power. The large figure of Lucifer at the top of page 3 points to a great citadel and its throne (which connects to the ‘heahsetl’ he desires in the adjacent passage from Genesis A). Unoccupied in the image, this seat of power is little more than Lucifer’s vision of a future that will never materialise. If we follow the pointing hand of C. D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1993), p. 129. 30 For the importance of division in the poem, see C. Hieatt, ‘Divisions: Theme and Structure of Genesis A’, NM 81 (1980), 243–51. 29

Figure 3.  MS Junius 11, pages 2 and 3 (right): description of Lucifer’s high throne in poetry with image of the creator and attending angels (p. 2) alongside full-page image of the fall of the rebel angels (p. 3). By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

5 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

the rebel angel, our eyes are directed to the topmost corner of the page and to the domineering, crenellated architecture of his desired palace. Jill Fitzgerald writes that lower down the page, as the visual narrative sequence turns to the angels falling into hell, the falling debris of this citadel can be seen, highlighting the ‘architectural instability in the aftermath of the rebellion’.31 Lucifer’s plans rested on insecure foundations, on folly and desire for strife, and his rule crumbles before his project is seen through. This is an important detail, highlighting the way the illuminations work with the poetry: as the prologue continues, God constructs hell as both master creator and divine punisher, which makes for a startling juxtaposition with the illumination of Lucifer’s falling palace. The procession involving angels bringing gifts to Lucifer in this image has been highlighted as a strong indication that the illuminations of Junius 11 have a continental source. Barbara Raw has drawn attention to the ways that the crowns and staffs surrounding Lucifer in the visual ceremony resemble representations of insignia associated with coronation and imperial rule developing in the ninth century, and seen in illustrations of Charles the Bald in the Vivian Bible.32 As the image relates to the prologue of Genesis A, we can think with Nicole Marafioti’s reminder that there was certainly an ‘increasing interest in imperial ideology and ceremonial focus’ from the period of King Edgar onwards into the late tenth century, and this appears to have been rooted in attempts to draw the earthly king ever closer to a position of God’s royal representative on earth.33 The combination in Junius 11 of the full-page illustration of the angelic fall and the poetry alongside it intensifies the position of God as divine ruler and of Lucifer as a failed one, but reminds early medieval readers that those ruling on earth are subject to similar dangers (such as unræd and the rebellion of those closest to them) and requirements (to quash betrayal and rebellion with force). Explicit reminders about both threats to rule and what a ruler or king should do in the face of disorder are certainly evident in the most substantial political writings to survive from early medieval England. The works of Wulfstan of York, for example, aid us in understanding how the prologue to Genesis A would have been an appropriate guide for those in powerful positions. Homilies and legislation written by Wulfstan for both Æthelred II (r. 978–1016) and Cnut (r. 1016–35) evoke sensibilities and ideals concerning kingship. To think with the prologue to Genesis A, political in its interest in ræd and unræd, Fitzgerald, Rebel Angels, p. 36. Raw, ‘Probable Derivation’, pp. 144–5. 33 N. Marafioti, The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2014), p. 72. 31 32

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   53

it is worth noting that Wulfstan often turned to salvation history as well as to English history to examine and advise his rulers and their subjects. As Patrick Wormald writes, the ‘corpus of Wulfstan’s homilies contains a number of meditations on Old Testament history, with its possible lessons for that of the English’.34 Wulfstan proposed that an ideal realm required the political and the spiritual to be in harmony. His famous tripartite division of society, possibly drawing on the Old English Boethius,35 saw this in terms of society’s three pillars – oratores (those who pray), laboratores (those who work or labour) and bellatores (those who fight to protect the land) – working together. We see this ideal outlined in his Institutes of Polity, in which Wulfstan elaborates further: On þyssum ðrym stapelum sceall ælc cynestol standan mid rihte on cristenre þeode. And awacie heora sona se stol scylfð; and fulberste heora ænig, þonne hrysð se stol nyðer, and þære þeode eall to unþearfe36 (On these three pillars must each throne stand in a Christian nation. And if any of them weaken, immediately the throne will tremble; and if any of them fall apart, the throne will then crumble and bring the people all to ruin)

Wulfstan’s mention of the crumbling throne might recall for us the image in Junius 11 of Lucifer’s falling seat and tower. But more resonant with the prologue still is Wulfstan’s policy that these pillars of society only remain stable with ‘wislicre Godes lare and mid rihtlicre woruldlage: þæt wyrð þam þeodscype to langsumne ræd’ (God’s wise teachings and with rightful worldly law: so that they will bring long-lasting good counsel to the people).37 The path to achieving ‘langsumne ræd’ will be detailed extensively by the poet of Exodus in P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 2009, repr. 2001), p. 462. 35 The Political Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, ed. and trans. A. Rabin (Manchester, 2015), p. 106. Rabin also notes that the variations on the three orders trope found in some of Ælfric’s texts, which Wulfstan may have been drawing on too, including the Letter to Sigeweard, ‘suggest that he (and perhaps Alfred also) was drawing on a now-lost Latin source’ (p. 106). 36 Die ‘Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical’, ed. K. Jost (Bern, 1959), pp. 56–7. Quotations of Institutes are from this edition’s text of II Polity from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 121. As both K. Jost and A. Rabin note, Wulfstan worked on the text from about 1008 onwards, with II Polity being a later text (dated to the early 1020s) than the text known as I Polity (which is found alongside II Polity in two manuscripts: London, BL, MS Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201) – the incarnation of Institutes Wulfstan had worked on before the arrival of Cnut. See Die ‘Institutes of Polity’, ed. K. Jost pp. 8–15; Rabin, Political Writings, pp. 43–4 and pp. 101–2. 37 Die ‘Institutes of Polity’, p. 57. 34

5 4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

a poem that reflects on interpretation, counsel and leadership by demanding that its audience learns how to read beneath the literal surface. Wulfstan’s point here, though, suggests that, mainly, a kingdom’s prosperity and comfort come from its ruler’s ‘riht’ (justice, law) and that ruler’s heeding of divine law and power. Sharing similarities with the language that defined the situation in heaven at the beginning of Genesis A, Wulfstan clarifies earlier in Institutes how a kingdom suffers without good ræd: Þurh unwisne cyning folc wyrð gerymed for oft, næs æne, for his misræde. Þurh cynincges wisdom folc wyrð gesælig and gesundful and sigefæst. 38 (Through an unwise king the people will become miserable not once but often, because of his misguided counsel. Through a king’s wisdom, the people will become happy, prosperous and victorious.)

The Old English Daniel, much later in Junius 11, will expand on this kind of idea, tracing as it does the fall of the Israelites from prosperity and rooting this in their lack of wisdom. Wulfstan’s Polity suggests that early medieval kingdoms were at risk from within as well as from without. The prologue to Genesis A seems to be addressing the story of Lucifer’s ruin from the perspective of concerns about the unræd that could lead to a kingdom disbanding or falling apart, and indeed as it is presented in the poem Lucifer’s tragedy would serve as a powerful reminder of the consequences of a ruler failing to uphold good counsel and God’s teachings. The account of what the creator does to the rebel angels in what follows in the prologue to Genesis A provides examples of a ruler punishing the crime of rebellion and lord-betrayal as well as a reminder of the creative power of God against ‘unræd’ as he constructs hell for those he banishes from heaven.

Foundations: the construction of hell

God’s first act of creation in Genesis A is also a violent form of compensation for his ‘þegnas þrymfæste’ (glory-fast thanes; l. 15a) who sought rebellion: God-the-creator fashions hell to punish them. The poem’s prologue outlines that the heavens ‘wæron gesette wide and side / þurh geweald godes wuldres bearnum, / gasta weardum’ (were established wide and far through God’s power for the children of glory, the guardians of spirits; ll. 10–12a).39 The Genesis A poet 38 39

Die ‘Institutes of Polity’, p. 47. As Richard Sowerby writes, the scribe here appears to have misread the text from which he copied and ‘mistook the Old English words gasta werodum (‘hosts of spirits’) for gasta weardum (‘guardians of [people’s] spirits’)’ and that ‘a few lines later, he makes the same mistake again’. While Sowerby views this misreading as a product

Foundation and Refoundation in Genesis A   55

describes the angelic beings initially in a state of wholeness but devotes little attention to the processes of how they were made, moving instead to detail how spatially and politically the kingdom became fractured. Casting the rebel angels out of the kingdom, God shapes hell:       þa wearð yrre god and þam werode wrað  þe he ær wurðode wlite and wuldre.  sceop þam werlogan wræclicne ham  weorce to leane, helleheafas,  hearde niðas. heht þæt witehus  wræcna bidan, deop, dreama leas  drihten ure, gasta weardas,  þa he hit geare wiste, synnihte beseald,  susle geinnod, geondfolen fyre  and færcyle, rece and reade lege.  heht þa geond þæt rædlease hof weaxan witebrogan.  hæfdon hie wrohtgeteme grimme wið god gesomnod.  him þæs grim lean becom. (Then God became angry and wrathful with the host that he had previously honoured with brightness and beauty. He shaped an exilic home for those oath-breakers, retribution for work: hell-heavings and hard hostilities. Our lord commanded the guardians of spirits to endure that deep, joyless torture house of exiles when he knew it was ready, sealed in endless night, inlaid with torment, filled throughout with fire and ferocious cold, smoke and red fire. He commanded wicked tortures to grow throughout that counsel-less dwelling. Against God they had grimly assembled a troop of criminals: grim was the reward they received. ll. 34b–46)

This vast space is ‘shaped’ (sceop; l. 36b). The hell created here is imagined as architectural in form, as an abode that expands as God’s own anger grows, and as a container that houses inimical qualities that have no place in the ordered community of heaven. The act of shaping-as-creation here, with its links to the nouns scyppend (creator) and scop (poet), echoes well-known Old of the scribe’s preoccupation with the idea of guardian angels, and further evidence of that widespread hexameral concept pervading early medieval culture, there remains the possibility that it was a deliberate re-making, a ‘conscious inversion’ of what A. N. Doane writes was the poetic formula ‘proper to God, gasta weard’, one that casts the angels who will fall ironically as ‘subordinate gods’. The scribe, then, might well look forward to Lucifer’s own gnarled and obscured reading of the hierarchy in heaven and do so by making a deliberate error regarding the position of the angels. See R. Sowerby, Angels in Early Medieval England (Oxford, 2016), p. 79. Doane, Genesis A, p. 289.

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English poetic accounts of the creation of the heavens and the earth in Cædmon’s Hymn and the ‘song of the scop’ passage of Beowulf (ll. 90–8, where the creator ‘shapes’ humankind). As a ‘rædleas’ dwelling, the hell of Genesis A is a place filled with the kind of disorder responsible for political instability and for strife within communities and kingdoms.40 As a result, the building itself becomes a corpus of anger and its architectural frame swells. This aggressive expansion is accentuated by alliteration and expanded, hypermetric lines (ll. 44–6): the linking of ‘rece’ (reek, smoke), ‘reade’ (red) and ‘rædlease’ (without good counsel) at line 44 evokes a surging, an assault. At the core of these lines is the verb ‘weaxan’ (to grow; l. 45a). As the torment within the dwelling increases, the frame of the place expands, along with the poetic lines. Demarcation of hell as ‘rædleas’ recalls the earlier ‘unræd’ that defined the cause of Lucifer’s desire to overhaul heaven. Scott Smith notes that OE unræd, at the root of the angelic rebellion, is used to refer ‘to treason against a king’ in a charter of the will of Æthelric (S 939, dated to between 995 and 999), which references King Æthelred’s concern that Æthelric was involved in a deceitful plot of unræd that planned to receive Swegn’s fleet in Essex. Use of unræd in Genesis A ‘intensifies heaven as a political kingdom and underscores the political nature of Lucifer’s crime as he covets a realm of his own’.41 The poet of Genesis A is certainly interested in the political ramifications of unræd, identifying it as the kind of poor counsel that gives rise to distorted understandings of how rulership works. This is so damaging that it requires necessary revenge and severity from the ruler of the kingdom in which unræd takes hold. God’s creative action separates unræd from heaven, containing it in a place of fire and chaos. In turn, the abode of hell at the forefront of the poem produces a picture of what a kingdom ruled by unræd might look like. Within this disorder, the angels are stripped of intellectual light and any kind of security: ‘heo on wrace syððan / seomodon swearte’ (afterwards they floated In his study of Beowulf, James Paz outlines in detail that the importance of Hrothgar’s closest advisor, Æschere, at the court of Heorot lies in his role as ‘rædbora’ (which we can understand as ‘bearer of ræd’) and ‘runwita’ (one who knows mysteries or runes, with connection to the political concept of a witan – a king’s group of counsellors). By removing Hrothgar’s ‘reader’ and killing Æschere, Paz suggests, Grendel’s mother ‘provokes an anxiety about things that resist human interpretation’. J. Paz, Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017), pp. 34–59 (p. 56). See Beowulf, ll. 1322–9. There are parallels here between Heorot absent of ræd (and therefore of the ability to interpret and understand the inscription on the giant’s sword hilt) and the disorder of hell in Genesis A, which seems to represent the chaos that comes to a community without good counsel. 41 Smith, ‘Faith and Forfeiture’, p. 601. 40

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darkly in exile; ll. 71b–72a). Images in Junius 11 correspond with these verbal impressions: surrounding the mouth of hell on page 3, and the other mouth of hell on page 16, are architectural frames and towers and, in the depiction on page 16 particularly, crenellated walls that bend inwards. As well as being described as a ‘rædleas hof ’, hell is also a ‘wræclicne ham’ (l. 37a) of ‘hearde niðas’ (l. 38b). These terms echo preceding lines, which detailed Lucifer’s desire for a ‘ham’ (with his throne in the northern part of heaven) and how he ‘niþes ofþyrsted’ (thirsted for hostility). As God’s punishment of the wicked angels is framed within the context of compensation, the divine ruler gives a ‘lean’ (a reward, or payment) in vengeance, but in the form of what, ironically, Lucifer had desired (hostility and a home). This compensation model will be used to similar effect in Genesis B, when Lucifer pursues compensation and vengeance against mankind, misunderstanding how the legal system should work. But what is important about the depiction of hell in Genesis A’s prologue is its architectural form, a feature that sets the abode, the ham, against the illustration of Lucifer’s palace on page 3 of Junius 11 (the visual sign of his attempt to build against God). OE ham has a broad range too, but most often its occurrences connote a house, dwelling, manor or homestead – a residence of some kind likely to be a constructed building or a collection of buildings.42 As a hof, which in Old English is even more specifically a built place – a ‘building, house, hall; dwelling, abode, home’ or a ‘court, hall, palace; royal residence’43 – hell holds things within it, while giving Lucifer an inverted version of what his ill counsel and pride had him wanting.44 Both OE ham and OE hof connote manufactured architecture. In retribution for Lucifer’s own botched disturbance of the heavenly equilibrium, the true creator fashions an alternative, damned community, enclosed within the boundaries of an architectural space. This is key to an understanding of Genesis A as an Old English poem and as more than mere paraphrase. As God’s first creation at the beginning of the poem, hell houses qualities such as unræd and nið that will recur throughout Genesis A, offering readers the chance to link them back DOE, ham, 2.a.ii. DOE, hof, 1 and 1.a. 44 Hof in Genesis A has a variety of applications. It describes the structure of the earth (l. 1380); refers to the Ark (l. 1316b), where the emphasis is certainly on construction (as with ll. 1345, 1393, 1489); to Noah’s house (l. 1569); to the city of Sodom (which is a ‘hean hofe’, l. 2458) and to the home of Abraham (2871a). In Beowulf, Heorot, shown to Beowulf and his retainers by the cliff-guard, is a ‘hof modigra’ (hall of the courageous; l. 312b). These applications suggest further that hell in Genesis A is being conceived of as a primarily architectural place. For Beowulf, see Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. Bjork, R. D. Fulk and J. D. Niles (Toronto, 2008). 42 43

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to the prologue, or re-read the poem for such links. The hell at the beginning of the poem, filled with unræd, suggests what destination lies in store for those who pursue misrule, while also stressing that any act or project formed out of unræd will fall and fail. Another of the poem’s reworked origin narratives expresses this idea through the extra-biblical image of the unfinished project of Babel left behind on the plain of Shinar. As Noah’s descendants migrate in search of ‘rumre land’ (more roomy land; l. 1651b) in the generations following the restoration of the ‘wær’ (oath, covenant; l. 1542) with God after the Flood, they soon have prideful ambitions, imagining that ‘burh geworhte and to beacne torr / up arærde to rodortunglum’ (a stronghold should be created and raised upwards to the stars as a towering beacon; ll. 1666–1667).45 As God arrives to inspect how these men raised ‘a stænenne weall / ofer monna gemet’ (raised a stone wall beyond human measure; ll. 1676b–1677a) the poet tells us that ‘þæs unrædes / stiðferhð cyning steore gefremede. / þa he reðemod reorde gesette / eorðbuendum ungelice’ (the strong-minded king carried out the correction of that ill-counselled act, when he, wrath-minded, set out different speeches for earth-dwellers; ll. 1682b–1685). This act of building is an imitation of God’s creative might and it even threatens to break through into the domain of heaven itself. Crafting out of unræd brings division and discord and produces things that have no unity. While the tower of Babel has a long tradition linking it with the demonic aspects of Babylon, and with the prideful giant Nimrod who according to Augustine expressed his evil in his creative work, the building of the tower in the poem is an act of earthly miscreation motivated by pride and misunderstanding rather than evil or violence.46 Being an act of unræd, the building of the tower also recalls Lucifer’s own attempt to craft and construct, again reiterating the way creating out of misreading and poor counsel leads only to ruination. This is clearly apparent in the description of the stonework the builders leave behind once they are divided:       him on laste bu stiðlic stantorr  and seo steape burh samod samworht  on sennar stod. These lines echo and oppose those used to define the obedient angels of heaven during the poem’s opening passages: ‘ne ongunnon / ræran on roderum nymþe riht and soþ’ (they began to raise up in the heavens nothing else but right and truth; ll. 20b–21). 46 For an overview of the emergence of Nimrod’s association with Babel and building in Christian antiquity see T. Major, Undoing Babel: The Tower of Babel in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Toronto, 2018), pp. 54–9. 45

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(In their track stood the standing stone-tower and the steep stronghold, together unfinished at Shinar. ll. 1699b–1701)

The poetic echo of ‘samod’ (meaning ‘together’ or, perhaps, ‘assembled’) within ‘samworht’ (‘unfinished’ but also ‘incomplete work’) accentuates the fact that completeness was never achieved. This is emphasised too in the fact that a once-united tribe is disbanded and in the notion that their ways of knowing and interpreting each other have been undone: one gradation of ræd and the verb, rædan, suggests communal, public acts involving oral communication in speech.47 Certain cognates of rædan also refer to speech (e.g. Old High German ratan ‘to consult or confer with’; the Gothic rodjan meaning ‘to speak’). ‘In an oral culture’, Nicholas Howe writes, ‘to give counsel is of necessity to speak and thereby create community.’48 The consequence of the act of building out of unræd for the Hebrews at Shinar, as the poet interprets and represents the event, results in an inability to unify, understand or bind work in complete success. Inclusion of what Roy Liuzza calls a ‘delicately proleptic use of another familiar topos in Old English poetry, the image of a ruined building that stands as a reminder of vanished glory’, however, allows the poet to continue his own project of bringing the biblical story into the realm of his own poetic tradition.49 The unfinished stonework left in the wake of the migrating Hebrew people in Genesis A lingers as an object of failure, a reminder that restoration and reconstruction will always be needed where communities have fallen away from God, and that communication and connection through one’s own language may help build or construct something – an idea that would not have been far from the poet’s mind as he or she mapped out verbal connections between related events from the biblical Genesis. The architectural hell at the beginning of Junius 11, in the prologue to Genesis A, plays a significant part in such a project by foregrounding the creative ingenuity and violence of God, forming the impression of a creator who makes and destroys in both physical and spiritual terms, while also outlining the consequences of unræd. The failed revolution of Lucifer and his followers stands as a warning against challenging divine power and those representing it on earth. In the last section of this chapter, I want to think further with N. Howe, ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New Haven CT, 2002), pp. 1–23 (pp. 4–5). 48 ‘Cultural Construction of Reading’, p. 7. 49 R. M. Liuzza, ‘The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 36 (2003), 1–35 (p. 4). 47

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the prologue to Genesis A, and the opening of Junius 11, about how such an arresting beginning to a poetic manuscript resembles political thought, and portrayals of the creator, in material associated with the tenth-century Benedictine Reform and with its later resurgence in the early eleventh century, because, first of all, Genesis A shares with such material an interest in the kind of creator that would have offered an earthly ruler a model in his acts of banishing, building and rebuilding. Moreover, and as mentioned earlier in this chapter, David Johnson has already identified synergies between Genesis A and the concept of replacement in the New Minster Charter, the document depicting some of King Edgar’s reformist actions at Winchester.50 Further examination of that charter, and of other material that looked back to this reform during a time of political upheaval (particularly during Æthelred II’s reign), suggests that Old Testament and apocryphal models of building and destroying were important for kings like Edgar looking to reform or rebuild their kingdoms and thus they offer more contexts for understanding why the prologue to Genesis A might have served its compilers well in their aims of producing a book of poetry that could offer political counsel.

Reforming creation, punishing miscreation

In this chapter, I have suggested that the prologue of Genesis A works as the foundation of the poem and as a beginning to the cycle of poetic history we find in Junius 11. The attempt to overthrow the divine creator by the rebel host at the beginning of the codex is an account that reveals the cause of the earthly creation. These opening passages of Genesis A also provide specific reasons for why a high-ranking subject within the heavenly kingdom may have betrayed his lord. As such, the prologue also reflects the kinds of political disasters that threatened rulers throughout the early medieval period. As Jill Fitzgerald writes, ‘the poet explores the connection between regal authority and territorial possession through God, who safeguards the heavenly realm from treachery much like an Anglo-Saxon king’.51 Within the political tenor of the rebellion lies counsel for readers of Junius 11: the poetry warns against pledge-breaking and offers an example of expelling rebels, but also provides useful representations of creativity and making. Lucifer’s failure as a constructor is thrown into harsh light by God’s creation of hell and then by the subsequent crafting of the earth. The opening folios of the manuscript, with their frontispiece of the creator enthroned, the full-page visual narrative of the fall of the angels from Lucifer’s ruined citadel, along with the account of God ‘shaping’ hell, are a 50 51

See Johnson, ‘Winchester Revisited’. Rebel Angels, p. 46.

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stern warning against creative acts that may transgress divine law, or that may affront the divine creator, without working to praise him. The title of this chapter, ‘Foundation and Refoundation’, refers to the way the prologue to Genesis A, as well as the architectural hell-home that dominates it, resituates the beginnings of Genesis while providing a floor-plan of sorts – a container – for some of the poem’s most important terms. This title is also a nod to the New Minster Charter (sometimes called the Refoundation Charter). As David Johnson has shown, Æthelwold’s document has parallels with Genesis A in its conception of replacement as, like the poem, the proem to the charter is explicit about the fact that God brought the whole creation into being to restore the spaces left behind in heaven by the rebel angels. The text of the New Minster Charter and its proem, which offers an outline of salvation history beginning with the fall of the angels, indicate how the idea of divine creation we encounter on the opening pages of Junius 11 might have been useful to early medieval rulers and their advisors. The opening sections of the New Minster Charter concern themselves with divine creation, first referring to ‘OMNIPOTENS TOTIVS MACHINAE CONDITOR’ (THE ALMIGHTY CREATOR OF THE WHOLE SCHEME OF THINGS). Expanding on this, the proem explains that God brings things into form like an artisan: ‘Qui coaeterno uidelicet uerbo quaedam ex nichilo edidit . quaedam ex informi subtilis Artifex propagauit materia’ (He, through the co-eternal Word, so to speak, formed certain things ‘out of nothing’ and, like a fine craftsman, created certain other things out of shapeless matter).52 While the rebel angels in the New Minster Charter are punished for their misuse of free will (‘Male pro dolor libero utens arbitrio’),53 the main concern of the proem is their move against the creator, and their attempt to miscreate: ‘disdaining to serve the Creator of the Universe, placing itself equal to the Creator, it plunged into the early fires of the Abyss with its confederates’ (creatori uniuersitatis famulari dedignans . semetipsum creatori equiperans . aeternis baratri incendiis cum suis complicibus demersus).54 When the voice of Edgar enters later in section VI, it states a desire to ‘investigate what works I might engage in with zeal’.55 Both the re-establishment of the monastic spaces and expulsion of the secular clerics are performed looking back to Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and Its Minsters, ed. and trans. A. R. Rumble (Oxford and New York, 2002), p. 74. 53 Property and Piety, p. 74. 54 Property and Piety, p. 75. 55 ‘rimari magnopere coeperam quid operum studio exercerem’, Property and Piety, pp. 79–80. 52

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Lucifer’s fall and other falls through history, and also in dedication to Christ, Mary, the apostles and saints. The words given to Edgar at a pivotal moment in the diploma make the connection between building and reform clear, as he has sought to build up good things as well as destroy evil, in the Lord’s name, drawing on Jeremiah 1.10, to authorise the Refoundation: Scriptum quippe per Hieremiam memini prophetam . Ecce constitui te super gentes et super regna ut euellas et destruas et disperdas et dissipes et edifices et plantes. (I am mindful indeed of that which was written by the prophet Jeremiah: ‘Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations and over kingdoms, to root up, and to pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant.’)56

The voice of Edgar (the earthly king looking to do ‘work’ and to destroy as well as ‘build and plant’) suggests that such emphasis on the divine creator as severe and creative, as uprooter and rebuilder, offered Edgar – a king seeking to restore and de-fragment his realm – ways of justifying a new model of rule. Edgar was no doubt aware that maintaining peace, and sustaining connections between ecclesiastical and secular environments, required harsh and even extreme punishment to be meted out as well. That the king employed such manner of punishment is suggested by the well-known account from Lantfred of Winchester, which tells of the now lost ‘law of great severity’ Edgar employed throughout the country, which included violent tortures and amputations for thieves (of hands, ears and nostrils).57 The text known as ‘King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’ (‘EEM’), in a late eleventh century manuscript alongside an Old English translation of the Regula S. Benedicti (London, BL, MS Cotton Faustina A.x), offers further insight into the reform project and its concept of the relation between divine and earthly rule. As such, the document ‘stands as an important statement of the ideology of the monastic reform movement at its zenith’.58 The presentation of Edgar in ‘EEM’ is one of rebuilder and restorer. Beginning with an overview of the history of the Christian faith in England, Property and Piety, p. 80. Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni, ch. 26, in The Cult of St Swithun, ed. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2003), pp. 310–12. As Simon Keynes notes, the story was told again in the 990s by Wulfstan of Winchester in his Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno, ch. 9 (Cult of St Swithun, p. 514). See S. Keynes, ‘Edgar, Rex Admirabilis’, in Edgar, King of the English: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 3–59 (p. 10). 58 D. Pratt, ‘The Voice of the King in ‘King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’’, ASE 41 (2013), 145–204 (p. 147). 56 57

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which is portrayed as culminating in Edgar’s reign, ‘EEM’ establishes a connection between Edgar (restorer on earth) and the divine creator (for whom earthly work is done). Edgar is not without flaws. This document suggests that Edgar reshapes the architecture of England to amend for his own boyhood indiscretions.59 ‘EEM’ sets out a clear connection between Edgar rebuilding himself and establishing monasteries: it outlines how he first constructed the monastery at Abingdon, before restoring monasteries throughout the kingdom with his wife Ælfthryth. The text, however, acknowledges that acts of recreation and rebuilding were not political endeavours performed against God-Christ the creator: ‘ne say la nan eorðcund cyning mid gitsunge to þam swiþe undergan þæt he þæm heofoncundum cyninge þe hine geworhte ne læte beon þæs ylecan rihtes worþne þe he sylf is’ (nor indeed let any earthly king be so greatly undermined with avarice that he will not let the heavenly king who created him be entitled to the same rights as he is himself ).60 This is an important message, it seems, and one that the fall of the angels accounts in Old English, particularly the one in Genesis A, are eager to promote. In Junius 11, Lucifer’s pitfall of assuming that he has those same ‘rights’ (whether laws, powers, fealties, freedoms or abilities) as God has disastrous consequences. ‘EEM’, alongside the Regularis Concordia and the New Minster Charter, emphasises that ‘the role of divine rewards and punishments is motivating Edgar’s actions’ and these texts ‘emphasize God’s just intentions in determining rewards and punishments for earthly kingdoms depending on their adherence to, or rejection of, the monastic cause’, as David Pratt writes.61 The events documented by the New Minster Charter were certainly planned to reflect such positioning of monasticism. Banishing the secular clerics required military strength, but the presence of the narrative of expulsion in the proem to the charter suggests that reformers were fully aware of the need for aggression and violence in creative processes. Edgar sent a martial force to make sure the expulsion was seen through, while the need to remain forceful was stressed by the rising hostility among those exiled, which gave rise to an attempt to poison Æthelwold.62 Further documentary evidence suggests Edgar was true In the text Edgar thinks of ‘hu he his agen lif gerihtlæcan meahte mid rihtre æfæstnesse’ (how he his own life can set right with rightful piety). Councils and Synods, p. 149; Pratt, ‘Voice of the King’, pp. 149–50. 60 Councils and Synods, p. 154. 61 ‘Voice of the King’, p. 156. 62 Wulfstan of Winchester: Life of St Æthelwold, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), p. xlvii. For Æthelwold’s role in the politics of this time see B. Yorke, ‘Æthelwold and the Politics of the Tenth Century’, in Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 65–89. 59

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to the words ascribed to him in the New Minster Charter document. Alexander Rumble notes that King Edgar ordered the monasteries of Old Minster, New Minster and Nunnaminster to be given external space, removed and replaced from the noise of crowds. This space, S 807 (Edgar’s grant of land to Old Minster, New Minster and Nunnaminster) tells us, was to exist where ‘the small houses of the secular have been demolished’.63 While no small feat physically, this was easy work to place within the divine scheme as part of the strengthening of England’s defences against miscreation. Æthelwold’s own building pursuits were reflected on by later writers in a similar fashion. Two works attributed to Wulfstan cantor of Winchester in praise of Æthelwold – the Vita S. Æthelwoldi (c. 1000) and the original metrical preface (the Epistola specialis) to the Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno (c. 996) – tell us a great deal about the role of Bishop Æthelwold as builder, as well as offering potentially eye-witness accounts of some of the construction projects taking place in Winchester during and beyond Edgar’s reign. Wulfstan notes in the Vita that Æthelwold had gone to ‘great lengths’ to renovate the structure of the Old Minster over many years following the movement of St Swithun’s relics there in 971. Working with craftsmen and builders, Æthelwold constructed and expanded these precincts so that the rise in pilgrims coming to view the saintly remains could be accommodated. In the Vita, Wulfstan also tells us that a monk, at labour high on the Old Minster’s tower, fell from a great height but was left unhurt: ‘The monk could not sustain harm, because the deserts of the man of God bore him up in his fall and kept him uninjured from so dangerous a drop’ (Qui idcirco laedi non potuit quia hunc in casu suo uiri Dei meritum portauit et a periculo ruinae incolumem protexit).64 As the account continues, the monk immediately returns to his job at the top of the tower, aware more than ever of his position working in dedication to the divine creator. Unlike the overreachers in the Babel story, Wulfstan implies, the monk working for Æthelwold built to accommodate the growth of God’s loyal flock on earth, rather than seeking to reach heaven through human craft. Toiling at construction work, Æthelwold (Wulfstan calls him aedificator),65 Wulfstan writes, survived a great post falling on him, breaking his ribs and knocking him into a pit (ch. 15). He perseveres and his work becomes part of the movement of early medieval people towards salvation. At the Old Minster, Æthelwold extended the precincts and monastic spaces: ‘Qui struxit firmis haec cuncta habitacula muris; / ille Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester, p. 137. Life of St Æthelwold, ed. Lapidge and Winterbottom, pp. 52–3. 65 Fully conveyed in the opening sections of Wulfstan cantor’s Narratio Metrica de S. Swithuno. See Cult of St Swithun, ed. Lapidge, pp. 372–5. 63 64

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etiam tectis texit et ipsa nouis / et cunctis decorauit ouans id honoribus’ (He built all these dwellings with solid walls; and he also covered them with new roofs, and rejoicing adorned the monastery with decorations of all kinds).66 By representing reformers and the king at their head as renovators and builders, those projecting or sustaining reform ideology could repeatedly strengthen the connections between earth and the divine. The evidence for God’s plan for the English, and his favour for Edgar, was there in the very buildings and rebuilt places for all to see. In Genesis A, God’s hostility towards the rebel angels and the construction of hell are necessary and rightfully sanctioned. The poet of Genesis A asks his audience to understand that hell is forged as a ‘lean’ (payment; ll. 37b and 46b), as a form of vengeful requital for Lucifer’s rebellion. The beginning of Junius 11 expresses the creative ingenuity of the divine ruler as he corrects the division incited by Lucifer. Such forceful poetry stresses the need for would-be early medieval rulers to live in dedication to such power, but at the same time it suggests a model for the intensity with which they might pay out retribution to those threatening their people, offering inspiration for the re-makings and re-buildings of their kingdoms they might look to pursue in response to fragmentation. By giving audiences one finished creation, particularly a hellish one filled with unræd, the prologue serves to suggest the destination in store for those who pursue misrule, while also stressing that any act or project formed out of unræd will fail. The first pages of Junius 11 present us with a sequence of poetry that speaks to the manuscript’s illustrations of the creator in majesty and of Lucifer falling from his newly constructed citadel. The representation of God-the-architect fashioning the earth to restore heaven after the angelic fall, which dominates the opening pages of poetry and illumination in Junius 11, certainly has connections with the New Minster Charter. Furthermore, the prologue to Genesis A is a refoundation of the Genesis story – part of an innovative poetic expansion of the biblical book that foregrounds episodes of creative failure and ill counsel. Compilers thought it right that their own ambitious project began in this way, with an account of Lucifer’s ‘unræd’ and with an account of God’s building of a ‘rædleas hof ’. While they might not have had any other Genesis-related poetic material to hand, it can be said that those copying the poem could well have left out the account and begun at Genesis 1.1. But that is likely never to have crossed their minds, for this was the creation story that spoke to them and to their project. It rooted the origin of all things in strife, in a divided kingdom, and in the response of a ruler to disloyalty, to deceitful 66

Cult of St Swithun, pp. 374–5 (Epistola specialis, ll. 39–41).

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design and intrigue. The fall of the angels at the beginning of the manuscript also prefigures and to some extent explains the other, major biblical falls that come after it: the transgression of Cain, the builders at Babel, the downfall of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the deception of Adam and Eve. Eden itself will become a target of Satan imprisoned in hell in the poem integrated into Genesis A, known editorially as Genesis B, and in many ways the prologue at the beginning of the manuscript’s poetic cycle means that the return to the tale of Lucifer’s plight in the interpolated poem has substantial impact, offering as it does further insight into the devil’s workings. The subsequent poems in the manuscript will continue to explore the conflicts between good and bad counsel and they will do so by framing and expanding biblical narratives through the vehicle and artistry of Old English poetry. Genesis B returns again to Lucifer’s creative failures and his own ill-counselled pursuit of vengeance and reiterates the warnings found at the beginning of the manuscript. With roots in an Old Saxon source on the Continent, and possibly moving to England during Alfred’s day, Genesis B suggests that Junius 11 may house a long history of concerns about unræd and fallenness that continued to be resonant as the manuscript was compiled over time.

2 Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B

T

he poem known as Genesis B is an important intrusion in the sequence we find in Junius 11. As discussed in the previous chapter, the beginning of Genesis A resituated biblical history by describing the building of hell as God’s first creation. Genesis B disturbs the linear narrative of this history further by returning manuscript readers and viewers to the events of Lucifer’s rebellion and contributing, as Janet Schrunk Ericksen writes, to the make-up of Junius 11 as ‘both a continuous whole and a collection with ruptures, discontinuities, and functionally independent pieces’.1 Interpolated into the longer Genesis A at lines 235–851, the poetry of Genesis B provides further insights into Lucifer’s disastrous attempt to rule the heavenly kingdom and therefore expands on the tragedy that structured the first pages of the manuscript.2 This flashback means that some of the preoccupations and warnings of Genesis A’s prologue, such as those concerning the destructiveness of ill counsel, re-emerge and are reiterated. But Genesis B also deepens the tale of the angelic rebellion and the warnings both implicit and explicit in those first 235 lines of Genesis A: this is poetry that provides another perspective on the rebellion as a political failure by tracing its fallout and by having Satan boast about his desire for compensation in long, grandiose speeches. This is a poem that is also interested in the dire consequences of poorly counselled pursuits of amends by those engaged in futile struggles for dominance. Despite Satan’s bad politics, his ideal of revenge does result in immense suffering and Adam and Eve are led astray by the devil’s ‘boda’ (messenger), a servant of hell, forcing the inhabitants of Eden to abandon the divine teaching and guidance gifted to them. Through this re-casting of the fall of Adam and Eve, Genesis B evokes the destruction wrought by the madness of those viewing themselves as greater than God.

J. S. Ericksen, Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 (Toronto, 2021), p. 9. 2 For the interpolation and the relationship between the poems see P. J. Lucas, ‘Loyalty and Obedience in the Old English Genesis and the Interpolation of Genesis B into Genesis A’, Neophilologus 76 (1992), 121–35 and R. Derolez, ‘Genesis: Old Saxon and Old English’, English Studies 76.5 (1995), 409–23. 1

Figure 4.  Junius 11, page 13: beginning of Genesis B with illustration of Adam and Eve in Eden. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B   69

On page 13 of Junius 11, where Genesis B enters the fray and begins at the top, there is no capitalisation or decorated initial, suggesting that compilers did not see the poem as out of sync with the cycle of history they sought to portray in poetry (see Fig. 4). The return to the story of the rebellion in heaven may have required a small pause from readers, however: before the lines of Genesis A become Genesis B, they come to an end halfway down page 12 and beneath them is an unfinished, drypoint sketch by a twelfth-century artist depicting the angel Michael fighting a dragon (there are fragments of psalms on the binding between fols. 12–13).3 It is difficult to say whether or not those working on ‘Liber I’ of Junius 11 thought of their Genesis as a long poem containing an ‘interpolation’, but they must surely have noticed that the style of Genesis A altered where Genesis B, a transliteration of a section of the Old Saxon Genesis, began. Still, that was not enough for the scribe of ‘Liber I’ to mark it out significantly in any way as a new section or poem. Although it might seem strange to a modern reader that the Junius 11 cycle circles back to the tale of Lucifer’s rebellion and offers another perspective on it, the variation on the narrative at this point is in keeping with the nature of the Junius 11 compilation, which often combines poems in ways that produce digressions and reiterations in the overarching poetic narrative. Genesis B itself is a poem that often looks back. Satan’s speeches recall his time in heaven and, as A. N. Doane suggests, the poet employs this for an effect ‘not unlike the laisses similaires of the Chanson de Roland’ where the ‘same action is looked at several times from different angles’.4 Junius 11 does this on a grand scale, of course, with different poems and differing styles of poetry. In part this might be said to be a by-product of a manuscript project produced in fits and starts over several decades, with its gaps or empty, unfinished spaces representing halts or pauses in its production (and in the reading of its texts). But Genesis B also serves to expand on, and explain further, some of the key concerns and details present in the prologue to Genesis A where the opposition between ræd and unræd was established, and where unræd, along with the pride and the disloyalty of the rebel angels, was responsible for rupturing heaven’s unity. The poetry of Genesis B allows manuscript audiences to re-examine the drama The illustration is further evidence of the manuscript being read in the centuries after the Conquest. Here it might be that the artist is drawn to the significance of the image of the chained Satan – an image associated with the apocalypse – that is to follow in the manuscript and has responded in kind with the dragon of Revelation. See notes in Digital Facsimile, ed. B. J. Muir, on this page. 4 The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis, ed. A. N. Doane (Madison WI, 1991), p. 129. Quotations from the poem are also from this edition, cited by line number. 3

7 0    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

of Genesis A’s prologue and its prominent themes of counsel and creativity, outlining from a different poetic perspective, and through Satan’s own words, the way these qualities can be misused or misunderstood. Genesis B has rarely been read as functioning in the manuscript cycle as a reiteration of the warnings, concerns and preoccupations of Junius 11’s opening pages. Nor has the poem received much attention for the way it shares certain early medieval political interests with the other poems in the codex. Some reasons for this might lie in poem’s transmission history, which Doane outlines in his study of the text’s movement across time: The Old Saxon original text was created about 840 by imperial fiat and distributed in deluxe copies throughout the Carolingian realms in an artificial atmosphere of domination of Franks over Saxons, intended to teach the latter a lesson of obedience to ecclesiastical and feudal lords and magnates. It seems probable that several learned and multicultural scholars made the original transcription in the late ninth century but left much to be desired. The Anglo-Saxon monks who continued to use and copy this text neither knew the original program of the Saxon poet nor had they the insider information of the first transcribers; with no political or cultural program in mind, they thus dealt with the text as best they could, and refashioned it bit by bit in accord with their linguistic, ecclesiological, and homiletic habits of thought, rather far removed from the world of the original makers and audiences.5

Doane locates the origins of the poem in the Carolingian use of Old Saxon poetry on the Continent, where poetic compositions were put to work to encourage loyalty towards one’s lord and warn against rulership built on pride and unrest. Doane thus highlights a connection between Genesis B and the political world of the Saxon poet that composed Genesis B’s ‘original’ source. However, the idea that the melding of Genesis B into Genesis A and especially the copying of Genesis B, as part of that longer Genesis, into Junius 11 was undergone without any ‘political or cultural program in mind’ overlooks the way the poem is representative of some of Junius 11’s most consistent interests, most notably those that turn to ruling and kingship in vernacular terms and those that resemble the language and ideas of early medieval English writings on governance and history. Thinking through the impact Genesis B may have had in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Jill Fitzgerald writes that the poem’s ‘central tensions such as the rebellious desire for rival territory, A. N. Doane, ‘The Transmission of Genesis B’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. E. Story (Tempe AZ, 2011), pp. 63–81 (p. 81).

5

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B   71

the stripping of lands, and the failed edification of the spiritual self ’ would ‘have been especially timely and relevant for readers – monastic, clerical, or lay – during the Benedictine Reform, a period characterised by a heightened awareness about the place of rules and obligations’.6 As noted in Chapter One, interests in promoting the ‘rules and regulations’ of the tenth-century reform also resurfaced later in the eleventh century (as we see in the writings of Ælfric and Wulfstan for example). The political drama of Genesis B, as part of a longer poetic Genesis, would have been important and useful for those putting Junius 11 together, who were, the manuscript’s recurring themes suggest, invested in having their poetry reflect early medieval concerns about rulership in specific vernacular terms while also portraying the great cycle of salvation history. It is also worth remembering that the reflexes of Carolingian ideals and ideas about kingship detectable in Genesis B would not have been unknown or unknowable to the poem’s ‘Anglo-Saxon monks who continued to use and copy’ it, as Doane writes, and that includes the Junius 11 bookmakers. Satan’s disobedience to his lord in the poem sees him fail to recognise his position in the kind of structured hierarchy that reflects the one that placed the Carolingian king at the apex, distributing law to the people, legitimised by God, his only superior.7 But England’s connections with the Continent during the time when the transliteration of Genesis B is likely to have occurred mean such models were influential in England too. Surviving works about good kingship from the Continent produced in the mid-to-late 800s, including those treatises by Hincmar of Rheims (806–82) such as his De divortio (c. 860) and De regis persona (c. 873), share similar anxieties concerning the suppression of rebellion to those we find in Genesis B. Such preoccupations also drove adaptations of biblical material on the Continent during the ninth century in ways comparable to those Doane outlines for the Saxon Genesis: the scale of such Carolingian translation projects is reflected by the Heliand (composed around 830) and that epic poem is likely to have influenced a number of Old English works.8 The Old Saxon Genesis came to England during the mid-ninth J. Fitzgerald, Rebel Angels: Space and Sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2019), pp. 98–9. 7 For such ideas about kingship, see Hincmar of Rheims: On Kingship, Divorce, Virtues and Vices, ed. and trans. P. Throop (Charlotte VT, 2014), pp. 1–34; Hincmar, The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s De divortio, ed. and trans. R. Stone and C. West (Manchester, 2016). For ideologies of Carolingian kingship see J. Nelson, ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988, repr. 2007), pp. 211–52. 8 For the Heliand, see Heliand und Genesis, ed. O. Behaghel, rev. B. Taeger, 9th edn (Tübingen, 1984). T. A. Bredehoft has made a strong argument for the influence 6

7 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

century and may have arrived in a manuscript containing illuminations that would serve as models for those in Junius 11.9 The poem in some form might also have made it to Winchester long before Junius 11 was made.10 Genesis B, transliterated between 850 and 900, but ‘widely regarded as a translation of the Alfredian period’, therefore reflects cross-cultural contact during the time of its composition (c. post-850).11 Later still, this poem was copied into Junius 11. This journey from the Continent to England and possibly to Alfred’s court and then eventually to a manuscript containing poetic representations of events from salvation history suggests the longstanding relevance of the poem’s content. The fact that the poetry’s subject matter is dominated by Lucifer’s failed attempt to overthrow his lord, and by the disastrous effects of his pursuit of requital in defeat, also suggests that the interest in the poem over of Old Saxon works like the Heliand on several Old English poems, including the Meters of Boethius and Exodus. Bredehoft suggests that the book of poetry Alfred famously wins in a competition organised by his mother included the Heliand. See Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009), pp. 65–104. The Heliand survives in a ninth-century manuscript, now in Munich (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Codex Germanicus (cgm) 25), and there are two other ninth-century fragments, referred to as the Prague and Straubing fragments. Passages from the Heliand and the Old Saxon Genesis were also copied into a manuscript now at the Vatican (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS Palatinus Latinus 1447) in the ninth century, and this would be the manuscript that allowed Edward Sievers’s 1875 postulation about an Old Saxon Genesis providing the basis for Genesis B to be confirmed in 1894. See further Der Heliand und Die Angelsächsische Genesis, ed. E. Sievers (Halle, 1875). A later manuscript (London, BL, MS Cotton Caligula A.vii) containing the Heliand was produced in England in the later tenth century. 9 See B. Raw, ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48 (p. 148). It is possible that John the Old Saxon, who Alfred brought to his court at the end of the ninth century, may have been involved in the transmission of certain books containing a version of the Old Saxon Genesis. 10 D. F. Johnson, ‘Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Date and Provenance of MS Junius 11’, in The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick Conner, ed. E. J. Christie (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 27–62, notes that ‘Grimbald, monk of St Bertin’s who came to England in about 893 and later became Abbot of New Minster at Winchester, where he died in 903’ is another likely candidate for the transportation of Saxon Genesis materials, given his translation activity at Alfred’s court (p. 58). 11 R. D. Fulk, A History of Old English Meter (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 281. See further T. A. Bredehoft, ‘Old Saxon Influence on Old English Verse: Four New Cases’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. E. Story (Tempe AZ, 2011), pp. 83–111.

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time was motivated by its potential ‘political or cultural’ impact, and for its ability to offer guidance in those spheres. While this chapter suggests that Genesis B could not have been a more fitting way to think through matters of foolhardy rulership for early medieval audiences of the Junius 11 manuscript, it remains hesitant to detach the Genesis B of Junius 11 from its likely origins during the Alfredian period. This is because, as the reforms of the tenth century and the invocation of reformist ideas by writers in the eleventh century tell us, similar ideals regarding kingship and good rule persisted through the early medieval period and Genesis B’s warnings against misrule and unlawful compensation reflect the interests of the other poetry, composed in different times and places, compiled in Junius 11. The codex is representative of long-running interests in poetry’s ability to reflect cultural and political issues. Although Genesis B’s critical history presents us with frequent scholarly focus on orthodoxy and tropology and on what is often defined as the poem’s ‘heroic’ or ‘martial’ tenor,12 there is more to say about the ways Genesis B intensifies some of the key warnings found in the account of the angelic fall at the beginning of the manuscript. Furthermore, prominent themes of the prologue to Genesis A, such as those connected to vengeance and compensation, and to the perils of abandoning God’s trust, are dealt with at length by the poet of Genesis B. By presenting a more detailed picture of the defeated devil in hell and his unwise stratagems for political gain, Genesis B demands that readers of Junius 11’s poetic history recall and remember once more the dangers of ill counsel and misinterpretation (especially when it comes to a subject’s relationship to divine rule, and to the right to pursue compensation). It asks that they interrupt their own reading of salvation history to recall these things and that they remember what the beginning of the manuscript told them about the folly of rebellion and about the creator’s unrivalled omnipotence.

12

See, for example, E. Jager, The Tempter’s Voice (Ithaca, 1993); G. R. Overing, ‘On Reading Eve: Genesis B and the Reader’s Desire’, in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. A. J. Frantzen (Albany, 1991), pp. 35–63. The book-length study by J. F. Vickrey offers a detailed overview of competing ‘schools’ of scholarship on the poem, which he sees as often divided into ‘orthodox’ or ‘heterodox’ interpretative factions. Vickrey offers a detailed study of the poem’s ‘martiality’, arguing for the position of orthodoxy in that, namely, Adam and Eve are morally culpable in the poem and are presented as figures who will pursue a kind of Christian penance. See Vickrey, Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative (Bethlehem PA, 2015).

7 4    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Beginning to fall again

Genesis B opens with a command from God that prohibits Adam and Eve from consuming fruit from the Tree of Death. This means that Genesis B moves the manuscript cycle back to Eden. The opening words of Genesis B, however, and their context, are also important for our understanding of what will come to be explored concerning Satan’s misguided ideas about his position. These first lines we have of Genesis B also look ahead to the fall of Adam and Eve, whose disobedience in the poem becomes representative of the devastation an ongoing rebellion can cause. Something may have been lost from the text of the poem where the first lines now sit, but, as Catherine Karkov writes, ‘we cannot be certain how much text or which illustrations, if any’.13 Looking at the opening lines as they stand, we can see that they signal an important warning: ‘… ac niotað inc þæs oðres ealles,   forlæteð þone ænne beam, wariað inc wið þone wæstm,  ne wyrð inc wilna gæd.’ (‘… but enjoy all the others for your own, let go that one tree, guard yourselves against that fruit. For you two there will be no want unsatisfied.’ ll. 235–6)

Preceding these lines in the manuscript are Genesis A’s accounts of the creation of Eve and God’s construction of Paradise. The change in tone and vocabulary Genesis B brings to the manuscript sequence may even help signal and accentuate God’s warning at its opening (which arrives at the top, or start, of page 13).14 The first lines of Genesis B in Junius 11 are notable for the use of OE forlætan, which is a key word in the poem. The word is reflective of the importance Genesis B places on themes of allowance and ownership. These will increase in prominence later when Satan outlines his plans to pursue vengeance against mankind. OE forlætan can mean ‘to leave’ or ‘to abandon’ but also ‘to allow’ or ‘to permit’, or even ‘to break a compact’.15 In the Old Saxon Genesis, the related word farlihan (‘grant’, ‘give’, ‘allow’) is used to refer to the land distributed to Abraham by God, but it occurs only twice, while the equivalent Saxon word farlatan does not occur, suggesting more interest in themes of allowance and abandonment in Genesis B. The use of the word in the first surviving lines of the Old English poem suggests that God commands his obedient creatures C. E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001), p. 65. 14 For a discussion of the trees in the Junius 11 Genesis, see J. Grimes, ‘Tree(s) of Knowledge in the Junius Manuscript’, JEGP 112.3 (2013), 311–39. 15 DOE, s.v. forlætan sense 9.b. and sense 1 respectively. 13

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to renounce that ‘one tree’, the Tree of Death, but also that he allows them to do so. Play on the senses of OE forlætan becomes more apparent as the poet uses the related OE verb lætan (‘to permit’) in the lines that immediately follow those quoted above: ‘He let heo þæt land buan’ (He [God] allowed them [Adam and Eve] to occupy that land; l. 239b). The conditional nature of what God grants, or allows, is emphasised throughout Genesis B. God, the true king, allows his subjects to ‘let’ land and occupy kingdoms in return for their ‘lof ’ (love or praise; l. 256a) and their loyalty. Satan, the foolish king in hell, offers fragile or non-existent gifts for those who will do his vengeful work for him. The poet will remind the audience later on, at the very moment Eve is deceived by Satan’s emissary and the fall of man is in motion, that ‘he þeoda gehwam / hefonrice forgeaf, halig drihten, / widbradne welan, gif hie þone wæstm an / lætan wolden’ (he, the holy lord, had given the kingdom of heaven to each person, wide-broad prosperity, if they would abandon that one fruit; ll. 641b–644a). The condition is emphasised by the play on OE lætan (with a meaning of ‘to let go’ or ‘abandon’ in these lines) but, because of the use of the word in other contexts (in relation to what Adam and Eve are allowed, as previously mentioned), and the echo of the poet’s use of OE forlætan, there is a reminder in the detail that God’s subjects must renounce a particular fruit that God ‘allows’ or ‘lets’ them have all others: their joy and prosperity is dependent on their upholding of God’s requests. Underlying these conditions, then, is the insistence on God’s ability to grant, allow and permit as well as instruct and command his subjects. Perhaps the fall of Adam and Eve in the poem can ‘be seen rather more simply as a matter of their disobedience to God’s command than of their finding themselves in a situation where that command was difficult to know’, as John Vickrey has argued.16 To put it another way, the disobedience of Adam and Eve reflects the poem’s conception of the creator as a ruler who relates to and makes demands of his subjects in ways that are conditional. This is a reminder to early medieval readers, particularly to those involved in any kind of earthly rule, that bounty and success (other connotations of OE wæstm, the word used of the ‘fruit’ in Eden in the lines above) are dependent on the heeding of divine rule. Before this chapter examines the ways Satan’s ideas about political governance in the poem return to those significant manuscript themes of good and bad counsel, it is worth examining further the poet’s explanation of the relationship between God and his subjects as one rooted in concepts of ‘letting’ – in ideas of permission, allowance and condition – because this sets up the portrayal of Satan, which takes centre stage in the poem, as a figure 16

Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative, p. 53.

7 6    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

disrupting and disregarding the conditional and structured hierarchy of divine creation. This aspect of Satan’s character is an important feature of his threat to the world, and important, too, for how it allows the poet to represent the dangerous consequences of breaking political systems: the devil’s own lack of faith in God and in divine counsel has consequences beyond the crime of rebellion and its fallout, encouraging earthly rulers, perhaps, to seek divine favour in their actions. Satan refuses to partake in the conditional relationship between God and his subjects in Genesis B. The devil’s plan to seek compensation for what he perceives as injustice looks to force Adam and Eve away from heaven’s protection and God’s teaching. Indeed, Satan’s desire to move them towards ‘letting go’ of that relationship with their divine ruler is clear: as Satan states, he wants to ‘gedon þæt hie his hyldo forlæten’ (make it that they [Adam and Eve] abandon God’s protection; l. 404b). This echoes God’s command in the first lines of the poem, of course, where Adam and Eve were instructed to ‘forlæteð’ that one Tree of Death, highlighting Satan’s prideful belief that he has similar powers to his former ruler. But this repetition of forlætan also suggests that much depends on understanding what God ‘permits’ and that ‘letting go’ of his instructions or rules leads inevitably to disorder. The repetitions of OE forlætan and OE lætan are good examples of what Elizabeth Tyler has pointed to in her study of Old English poetics: ‘the feature which emerges strongly in looking at verbal repetition’, Tyler writes, ‘and especially at its convergence with conventional, sometimes formulaic language, is the capacity for language to be a source of ideas’.17 The compilation of poetry in Junius 11 makes it possible for the effects of verbal repetition, such as, in Tyler’s words, the addition of ‘layers of meaning’ through ‘each subsequent use of a word or phrase potentially builds on and refigures earlier uses’, to take place across the manuscript.18 Recurrent words across the different poems of the codex suggest the interests of compilers in the thematic connections between the poems they grouped together. In Genesis B, for example, those terms evocative of counsel and divine rule, such as OE ræd and OE riht, prominent in the prologue to Genesis A, re-emerge in a related context but in an alternative style, where they will reveal more about the nature of Lucifer’s counsel first mentioned earlier in the codex. Genesis B also stresses the connection between the devil and ill counsel because of other verbal repetitions within the poem itself: the recurrence of OE lætan and OE forlætan generates the idea that permission and allowance form part E. Tyler, Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (York, 2007), p. 145. 18 Old English Poetics, p. 146. 17

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of a hierarchy governed by God, setting up a system against which Lucifer’s own renunciation of counsel and faith leads to hell. After outlining God’s command to Adam and Eve in Eden, the poet turns back to the tale of the angelic rebellion on the next page. Page 14 of the manuscript begins with an illuminated ‘h’ (a winged, serpent-like beast), as if signalling the importance of the upcoming account of the fall of the angels. The poet first outlines relations in heaven, detailing the ‘geongorscipe’ (one of the poem’s words for the state of service or allegiance) that existed in the kingdom between God and his angelic host. Again, the emphasis is on allowance and what God the ruler permits, as the poem continues to set the stage for Lucifer’s struggle against his superior:       ænne hæfde he swa swiðne geworhtne swa mihtigne on his modgeþohte,  he let hine swa micles wealdan, hehstne to him on heofona rice […]       sceolde his drihtne þancian þæs leanes þe he him on þam leohte gescerede  þonne læte he his hine lange wealdan. ac he wende hit him to wyrsan þinge,  ongan him winn up hebban wið þone hehstan  heofnes waldend, þe siteð on þam halgan stole. (one had God made so powerful, so mighty in his inner thought, so much he let him rule, highest after him in the kingdom of the heavens […] he, the lead angel, should have thanked his lord for the reward shared on him in that light, then God would have let him rule for a long while. But he [Lucifer] turned it to a worse thing for himself, began to raise up strife against the highest ruler of heaven, who sits on the holy throne. ll. 252b–254a, 257b–260c) [italics mine]

There are echoes in this passage of the rebel angels’ attempt to secure their own throne in Genesis A’s prologue, where Lucifer seeks his ‘heahsetl’ (Genesis A, l. 33a). The reference to God sitting on the ‘halgan stole’ in Genesis B, therefore, may have offered readers of the Old English combined poetic Genesis a chance to look back to Lucifer’s quest at the beginning of the poetry, or at least bring it to mind for effect, so that these references to God ‘letting’ Lucifer rule beside him (ll. 253b–254) and to the prospect of God ‘letting’ Lucifer rule (‘wealdan’; l. 257b) would reinforce the impression that the high position of those who rebelled was conditional. Lucifer will mimic this conditional language as the ruler in hell, as he states that ‘Sittan læte ic hine wið me sylfne’ (I will let him be seated beside me; l. 438) when seeking out a loyal subject to

7 8    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

make Adam and Eve abandon the divine favour gifted to them. Genesis B presents the relationship between God and his highest subordinate (a paradox the poem will invoke time and again) in ways that recall commitments of loyalty, and damnations of its breakage, in such Old English poems as The Battle of Maldon, and in ways that allow for Satan’s own speeches about his motivations and designs to reveal the brittle, unwise grounds on which his philosophies about power and his own rank rest:       feala worda gespæc se engel ofermodes.  þohte þurh his anes cræft hu he him strenglicran  stol geworhte, heahran on heofonum.  cwæð þæt hine his hige speonne þæt he west and norð  wyrcean ongunne, trymede getimbro.  cwæð him tweo þuhte þæt he gode wolde  geongra weorðan. ‘hwæt sceal ic winnan?’ cwæð he.  ‘nis me wihtæ þearf hearran to habbanne.  ic mæg mid handum swa fela wundra gewyrcean.  ic hæbbe geweald micel to gyrwanne  godlecran stol, hearran on heofne.  hwy sceal ic æfter his hyldo ðeowian, bugan him swilces geongordomes?  ic mæg wesan god swa he. bigstandað me strange geneatas,  þa ne willað me æt þam striðe geswican, hæleþas heardmode.  hie habbað me to hearran gecorene, rofe rincas.  mid swilcum mæg man ræd geþencean, fon mid swilcum folcgesteallan.  frynd synd hie mine georne, holde on hyra hygesceaftum.  ic mæg hyra hearra wesan, rædan on þis rice.  swa me þæt riht ne þinceð, þæt ic oleccan  awiht þurfe gode æfter gode ænegum  ne wille ic leng his geongra wurþan.’ (The proud angel spoke many words. He thought how he would create a stronger throne for himself, through his own craft, higher in the heavens; he said that his mind urged him so that he should begin to work west and north, and build up a structure; he said that it seemed doubtful to him that he would continue to be an underling for God. ‘Why must I strive?’ he said. ‘It is not at all necessary for me to have a superior. I can work as many wonders with my hands. I have great power to prepare a more godlike throne, higher in heaven. Why must I serve for his favour, and bow to him with such allegiance? I can be god just as he. Strong retainers stand by me, who will not fail me in the strife, hardminded warriors. They have chosen me as their ruler, the bold soldiers, with

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such subjects one can devise counsel, begin with such as these. They are my devout friends, loyal in their hearts. I can be their master, govern in this kingdom. So it does not seem right to me, that I need to pay court to God to get anything good. I will no longer be his underling.’ ll. 271b–291)

In both reported and direct speech, Lucifer’s machinations are founded on overreaching. The Genesis B poet plays on words like ‘hearran’ and ‘heahran’, suggesting that Lucifer’s needs to craft a throne and structure above God and to rule as a king ‘higher in the heavens’ are ambitions with their roots in a misinterpretation of the kinds of hierarchies that stabilise the heavenly politic, with God as the highest ruler, with the divine creator as the one that permits all things to be. To think of OE forlætan again, it is worth noting that Lucifer’s speech at this point in the poem is devoid of it, suggesting his disregard of the heavenly system of exchange and allowance. In the context of Junius 11, this passage offers a behind the scenes look at the tragedy that made up the foundation of the poetic cycle at the beginning of the manuscript, where the detail that Lucifer said he would possess a ‘home and a high throne’ in the prologue to Genesis A is expanded by the inclusion of Genesis B. On two occasions in close proximity in these lines, the Genesis B poet, first in the narrator’s then in Lucifer’s voice, states that the leader of the rebellion wished to create a new kind of throne, and that he intended to craft or work (‘wyrcean’; l. 275b) his own seat of rule and build a new kingdom. The soon-to-be-devil’s desires are repeatedly undercut by his own insistence on height and a higher form of rule because the audience knows, particularly if they have viewed the images of his falling citadel earlier in the manuscript, he can go no higher than God, though in contemplating such highness he will inevitably fall to the lowest depths. It is in this first speech by Lucifer in Genesis B where, alongside the rebel angel’s revelations that he will no longer serve God, the manuscript poetry returns to matters of good and bad counsel. Lucifer voices his own idea of OE ræd as he refers to his thanes and their reliability. While counsel and loyalty are prime components of Lucifer’s thinking in this speech, the poet links through verbal repetition Lucifer’s statement that, now that he has gathered strong retainers and warriors, he can ‘ræd geþencean’ (devise counsel; l. 286b) with his claim that he can ‘rædan on þis rice’ (govern in this kingdom; l. 289a). The repetition draws attention to the fact that Lucifer has not counselled or planned things before gathering loyal subjects (suggesting his plans might be rooted in something other than good counsel): the sense is that he will now look to counsel and to advise only after gathering a martial force. Furthermore, by having Lucifer state just a few lines later that he wishes to ‘rædan’ in a ‘rice’, the poet also draws attention to the fact that the governance or rule of a kingdom is dependent on good counsel and one’s ability to ‘rædan’ – to govern, but also

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to give counsel, to interpret, to read. As Lucifer falls into hell, the Genesis B poet will explore this idea further by consistently demonstrating the devil’s misunderstanding of his ability to rule. In this first speech it does not ‘seem right’ or ‘rightful’ to Lucifer that he must be loyal to God and this marks him out as a high ranking figure that can sow destruction because of his individual concept of riht, but whose own attempt to overthrow his king will ultimately stand as a warning against tyranny and lawlessness. In the next section, I will place some of the descriptions of Lucifer’s actions in Genesis B in the context of early medieval kingship to demonstrate in more detail how the poem, as an intrusion into Junius 11 that deepens some of the references to Lucifer’s ill-advised action described in Genesis A, speaks to early medieval concerns regarding poor or tyrannical kingship.

Good and bad kings

Early medieval writings about kingship offer a picture of how a ruler was expected to govern the realm and demand loyalty and oaths from his subjects while reserving harsh punishments for those who severed the joinings holding together his plans for peace.19 Such documents offer us suggestions for thinking about how a poem like Genesis B, especially through its tracing of Lucifer’s ruin and his pursuit of recompense against his ruler, would have offered a variety of parallels with early medieval concerns about, and conceptions of, disastrous events within and around political fracture. Ideas about ‘righteous kingship’, Francis Leneghan writes, emerged with the Carolingian ‘mirrors for princes’, which, drawing on the influential seventh-century Hiberno-Latin text, De XII abusivis saeculi (with its ninth abuse outlining the nature of the rex iniquus), stressed the need for royal wisdom and moderation and came to inform early medieval ideas about rule in the ninth century.20 It would not have been difficult for readers of Satan’s plight in Genesis B, framed in terms that would be understandable to those writing about earthly politics and early medieval kingship, to reflect on their own rulers and their own realms in relation to Satan himself. The ideology of kingship that progressed through the early medieval period was part of a long tradition and a long process of revision, of course, but it See P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999, repr. 2001), pp. 264–407. For a variety of approaches to early medieval kingship see Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. G. R. Owen-Crocker and B. W. Schneider (Woodbridge, 2013). 20 F. Leneghan, ‘Royal Wisdom and the Alfredian Context of Cynewulf and Cyneheard’, ASE 39 (2010), 71–104 (pp. 74–5). 19

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remained inherited from earlier centuries and from the Continent, meaning that Genesis B’s depiction of Satan as a fallen lord with desire for resurgence and revenge against his ruler would have resonated in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries as well as during the time the poem is thought to have been transliterated (during King Alfred’s reign). Surviving documents from royal inauguration rituals demonstrate that, at least from the mid-900s, early medieval kings were anointed in events that involved the issuing of commands and taking of oaths that stressed the duty of a ruler to peace and to his people. These are witnessed by the English coronation ordines, written in Latin. The first English ordo (c. 850), which may have provided the basis for the continental ordo by Hincmar to inaugurate Charles the Bald’s daughter, Judith, as queen of the West Saxons when she married Æthelwulf in 856, concluded with the relevant king issuing three commands to his people and the Church: to preserve peace, to forbid robbery and injustice and, thirdly, to order justice and grant mercy so that, in turn, God’s mercy could be attained. Barbara Raw suggested that an illuminated manuscript containing the Old Saxon Genesis and many of the illustrations that were copied into Junius 11 may have been presented as a gift at this wedding, coming to England not long after.21 The so-called second English ordo exists in two versions, now known as A (c. 900) and B (c. 960, perhaps used at the consecration of Edgar in 973) following Janet Nelson.22 In the B version, which may have been in currency during the time the Junius 11 poems were in circulation in some form, the king’s commands to his subjects from the first ordo are replaced by a threefold coronation oath, spoken by the king at the beginning of the ceremony. This was an oath to maintain peace, and, in the later Old English Promissio regis, which reflects the B version of the second ordo and draws on the ninth abuse of the De XII abusivis saeculi, the king’s oath is ‘þæt godes cyrice and eall cristen folc minra gewealda soðe sibbe healde. Oðer is þæt ic reaflac and ealle unrihte þing. eallum hadum forbeode’ (that God’s church and all Christian folk in my power preserve true peace, the other is that I forbid robbery and all unrighteous things).23 OE unriht here marks what is forbidden – things unrighteous, and things that go against the king’s rightful place as God’s representative. There is no doubt the various tales of the angelic rebellion in Junius 11 could have been utilised to reflect the severity of threats to peace that plagued early medieval ‘Probable Derivation’, p. 148. J. Nelson, ‘The Second English Ordo’, in J. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 361–74. 23 M. Clayton, ‘The Old English Promissio regis’, ASE 37 (2008), 91–150 (p. 149). I have quoted from Clayton’s new edition of the Promissio which concludes this article. 21 22

8 2    MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

kings within and without their own political circles. When reading Genesis B, it is worth considering the two paragraphs later added to the Promissio, possibly by Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury from 959–88, preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript (London, BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra B.xiii), and still rooted in the long tradition of the rex iniquus. The lines associated with Dunstan offer some more specific context for understanding Satan’s disloyalty and wrongful pursuit of compensation in Genesis B as one shaped by early medieval concerns about a ruler, or a would-be ruler, failing to uphold his promises to God: Gif he þonne þæt awægð. þæt gode wæs behaten. Þonne sceal hit syððan. wyrsian swyðe. sona on his þeode. and eall hit on ende. gehwyrfð on þæt wyrste. butan he on his liffæce ær hit gebete (If he [the king] fails to fulfil that which was promised to God, then it will very soon afterwards grow worse on his people and in the end it will all turn out for the worst, unless he make amends for it during his lifetime)24

The connection between the king and his people and the need to make ‘amends’ is pressing (and that OE word, gebetan, casts the king’s work in compensatory terms), because things could ‘grow worse’ (‘wyrsian’) swiftly as history continued to turn (‘gehwyrfð’). Lack of praise and payment to God, these lines suggest, results in a cycle of ills that spread outwards from the king to the realm. Those lines from early on in Genesis B, highlighting how Lucifer ‘awende hit him to wyrsan þinge’ (turned it [his power] to a worse thing for himself; l. 258a) as he failed to keep his oath, resound here, because they also demonstrate the effect of a leader on those who follow. Junius 11 has been viewed as a book intended for a lay ruler, its good and bad kings providing models for would-be leaders and Genesis B’s resemblance to the ordines supports this.25 Satan, whose presence overshadows all of Genesis B as it stands, will become the ruler of an upside-down kingdom (‘hyra woruld wæs gehwyrfed’, or ‘their world was overturned’, the poet says of the rebel angels at line 318b), working to ‘gebetan’ (make amends, gain compensation; l. 399b) in vengeance, serving as a model of what a ruler should avoid and prevent. Another verbal link between the poem and Dunstan’s likely additional lines of the ordo is that word ‘gebetan’ and the concept of amends: in Genesis B, of course, Satan pursues amends despite having committed crimes against God, highlighting once more his misunderstanding of how rulership, 24 25

Clayton, ‘Promissio regis’, p. 148. See D. Anlezark, ‘Lay Reading, Patronage and Power in Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, in Ambition and Anxiety: Courts and Courtly Discourse, c. 700–1600, ed. G. E. M. Gasper and J. McKinnell (Toronto, 2014), pp. 76–97.

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compensation and promises or oaths are supposed to function. Such depictions of Lucifer as a subject of God with prideful plans of becoming a king of his own realm recall the illuminations at the beginning of the manuscript, creating an interplay that has the potential to expand the manuscript’s depiction of Lucifer as a prideful figure with illusions of becoming a king. As the previous chapter noted, in the top register of the full-page image on page 3 of the manuscript a crowned Lucifer operates in heaven, prior to his fall, taking part in a ceremony in which his fellow rebels, in the lower right of the top register, bring him crowns that are influenced by continental art, possibly representing his plan to rule a new kingdom while foreshadowing his approaching accursed position as the ruler of hell.26 As the ideal king in Genesis B, God responds to Lucifer’s attempt to establish an illegitimate new kingdom by forcing the rebel angels to compensate for their actions, which will serve to accentuate the folly of Satan’s own pursuit of amends. The poem is explicit, too, about the disasters awaiting those who move against their rulers. The poet makes sure the reader or hearer knows how God’s punishment of the rebels relates to their own time: þa hit se allwalda  eall gehyrde þæt his engyl ongan  ofermede micel ahebban wið his hearran  and spræc healic word dollice wið drihten sinne.  sceolde he þa dæd ongyldan, worc þæs gewinnes gedælan  and sceolde his wite habban, ealra morðra mæst.  swa deð monna gehwilc þe wið his waldend  winnan ongynneð mid mane wið þone mæran drihten. (When the real ruler heard it all, that his angel began great overreaching against his master and foolishly spoke lofty words against his lord, he 26

Barbara Raw suggested that the coronation at the top of page 3 has continental influence, as the crowns here differ from those in English manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The double-arched crown like the ones shown on page 3 were a ninth-century continental development, resembling illustrations of Charles the Bald in the Vivian Bible and San Callisto Bible. Raw writes of the ‘closest parallels to the crown with a soft cap’ being ‘paintings of Louis the Pious as the warrior of God’ in two early ninth-century manuscripts of the De laudibus sanctae crucis of Rabanus Maurus. The crowns on page 3 of Junius 11, as well as Lucifer’s lily sceptre (first known from an illustration depicting the investiture of Charles the Bald in 869), remain strong evidence for many of the illustrations of Junius 11 being derived from the lost manuscript of the Old Saxon Genesis that came to England before being transliterated into an early version of Genesis B. ‘Probable Derivation’, p. 145.

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[Lucifer] had to pay for the deed, share the suffering of the struggle, and had to have his punishment, the greatest of all murders. So does each man who begins to strive against his ruler with sin, against the renowned lord; ll. 292–299a)

This is a moment in the Junius poetry in which the story of the rebellion accumulates further potential as a warning an early medieval reader could apply to their own contemporary moment. The detail that Lucifer began to raise up ‘ofermede’ (overreaching, pride; l. 293b) and speak ‘dollice’ words (OE dollice suggests foolishness, but also a lack of wisdom, even a bewildered state),27 echo the prologue of Genesis A, where the rebel angels were also moved to rebel by Lucifer’s ‘oferhygd’ and his ‘word’. In these lines from Genesis B, the additional instruction warns against attempts to overthrow one’s lord by suggesting that what happens to Lucifer will happen to any earthly leader of an insurrection against their ruler. The Genesis B poet also acknowledges God’s action towards the rebels as a necessary form of justice and compensation (‘ongyldan’). Old English gyld occurs frequently in early medieval legislation as a term denoting the payment for a transgression.28 This passage in Genesis B frames the punishment itself as the ‘payment’, but also signals the moral as well as cosmological implications of rebellion against a lord or king: striving against a ruler only serves to repeat the first struggle, to repeat the falls of those who were first permitted to possess the gifts of obedience and understanding (‘gewit’). The retelling of the angelic fall that occurs with the interpolation of Genesis B would have the effect of reiterating such ideas for readers of the poetic Genesis as it stands in the manuscript – it is almost as if the return to the event in Genesis B works to warn against emulating Lucifer’s pitfalls precisely because it recalls the earlier account of the rebellion in Junius 11 (the repetition promoting watchfulness against or acknowledgement of repetition itself ) providing additional counsel and instruction. As Genesis B proceeds, God transforms the rebel angels ‘to deoflum’ (to devils; l. 309a) as he casts them into the abyss (ll. 313–27). Satan begins to outline his plan for vengeance from his position in hell. Read from the perspective of early medieval documents concerning crimes of betrayal, particularly the betrayal of a king or lord, Satan’s impulse to pursue amends from the position of defeat and punishment offers a detailed gloss on Genesis A’s prologue by portraying the devil in greater detail as a fallen ruler of a doomed kingdom, but also as a disloyal subject of his former lord.

27 28

DOE, s.v. dollice (1 and 3). DOE, s.v. gyld.

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Loyalty is a major concern in the laws of King Alfred, and one detail useful for understanding Genesis B from legislation associated with Alfred’s reign is the idea that the betrayal of a lord was an act that could rarely be settled through compensation. This is evident in the Prologue to the Domboc in which the voice of Alfred discusses Christ’s teaching and Passion: Siððan ðæt þa gelamp, þæt monega ðeoda Cristes geleafan onfengan, þa wurdon monega seonoðas geond ealne middangeard gegaderode, and eac swa geond Angelcyn, siððan hie Cristes geleafan onfengon, halegra biscepa and eac oðera geðungenra witena; hie ða gesetton, for ðære mildheortnesse þe Crist lærde, æt mæstra hwelcre misdæde þætte ða weorldhlafordas moston mid hiora leafan buton synne æt þam forman gylte þære fiohbot onfon, þe hie ða gesettan; buton æt hlafordsearwe hie nane mildheortnesse ne dorston gecweðan, forþam ðe God ælmihtig þam nane ne gedemde þe hine oferhogdon, ne Crist Godes sunu þam nane ne gedemde þe hine to deaðe sealde, and he bebead þone hlaford lufian swa hine29 (After it happened that many peoples received the faith of Christ, then many synods were gathered throughout the world, and also among the English, after they received the faith of Christ, of holy bishops and also of other distinguished counsellors; they then established, because of the mild-heartedness that Christ taught, that worldly lords might with their leave and without sin receive the compensation that they [the bishops] established at the first crime for most of those misdeeds; but at lord-betrayal they dared not speak any mild-heartedness, because God almighty judged none for them who hated him, nor did Christ, God’s son, give any mercy for them who betrayed him to death, and he bade to love a lord as himself; Alfred Prol. 49.7)

Stefan Jurasinski and Lisi Oliver note that, although the detail here that the betrayal of a lord is an act not worthy of forgiveness or compensation might seem ‘contrary’ to the forgiveness Christ calls for during the Passion in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 23.24), ‘Alfred’s thinking is in this instance perfectly conventional’.30 As such it is in keeping with some of Alfred’s other writings on loyalty: quoting the Legatine Capitulary (a collection of codes addressing particular crimes from 786, sent to England by Hadrian) in his law on the For the text of the Domboc, see now The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law, ed. S. Jurasinski and L. Oliver (Cambridge, 2021), p. 270 for Alfred Prol., 49.7. For the Domboc as literature see P. Wormald, Making of English Law, pp. 416–30. 30 The Laws of Alfred, p. 271, n. 80. 29

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plotting against a lord, for example, the voice of Alfred states that the one disobeying a lord will be liable for ‘his feores’ (his life) and ‘ealles ðæs ðe he age’ (all that he owns) (Alfred 4.2).31 The code from Alfred’s Prologue focusing on Christ’s faith serves as a good example of the long-running concern with pledge-breaking in early medieval England (the severity of the crime does not diminish in later legislation, we see it emphasised, for example, in Æthelred V and VI) and represents the kind of political and social attitudes to treachery through which Satan’s transgressions in Genesis B could have been understood.32 As Nicole Marafioti points out, the rare cases where the laws of King Alfred explicitly prescribe the need for both spiritual and earthly remedies are in those clauses concerning oath-breaking and ‘treasonous or unjust activities’, as in early medieval law ‘pledge-breaking is more than a violation against earthly parties; it is also a sin that required religious reconciliation’.33 In the Prologue to Alfred’s Domboc, ‘worldly lords’ and their crimes might be understood as sinful when we consider that a king’s role would have often been viewed as one that carried out God’s work by regulating such crimes. Such examples of the approach of early medieval rulers to betrayal and plotting, to ‘hlafordsearwe’, and the harshest of punishments that were reserved for these, help explain why a poem like Genesis B portrays the fall of the angels and the suffering in hell as a consequence of rebellion against a lord, and why the poem utilises the figure of Satan to highlight the wrongful and devilish nature of a lord-betraying criminal pursuing compensation. In Genesis B, Satan believes that he is entitled to reconciliation. He does not want to make amends for the transgression he and his followers have committed with rebellion and oath-breaking, however, but desires instead to gain payback for having been expelled from heaven. Arguments for the Satan of the poem representing nostalgia for heroic values are difficult to sustain (there is nothing ‘heroic’ about these ideas or plans).34 Lack of fidelity was a serious crime in early medieval England and, as Andrew Rabin writes, ‘the ubiquity See Laws of Alfred, pp. 294–5 and note. J. Fitzgerald draws attention to Alfred’s laws on treachery against an earthly lord to highlight the way the Genesis A poet also draws on the language of compensation and familiar legal procedures, such as forfeiture, to stress that ‘God cannot allow Satan to recover his former place in the heavenly homeland.’ Rebel Angels, p. 45. 33 Marafioti, ‘Crime and Sin in the Laws of Alfred’, in Languages of the Law in Early Medieval England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver, ed. S. Jurasinski and A. Rabin (Louvain, Paris and Bristol CT, 2019), pp. 59–87 (pp. 69–70). 34 Saxon Genesis, p. 131. Doane notes here that like ‘any injured “hero” he desires vengeance, continuation of the feud for its own sake. There is no bote except by extending the circle of harm; it is in this narrow, old-fashioned, pagan way that Satan is truly “heroic”.’ 31 32

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of oathtaking (and oathbreaking) clauses in royal legislation suggests something of their importance to kings seeking to consolidate and centralize the governance of their kingdom’.35 In his own fallen kingdom, Satan foregrounds vengeance as an ideology, instead of good counsel or even fealty (which he will demand after outlining his lust for compensation). Undercutting the very premise of his project, Satan acknowledges first that directing vengeance towards God is an impossible task:        he hæfð us þeah þæs leohtes bescyrede, beworpen on ealra wita mæste  ne magon we þæs wrace gefremman, geleanian him mid laðes wihte  þæt he us hafað þæs leohtes bescyrede. (he [God] has thus cut us off from the light, cast us down into the greatest of all punishments. We cannot carry out vengeance for this, repay him in any way with harm because he has cut us off from the light. ll. 392b–394)

Compilers might well have spotted the verbal connections between this passage and the account of God’s vengeance upon the angels in Genesis A earlier in the manuscript narrative, where the divine ruler ‘torn gewræc / on gesacum’ (took vengeance on [his] enemies; ll. 58b–59a) and ‘æðele bescyrede / his wiðerbrecan’ (severed his enemies from the homeland; l. 63). Previously in Genesis B, the poet stated that Lucifer, instead of pursuing rebellion, should have ‘drihtne þancian / þæs leanes þe he him on þam leohte gescerede’ (thanked his lord for the reward he shared on him in that light; ll. 257b–258a). These lines are reminders that, while God was justified as a lord facing rebellion to vengefully repay those committing treason, Satan, suffering the severance from king and kingdom, does not have those rights. While early medieval law outlines that payment of compensation could prevent the pursuit of vengeance from the injured parties or kin, that does not apply here, since Satan had instigated a rebellion, and has been banished to prison, rather than having any of his kin murdered, or being harmed himself in the first instance.36 In his position as a lord, but as the lord at the very bottom of a cosmological hierarchy, Satan, unable to seek direct compensation for his exile or for the justified acts of God that banished him, turns his attention to those who are intended to replace him in heaven: A. Rabin, Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2020), p. 36. On fidelity and oaths see, for instance, VI Aethelred and II Cnut. 36 See S. Rubin, ‘The Bot, or Composition in Anglo-Saxon Law: A Reassessment’, The Journal of Legal History 17.2 (1996), 144–54, who mentions Bede’s account of Ælfwine, brother of King Ecgfrith, who was killed in battle. Ecgfrith, on the advice of Archbishop Theodore, received compensation payments to prevent his pursuit of vengeance from King Æthelred of the Mercians. 35

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      we þæs sculon hycgan georne þæt we on adame  gif we æfre mægen and on his eafrum swa some  andan gebetan, onwendan him þær willan sines  gif we hit mægen wihte aþencan. (We must consider eagerly how we through Adam, if we ever can, receive compensation in vengeance, and so too through his heirs, pervert his will, if we can design it any way; ll. 397b–400)

Satan’s need to ‘gebetan’ through vengeance and in anger suggests a fabricated and misplaced idea of a system of compensation, one that sees him look to make amends in vengeance despite him being the guilty party. The verb gebetan ranges in meaning from ‘to make good’ and ‘to heal’ to its meaning in legal contexts, which is ‘to obtain compensation’.37 In the poem, the word connotes Satan’s intention to pursue amends and revenge. That this is a dreadful philosophy for a ruler of any kind to hold to is also suggested by further early medieval royal legislation. Since Alfred’s day at the least laws had looked to delay or suppress outbreaks of vengeance and rebellion.38 During the reign of King Edmund (939–46), there emerged a concerted effort to reduce the bloodshed that could escalate from unsanctioned pursuits of violent amends. This was accompanied by a growing sense of ‘horror at wrongdoing’.39 King Edgar’s extant laws suggest that the king and his counsellors implemented strict and organised regulation in tune with the ideology of the tenth-century DOE, s.v. gebetan. As J. H. Baker writes, the main ‘effort in Alfred’s laws was to delay the outbreak of violence for as long as possible’. See The Oxford History of the Laws of England: Volume 2, ed. J. H. Baker (Oxford, 2012), p. 172. See also 42 Alfred, which stipulates that a man seeking revenge who knows his opponent dwells at home is not to fight him before requesting justice and surround him for seven days instead: ‘Eac we beodað: se mon se ðe his gefan hamsittendne wite, þæt he ne feohte, ærðam he him ryhtes bid’ (also we command: the man who knows that his enemy is sitting at home, that he not fight him before he settles by law). See The Laws of Alfred, pp. 342–3. 39 P. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (New York and London, 2003), p. 81. In II Edmund, for example, the kin group is not legally justified in retaliating against the murder of their blood relations: ‘gif hwa heononforð ænigne man ofslea, ðæt he wege sylf ða fæhþe, butan hy mid freonda fylste binnan twelf monðum forgylde be fullan were, sy swa boren swa he sy’ (if henceforth anyone slay a man, he himself is to be subject to ‘fæhþ’, unless within one year, with the aid of his supporters, he pay compensation to the full amount of the man’s wergild, according to the slain man’s rank). Edmund’s laws wanted revenge only on the offender and his laws concerning feud begin by outlining just how unlawful conflicts distress him and his kingdom (II Edmund, Prologue). 37 38

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monastic reform, uniting spiritual and secular concerns. As III Edgar has it, legal compensations had to work for the earthly kingdom and for God: ‘sy on ðare bote swilce forgifnes, swilce hit for Gode gebeorhlic sy 7 for worlde aberendlic’ (let there be such forgiveness in the system of compensation [‘bote’] that it is safe for God and tolerable before the world). Genesis B’s Satan is a prominent example of the kind of pursuit of vengeance based on misunderstanding and poor counsel that such laws seem intent on suppressing. Satan’s need to ‘gebetan’ also highlights his dependence on the system of loyalty and reward, of fealty and permission, that underlies the heavenly hierarchy and God’s ‘letting’ or permitting of power and gifts – things which, by rebelling against his lord in the first place, he has ‘abandoned’ (and I am thinking again of the poem’s play on OE lætan). The poet may also be attuned to the ways ‘gebetan’ could connote reparation in both spiritual and financial terms, as it does in the laws of the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Carole Hough has demonstrated. Hough notes that both senses of the term may be at play when it is used in Edmund’s laws (especially IV Edmund, where the criminal seducing a nun would be denied burial ‘buton he gebete’, ‘unless he make amends’).40 Cast out from the heavenly kingdom, Satan must target his lord’s heirs to gain his revenge. But the ‘ifs’ of Satan speech – ‘if we can’ or ‘if we can design it’ – betray him and also highlight the way his ideal of compensation rests on unstable ground: we might interpret the ‘ifs’ as akin to the ‘if-then’ formulas of early medieval legislation (often stating, as in Alfred’s laws for example, that ‘if ’ someone transgresses, ‘then’ they must pay or perform the required compensation), highlighting in his very speech his ties to the conditional nature of what forms his identity (his former status and its relationship to his former lord).41 Satan’s ‘ifs’ also serve to cast his claim of ability and agency (‘mægen’) into doubt. A cohesive kingdom hell is not, and Satan’s own idea of what he is owed is the work of a disobedient force and of an illegitimate and ill-advised new ruler who unjustly seeks reparation for his own crimes. When viewed in the light of the royal ordines, too, these lines give us a ruler who makes no oath to God or to his own subjects in the way those texts instruct. Satan’s proposal is that he and his followers should seek to receive payment for, and thus satisfy, their ‘andan’ (OE anda, anoþa, which quite often in the corpus of Old English refers to a kind of anger that reaches a point of action and is a characteristic of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old English Daniel, for example). Use of the word by Satan in the phrase ‘andan gebetan’ has been interpreted as ‘“to make good (one’s) anger on (someone)’, interpreted 40 41

C. Hough, ‘An Ald Reht’: Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law (Newcastle, 2014), pp. 32–3. See, for example, 14–20 Alfred.

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contextually as ‘to satisfy vengeance on (someone)”’,42 because of the previous lines referring to the inability of the apostate angels to perform ‘wracu’ (revenge) against God. As far as other attestations go in the corpus, the OE word anda clearly connotes anger and rage, often in a very negative, sinful form. To seek to address this against mankind, Satan, bound by hands and feet in hell, must do so through his ‘boda’, or messenger, who he will employ to make it so that Adam and Eve ‘hyldo forlætan’ (abandon protection/obedience; l. 404b). This attempt to gain redress for wrong is misplaced: there is no killing, no feud, because Satan committed a crime without cause and God punished him and imprisoned him. However, the way the plot to seek vengeance through God’s obedient subjects is designed and spoken out by Satan reveals more of his lofty ideas as well as pointing to the devastation unlawful vengeance can cause in the world. Genesis B’s interests here align with another of the Junius 11 compilation’s overarching concerns about how wrongfooted rule leads to fragmentation and a decline in the practice and benefit of good counsel, which is a vital component in the journey to salvation. By offering false hope and futile, overblown political plans, Satan works evil and strife through his followers. Part of Satan’s justification for directing his vengeance against mankind in the middle-world is that he and his followers cannot reach God. The other motivation for this self-justification is that Adam and Eve, as well as their descendants, are not only ‘on eorðrice / welan bewunden’ (wound round with prosperity in the earthly kingdom; ll. 419b–420a), but will come to inherit and possess the kingdom of heaven, as Satan says:       ‘nu hie drihtne synt wurðran micle  and moton him þone welan agan þe we on heofonrice  habban sceoldon, rice mid rihte.  is se ræd gescyred monna cynne.  þæt me is on minum mode swa sar, on minum hyge hreoweð,  þæt hie heofonrice agan to aldre.’ (‘now they are much honoured by the lord, and they can possess that prosperity that we should have in the kingdom of heaven, our kingdom by right. The counsel is shared out to mankind. To me in my mind that is so sore, roughens in my heart, that they possess the kingdom of heaven forever.’ ll. 421b–427a)

42

DOE, s.v. anda, 1.b.ii.

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B   91

In outlining his grievance further, Satan returns once more to the ‘power’ (‘rice’) and ‘kingdom’ (‘-rice’) lost. But another interesting detail, which is verbally tied to the speech made by Lucifer in heaven before the angels fell (ll. 271b–291), is that ‘se ræd gescyred’ (the counsel is shared; ll. 424b–425a) to mankind (or to Adam and Eve). As was the case earlier in the poem, this increases the potential for OE ræd to carry with it meanings generated from its appearances earlier in the manuscript (where, in the prologue to Genesis A, it was abandoned by the rebel angels in heaven as Lucifer crafted its opposite, OE unræd) and earlier in Genesis B (where it became the term Lucifer used to define the plans he was about to make). In this speech by Satan, ‘ræd’ represents something that Adam and Eve possess that he does not, highlighting the good counsel granted to them by God, which would also of course be an ‘advantage’, as Doane glosses the word in this occurrence at line 424.43 But the importance in the use of ‘ræd’ at this point lies in its loaded nature for readers of the Genesis poem, particularly if they are aware of its tie to heaven and to what Lucifer abandoned at the beginning of the manuscript: that ‘ræd’ has been shared with mankind (and perhaps the realisation that this is a quality that will allow mankind to ‘possess’ power in the kingdom of heaven), causes Satan soreness and pain, stressing once more in this manuscript poetry the vital nature of good ‘ræd’ when it comes to ruling a kingdom and maintaining sound relations with the divine, although this time it catches Satan almost coming to that realisation himself (at a point when it would be all too late). In Doane’s edition of Genesis B, there are no commentary notes for lines 421–427 quoted above, but what Satan speaks in these lines offers some key information about the poem’s idea of the misshapen politics underpinning a fallen lord’s desire for power and requital. Speaking of his inner condition (his ‘rough’ heart, his ‘sore’ mod), Satan points out that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the rebel angels ‘mid rihte’ (by right, by law). Satan’s idea of his ‘right’ to a kingdom in this instance suggests that he envisions something like what is connoted by OE landriht, a word Scott T. Smith has traced in a number of Old English poems, including Genesis A and Exodus, where it ‘positively denotes the formation and endurance of community through land’.44 Landriht is a compound used in poetry to refer to a collective holding of ancestral land. Loss of this, Smith has demonstrated, ‘is equivalent to collective death or erasure of an entire people’.45 Genesis B, much like Genesis A and other Old Saxon Genesis, ed. Doane. S. T. Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2012), p. 226. 45 Smith, Land and Book, p. 225. 43 44

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English poems describing the dispossession of the rebellious angels (such as Guthlac A, for example), stresses that the rebels lose all they are when they move against their king and their territory is taken from them. What Satan and his followers come to possess is an unruly space with unstable foundations, an ‘oþerland’ (other land; l. 332b), an expansive ‘niobedd’ (death-bed; l. 343a). Satan acknowledges that the land the angels have come to possess will resist them rather than provide for them when he states ‘ic a ne geseah / laðran landscipe’ (I never saw a more loathsome landscape; ll. 375b–376a).46 The poet of Genesis B also makes clear that the fallen angels view the possession of kingdoms beyond their own as a source of power, playing on OE rice (‘kingdom’, ‘power’), as Satan admits in the same group of lines ‘Ic eom rices leas’ (I am powerless; l. 372b). Being cast out of heaven, the rebels are denied inheritance and look therefore to disrupt and devastate the new owners of their former kingdom as Satan, in his call to arms, tells his host: ‘siððan ic me sefte mæg / restan on þyssum racentum, gif him þæt rice losað’ (if they [Adam and Eve] lose that kingdom themselves I can more easily rest in these chains; ll. 433b–434). As this plays out, the poem will return to themes of counsel and interpretation and therefore to some of the qualities the angels let go when they sought to betray their lord, as Satan sets his sights on making God’s subjects abandon the dominion and intellectual stability he can no longer achieve. Junius 11 frequently represents the way Satanic misunderstanding of communities and of rule spreads through history in the rise and fall of kingdoms and in the misdeeds of poor leaders. To possess a kingdom, or to seek to expand or create one, requires obligation to the power that granted such things (Genesis B emphasises this time and again, particularly through its use of lætan and forlætan).47 Satan in Genesis B sees this as an injustice and refuses to atone or pay compensation for his crimes, choosing instead to see God as the guilty party: ‘þeah we hine for þam alwaldan agan ne moston, / romigan ures rices, næfð he þeah riht gedon’ (because of the all-ruler we could not possess it

OE Lað / laþ is a frequent word in Genesis B, as it is in many other Old English poems, but the poet of Genesis B makes interesting use of it and tracing it through the poem is one way of observing the emergence of hell into the world of humanity through the use of the ‘laðtreow’ (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Indeed, Satan and his ‘boda’ seek to ‘forlæden and forlæren þæt hie wurdon lað gode’ (mislead and mislearn, so that they, Adam and Eve, become loathsome to God; l. 452). 47 S. T. Smith, in his analysis of Guthlac A and land tenure, writes that this obligation is a ‘social qualification’ very much part of early medieval discourse. See Land and Book, p. 192. 46

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B   93

or expand our kingdom, he did not do right; ll. 359–60).48 The devil’s striving in Genesis B is rooted in illegitimacy and delusion. Moreover, in pursuing vengeance against the inheritors of his former glory, Satan takes on the role of a granter, or a gift-giver, and even a lawmaker, in his offer to his followers, and one of them will become the instrument of that vengeance. As he assumes this role, Satan’s speech is compounded by the language of obligation, payment and reward, placing him in stark contrast to God, who gifted light and life to angels and mankind earlier in the poem. Satan speaks his way further into a false position, into a realm of makeshift law, as he imitates the role of the gift-giver and proposes his offer to whoever will do his bidding and enact his vengeance: ‘gif ic ænegum þegne  þeodenmadmas geara forgeafe  þenden we on þan godan rice gesælige sæton  and hæfdon ure setla geweald þonne he me na on leofran tid  leanum ne meahte mine gife gyldan  gif his gien wolde minra þegna hwilc  geþafa wurðan […] Se þe þæt gelæsteð,  him bið lean gearo æfter to aldre  þæs we her inne magon on þyssum fyre forð  fremena gewinnan. Sittan læte ic hine wið me sylfne  swa hwa swa þæt secgan cymeð on þas hatan helle  þæt hie heofoncyninges unwurðlice  wordum and dædum lare [forlæten] …’49 (‘If I ever gave noble treasures to any thane, while we sat happily in the good kingdom and had the rule of our thrones, then he could never repay my gift to me with recompense at a more desired time, if still one of my thanes would become my helper […] A. N. Doane writes that there ‘is danger in all of this of assigning too much sense to Satan’s speech. What Satan cannot keep is what he had, i.e. styde in heaven; what he cannot strive to get is rice, i.e. the “whole” kingdom, which he never had; he had a place and a role in the hierarchy of heaven, he did not have the whole. That he should refer to “ures rices” is a symptom of the problem.’ See Saxon Genesis, p. 271. 49 Editors of the poem agree that the missing verb here is OE forlæten, because of its occurrences in this kind of construction frequently elsewhere in the poem. A substantial part of the text has been lost here, indicated by the section numbers in the manuscript, which jump from viii to xi, as Doane notes (Saxon Genesis, p. 277). 48

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He who attains that, a reward will be ready for him forever afterward, of whatever treasures we can strive to win within these fires from now on. I will let him be seated beside me, whoever comes back to this hot hell to say that they [Adam and Eve] have dishonourably [abandoned] the teaching of heaven’s king with words and deeds…’; ll. 409–14, 435–41)

The poet allows Satan to lay bare his deceptive machinations. Satan now begins to present himself as a ruler who distributed treasure and, because of that, demands recompense from his subjects. He uses the word ‘þeodenmadmas’ (the compound noun is OE þeodenmaðum, meaning ‘treasure given by a prince’) which distorts the system of giving and exchange that characterises heaven, where God grants and allows gifts of light and intellect, and Satan brings that system into the material, temporal realm. Elizabeth Tyler has demonstrated the ways in which OE maðm, in ‘close to a third of all its occurrences and in most of the occurrences where we can determine what the term denotes, maðm and its compounds are likely to refer solely to war equipment’ and gift-giving ‘is the main context associated with maðm’.50 Yet, Satan’s reference to treasure is marked by play on the Old English words gif (if ), forgeaf (give, forgive) and gife (gift), as if to create doubt about the possibility that a tangible gift will definitely be in store for the one who does the lord of hell’s bidding (OE gif expresses conditional exchange as well as doubt). Even Satan’s memory of his role in heaven seems inaccurate: the devil is here demanding to be repaid for what God did in heaven, but earlier in the poem heaven’s king ‘gewit forgeaf ’ (gifted intellect; l. 250b) to the angels and bestowed rewards on Satan in the light. There is no mention of Satan distributing treasures in heaven other than this claim by Satan himself. In his work on political thought during the time of King Alfred, David Pratt suggests that gift-giving was fundamental to the cultivation of royal favour. Pratt notes how Alfred gave land, swords and clothing, amongst other things, to his subjects and that ‘as a tool of power, the king’s gifts created obligations which could only be redeemed through continuous service and loyalty’.51 Satan is reaching for such an economy, but it rests on unstable foundations. A lord in chains has only false gifts to distribute. Another revealing element in this section of Satan’s speech is the devil’s need to find a way to have Adam and Eve abandon God’s teaching and protection. It should not be overlooked that the poem frames the fall of man in this way, because it is in keeping with many other falls in the poetry collected in the manuscript (Lucifer on the opening pages, turning from heavenly ‘ræd’, 50 51

Old English Poetics, pp. 26–7. D. Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), p. 39.

Satan’s Vengeance and Genesis B   95

or the Israelites who fall at the beginning of the Old English Daniel, succumbing to the arcane arts of the Chaldeans). At the heart of Satan’s design to lead Adam and Eve to damnation is an offer to ‘sit’ beside him as second-in-command in an inverted hierarchy. The image on page 20 of Junius 11, with the ‘boda’ flying up out of the black gate of hell towards Eden, shows Satan suspended above flame, his hands and feet bound, as though he were on a spit. There is no throne, or seat, but Satan’s bound hands do look to be involved in making a lord-vassal pact or oath with the emissary. Offers of ‘payment’ and of a ‘high’ seat from the devil, then, are contradictions in terms (see Fig. 5). Genesis B goes on to outline the consequences of Satan’s false promises and of his illegitimate vengeance and rule through its reworking of the fall of man episode, which highlights how Adam and Eve come to ‘forlætan’ (abandon) God’s ‘hyldo’ (protection, bond), as their world is destabilised by Satan’s instrument. Satan’s vengeance, wrong-footed and unlawful, still has the ability to destroy and to unbuckle the cohesion of a realm. This is a powerful message the poem works through, utilising and expanding the story of what happened in Eden to strengthen its emphases on the aftershocks of rebellion, folly and unsanctioned pursuits of justice.

Losing and losing again

Christina M. Heckman writes that, in Genesis B, ‘Eden itself becomes a topos, the primordial “place” in which Adam and Eve must find arguments to refute or resist the serpent who “teaches” them, an endeavour in which they are unsuccessful.’52 Heckman uncovers how this failure on Adam and Eve’s part is because of their inability to ‘evaluate the demon’s argumentum’ and respond to it, as they find themselves ‘accepting the demon’s diverse faulty propositions’, although this ‘misfortunate exemplum’ may provide the wisdom and teaching for their descendants.53 Perhaps the Genesis B poet, and maybe even by extension the Junius compilers, saw the culmination of Satan’s pursuit of recompense in this way too – as instructive, and as a warning against strands of teaching and wisdom that spoil or disrupt one’s relationship with God. It is fitting that what God was teaching Adam and Eve at the beginning of Genesis B seems to be missing several lines (we see only the instruction by God to stay away from the ‘one Tree’) not only because of the way Satan’s messenger lures them into forgetting what they were taught, but also because of the way the manuscript compilation seems to encourage its audience to draw out their own ræd from Heckman, Debating with Demons: Pedagogy and Materiality in Early English Literature (Cambridge, 2020), p. 125. 53 Debating with Demons, p. 126. 52

Figure 5.  MS Junius 11, page 20, depiction of Satan’s messenger. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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its examples of fall and failure, to fill in the gaps. Events in Eden are depicted as a direct consequence of Satan’s abandonment of his lord and of his own plan to gain compensation following his failed rebellion. As the poet portrays them, the circumstances of Eve and Adam’s plight highlight the ways the devil, and those who follow him or persist in similar kinds of unwise pursuits, rip kingdoms apart not necessarily through war, but through their damage to a realm’s state of peace with the divine ruler, and through the distancing of subjects from good wisdom and counsel. Indeed, the very employment by Satan of a ‘boda’ skilled in ‘wora worda’ (crooked words; l. 446a), ‘feondes cræft’ (enemy’s craft; l. 449b) and equipped with a ‘hæleðhelm’ (helm of invisibility; l. 444a) – a device the emissary clamps and straps to his head – means that the approach to Eden, and the leading astray of Adam and Eve, are pursued through arcane arts, verbal deceit and devious acts of concealment.54 The ‘boda’ also represents how God’s instruction and counsel can be unlearned, and the knowledge of what God permits forgotten and lost, through his deceptive verbal art and in particular his admonitions to Eve:       ‘nu sceal he sylf faran to incre andsware.  ne mæg his ærende his boda beodan.  þy ic wat þæt he inc abolgen wyrð, mihtig on mode.  gif þu þeah minum wilt, wif willende,  wordum hyran þu meaht his þonne rume  ræd geþencan. gehyge on þinum breostum  þæt þu inc bam twam meaht wite bewarigan,  swa ic þe wisie: æt þisses ofetes.  þonne wurðað þin eagan swa leoht þæt þu meaht swa wide  ofer woruld ealle geseon siððan  and selfes stol herran þinnes  and habban his hyldo forð.’ (‘Now he [God] himself will journey to you two with an answer – his messenger cannot announce his bidding – I know that he, mighty in mind, will become swollen in rage with you two. But if you will obey my words, willing woman, you may be able to think of roomy counsel for it. Consider 54

For the messenger’s contraption, and the difficulty of the term hæleðhelm, which has connections to Satan’s visions sent to Pilate’s wife in the Heliand as well as to accounts of covering and invisibility in Old Norse, see M. Fox, ‘Feðerham and Hæleðhelm: The Equipment of Devils’, Florilegium 26 (2009), 131–57. For secrecy and concealment in early medieval England, see B. A. Saltzman, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2019).

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in your mind how you two together can be wary of punishment, as I advise. Eat of this fruit! Then your eyes will become so enlightened afterwards that you will be able to see widely throughout the world, and the own throne of your master, and have his favour henceforth.’ ll. 556b–567)

Eve falls for the emissary’s trickery and ill-meaning advice due to the promise of further illumination and sight and perhaps too because of the concept that obeying the ‘boda’ will allow her to think of a ‘roomy’ – a more expansive or ample – form of counsel (‘ræd’) for avoiding the wrath of her lord. The substance of the emissary’s speech to Eve echoes the experiences and desires of the fallen angels, but he can twist these things so that they tempt Eve towards what the poet calls ‘unriht’ a few lines later (l. 589a): the threat that God will become ‘gebolgen’ brings to mind both the beginning of Genesis A and the retelling of the angelic fall in Genesis B, while the idea that Eve will be able to see the ‘stol’ of heaven echoes Satan’s obsession with possessing and creating his own throne in both poems too. But it is the threat of losing ‘hyldo’, that quality of protection that God’s subjects have and the fallen angels do not that pushes Eve to give in to this ‘deofles searo’ (devil’s devices; l. 632a). Again, the poet captures something of the importance of maintaining divine favour, connoting how this can be lost through an abandoning of divine wisdom and a following of bad counsel: ‘hæfde hyldo godes, / lare forlætan. þa heo þæt leoht geseah / ellor scriðan þæt hire þurh untreowa / tacen iewde se him þone teonan geræd’ (she [Eve] had abandoned God’s favour and teaching when she saw that light glide elsewhere, the sign that he who had advised them in the destruction showed her in fraud; ll. 771b–774). Once more the poet uses ‘forlætan’, reminding the audience that the conditional relationship with God is broken through bad counsel – the demonic form of ‘ræd’ that led to Lucifer’s downfall and now breaks the stability in Eden. This is a reminder to an early medieval audience of the connections between the virtues of God’s teaching, of Christian teaching, and the kind of divinely granted success important for the security of rulers and subjects. The realisation that the devil’s counsel led to this breakage dawns on Adam and Eve once the ‘boda’ succeeds in making them eat of the fruit, as Adam states:       ‘nis heofonrice gelic þam lige  ac þis is landa betst þæt wit þurh uncres hearran þanc  habban moston þær þu þam ne hierde  þe unc þisne hearm geræd þæt wit waldendes  word forbræcon, heofoncyninges.’ (‘The kingdom of heaven is not like that flame [of hell], but this is the best of lands, which we two could have had through the favour of our master if

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you had not heard him who counselled us to this harm so that we broke the word of the ruler, heaven’s king.’ ll. 794b–799a)

In his speech to Eve, Adam acknowledges that it was the ræd (‘geræd’; l. 797b) of Satan’s messenger that led to the harmful breaking of the word (the oath, the command, the conditional pact they had with God). As in the prologue to Genesis A, it is wrongful advice and bad counsel that leads to disloyalty and loss. That Adam and Eve fall because of Satan’s unlawful pursuit of a redress for wrong certainly opens up the tragedy of Eden for more politically focused exploration: the version in the poem that gives us a rebel, a fallen ruler, endangering innocent subjects through the devices of his messenger might be traced back to the relationship of Genesis B to the Continent, and also to the continuing relevance of such concerns with rebellion and poor counsel in politics throughout the early medieval period in England. John Vickrey has written that the emphasis on obedience we find in the Heliand and the Saxon Genesis may have emerged out of the Carolingian movements of Louis the Pious (814–40) and his son Louis the German (843–76), and especially out of the Stellinga uprising in 841–42 and its racial tensions, where dissension and rebellion among nobility called for the strengthening of the idea that ‘obedience was a secular as well as a religious necessity’.55 In Genesis B, the rebel angels’ turning away from God leads to a cycle of disasters, and to Adam and Eve breaking their ‘word’ and losing ‘hyldo’. Although Vickrey sees this kind of concern with hyldo in Genesis B as primarily a Carolingian one, in the Old Saxon Genesis the word huldi appears three times, while OE hyldo occurs eighteen times in Genesis B, ‘which is not quite twice as long’ and offers us the ‘almost half of all recorded instances in Old English poetry’.56 Furthermore, in Old Saxon huldi is less exclusively about the relationship between a lord and a subordinate. Instead the Old Saxon huldi describes the attitude of God to man more frequently, whereas in Genesis B the word denotes a ‘superior’s disposition vis-à-vis a subordinate wherein kindness is discretionary, not obligatory’ but the ‘subordinate’s role – loyalty, obedience – is unilaterally obligatory’.57 Satan’s move away from hyldo – ‘hwy sceal æfter his hyldo ðeowian’ (why must I serve for his [God’s] favour?; l. 282b) he asks – and to the chaos of an upsidedown kingdom stands to show the repercussions in store for those who break hyldo of their own will. Adam and Eve’s turning away from hyldo reveals the damage done when subjects are deceived to do so.

Vickrey, Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative, p. 68. Noted by Vickrey, Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative, p. 72. 57 Vickrey, Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative, p. 31. 55 56

1 0 0   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

The frequency of hyldo in Genesis B aside, its use to define the state of favour or safety which Adam and Eve inhabit before their fall, targeted by Satan and his ‘boda’, makes it key to the Genesis B poet’s depiction of how the illegitimate and vengeful acts of fallen rulers ruin bonds that maintain stable communities and kingdoms. The grace and protection of God (his ‘hyldo’) bestowed on Adam and Eve come with the expectation of obligation and obedience and with the command that they do not break that ‘hyldo’ by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life is associated with ‘hyldo’ explicitly: eating from it keeps one in the favour of the heaven-king forever (ll. 473–5). In Genesis B the concept of OE hyldo highlights the way the vengeance of Satan comes to be responsible for the fall of man and the breaking of God’s lord–subject system of obligation. It is the directive of the fallen Satan to make Adam and Eve ‘hyldo forlæten’ (abandon [God’s] favour; l. 404b) and ‘awhet […] from his hyldo’ (turn from his protection; l. 406a) and in the celebratory speech of the devilish messenger to his own lord Satan towards the end of the poem, it becomes more explicit that the aim of the Satanic operation was to undo the established system of obligation and order set up between heaven and earth:        ‘nu hæbbe ic þine hyldo me witode geworhte  and þinne willan gelæst to ful monegum dæge.  men synt forlædde, adam and eue.  him is unhyldo waldendes witod  nu hie wordcwyde his, lare forleton.’ (‘Now have I allotted your favour for myself and carried out your will for full many a day. Adam and Eve, humankind, are led astray. For them the ruler’s disfavour is absolute, now that they have abandoned his spoken word, his teaching.’ ll. 726b–731a)

Breaking their oath with God and eating from the ‘lað treow’, Adam and Eve, as far as the words of the ‘boda’ are concerned in this passage, have exchanged ‘hyldo’ for ‘unyldo’, and ‘abandoned’ (forleton) the lore and learning of God that kept them at peace (as with the angels, who abandoned ‘ræd’ for ‘unræd’ in Genesis A). In this moment of tragedy, the poem emphasises that Satan’s thirst for repayment and ‘andan’ – a thirst that can be likened to that of an illegitimate ruler with no sense of law – results in exile from a state of peace and protection, but remains repairable; something that can be rebuilt over the generations. There are vestiges in Genesis B of the troubles with rebellion and obedience that surely drove the production of the Heliand (where there is much emphasis on the ‘treuwa’, or ‘loyalty’, of Christ’s band) and the Old

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Saxon Genesis on the Continent, but they take on a further significance if indeed the transliteration of the Old Saxon Genesis into Old English first took place in or around the court of Alfred, amidst a time of great shifts in the way violence was regulated, oaths were made and law remodelled. Further iterations of Genesis B that A. N. Doane imagines taking place over the decades before it came to immerse itself within Genesis A, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,58 would also have allowed its concerns to speak to forms of early medieval governance and kingship that grew increasingly aware of the dangers of illegitimate, ill-counselled rule and unlawful vengeance, themes that pervade the Junius 11 compilation, and reflect too the core reasons the Junius 11 compilers attempted to put together their book of illustrated poetry.

58

Doane, ‘The Transmission of Genesis B’.

3 Reading, Misreading and the Red Sea: the Journey to Ræd in Exodus

A

large ornamental letter ‘H’ announces the beginning of the Old English Exodus on page 143 of Junius 11. This illuminated ‘H’, made up of interlocked, winged dragon-beasts, is the first letter of ‘HWÆT’ (see Fig. 6). At the top of the page, above the capitalised first half line, a section number (XLII) calls attention to a new chapter in the manuscript narrative.1 That a new poem in the cycle is about to get underway is signalled in various ways therefore. We are relocated, too. From the time of Abraham and Isaac, whose drama at the smoking altar in the land of Beersheba brought the Genesis poetry of Junius 11 to an end at the top of page 142 (the remainder of that page is blank), the manuscript takes us to Egypt and to the time of Moses. The Old English Exodus follows the poetic Genesis, resembling the order of the Vulgate and of the Old English Hexateuch. But what we find in Junius 11 is something so unlike any other medieval version of the Exodus that aids to reading scripture, such as commentaries by the Fathers, as well as knowledge of the Bible, soon reach their limits when it comes to navigating a way through the poem. The Junius codex shapes specific responses to its poetry that often move us away from ‘the Bible’ in any case: the poems found on these pages are impacted by achievements and failures of the manuscript’s production and compilation, by interpolations and interruptions, and by blank pages and corrections. Many spaces left for illustrations are found on the pages where the text of Exodus has been inscribed, along with a spill of something red and brown in colour that has seeped through such empty sections from pages 146 to 149.2 These features are fitting and not insignificant attributes of a poem that can resist interpretation. Quotations of the poem are taken from Exodus, ed. P. J. Lucas, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1994), unless otherwise noted. Where I have altered or drawn attention to Lucas’s editorial emendations, The Old English Exodus, ed. E. B. Irving Jr (New Haven CT, 1970) and the more recent Old Testament Narratives, ed. and trans. D. Anlezark (Cambridge MA, 2011) have been useful. 2 Blank spaces are left throughout the section of the manuscript on which the text of Exodus is found. Presumably these were for illustrations that were never completed. Barbara Raw concluded that a bifolium was lost between pages 148 and 149. B. 1

Figure 6.  MS Junius 11, page 143: the beginning of Exodus. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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An array of otherwise unattested compounds alongside abundant wordplay and a wealth of textual eccentricities have long presented troubles for those attempting to unlock the messages embedded within Exodus: the poem, writes Roberta Frank, ‘lingers in the mind as the alien, the oddly shaped and worded stranger haunting the halls of Old English poetry’.3 Criticism working with the riddle-like poetic art of Exodus has often highlighted how it stands apart from its companions in Junius 11,4 while studies taking a broader view have suggested its inclusion in the manuscript might have been influenced by the structure of the early medieval liturgy.5 But the poetic language of Exodus is important for our understanding of the poem itself and of the codex in which it is found. Looking closely at the poet’s vocabulary reveals important idiosyncrasies as well as the poem’s potential to deepen and develop the manuscript’s major concerns best represented by the Old English words ræd and unræd. In the previous two chapters, I examined how bad counsel often represented by OE unræd was for the poets of Genesis A and Genesis B a significant factor in Lucifer’s decision to pursue rebellion. Such an explanation of the reasons for Lucifer’s destructive misunderstanding of rule and of riht allowed these poems to become literary objects of rumination for early medieval audiences, as they represent the conflict in heaven and its aftermath in early medieval political terms. The opposition between OE ræd and OE unræd will also be key to explaining the differences between divinely favoured intellectual processes and demonic misreading in the Old English Daniel, the poem that follows Exodus in Junius 11. Moreover, the figure of Moses in the poetic Exodus represents a leader and a ruler ‘ræda gemyndig’ (mindful of good counsel; l. 549b) and his portrayal, as well as his teaching of the Israelites, once more directs manuscript audiences towards ways of reading, ways of interpreting and counselling, that can sustain a beneficial relationship between an earthly kingdom and the divine ruler.

Raw, ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 13 (1984), 187–207 (p. 195). 3 R. Frank, ‘What Kind of Poetry is Exodus?’ in Germania: Comparative Studies in the Old Germanic Languages and Literatures, ed. D. G. Calder and T. Craig (Cambridge and Wolfeboro, 1988), pp. 191–205 (p. 191). 4 See, for instance, S. E. Novacich, ‘The Old English Exodus and the Read Sea’, Exemplaria 23.1 (2011), 50–66 and D. Ferhatović, Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse (Manchester, 2019), pp. 61–85. 5 See J. W. Bright, ‘The Relation of the Cædmonian Exodus to the Liturgy’, Modern Language Notes 27 (1912), 97–103 and P. G. Remley, Old English Biblical Verse: Studies in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel (Cambridge, 1996).

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Like other poems in Junius 11, then, Exodus is concerned with the path to rightful interpretation and with the perils of misreading and misunderstanding. In addition, the poem itself challenges us to uncover its veiled Christian meanings through re-reading. Critical attempts to explain this effect have resulted in examinations of the poem as representative of the rites of baptism; as a vernacular instructional work that teaches typological reading; and as a migration story that allowed early medieval readers to reflect on the salvation in store for the faithful, as it traces the Israelite transitus as a path to profound ræd, full of peril and twisted fault lines.6 Janet Schrunk Ericksen, writing about how Exodus offers brief glimpses of an early medieval idea of reading as part of a journey towards heavenly reward, suggests that readers ‘of Genesis B attuned to discretio spirituum and accustomed to reading with attention to issues of interpretation and understanding may have welcomed Exodus, and they may have read the Israelites’ reliance on the learned guidance of Moses as yet more evidence of understanding achieved with the assistance of the right authority. Exodus, however, asks all readers to consider how well they read.’7 In doing so, Ericksen writes, ‘the poem sketches a meta-narrative on reading that defines two kinds of readers – those who are practiced, accomplished readers and those who are not’.8 In keeping with Ericksen’s argument that this poem is concerned with carving a path towards salvation through rightful interpretation, this chapter seeks to locate where in the poem representations of good and bad ræd – and, on a related note, good and bad readers – are to be found: scholarship has highlighted some of the ways Exodus instructs and directs its audience to find a way to revelatory, hidden meaning as though the track towards it was a journey through trap-filled terrain, but it is the poem’s development of a conflict between an Egyptian society plagued by misreading and the Israelites led by Moses towards eternal ræd that is key to the poem’s hermeneutics. The poem also offers clues about how the Junius book itself could be read and re-read. Exodus can thus be understood as offering one of For baptism see further Remley, Old English Biblical Verse, pp. 168–231 and also D. Anlezark, Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2006), pp. 206–7. For the poem’s allegorical nature, see J. E. Cross and S. I. Tucker, ‘Allegorical Tradition and the Old English Exodus’, Neophilologus 44 (1960), 122–7; J. F. Vickrey, ‘Exodus and the Battle in the Sea’, Traditio 28 (1972), 119–40. For migration, see N. Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven CT, 1989), pp. 72–108. For the poem’s economy as related to its instructions see M. Sharma, ‘The Economy of the Word in the Old English Exodus’, in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. M. Fox and M. Sharma (Toronto and London, 2012), pp. 172–95. 7 Ericksen, Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 (Toronto, 2021), p. 101. 8 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 104. 6

1 0 6   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

the interpretative keys to the manuscript. Bringing to the Junius 11 narrative the great Israelite migration as well as its models of the opposing peoples of Egypt and Israel, lessons, warnings and teachings about right and wrongful interpretation emerge in dramatic and even explicit terms, making Exodus one of the most powerful reminders of Old English poetry’s potential to operate on multiple levels of narrative, instruction and meaning at one time. As it responds to episodes found in Exodus 13.20–14.31, the Old English Exodus refashions the Old Testament relationship between the Egyptians and the Israelites, altering the biblical account, in which Pharaoh pursues Moses and his followers to bring them back to servitude, into one in which the Egyptians pursue their own kind of vengeful compensation. Here manuscript readers might be reminded of the fallen Satan in Genesis B and his destructive quest to ‘gebetan’ (l. 399b) – to receive payment or compensation – for his banishment from heaven and loss of inheritance. But the Egyptian lust for vengeance is not targeted at God’s subjects in order to lead them away from divine wisdom and protection as it was in that poem. Instead, the Egyptians seek reparation in blood. As the two armies move closer to contact near the shores of the Red Sea in Exodus, the poet identifies the rationale driving the Egyptian pursuit: Swa þær eorp werod,  ecan læddon, lað æfter laðum,  leodmægnes worn þusendmælum;  þider wæron fuse. Hæfdon hie gemynted  to þam mægenheapum to þam ærdæge  Israhela cynn billum abreotan  on hyra broðorgyld. (So the dark army led reinforcements there, enemy after enemy, the multitude of the mighty nation by the thousand; they were ready to get there. They had meant at dawn to destroy the Israelite kin with swords in a great army, in their brother-payment. ll. 194–9)

This passage is split over three pages of Junius 11, which are stained and crumpled. Between lines 196 and 197 is a blank page (page 152 of the manuscript) and on page 153, where the text resumes and runs only to line 207, almost three-quarters of the page is left blank. As these sections of the poem detail the growing tension of the pursuit, and the gathering of armies towards the shore, it is likely that copiers and compilers planned for large-scale illustrations corresponding to these important moments in the text. What stands out most of all is the way the poet identifies the Egyptian cause: they seek ‘broðorgyld’ for the death of their kin during the Tenth Plague (an event described earlier in the poem at lines 32–53 and discussed below). The entry for OE broþorgyld, a

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compound unique to Exodus, in the Toronto Dictionary of Old English translates it as ‘payment for (slain) brothers, retribution for brothers’.9 The word changes the biblical narrative’s explanation of the Egyptian operation: in the book of Exodus, it is the need to bring back the Israelites to servitude that drives Pharaoh’s host. This specific kind of vengeance given as the reason for Egyptian pursuit in the poem differs from all other Old English accounts of the Exodus as well: the Exodus of the Hexateuch tells us Pharaoh’s command on the shore of the Red Sea is that his army ‘ne lætan nænne libban on eallum heora cynne’ (do not let any live of all their kin), but there is no mention of any ‘gyld’.10 In Ælfric’s Second Series Mid-Lent Sunday Sermon (c. 990s), in which he painstakingly outlines the spiritual, Christian meaning of Exodus (this is one of the longest of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies), Ælfric puts the reason for pursuit down to the regretful thoughts of Pharaoh: he thought he ‘þæt folc swa freolice forlet and tengde æfte mid eallum his here’ (had so easily let that people depart and pursued after them with all his army).11 Peter Lucas notes that the Exodus poet alters the scriptural account, in which Pharaoh wants to bring the Israelites back to slavery, and that the poet’s motive here ‘is clearly that of Germanic vengeance’ and that the ‘addition of the motive is in harmony with the emphasis on kinship in the poem’.12 But there is more to the reason for pursuit than the poet’s interest in peoples and ‘kinship’. Because gyld refers to payment exacted as compensation,13 and because it forms part of the compound wergild or wergyld, what the Egyptians seek is a form of vengeance understandable within the context of early medieval politics and legislation, yet, in this case, by being tied to the Egyptians, it is wrongful and misguided. Examining the DOE, broþorgyld. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch: Ælfric’s Treatise on the Old and New Testament, and his Preface to Genesis, ed. S. Crawford, repr. with transcriptions by N. R. Ker (London, 1969), p. 249. 11 Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, ed. M. Godden, EETS SS 5 (Oxford, 1979), p. 112. As I discuss below, however, Ælfric’s variety of comments on reading and understanding have much in common with the poetic Exodus. While Ælfric’s overview of history corresponds to the plan of the Junius 11 compilation, there are important differences created by poetry, and by the context of a poetic manuscript. Paul Remley has offered the suggestion that there may be some shared knowledge between Exodus and Ælfric’s works, most notably the Letter to Sigeweard. See Remley, Old English Biblical Verse, pp. 202–6. 12 Exodus, ed. Lucas, p. 106. 13 DOE, gyld, A.3.a.: ‘specifically, referring to compensation for the death of a person’. As part of compounds in laws, like wergyld or leodgyld, the term functions as the compensatory or payment part of the word – the other part of the compound usually referring to who or what is to be paid. 9

10

1 0 8   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

events in the poem that lead to the pursuit, it becomes apparent that the army of Egypt look to apply a system of compensation where it does not belong and that this error arises out of their misreading of God’s emanations. The poem stresses in various ways that its audience should avoid the kind of misinterpretation that will result in the drowning of Pharaoh’s host and this becomes one of the poem’s most forceful messages, highlighting once more the ways in which the poetry of Junius 11 often exercises ingenuity and creativity not only with biblical narrative but with early medieval institutions or practices too. The unique details of the poetic Exodus (at least among what survives in the corpus) concerning the Egyptian response to the Tenth Plague, and the ways this account allows the poet to represent Egyptian culture as misinterpreting a divine warning, are worth examining in relation to one of the most intriguing accounts of pestilence to survive from early medieval England, if only because the account in question, from the laws of King Edgar, offers us some idea of the way such afflictions were read and understood – or at least were supposed to be read – in the late tenth century. Edgar’s law suggests how the plague account in Exodus may have offered warnings to those in rule about the dangers of misreading. King Edgar’s laws, as Nicole Marafioti writes, ‘articulate more explicitly than any of his [Edgar’s] predecessors the connection between good law and divine favour’.14 Edgar’s law issued at Wihtbordesstan, known as IV Edgar (likely to have been issued in the early 970s),15 begins with a prologue addressing a national crisis: ‘Her is geswutelod on þisum gewrite, hu Eadgar cyncg wæs smeagende, hwæt to bote mihte æt þam færcwealme, þe his leodscype swyðe drehte and wanode wide gynd his anweald’ (Here it is made known in this written document how King Edgar inquired about what could be a remedy in the sudden pestilence which greatly oppressed and reduced his people far and wide throughout his dominion).16 The ‘færcwealm’ – a plague, or pestilence that has advanced quickly – requires ‘bote’, remedy or even compensation. Patrick Wormald notes that IV Edgar sheds light on the ‘ideological charge that motivated tenth-century lawmaking’: to attempt to amend or prevent disasters in the realm by achieving divine favour.17 Scott Smith also writes that the plague in IV Edgar is a ‘fatal mystery that requires an immediate solution’, and that the code is keen to show how Edgar and his advisors deliberated carefully and came to understand it as N. Marafioti, ‘Secular and Ecclesiastical Justice in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Speculum 94.3 (2019), 774–805 (p. 782). 15 For the possible date, see P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999, repr. 2001), pp. 441–2. 16 IV Edgar, Prol. 17 Making of English Law, p. 320. 14

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a ‘manifestation of God’s anger’.18 Indeed, IV Edgar points out that the king and his advisors have concluded that the calamity was earned ‘mid synnum’ (with sins) and by breaking God’s oath. By performing what Andrew Rabin suggests is a linking of ‘civic behaviour to moral disposition’,19 the code works to persuade its audience that deliberation and interpretation of such terrible mysteries can offer ‘bote’ – a ‘compensation’ or ‘remedy’ (which the code then carefully outlines as a sequence of regulations for paying tithes and upholding law). Although, as we will see, Egyptian society in the poetic Exodus earns divine punishment for its sins in the form of the Tenth Plague, their response to that numinous attack includes a distinct absence of deliberation that refuses to acknowledge God’s works and eventually results in their final destruction. Exodus proposes that good ræd and rightful interpretation will lead to reward and divine favour in the form of being able to understand God’s miracles in the world. Gaining such things, the poem outlines, brings people, nations and kingdoms to prosperous compensation for their struggles, while refusing them, or misunderstanding them (as the Egyptians do), leads to destruction and punishment. To offer some further context for why the poet of Exodus fashioned the history of the Israelites into verse concerned with unlawful and righteous pursuits of compensation, and with interpretation and misreading (and especially the misreading of a plague), this chapter will examine the importance of the biblical Exodus for early medieval culture before turning to accounts in the poem of the different kinds of interpretative journeys taken by the Israelites and the Egyptians, and then to the significance of the poem’s portrayal of the Tenth Plague.

Exodus: limits and laws

The book of Exodus was an important text in discourses concerned with law and its interpretation in early medieval England at least from the time of King Alfred. Alfred’s laws concerned with compensation (or with a system of bot that decided remedy or payment for wrongdoing), found within his Domboc (c. 880s or 890s), are preceded by translations of the Ten Commandments and sixty-six segments of Mosaic law (drawn from Exodus chapters 20–23:19).20 S. T. Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2012), p. 110. 19 Rabin, ‘Witnessing Kingship: Royal Power and the Legal Subject in the Old English Laws’, in Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. G. Owen-Crocker and B. W. Schneider (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 219–36 (p. 232). 20 The concept of payments – the bots – that atone for personal grievances or injury are also found in the law code attributed to King Æthelberht of Kent, issued c. 18

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This stands as one of the earliest attempts to render the Old Testament into English.21 The Domboc demonstrates how the Book of Exodus was adaptable to early medieval legal discourse as well as a source with which to think through political change and national destiny: it allowed Alfred to position his subjects as a type of Israelite nation worthy of salvation and, with the invocation of Moses, place his own laws ‘within a continuum of divine lawgiving’.22 But, as Stefan Jurasinski and Lisi Oliver write in their edition of the Domboc, although ‘a shared history of migration perhaps played some role in making the laws of Moses the centrepiece of the Prologue’ to Alfred’s laws, inspiration was more likely ‘the catastrophes that befell the English in the early years of Alfred’s reign’ which demanded ‘a remaking of social order not wholly unlike that undergone by the Hebrews of Exodus’.23 The Mosaic prologue to the Domboc is a reminder to those about to receive or read Alfred’s own codes that oaths and commands were key to the success and survival of a chosen people. Setting his laws up in this way, and taking heed from continental lawmakers, such as those who composed the Admonitio generalis and placed Charlemagne in the role of Josiah,24 Alfred’s advancements in the laws of vengeance and compensation were thus demanded to be read or heard attentively, inspired by scriptural history and the rule of God. Many of the Domboc’s codes specify when vengeance was appropriate. They think more strategically about how and when compensation should be sought, promoting the importance of legally rightful forms of violent amends (a concern advanced in the Domboc). Code 42.5 of the Domboc, for instance, states that a man fighting for his lord cannot become liable for wergild and is lawfully exempt from vengeance (‘þæt mon mote mid his hlaforde feohtan orwige’). Meanwhile code 42.7 states that ‘a man can fight without consequences for wergild, if he encounters another man with his lawful wife’ (mon mot feohtan orwige, if he gemeteð oþerne æt his æwum wife). Code 42 of 602–3 (clauses 34–72). See S. Rubin, ‘The Bot, or Composition in Anglo-Saxon Law: A Reassessment’, The Journal of Legal History 17.2 (1996), 144–54 (p. 145). 21 The earliest copy of the law code, joined with the code of Ine, survives in the Parker manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173, fols. 33–52. 22 D. Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007), p. 222. 23 The Laws of Alfred, p. 57. 24 Pratt, The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great, p. 223. See also R. Marsden, The Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1995). Marsden writes that a collection of extracts very similar to those used in the prologue to the Domboc are ‘found in the Liber ex lege Moysi, an eighth-century Irish work which was probably known in Alfred’s England’ (pp. 401–2).

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Alfred also specifies that a man who knows his foe is living at home should not pursue vengeance until ‘he him ryhtes bidde’ (he asks justice of him) and gains it by permission. The Mosaic prologue allows Alfred’s codes to gain credence by awakening the possibility that the law-giving king can be aligned with Moses the leader, commander and legislator who was connected directly to God. The Domboc suggests that Exodus had much to say for early medieval law, and vice versa. While it cannot be said with any certainty that the poetic Exodus was composed before or after Alfred’s law book, the poem utilises the language of compensation and vengeance (particularly that associated with OE bot) in comparable ways, and functions as part of the Junius 11 compilation’s forceful warning about the abuse of law, especially when it stems from ill counsel or poor reading. Adapting the tale of the Israelite transitus, the poet of Exodus describes the connection between understanding Mosaic law and gaining ‘ræd’ in terms of amends and repayment: Hwaet, we feor ond neah  gefrigen habbað ofer middangeard  Moyses domas, wræclico wordriht,  wera cneorissum – in uprodor  eadigra gewham æfter bealusiðe  bote lifes, lifigendra gehwam  langsumne ræd – hæleðum secgan.  Gehyre se ðe wille! (Now, we have heard far and near over the world of the laws of Moses, the commitments in exile, given to generations of men: life’s compensation in heaven for each of the blessed after the baleful journey, long-lasting counsel for each of the living – spoken to heroes. Listen he who will! ll. 1–7)

In Alfred’s Domboc, the concept of bot – compensation, weighted in terms relevant to the severity of the transgression – is repeatedly invoked to outline payment. OE bot is an important word for the Exodus poet, too, except, like we see in the opening lines of the poem above, it has a different emphasis: the reward or compensation (‘bote’), heavenly life, is the payment promised for hardship, for the baleful journey (‘bealusið’) of both Israelite and contemporary Christian. Moses is positioned in this passage as the distributor of the ‘domas’ that have told of this heavenly reward down through the ages, of laws that speak of the ‘langsumne ræd’ (l. 6b).25 ‘Ræd’, in parallel with ‘bote lifes’, 25

Satan is said to have offered his followers ‘langsumne ræd’ in Christ and Satan (l. 248), towards the end of Junius 11. I discuss this in Chapter Five.

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is at once the reward for faith and the quality required to receive the word of God. Whether taken to mean ‘benefit’, ‘good counsel’, ‘interpretation’, ‘law’ or all of these things, it arrives, the poet of Exodus suggests, only after earthly hardship and by the laws themselves. This is something made more apparent at the end of the poem when the Egyptians, who do not follow good counsel or God’s commands, are consumed by the Red Sea while the Israelites receive ‘ece rædas’ from Moses (l. 516b). In the context of the manuscript scheme, or at least if an audience was reading Exodus after the poetic Genesis that goes before it, the poem’s idea about the achievement of ‘langsumne ræd’ has the effect of re-emphasising the warnings inherent in the tales of Lucifer’s rebellion, where the dangers of acting without ræd were given in elaborate detail and where descriptions of hell specified the kind of place the ‘rædleas’ end up. The poet of Exodus may also encourage the pursuit of ‘langsumne ræd’ for leaders or rulers seeking divine favour. This book has already drawn parallels between the poetry of Junius 11 and early medieval political writings, particularly those by Wulfstan of York, whose work often reflects similar ideas about the necessity of ræd for spiritually prosperous kingship. Wulfstan promoted the spiritual benefits of clear and applicable earthly law and acknowledged the need for compensatory penance to redeem those who had failed morally. To return once again to his Institutes of Polity, and to the moment in the text that sees Wulfstan focus on the relationship between a realm’s ræd and its salvation, we see that he also points out the ways God’s teachings can sustain the stability of a kingdom because of the way they will guide a realm towards long-lasting counsel: Godes lare, and mid rihtlicre woruldlage: þæt wyrð þam þeodscype to langsuman ræde. And soð is, þæt is secge: awacie se cristendom, sona scylfð se cynedom; and arære man unlaga ahwar on lande oððe unsida lufige to swiðe, þæt cymð þære þeode eall to unþearfe.26 ([with] God’s teachings, and with rightful earthly law: that will guide the people to long-lasting counsel. And it is true, what I say: if Christianity weakens, soon the kingdom will be shaken; and if anyone raise injustice anywhere in the land or love wrongful customs too much, then the nation will all come to ruin.)

Nicole Marafioti writes that Wulfstan, like Edgar, had a legal philosophy in which ‘crime was a symptom of more serious spiritual corruption’.27 Following both earthly law and God’s teaching results in what Wulfstan and Exodus 26 27

Die ‘Institutes of Polity’, ed. K. Jost (Bern, 1959), pp. 57–8. Marafioti, ‘Secular and Ecclesiastical Justice’, p. 803.

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both refer to as long-lasting ræd. The poem establishes links between following good, rightful law and maintaining God’s favour in the face of disaster. Concern with law – Old Testament law, New Testament fulfilment of that law, and early medieval law (which in Alfred’s Domboc sought to maintain a connection with the time of the Patriarchs as well as his own West-Saxon ancestors) – and rightful interpretation (one aspect of the concept of OE ræd) lie at the heart of the events depicted in Exodus, and they are also central to the way the poem operates on numerous levels of meaning (typological, anagogical, poetic) at one time.28 Janet Schrunck Ericksen writes that the poem’s opening invocation ‘Gehyre se ðe wille’ (l. 7b) serves to highlight ‘that while some may choose not to hear (including, in other words, not to be educated by the poem that follows), a rejection of reading, whether heard or seen, would be imprudent and improvident’.29 Within the poet’s history of the Hebrews it is the Egyptian response to the Tenth Plague that is the prime example of choosing not to read – or at least of not being able to read – the kind of divine signatures that lead to salvation.

Unlocking the way to ræd

As model lawgiver, Moses represented the best of teaching, leading and interpreting for a variety of early medieval translators and artists beyond Alfred’s reign, and he comes to the fore in homilies and manuscript art in late tenth and early eleventh century England as a divine conduit. In the Junius 11 poetry, Moses is a key figure because he is the earthly leader associated with those qualities of counsel and interpretation that the devil lost and opposed (as the poetry of Genesis describes). Moses is therefore a model for rulers looking to seek salvation and safety for their people. Early medieval qualities of powerful ræd and divinely authorised leadership coalesce in the Moses of Exodus, who destroys the legal rights and the very culture of Egyptian society: He wæs leof Gode,  leoda aldor, horsc and hreðergleaw,  herges wisa, freom folctoga.  Faraones cyn, Godes andsacan,  gyrdwite band, þær him gesealde  sigora Waldend, modgum magoræswum  his maga feorh, On one level, these opening lines refer to what the laws of Moses offered to the world. But, as P. J. Lucas notes in his edition, they are rich with multi-meaning and ‘indicate the kind of response required for the understanding of the poem as a whole’ (p. 75). 29 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 105. 28

1 1 4   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

onwist eðles  Abrahames sunum. Heah wæs þæt handlean  and him hold Frea, gesealde wæpna geweald  wið wraðra gryre; ofercom mid þy campe  cneomaga fela, feonda folcriht.  Ða wæs forma sið þæt hine weroda God  wordum nægde: þær he him gesægde  soðwundra fela, hu þas woruld worhte  witig Drihten, eorðan ymbhwyrft  and uprodor, gesette sigerice,  and His sylfes naman, ðone yldo bearn  ær ne cuðon, frod fædera cyn,  þeah hie fela wiston. (He was beloved of God, a leader of his people, sharp and wise, commander of the army, a bold chief. He bound Pharaoh’s kin, that antagonist of God, with rod-punishment, when the lord of victories granted it to him, the brave guide of men, the life of his people, Abraham’s sons, as well as a dwelling in the homeland. High was that repayment by hand, and strong his Lord, he made him powerful in weapons against the terror of fierce enemies, and he destroyed in battle many kinsmen, and their common law. That was the first time that the God of hosts spoke in words to him, when he told him many truthful wonders – how the wise Lord had wrought this world, the circuit of the earth and the sky above, established the victorious kingdom – and he told him his own name, which the children of men, the wise kin of fathers, had not known before, though they knew many things. ll. 12–29)

This is the Moses who will guide Israelites as well as the audience of the poem towards interpreting the world in spiritual terms. In this passage, he also carries forward the history, as well as the descendants and virtues, of patriarchs such as Noah and Abraham who, as detailed in Genesis A and in the digressions of Exodus (which flash back to the time of Noah and of Abraham from l. 356 to l. 446), kept their wær (oath, pledge, covenant) with God. But the older figures are not surpassed to be forgotten. Rather, their achievements remain present in Moses, who is martially strong but also sharp-minded (‘horsc and hreðergleaw’) and a translator of law (that which the opening lines of the poem called the ‘wræclico wordriht’): with these attributes, the poem states, he has the ability to overcome ‘feonda folcriht’, the ‘common law’ of ‘enemies’.30 Pharaoh, these lines tell us, is ‘godes andsacan’ (God’s antagonist), and in the context of the poem would be the Egyptian leader (and, by extension, his kin) See R. T. Farrell, ‘Eight Notes on Old English Exodus’, NM 67.4 (1966), 364–75, who demonstrates that the word folcriht refers to the common law of the Egyptians.

30

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but, because the phrase refers to Satan a great deal elsewhere in Old English poetry (and elsewhere in Junius 11 too), the description asks the audience to partake in a broader frame of reference that casts Moses as a major figure in God’s war against hell.31 This is how a great deal of the poetic language of Exodus works. Binding adversaries, Moses directs divine punishment and overcomes ‘feonda folcriht’ with ‘rod punishment’ (‘gyrdwite’; l. 15b). Old English gyrd can mean ‘staff ’, ‘rod’, ‘twig’ – and sometimes the shoot or branch of a tree – and, in charters, it emerges as a unit of measurement.32 Although it was common for biblical commentators to see the wood of Moses’ staff as a symbol of the victorious Cross of Christ, the poem offers another clue of this much later, when this same object is referred to as a ‘grene tacne’ (green token/ symbol; l. 281a), its green or living nature as wood, or tree, inviting further connections with the Cross.33 The rod held by Moses in Exodus will create a ‘færwundor’ (sudden, fearful wonder; l. 279b) by opening the Red Sea and revealing the ‘ealde staðolas’ (old foundations; l. 285a) beneath. This action, Sarah Elliot Novacich argues, is one that moves the biblical miracle into the realm of understanding and significance for an early medieval audience, as Moses enters the tradition of vernacular poets who interpret history with the benefit of Christian hindsight through their craft (and the poem’s description of Moses unveiling the ancient foundations of the earth might be interpreted as an action akin to deep, poetic reading).34 Those foundations of knowledge In Christ and Satan, at line 190, the word is used to define Satan. DOE, gyrd. 33 The virga, or ‘rod’, held by Christ on the frontispiece to the tenth-century ‘St Dunstan’s Classbook’ (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Auct. F. 4. 32) – a codex containing an array of pedagogical texts including Latin grammatical treatises such as Eutyches’s Ars de verbo from the sixth century and a copy of Ovid’s Ars amatoria (in a ninth-century hand) – suggests its nature as an instrument of teaching as well as force. According to Ælfric’s Life of Æthelwold, the rod was an instrument of learning and punishment for reformers, especially for Æthelwold: in chapter 19 Ælfric tells us that Æthelwold, like ‘a terrible lion’, would do his rounds of the reformed monasteries, correcting the foolish with rods. See EHD, p. 909. The instrument of Moses in Exodus can be read as the instrument of both a ruler and a teacher, important to the way his ræd guides the faithful and destroys the wicked. 34 Novacich, ‘Exodus and the Read Sea’, p. 53. Keys, or cross-keys, are prominent objects in the hands of evangelists and heavenly guardians in early medieval manuscript art of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. In the famous frontispiece to the New Minster Charter, Mary and Peter stand on the sides of King Edgar, holding such keys. These objects, Karkov writes, are ‘symbols of judgement and salvation’ but also ‘cognate symbols of the key of David’ which is a symbol used in Edgar’s second coronation ordo: ‘the king was invested with the uirgam uirtutis atque aequitatis (‘staff of strength and equity’), which symbolises his just rule and 31 32

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and history (and OE staðol can also refer to parchment) are uncovered with the tools of wisdom and divine direction, represented by the staff, the key that opens the way. Thus, the poet gives the object multiple functions. The rod itself will destroy the Egyptians (it is their ‘gyrdwite’) by ruining their system of law, but as the poem goes on it will open new depths for interpretation for those who follow the one wielding it. The actions of the Israelite chieftain also supply readers of the poem with guidance and instruction for interpretations of their own. Moses, after all, is privy to a knowledge concealed from those who had gone before him when gifted ‘soðwundra fela’ (many truthful wonders; l. 24b), which include God’s ‘own name’ and the secrets of creation. Moses therefore represents a spiritual and a military leader to follow through the text. As Exodus traces Moses leading the Israelites (and the poet will repeat that OE verb, lædan, many times through the transitus section, beginning at line 54) along the ‘lifweg’ (life-way; l. 104b), away from an Egyptian culture holding to old, pagan law, and towards ways of interpretation that counsel and direct his followers along a route to salvation, so too the poem itself demands a practice of reading and re-reading that unlocks a deeper set of associations. As ‘magoræswa’, a compound repeated at lines 55 and 102, Moses can unlock meaning for others through his own ability to connect to the divine and transmit that power in earthly terms and in human language: ræswa in Old English poetry often suggests one who can lead in matters of counsel and thought (for good or ill).35 Tracing his qualities through the poem, it is easy to see why Moses was a model for early medieval kingship long after Alfred. He could represent the way an earthly ruler might maintain divine favour for his people through the cultivation of faith and wisdom. When Byrhtferth of Ramsey wrote his Vita S. Oswaldi in the 990s, for example, he sought to remember Edgar in what Michael Lapidge calls a ‘hagiographical topos’ in which the early medieval king is said to possess the same qualities as successful Old Testament kings and prophets, ‘sceptris et diadematibus polens et iura | regni bellica potestate regaliter protogens’ (exulting in sceptres and diadems and regally protecting the laws of the kingdom with militant authority), being ‘iustus et Paulus, misericors {ut} Moyses’ (just like St Paul, merciful like Moses).36 As translations and manuscripts of Old Testament narratives in the vernacular and with illumination grew apace during the late tenth and early eleventh his imitation of Christ’. See C. E. Karkov, The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 86. 35 B-T, s.v. ræswa. 36 Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2009), pp. 74–5.

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centuries, concerns about interpretation continued to circulate around the figure of Moses, while the conception of his role as a scribe, translator and teacher intensified. These interests are best illustrated by Ælfric of Eynsham, and by the images in the manuscript associated with him: the eleventh-century illustrated Hexateuch (London, BL, MS Cotton Claudius B.iv), which also contains Old English versions of the first six books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Joshua) and 127 illustrations of Moses himself.37 These illuminations represent Moses in his role as intermediary and transmitter. He is depicted as resembling the crucified Christ in his pose (103r), as ideal copyist and scribe (95v, 100r, 136v and 138v) and as one who interpreted God’s commandments correctly and distributed them: on fol. 99v Moses stands speaking for God to his people much like he lectures to the crowd on folio 45r of the Utrecht Psalter.38 But there are more specific links between the way the poet of Exodus describes Moses unveiling deeper meanings beneath the world and the writings of Ælfric in which the monk of Eynsham turns to matters of spiritual interpretation and, more specifically, to the relationship between the Old Law and the New. Ælfric’s well-known ‘Preface to Genesis’ for his patron Æthelweard, found at the beginning of Claudius B.iv but written around fifty years before that compilation (around 992–1002), expresses Ælfric’s own anxiety about translating the Old Testament into English.39 Writing to his patron, Ælfric struggled with the prospect of having his translation of Old Testament scripture misinterpreted by those who were ‘foolish’ (dysig) and likely to think that they ‘leofodon under Moyses æ’ (lived under the law of Moses), mistakenly applying Old Testament law to their contemporary society. Ælfric made clear how instrumental it was that intermediaries and wise teachers learned how to correctly interpret things ‘spiritually’, from the perspective of a For the Hexateuch see B. C. Withers, The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2007). For Moses in the Hexateuch, see H. R. Broderick III, Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (Notre Dame, 2017). 38 Withers, Hexateuch, pp. 144–5. The Old English Seasons for Fasting, once found in London, BL, MS Cotton Otho B.xi, which was badly damaged in the Cotton fire, and copied by Laurence Nowell in 1562, sets out rules for fasting and condemns priests who do not have discipline. Moses is invoked throughout as the ‘mærne lareow’ (famous teacher; l. 1), as one to whom the divine lord made clear mysteries (‘runa’) so that he could teach and direct humankind. For the poem, see M. P. Richards, The Old English Poem Seasons for Fasting: A Critical Edition (Virginia, 2014). 39 For the Preface and its relationship to the manuscript see B. C. Withers, ‘A “Secret and Feverish Genesis”: The Prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch’, The Art Bulletin 81.1 (1999), 53–71 (pp. 55–6). 37

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Christian reading, in a moral and tropological way, so they could generate the same kind of seeing, viewing and receiving in their communities: Preostas sindon gesette to lareowum þam læwedum folce. Nu gedafnode him þæt hig cuþon þa ealdan æ gastlice understandan and hwæt Crist silf tæhte and his apostolas on þære niwan gecyðnisse, þæt hig mihton þam folce well wissian to Godes geleafan and wel bisnian to godum weorcum.40 (Priests are set as teachers of lay people. Now it is fitting for them that they know how to understand the Old Law spiritually and what Christ himself taught and his apostles in the New Testament, so that they might direct the people to belief in God and set a strong example through good works.)

With a deep knowledge of Christian history, and of Christ’s own fulfilment and extension of the Old Law, the spread of misinterpretation, which is dangerous because the power of the priest is such that he sets the ‘bysne’ (example) for how to read and understand, is curtailed because ‘man mæg understandan hu deop seo boc ys on gastlicum andgite’ (people can understand how deep the book is in spiritual meaning).41 Ælfric’s remarks extend to texts beyond the Old Testament, and perhaps to other kinds of Latin and vernacular literature including poetry. The example of how to apply such a gastlic way of seeing is so connected to the biblical Exodus that it suggests that the book, and particularly the narrative in the vernacular, had a primary place in concerns and debates about misinterpretation during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. In his ‘Preface’ Ælfric uses Exodus as a further example of gastlic signification, writing ‘þæt micele geteld þe Moises worhte mid wunderlicum cræfte on þam westene, swa swa God sylfe gedihte, hæfde getacnunge Godes gelaþunge’ (that great tabernacle that Moses wrought with wondrous craft in the desert, just as God himself directed, had signified the Church of God).42 Such ties between Exodus and interpretation are expanded to an even greater extent in Ælfric’s Midlent Sermon (Dominica in Media Quadragesime). In the second section, Ælfric outlines carefully what the episodes of Exodus signify in gastlic terms (apologising, almost, for the length of the piece). In this Ælfric is very keen to systematically explain the limits of our understanding, but also to explain that the book of Exodus has ‘deopan digelnysse’ (deep secretness), and that ‘Crist geopenode us ða deopan digelnysse’ (Christ opened for us the deep secretness)

Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. J. Wilcox (Durham, 1995), p. 117. Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Wilcox, p. 118. 42 Ælfric’s Prefaces, p. 118. 40 41

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of the Old Law.43 In Ælfric’s ‘Preface’, too, Old Testament events retain their narrative and their initial meaning, but from the vantage point of informed Christian learning an audience is able to unlock deeper mysteries. Ælfric is keen to label those who would abandon the Old Law or cast off the New entirely as ‘gedwolmen’ (erroneous, chaotic). What is required, his ‘Preface’ suggests, is a kind of layered reading, informed and multi-temporal, because ‘Crist sylf and his apostolas us tæhton ægþer to healdan þa ealdan gastlic and þa niwan soþlice mid weorcum’ (Christ himself and his apostles taught us to keep both, the Old Law spiritually and the new truthfully, with works).44 While Exodus has a reputation for its potential to invite allegorical interpretations, it might also be read as the result of an early medieval gastlic reading of or response to the biblical book, where a process akin to enarratio has, in Cassian’s terms for instance, allowed a reader to ‘appropriate a text to his own culture and apply spiritual knowledge to interpret it – allegorically, anagogically and tropologically’, and also reshaped the Old Testament story so that a reader can ‘explore the text for his own spiritual advantage’.45 Roberta Frank suggests that the language of the poem might be better understood as employing ‘double focus’, a technique similar to skaldic poetry of ninth- and tenth-century Scandinavia, which often ‘kept one eye on narrative foreground and another on mythical or cosmic background’.46 At times, however, the Exodus-poet goes further, layering level upon level of meaning. This is the case with the depiction of Moses’ gyrd, for example, which is at once the leader’s staff, the Cross of Christ, the instrument of direction, the rood of destruction, and the key that opens the depths. Imagining receivers of the manuscript, Janet Schrunk Ericksen reminds us that an ‘early medieval reader of a book such as Junius 11 might be a highly educated monastic or secular reader, or a novice using the book to become a better reader’.47 Exodus is a good example of poetry that could challenge the learned – or the ‘highly educated’ – and also learn or direct those not yet accustomed to its nuances. But how would Exodus have directed a reader towards reading with and for ræd? At least in Ælfric’s ‘Preface’, a gastlic mode of tackling a text encompasses more than a simple application of typology: it is the work and process of uncovering, of seeing further and further beneath a surface through the Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series, Text, ed. P. Clemoes, EETS SS 17 (Oxford, 1997), p. 12. 44 Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Wilcox, pp. 118–19. 45 M. B. Parkes, ‘Rædan, areccan, smeagan: How the Anglo-Saxons Read’, ASE 26 (1997), 1–27 (p. 14). 46 Frank, ‘What Kind of Poetry is Exodus?’ p. 196. 47 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 8. 43

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application of Christian instruction – a kind of balancing act that keeps the stratification of a text’s multiple meanings in place, applying knowledge and learning to move through structures of signification and spiritual direction unavailable to the misguided. In other words, such a reading mode would require the application of skills connoted by the words ræd and rædan. The kind of reading that can reveal the poem’s more gastlic undercurrent, and therefore its deepest counsel, is outlined by the instructional passage towards the end of Exodus itself: Gif onlucan wile  lifes wealhstod, beorht in breostum,  banhuses weard, ginfæsten god  Gastes cægon, run bið gerecenod,  ræd forð gæð; hafað wislicu  word on fæðme, wile meagollice  modum tæcan, þæt we gesne ne syn  Godes þeodscipes, Meotodes miltsa.  He us ma onlyhð, nu us boceras  beteran secgað, lengran lyftwynna.  þis is læne dream wommum awyrged,  wreccum alyfed, earmra anbid. (If the interpreter of life, the guardian of the body, bright in the breast, will unlock the vast and good stronghold with the keys of the spirit, the mystery is understood, good counsel will go forward; he has wise words in the embrace, will earnestly teach minds so that we might not be lacking God’s allegiance, the mercy of the measurer. He enlightens us more, now that the bookish explain to us better concerning the longer joys of heaven. This is a loaned joy, marred by sins, allowed to exiles, expectation for the wretched. ll. 523–534a)

This passage has been read as a consideration of the messages embedded in Old Testament scripture as well as the poem.48 The ‘key’ passage also functions as a guide for how the poem itself should be read. Reference to the ‘lifes wealhstod’ (‘life’s interpreter’ or ‘translator’) evokes the inner workings and capacity of each reader to receive and understand spiritual guidance. For Dorothy Haines, this refers to Christ, who was invoked as the key to scripture in the Middle Ages.49 It is this inner quality – whether Christ within the reader A. Walton, ‘“Gehyre se ðe Wille”: The Old English Exodus and the Reader as Exegete’, English Studies 94.1 (2013), 1–10. 49 D. Haines, ‘Unlocking Exodus ll. 516–532’, JEGP 98.4 (1999), 481–98. 48

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or the intellect informed by Christian reading practices working with ‘gastes cægon’ (keys of the spirit) – that can unlock a ‘ginfæsten god’, a fast-bound coffer of good things that seems to refer to the deeper significances encased beneath surface language, or surface meaning. Long thought to be proof that the poem was an allegorical text, readings of the ‘key’ passage have since come to address with more intent the possibility that the passage refers to reading as a process, as uncovering, as a gradual movement towards understanding things in gastlic terms.50 Thus this part of the poem serves to aid interaction with Exodus itself. Further scrutiny of the poetic language of this passage, combined with the act of reading it alongside other Junius 11 poems, also draws our attention to ‘ræd’ at line 526. For a reader navigating the poetry of the manuscript, this passage outlining how counsel will go forth (and increased knowledge of heaven and divinity will come) if one persists in seeking to unlock the mysteries of text and world is not at odds with those accounts of Lucifer’s rebellion in Junius 11 that see the renegade angels disregard God’s rule and abandon counsel and protection, and in fact this ‘key’ passage has the potential to offer further instruction for the contemplation of those accounts. Exodus could encourage further readings of the political disasters of Lucifer’s plight from the perspective of the spiritual consequences of such failures. It is worth noting as well that this instructional passage keeps a focus on maintaining God’s ‘þeodscipes’ (allegiance, or bond; l. 529b) through deep reading and understanding – and such allegiance was a strong, if implicit, theme in Genesis B. As the passage comes at the end of Exodus, it invites looking back over the Israelite journey, too, as one that ‘unlocked’ good counsel, asking the audience to see that transitus as a journey towards achieving ‘ræd’ and, ultimately, to read that journey as one that moved towards rightful interpretation. Emergence of this passage towards the end of the poem as we have it may also encourage re-reading for, as Ericksen acknowledges, those for ‘whom the mysteries remain locked’, the work of studying and gaining counsel from the poem ‘is unfinished’.51 Such guidance and instruction also reminds those who are expertly attuned to navigating their way through Old Law, Old Testament scripture and its history, with the For allegorical approaches, see B. F. Huppé, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (New York, 1958); J. E. Cross and S. I. Tucker, ‘Allegorical Tradition and the Old English Exodus’; and J. W. Earl, ‘Christian Traditions in the Old English Exodus’, NM 71 (1970), 541–70. For arguments that move away from allegorical interpretation, see T. Shippey, Old English Verse (London, 1972), pp. 134–54 and N. Howe, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven CT, 2008), pp. 208–16. 51 Reading Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 109. 50

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ability to note Christian resonances, that there may be a way of turning this reading to other kinds of text. The ‘key’ passage, in a way that is characteristic of the Exodus poet, does not say that the keys will unlock scripture specifically, but suggests that the writings of the ‘boceras’ offer the opportunity now more than ever to uncover the deepest mysteries for purposes of counsel, of ‘ræd’. Towards the end of the manuscript, the poetry of Christ and Satan will remind readers again that the process of unlocking Christian meaning in the world is central to survival and salvation.52 On the other hand, this passage in Exodus directs those less learned in such practices of decoding, who have followed the poem for its action and martial drama, to retrace their steps and look again. Each sequence of the poem’s version of the journey of the Israelites details ways of interpreting things and different ways of seeing beneath surfaces through reading. Even the cataclysm in the Red Sea – reshaped by the poet into an extensive, violent and apocalyptic sequence – represents the way ræd goes forth to destroy the misinterpretation represented by the Egyptians. In this sense, the instructional passage offers the ‘key’ to Exodus by explaining the workings of the poem: the journey of the Israelites is one that moves towards unlocking the deeper mysteries of the world through the instructions of Moses. The act of opening the Red Sea and seeing beneath its surface, following the tribulations of their ‘bealusið’, brings the Israelites to salvation, allowing ræd to go forth and destroy older, wrongful ways of reading – older, pagan ways of law. 53 In the next section, I will focus on the poem’s depiction of the Egyptians and the Tenth Plague to demonstrate how the Egyptians themselves provide the poem’s version of a doomed culture bound to misinterpretation while Moses and the Israelites represent a pathway to ræd – to ‘langsumne ræd’ – that can be understood as a kind of gradual, gastlic reading process.

The Tenth Plague

Attention devoted to the Tenth Plague in Exodus suggests that it was an important event for the poet. The account in the poem is a dramatic expansion Christ and Satan stresses that we ‘onlucan mid listum locen waldendes, / ongeotan gastlice’ (unlock the ruler’s locks with skill, to understand spiritually; ll. 299–300a). This passage is placed between the narrative overview of the angelic fall and the Harrowing of Hell. 53 That the Red Sea section (ll. 447–515) undoes many of the constraints described in the preceding lines of the poem and contrasts with the imagery of the ‘bone-house’ and the coffer of wisdom in the ‘keys of the spirit’ section, which also mention ræd going forth, of course, is emphasised by the violent descriptions of things bursting, breaking and flowing. In this drowning passage, the poetic ‘tempo’ increases and statements arrive with ‘breathless, staccato-like effect’ (Exodus, ed. Lucas, p. 45). 52

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of that found in the Vulgate and supersedes in detail vernacular versions in the writings of Ælfric or in the prose Exodus of the Hexateuch.54 It has several verbal connections with the poet’s other major reworking of an episode from Old Testament history, the fall of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, and these two events mark the beginning and end of strife between Pharaoh and Moses in the poem. The Exodus poet passes over details of the preceding nine plagues to amplify the Tenth: Þa wæs ingere55  ealdum witum deaðe gedrenced56  drihtfolca mæst, hordwearda hryre  (heaf wæs geniwad): swæfon seledreamas  since berofene. Hæfde mansceaðan  æt middere niht frecne gefylled,  frumbearna fela, abrocene burhweardas.  Bana wide scrað, The biblical passage, Exodus 12.29–30, is brief: ‘Factum est autem in noctis medio percussit Dominus omne primogenitum in terra Aegypti, a primogenito Pharaonis qui sedebat in solio eius usque ad primogenitum captivae quae erat in carcere et omne primogenitum iumentorum’ (And it came to pass at midnight that the Lord slew every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive woman that was in the prison and all the firstborn cattle). 55 Lucas has ‘ungeare’ (soon), drawing on Klaeber’s initial proposition that MS ingere was the result of scribal misunderstanding. The word may require some emendation, but in the manuscript it is quite clearly ingere, on page 144, where there is also a space for an illustration. In the context of the passage and the occurrence of ing- forms throughout the poem (e.g. ‘ingefolc’, l. 142; ‘ingemen’, l. 190), ing[h]ere keeps the basic structure of the manuscript word and it might therefore be rendered ‘native host’ or ‘indigenous army’. See further S. B. Greenfield, ‘Exodus 33a: Ingere, a New Suggestion’, N&Q 26.4 (1979), 296–7. 56 There has been emendation of the erasure ged[…] by the scribe, but it has clearly become gedrenced. Bryan Weston Wyly notes that, ‘in the absence of a participle which provides sense, is of the correct graphic and metrical dimensions, and whose orthographic overlap with gedrenced is limited to {ged-}, the restoration of the verb in this period is highly speculative’. See B. W. Wyly, Figures of Authority in the Old English Exodus (Heidelberg, 1999), p. 72. Lucas also avoids the manuscript word, opting for ‘gedrecced’ (afflict). However, I disagree with Irving’s view (The Old English Exodus, pp. 68–9) that a reference to drowning is out of place here as, given the use of certain other vocabulary in this passage (discussed below), and the poet’s consistent use of metaphor, it is in fact quite likely in the context, particularly in the sense that this homicide connects to the Red Sea drowning (where the feud initiated by the Egyptians because of the Tenth Plague is resolved) and is the only other sustained act of God’s physical hostility towards his earthly adversary. 54

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lað leodhata,  land ðrysmyde57 deadra hræwum –  dugoð forð gewat. Wop wæs wide,  worulddreama lyt, wæron hleahtorsmiðum  handa belocene, alyfed laðsið  leode gretan, folc ferende –  feond wæs bereafod.58 Hergas on helle  (heofon þider becom) druron deofolgyld.  Dæg wæs mære ofer middangeard  þa seo mengeo for. Swa þæs fæsten dreah  fela missera, ealdwerige  Egypta folc, þæs þe hie wideferð  wyrnan þohton Moyses magum,  gif hie Metod lete, on langne lust,  leofes siðes (Then the native host, greatest of lordly peoples, was drowned in death by old tortures, the demise of the hoard-wardens (the lament was renewed). Hall-joys slept, bereft of treasure. In the middle of the night he brought down the harmful ones, many firstborn, broke the guardians of the city. A destroyer flew far, a loathed people-hater, the land stank with corpses of the dead. The [Israelite] company went forth. There was widespread weeping, little worldly joy. The hands of the laughter-smiths were locked down. The people, the faring host, were allowed to begin the loathed journey – the enemy was bereft. (Heaven came down) the hell-shrines, devilish offerings perished. That day was famous over the earth when the multitude set out. So the Egyptian people, long-accursed, endured confinement for many a season because if God let them they wished to keep the people of Moses from their long desire, the beloved journey; ll. 33–53)

These lines are difficult to interpret, and modern editors will often emend them. The top half of page 144, on which most of this passage is found, is blank, while the text is clear enough. But line 34a appears as ‘gedrenced’ in the manuscript, where there has been an emendation of an erasure. Most editors favour OE gedrecced (past participle of OE gedreccan, ‘to afflict’), but Lucas emends from MS dryrmyde (not a known word) and the sense of ‘ðrysmyde’ (stifle), derived from the noun ðrosm (vapour) works in the context. 58 I follow previous editors of the poem here in reading feond instead of MS freond. The interesting closeness of the two words is worth noting in an act of such devastation – the possible scribal error reflects the blurred boundary between freond and feond, and the blurring of the line between hostility and hospitality, in societies where vengeance played a key ideological role. 57

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the correction of the obscured word suggests that the corrector viewed the Tenth Plague as a precursor for the Red Sea event. The ‘ealdum witum’ visited upon Egypt are the ancient plagues, but also figuratively the punishments of hell that will come to its people (not a stretch of the imagination for any audience becoming acquainted with this manuscript). These are appropriate punishments for a culture whose leader represents the Satanic, and whose rituals tie them to pagan gods. The presence of ‘gedrenced’ points us towards reading the later Red Sea passage for echoes of or connections to the Tenth Plague, as if to emphasise that it is the end of the vengeance pursuit that began with the homicide in the city of Egypt, a possibility supported further by the reference to the ‘hordwearda hryre’ (demise of the hoard-wardens): this statement occurs during the Tenth Plague account (l. 35a) and once more in the poem, during the Red Sea catastrophe (l. 512a), referring to the end of the Egyptian dynasty. Unlike ‘deaðe gedrenced’, these two statements show no signs of later emendation. These are further indications that Exodus demands not only deep, gastlic reading, but re-reading back and forth through its passages for meanings missed, buried or veiled, so that audiences might build and construct parallels between events, and between the fates of different figures, that this poetry has adapted from salvation history. The account of the divine visitation and death of the firstborn in Exodus is described from the Egyptian point of view. This suggests some of the ways the society begins to misunderstand the work of God, and some of the reasons they pursue compensation in blood, which will eventually lead to their end in the Red Sea (metaphorically crushed by the power of Mosaic ræd). To recall Edgar’s law cited at the beginning of this chapter, the Egyptians do not seek counsel concerning the plague’s signification the way Edgar and his witan do, nor do Pharaoh’s people read it as a work of divine warning. The perpetrator of the firstborn murder is the ‘bana’ (destroyer; l.39b), an entity also referred to as the ‘lað leodhata’ (loathed people-hater; l. 40a), a term often used of tyrants such as Holofernes (Judith; l. 72a) elsewhere in Old English poetry. This attacker could be God, or the Passover Angel (or even Moses), but the Egyptian view places emphasis on its nature as an ally of the Israelites, and its hateful or loathsome action, antagonistic to the Egyptian people and their custom.59 In other words, the Egyptians have a sense of an adversary assaulting their kingdom and their descendants. Society within the ‘burh’ seems founded 59

The role of Moses as ‘lað leodhata’ depends, as Wyly, Figures of Authority, p. 294, notes, on the point of view that is being represented: ‘to the Egyptians, Moses’ perceived agency in the plagues makes him appear a detestable tyrant (hatan), while to the Israelites, Moses’ initial setbacks in the attempt to liberate his people cause him to seem an unwelcome prophet (haitan)’.

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on Germanic warrior values without the promise of salvation or bot. Social practices responsible for maintaining value systems within a society built on wealth and war are targeted by the ‘bana’: strongholds holding treasure are broken, those ‘hleahtorsmiðum’ (laughter-smiths; l. 43a), makers of revelry and song who would have memorialised the riches and strength of this society (as well as its past), are locked down by their hands (hands that may have struck the harp, made music, and filled the hall with sound).60 The ‘bana’, then, brings a wave of destruction on Egypt and the poet focuses much less on the death of the firstborn than on the decline of a heathen society. Heaven is described as coming down on hellish shrines (l. 46) and ‘deofolgyld’ (l. 47) – the idols, or the objects of Egyptian offerings to devils – crumble and fall. Gyld and the verb gyldan often refer to compensation and repayment, as previously mentioned, and the compound here in Exodus highlights the brittle foundations of Egyptian practice and belief: they pay their price to idols, not to God. As the Israelites are pursued to the edges of the Red Sea, a break in the manuscript text separates a reference to the Egyptian inability to keep oaths and another to their desire for compensation. As ‘wræcmon gebad / laðne lastweard’ (the exile waited for the hostile tracker; ll. 137a–138b) – the Israelites here are the exile as a group, the Egyptians the loathed pursuers – the poet mentions that the Egyptians ‘wære ne gymdon’ (kept not (their) oath; l. 140). The use of ‘lastweard’ is suggestive (OE last evoking tracks and trails through land as well as time). The only other occurrence of the word in Exodus is used to refer to Isaac (l. 400), where it appears to have the meaning ‘heir’ or ‘successor’. What might the Pharaoh of line 138a be heir to, if OE lastweard is translated as something like ‘tracker’, ‘follower’ or maybe even ‘one who comes after’? Unerringly on the ‘track’ of vengeance, the Egyptians have not heeded or recognised the Tenth Plague as a sign of God. Furthermore, the tracking of the Israelites is also the movement along the track of doomed Egyptians who have gone before and were killed in the Tenth Plague. The poet sets down these track-lines of a people repeating the errors of their predecessors and ancestors, following their old pathways. The audiences of the poem are invited follow such lastas, too, and to trace the cursed history of those who have been repeatedly misguided. It is likely that the break in the manuscript following line 141 here, at the bottom of page 148, signals the loss of a portion detailing the history of the 60

The image is also significant because of the poem’s reference to ‘handlean’ (which describes the plague as payment of punishment by hand), but also in the context of the manuscript, which shows several images of Satan’s bound hands, representing a block on his ability to miscreate or cement oaths through exchange.

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oath, the ‘wære’, of line 140: the pact made between Joseph and the old Pharaoh ( Joseph himself seems to be a figure of reference when the text resumes on page 149, and as the one who helped bring wealth to the Egyptians he is mentioned by name at the end of the poem).61 The amount of text lost between pages 148 and 149 remains a mystery, but what is clear is that the oath had a significant history to it: we are told on page 149 that the Egyptians forgot all that came before (l. 144) and ‘morðor fremedon, / wroht berenedon, wære fræton’ (committed murder, made strife, devoured the oath; ll. 146b–147). As that old oath with Joseph was ‘devoured’ because of the death of Israelite male children (related in Exodus 1.22), Egyptian history is marred by lawbreaking, and, as the poem turns to the present pursuit of Moses and his people, that history of breakage and murder continues to generate a desire for violence, leading to a ‘manum treowum’ (break of trust; l. 149), even when the Pharaoh and his people should have heeded the Tenth Plague as a final warning to repent for their actions and their past: Woldon hie þæt feorhlean  facne gyldan, þætte hie þæt dægweorc  dreore gebohte, Moyses leode,  þær him mihtig God on ðam spildsiðe  spede forgefe. (they desired to repay a life-debt with treachery, so that Moses’ people would compensate for that day-work in blood if mighty God would give them success on that destructive journey; ll. 150–3)

No doubt the horror of an advancing army that cared nothing for oaths, gave offerings to devils (‘deofolgyld’) and looked to pay (‘gyldan’) through blood, murder and nefarious means would have struck a chord with those living in the midst of Viking threat (either during the manuscript’s long production, or previously, during the period of the poem’s composition).62 The Egyptians See The Old English Exodus, ed. E. B. Irving, p. 77: ‘It seems likely that the wære of 140 is probably the old Pharaoh’s promise of the Land of Goshen to Jacob and his children (Gen. 47: 19–20)’. 62 The occurrence of ‘sæwicingas’ (sea-vikings; l. 333) in Exodus to refer to the Israelites associated with Reuben has also proved intriguing. P. J. Lucas notes that the second element of this compound is one of ‘the earliest occurrences of wicing in Old English’, though ‘the word existed in English before the Norse invasions’, the ‘influence of ON vikingr probably gave it its special signification’ (Exodus, p. 120). N. J. Speirs notes that ‘outside of Exodus, (-) wicing occurs in poetry only in The Battle of Maldon (six times), in one of those occurrences it collocates with flota in a variation like that of Exodus (ll. 72–73)’. Speirs suggests that Reuben is technically Viking because he is a figure or ‘type’ related to those Jews who reject Christ. See N. J. Speirs, ‘Hermeneutic Sensibility and the Old English Exodus’ (Ph.D. 61

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here look to kill the Israelites who have escaped them, even though the history of Pharaoh’s people itself demands both legal and divine punishment. What pre-Conquest law codes tell us cannot always be taken as what was imposed or unquestioned, but what we can say is that there is a substantial concern in the laws with regulating vengeance and reducing bloody pursuits of private grievances – enough to make it probable that cycles of violence within communities were often on the verge of causing considerable damage to a king’s attempt to make stable his realm. Edmund’s reign (939–46) reads as a time of change in the way vengeance began to be more stridently regulated, as II Edmund (c. 942–46) begins by recording that the king and his advisors had approached the drafting of their legislation by asking the question of how to maintain peace through the realm. II Edmund demonstrates a real attempt to prevent vengeance spiralling out of control, as well as the need to make sure compensations that were pursued were legitimate. Those seeking repayment are encouraged to slow down and receive monetary compensation rather than blood. There are regulations that prevent those associated with the committer of a crime receiving vengeance (II Edmund, 1.3); and the establishment of firm protections for a slayer so that he had the chance to pay reparation, or ‘manbot’, to the kin of the dead (II Edmund, 7). The system practised during the reign of King Edgar put the OE concept of frið (peace) at the fore. In Eadgares gerædnes (III Edgar) this is made clear from the outset: 1. Þæt is þonne ærest þæt ic wille, þæt ælc man sy folcrihtes wurðe, ge earm ge eadig, 7 heom man rihte domas deme 2. 7 sy on ðare bote swilce forgifnes, swilce hit for Gode gebeorhlic sy 7 for worlde aberendlic. (1. That is the first that I will, that every man, rich or poor, be entitled to the benefit of common law, and be deemed by the rightful judgements

Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990). It is an argument that gains strength if we consider that the parallels between Exodus and Maldon – a historical battle poem depicting the approach and onslaught of Viking invaders – are too many to ignore. T. A. Bredehoft has suggested that the Maldon poet may have had knowledge of Exodus and Genesis A. He outlines the phrases that occur in Maldon and only one other Old English poem (twenty-five in total). Of these, nine are from the Junius Genesis and Exodus. It can be stated that these poems, if the Maldon poet did know them, with their emphasis on war and ræd, could certainly have been read in relation to the Norse invasions, particularly those taking place during the reign of Æthelræd II. Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009), pp. 139–42.

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2. And that there be such forgiveness in compensation as shall be justifiable in the sight of God and acceptable for the world.)

Evident in this law is a heavily regulated form of compensation, which filters through the code’s language of forgiveness and acceptability. There are echoes in the opening of III Edgar of Exodus: the concept of folcriht, of common law, which here is to be benefit to those in Edgar’s kingdom, is what Moses takes away from Egyptian society because of their status as enemies of God (l. 22a); and what III Edgar calls ‘rihte domas’ is akin to what Moses distributes to the Israelites at the end of the poem. By having their folcriht destroyed because of their sin and inability to heed God’s warnings, the Egyptians cannot benefit from compensation (what III Edgar, like the Exodus poet, calls ‘bote’). Pharaoh’s oath breaking and the disregard of God’s rightful law are part of a larger descent into damnation, one that culminates in the rejection by the Egyptians of the Tenth Plague as a final warning from heaven. The Israelites are at risk of similar misinterpretation when they are pursued because of what they see on the surface (a great army) as their approaching doom leads them to a crisis of faith: ‘Þa him eorla mod ortrywe wearð, / siððan hie gesawon of suðwegum / fyrd Faraonis forð ongangan’ (then the mind of the men [the Israelites] turned to mistrust when they saw on the south-way the army of Pharaoh going forward; ll. 154–6). But the poet makes clear that the teaching and direction of Moses, whose own act of revealing the foundations beneath the Red Sea represents his nature as a leader privy to deeper spiritual knowledge, saves the Israelites from abandoning their faith. Just before opening the sea, and directing the eyes of the Israelites towards a ‘færwundor’ (sudden wonder; l. 279), Moses explains how he offers them good counsel and insight, qualities that will bring them salvation: ‘Ne willað eow andrædan  deade feðan, fæge ferhðlocan,  fyrst is æt ende lænes lifes.  Eow is lar Godes abroden of breostum.  Ic on beteran ræd, þæt ge gewurðien  wuldres Aldor, and eow Liffrean  lissa bidde, sigora gesynto,  þær ge siðien.’ (‘You will not dread dead troops, doomed body-homes, the time of their loaned life is at an end. God’s teaching has been plucked from your breasts. I offer you better counsel, that you should honour the lord of glory, and when you advance pray for grace from the lord of life, for salvation in victories.’ ll. 266–73)

1 3 0   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

There are verbal echoes here with the ‘keys of the spirit’ passage that will come later in the poem: the idea of ‘loaned life’, the conception of the divinely inspired intellect being within the breast, and of course the possibility of profound ræd. Interpretation of the world with wisdom and by way of the teachings of Moses, following the journey along ‘uncuð gelad’ (unknown paths; l. 58b) and ‘fela mæringa’ (many an obstacle; l. 62a), leads to an escape from the blind, destructive social and religious practices represented by the Egyptians and towards what the poet calls ‘ece rædas’: eternal counsels, benefits, insights.

‘Ece rædas’

The Egyptians, devouring an oath of historical and divine importance, pursue payment in blood and what they get, the poem tells us, is a ‘deop lean’ (deep repayment; l. 507) in the form of the Red Sea ‘heolfre geblanden’ (blended with blood; l. 477) crashing over them. Much has been said in criticism about the long passage of violent, verbal ‘tour de force’ in which the poet details the drowning of Pharaoh’s host (ll. 447–515): it has been read as a great battle, a reflection of the Last Judgement, and as an exercise in turning the sea into a great antagonist.63 But the positioning of the event, between Moses directing the Israelites to a ‘better’ ræd on the shore and Moses, in the aftermath of the Red Sea flood with the saved Israelites, giving them ‘ece rædas’ (eternal counsels; l. 516) and a ‘deop ærende’ (deep message; l. 519), also suggests that the annihilation of the Egyptian army represents the going forth of ræd mentioned in the poem’s ‘keys of the spirit’ passage: more than a mere pun on ‘Readan Sæ’, the drowning passage serves as a metaphor for how ræd that emerges from a deep reading of God’s works can demolish devilry, ignorance and misinterpretation. The prominence of images of blood, right from the statement at the beginning of the passage that ‘Wæron beorhhliðu blode bestemed, / holm heolfre spaw’ (the cliffs were besteamed with blood,64 the sea spewed gore; ll. 449–450a) to the later arresting image of the line ‘flod blod P. J. Lucas notes that the passage is a ‘tour de force of dramatic description’ (Exodus, ed. Lucas, p. 132). For the repetitions in the passage, see K. Olsen, ‘The Dual Function of the Repetitions in Exodus 447–515’, in Loyal Letters: Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1994), pp. 55–70. 64 The waves are envisioned as cliffs or mountain-slopes in an astounding image that brings to mind gigantic coastal shelves that deepen and crumble. The water that rises (also like a mountain or cliff ) can bring such crumbling about as well as threatening (as its very own high rising mountain) to avalanche. J. R. Hall, ‘Exodus 449a: beorhhliðu’, American Notes and Queries 22 (1984), 94–7 sees the beorhliðu as waves, but this overlooks the poet’s use of double meaning. 63

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gewod’ (blood moved through the flood; l. 463b), also asks that the demise of the Egyptians be tied to their lust for blood: this is their punishment for holding to violence, but, in a way, it also represents the kind of calamity that comes from the pursuit of illegitimate vengeance, as they are covered in rising ‘wælmist’ (slaughter-mist; l. 451), their senses obscured. The Red Sea passage can be read as taking place in three main stages, as highlighted by Peter Clemoes: ‘the Egyptians’ fear as they struggled to escape the raging water cutting off their retreat and drowning many of them (447– 67); the actual caving in of the waters upon them (468–97); and the total destruction of God’s adversaries (497b–515)’.65 The passage as a whole has an almost repetitive effect that captures the force of relentless tide, but gradually builds to reveal that God is the source of the wondrous devastation in the final segment.66 These lines move from martial conflict – the sea is full of broken ‘randbyrig’ (wooden shields; l. 464a) and armour – to a more ‘heavenly perspective’.67 Certain parts of the drowning passage echo previous sections of the poem (the repetition of ‘hoard-wardens’ mentioned above, for example), as if to suggest further that this is the final ‘payment’ of punishment for the Egyptian lineage and the result of their repeated mistakes. The sense of finality is heightened by the reference to the eternal foundations, which had been revealed by Moses, now being covered once again:       Sand basnodon witodre fyrde,68  hwonne waðema stream, sincalda sæ,  sealtum yðum, æflastum gewuna,  ece staðulas, nacud nydboda,  neosan come, fah feðegast,  se ðe feondum gehneop

Clemoes, Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), p. 292. 66 The reiterations of the event, Olsen points out, cast the sea as the main antagonist in the first instance and God more prominently in the sections where the overwhelming of the Egyptians reaches the height of poetic intensity. Olsen, ‘The Dual Function’. See further P. Portnoy, ‘Ring Composition and the Digressions of Exodus: The “Legacy” of the “Remnant”’, English Studies 82.4 (2001), 289–307 (p. 300). 67 Olsen, ‘The Dual Function’, pp. 55–6. 68 Lucas emends to ‘witodre wyrde’ (ordained fate). Again, this is based on the construction being unusual. But the manuscript here makes sense (and in relation to the Old English poetry that survives, unusual constructions in Exodus are common). 65

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(sand awaited the doomed [Egyptian] army, when the stream of waves, the cold sea, with salt-surges returned from its wayward path to seek its eternal foundations, the naked messenger of inevitable chaos, the hostile, faring guest who overcame the enemies; ll. 471b–476)

Following the same path as their ancestors who also broke their oath and sought murder, the Egyptians are devoured by the sea that resembles the army that pursued the Israelites earlier in the poem: the sea is a ‘fah feðegast’ (l. 476a) coming back from its diverted track (l. 474a) to swamp the Egyptian forces – it is an exile returning to make its own kind of amends. The ‘ece staðulas’, unlocked and revealed to Moses and the Israelites earlier in the poem, are covered once more by the waves, preventing the Egyptians, who could not read beneath the surface, the possibility of a pathway to salvation. The Israelites, however, make it to the shores of the promised land. Moses, who is referred to at this point as ‘ræda gemyndig’ (mindful of good counsel; l. 516b), distributes the ‘ece rædas’, the eternal counsels, the new earthly law, reserved for those following divine guidance. Only a few pages later in Junius 11, the poet of Daniel will outline how the Israelites abandoned such eternal counsel (‘eces rædes’; Daniel, line 30b). Just what the ‘ece rædas’ contain is not revealed, but that is part of the Exodus poet’s own gesture towards encouraging its audience to seek out good counsel in their own time. These eternal counsels have much significance, however, as the reward for Israelite faith and for wandering and following Moses’ teachings. The very end of the poem recalls the opening lines when it tells us that the Israelites ‘bliðe wæron, bote gesawon, / heddon herereafes – hæft wæs onsæled’ (were happy, they had seen the reward, received the war-remnant, captivity was unsealed; ll. 583–4). The ‘bote lifes’ of the opening lines, referring to compensation (OE bot) that would come to those who endured the journey with Moses, the journey to wisdom and divine favour, is now viewed by the Israelites. The reward for faith in Moses, that remedy and compensation for the journey, is also the ræd (the ability to see, interpret, read) pertaining to higher mysteries now unsealed and unlocked (in unison with the Israelite release from an antagonistic relationship with the Egyptians). The transitus to insight, like a sea-journey (a common motif in the works of early Christian authors such as Origen and Augustine) has gone through its stages of separation, transition and arrival. The Israelites need wander no longer, or risk losing sight of the shores of gastlice andgyt for, as the poet tells us in one of his final lines, ‘folc wæs on lande’ (that folk [the Israelites] was on land; l. 567b). The text of the Old English Exodus comes to an end a third of the way down page 171 of Junius 11 (see Fig. 7). It is followed by a blank space and then a completely blank page (page 172). The final word of the poem as we have it

Figure 7.  MS Junius 11, page 171. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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is smudged away slightly, but ultra-violet light shows the word and therefore the final mention of the Egyptians as ‘drihtfolca mæst’ (the greatest of lordly peoples; l. 590b). These last lines tell us that, much like the angels suspended in the void in Genesis A, the Egyptians ‘werigend lagon’ (lay weary; l. 589b) in the place of death and punishment. The Old English Daniel will pick up the next phase in this history as it takes us to the rise of Babylon and another sequence of falls (of Israel, of Nebuchadnezzar, of Belshazzar) and to another collection of models of ræd and unræd. For a reader of the manuscript poetry in sequence, Exodus has also added much in the way of history and instruction to these words and their associated themes. As a model of rule, and of kingship, the work of Moses in the poem is in keeping with the impressions the codex makes elsewhere concerning the cultivation of divine favour and the need to achieve good counsel through faith, teaching, deliberation and adherence to God’s laws and boundaries. Exodus is a long riddle, a challenge to its audience, and a rumination on the spiritual treasures granted to those who follow trails and roads through difficult terrain of puzzling scripture, poetry and existence. In many ways, it offers a key to the manuscript as a whole: its instructions to ‘read’ across and between stratified meaning systems; its warnings against misreading and misinterpretation; and its gestures towards ways of thinking about history, past, future – or Old and New law – point to some of the ways Junius 11 itself demands to be understood. This is a material codex of exemplary narratives intercut with instructions and shifts in time, punctuated with illustrations, blank spaces and reiterations. It demands re-reading, or reading back and forth, or reading in a variety of directions, for its own ‘rædas’ to be fully uncovered.

4 Rise and Fall Again in the Old English Daniel

A

t the end of Exodus, a third of the way down page 171 of Junius 11, the Israelites share out a hoard of ‘ealde madmas’ (ancient treasures; l. 586b) on the shore of the Red Sea. Moses and his followers ‘on riht sceodon / gold and godweb’ (rightly shared the gold and fine cloth; ll. 587b–588a), enjoying the plunder received following the battle between the raging waters and the helpless Egyptian host.1 After these final lines, Exodus is followed by a blank page, before the Old English Daniel begins on page 173 in the same hand. While the end of this poem, which details the fall of Belshazzar, has been called incomplete and imperfect by N. R. Ker, the poem’s most recent editor, R. T. Farrell, suggests Daniel ends ‘as its author intended’.2 Despite these different views about the state of Daniel’s ending, narrative continuity between Exodus and the beginning of Daniel forms an important bridge in the manuscript cycle. Daniel does pick up the story that paused on the edges of the Red Sea in Exodus, but it also continues that poem’s interest in themes associated with OE ræd, focusing as it does on the need for good counsel for those in positions of prosperity, and on the need for kings and kingdoms to rightfully interpret divine messages through wisdom. Farrell has drawn attention to the Daniel-poet’s ‘thematic word-use’, writing that the ‘introductory section’ of the poem (ll. 1–103), which traces the fall of the Israelites from their glory in Jerusalem, establishes ‘central themes’ and ‘words used to describe the Jews here are to appear consistently throughout the text’.3 One key example is the poet’s explanation of the Israelite loss of prosperity being a result of their abandonment of ‘eces rædes’ (eternal counsel; l. 30b) early on in Daniel. Lack of ræd will become associated with the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar, who is ‘rædleas’ (l. 177a), later in the poem. Such repetition, Farrell notes, allows the poet to reinforce his As P. J. Lucas notes, MS sceo here seems ‘defective’. See the line in Exodus, ed. P. J. Lucas, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1994). 2 N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957), pp. 406–8. Daniel and Azarias, ed. R. T. Farrell (London, 1974), p. 6. 3 Daniel and Azarias, p. 34. 1

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lessons ‘by the use of a series of weighted words which are used with absolute consistency to establish an opposition between the forces of good and evil’.4 But the loss of ‘eces rædes’ by the Israelites in Daniel also recalls the ‘ece rædas’ they achieved with Moses at the end of Exodus (l. 516b). As I have discussed, the poetry of Junius 11 consistently returns to those political matters of counsel, rightful compensation, rule and kingship, and offers audiences the opportunity to trace these across the codex by providing them with different scenarios of poetic drama in which they play out for good or ill. Accumulating a variety of perspectives on and contexts for the significant role of good counsel, manuscript audiences may themselves gather a multifaceted sense of what has constituted good ræd through time, putting such knowledge to work in their own epoch. Daniel, like its partners in the manuscript, impresses its themes on readers through its exploration of the ways peoples, kingdoms and kings find salvation or fall to ruin. In what follows in this chapter, I will first examine the Daniel poet’s account of the fall of the Israelites. Doing so, I want to demonstrate how Daniel offers a warning to an audience that might have traced the journey of Moses and his people through Exodus as the manuscript poetry focuses once again on how the loss of good counsel and divine favour has disastrous consequences. In the case of Daniel, the fall of the Israelites is also the fall of their great city of Jerusalem and, when the Daniel poet turns attention to Nebuchadnezzar (who brings punishment to the Israelites) and his own abandonment of counsel and wisdom, there is much focus on the relationship between his own mental state and that of his city and kingdom. In the second part of this chapter, therefore, I turn to the portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar to outline how the poet’s representation of this king’s tumultuous relationship with God gives manuscript audiences another kind of model for contemplation, one of a king rising, falling and rising again in power, mind and faith.

An exodus into Daniel

A pressing issue for the literary study of Junius 11 is how we navigate the balance between our notion of ‘completeness’ and the ways of making, compiling and assembling that brought poems together in books during the early medieval period. Aside from that question of ‘unity’, which, as discussed in the Introduction, also plagues the Junius 11 manuscript itself, the position of Daniel in Junius 11 still reflects the plans of compilers and suggests that, at least at this point in the codex, there was some interest in encouraging a reading of different poems in combination. Moreover, the beginning of Daniel 4

Daniel and Azarias, p. 36.

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looks back to Exodus in specific ways. Daniel’s extra-biblical opening lines outline the prosperity of the Israelites in Jerusalem as they ‘goldhord dælan’ (deal the gold-hoard; l. 2), recalling the celebrations on the shore of the Red Sea at the end of Exodus. Movement of one poem into the next is also propelled by verbal echoes, suggesting that manuscript-makers may well have viewed Daniel as more than just another example of Israelite history, but as poetry that developed the concerns of Exodus, focusing especially on the success of those who pursue ræd and on the nature of divine vengeance visited on those misinterpreting the signatures of God in the world. In the opening passage of Daniel, the poet looks back to the Israelite transitus we find in Exodus with a short overview: siððan ðurh meotodes mægen  on Moyses hand wearð wig gifen,  wigena mænieo, and hie of Egyptum  ut aforon mægene micle.  Þæt wæs modig cyn! Þenden hie þy rice  rædan moston, burgum weoldon;  wæs him beorht wela. (since through the measurer’s power an army of many warriors was given into the hand of Moses, they fared out from Egypt by a great wonder. That was brave kindred! While they were able to counsel the kingdom, rule the strongholds, their glory was bright; ll. 4–9)

Compilers could not have overlooked the ways the opening passage of Daniel echoes the poetry of Exodus. Repetition of OE mægen, a word used in Exodus more than any other Old English poem, and the reference to the hand of Moses, described as directing God’s power many times by the Exodus poet, recall previous pages of Junius 11.5 These opening lines of Daniel also tell us that, while they had ræd following their tribulations, the Israelites had glory and were allowed to rule. As was the case in Genesis B, the collocation between 5

The Exodus poet’s use of the Old English word mægen alone and in compounds is just one example of his extraordinary wordplay. This term is one of the most frequent examples, laced and connected throughout the poem as it is, and it calls on the interpretative faculties of the audience to distinguish between ‘strength’, ‘glory’ and ‘power’ within a given context. The noun ‘mægen’ at l. 131 connotes ‘strength/ power’ (referring to the Israelites being restored by food on the sea shore), as it does at l. 242. The word refers to the ‘troop’ or ‘army’ at ll. 67, 101, 210, 215, 226 and 245. Compounds also refer to the troop or powerful troops: ‘beadumægen’ (l. 329), ‘folcmægen’ (l. 347), ‘leodmægen’ (ll. 128, 167, 195), ‘þeodmægen’ (l. 342), ‘mægenheap’ (l. 197), ‘mægenþreat’ (l. 513), ‘mægenþrymm’ (ll. 349, 541). The adjective ‘mægenrof ’ refers to the power of God (l. 275), and he is also a ‘mægenwisa’ (l. 554).

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‘rice’ and ‘rædan’ in Daniel also suggests their co-dependence: good counsel, rule and faith bring glory and stability within a kingdom (‘rice’) and, in this passage, within the ‘burgum’ (strongholds; l. 9a) of a realm. That the beginning of Daniel was re-grafted for Junius 11 or had some partnership with Exodus in a previous compilation cannot be proven. Daniel, or parts of it, may well have circulated elsewhere and therefore in its transmission it may have been subject to editing: the fragmentary poem Azarias, found in the Exeter Book, for example, corresponds to the section in Daniel that describes the Three Youths in the furnace (ll. 279–361), but shows some differences in vocabulary and focus. Whatever the relationship between Daniel and Azarias, the Junius 11 poem is a sign, as Daniel Anlezark writes, that ‘poets (and scribes) felt a degree of freedom in their roles as transmitters of received verse and could happily substitute words, or metrically acceptable half-lines, or even greater portions of poems’.6 For readers or viewers of Junius 11, knowledge of the events and vocabulary of Exodus has a bearing on intensifying the impact, tragedy and implications of the events explored by the poetry of Daniel, especially as it describes the fall of the Israelites in its opening section. This book has thus far examined those poems that come before Daniel in the codex from the perspective of their possible political resonances for early medieval audiences. As it serves to carry on the Exodus-poet’s intensive interest in the relationship between earthly and divine rule, between rightful and malign interpretation, Daniel concludes the poetry based on the Old Testament in the codex, extending the historical narrative of Israel and Babylon. The Daniel poet’s deep interest in counsel and interpretation is also part of an exploration of how wisdom (or ‘sapientia’), held to by the faithful, and counsel or ‘effectual knowledge’ (one of Farrell’s explanations of OE ræd) abused by those such as the Chaldeans in the poem, work on the interiority and mentality of those holding to them.7 As the poem responds to and adapts sections 1–5 of the biblical book of Daniel, against the backdrop of translatio imperii (the transfer of rule), parallels are established between individuals and the kingdoms or cities they inhabit and govern. The main subjects of the poem, the Israelites and then, in the latter portions, Nebuchadnezzar, are further examples in Junius 11 of the effects of ill-counselled, unwise rule on a kingdom and on that kingdom’s relationship with God, although the ways the Daniel poet explores these themes through an interest in built spaces and mental states adds another component

Old Testament Narratives, ed. and trans. D. Anlezark (Cambridge MA, 2011), p. xix. Daniel and Azarias, ed. Farrell, p. 49.

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R ise and Fa l l Again in the Old English Daniel  139

to the collection of narratives in Junius 11 circulating around rule and counsel as well as around rightful and wrongful interpretation.

The fall of the Israelites

The first sixty lines of Daniel are an expanded version of a brief remark in the Vulgate – that ‘venit Nabuchodonosor rex Babylonis Hierusalem et obsedit eam’ (Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem, and besieged it; Daniel 1.1) – and they detail the fall of the Israelites. This entire section is vital to an understanding of the poem because it sets down a foundation for the central conflicts of the narrative on the level of thematic vocabulary (and we can recall the function of Genesis A’s prologue here). The Israelites abandon ‘æcræftas’ (law-crafts; l. 19a), ‘wisdom’ (wisdom; l. 27b) and ‘rædes’ (counsel; l. 30b) in favour of ‘deofles cræft’ (devil’s craft; l. 32b), for instance, while, elsewhere in the poem, Daniel and the Three Youths are typified by their discipline in these intellectual areas: Daniel provides ‘fæstlicne ræd’ (firm good counsel; l. 585b) and ‘snytro cræft’ (wise craft; l. 535b) and is ‘æcræftig’ (wise in the law; l. 741a); the Three Youths are ‘æfæst’ (faithful to the law; l. 248a). The Israelite ruling of Jerusalem is dependent on maintaining wisdom, faith and divine favour. Moses’ people have ‘lufan, lifwelan, þenden hie let metod’ (love, life’s joys, while the measurer let them; l. 56). In lines 8–9 (which state that the Israelites had bright glory while they had ‘ræd’, as discussed above), ‘þenden’ directs us to the nature of longevity of this rulership: it will last for as long as the Hebrews can offer and receive what is encapsulated by OE ræd. Good counsel and wisdom assist the Israelites who have moved into Daniel from Exodus with the upholding and understanding of their oath-bond with God (the wær) as the next two lines, again marked by the temporal conjunction, suggest: ‘Þenden þæt folc mid him hiera fæder wære / healdan woldon, wæs him hyrde god’ (while that folk intended to keep their father’s oath with him, God was their protector; ll. 10–11). The poet is keen to point out that ‘while’ the Israelites remained enlightened by good counsel, wisdom and through their oath with God, they were able to stay vigilant, stay ‘bright’ (beorht), intellectually and spiritually. In Daniel, it is earthly pleasures that take the Israelites away from their ordained spiritual gifts and from the eternal counsel their faith and hardship granted them: ‘hie langung beswac / eorðan dreamas eces rædes’ (lust, the joys of the earth, deprived them [the Israelites] of eternal counsel; ll. 29b–30). Repercussions of this loss impact a kingdom, as is the case when the Israelites move from their role as God’s favoured instruments of retribution to victims of devilry in a matter of lines:

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      Se ðam werude geaf mod and mihte,  metod alwihta, þæt hie oft fela folca  feore gesceodon, heriges helmum  þara þe him hold ne wæs, oðþæt hie wlenco anwod  æt winþege deofoldædum,  druncne geðohtas. (He, the measurer of all things, gave that host mind and might, so that they often harmed the life of many a nation that was not devout to him with helmed ones of the army, until pride invaded them with devil-deeds at the wine-feast, drunken thoughts. ll. 13b–18)

Such a dramatic change in fortune pivots on yet another temporal conjunction (‘oðþæt’). The OE word wlenco, which here spoils the spiritual wellbeing of the Israelites, has only one other occurrence in the poem, during the final section, in which the ‘medugal’ (drunken; l. 702) Belshazzar is ‘harmed’ in a similar way: ‘wæs Baldazar burga aldor, / weold wera rices oðþæt him wlenco gesceod’ (Belshazzar was lord of the strongholds and wielded the human realm until pride destroyed him; ll. 676–7). In Daniel, the word wlenco is an active, invasive entity, piercing the weak and drunk of mind. It is not applied to Nebuchadnezzar, whose pride is more outward moving and antagonistic to those around him and defined by the OE concept of oferhygd. The forceful entry of wlenco into Israelite minds and their community at the beginning of Daniel is fully conveyed by ‘anwod’ (l. 17a), a variant of OE onwodan, which brings with it meanings of invasion and possession by hostile means.8 Though the lines referring to Israelite ruin above describe a mental invasion by ‘druncne geðohtas’ (drunken thoughts; l. 18b), they express it as a penetration of defences weakened at the ‘winþege’ (wine-feast; l. 17b), which inevitably grows to weaken the city as a whole: Jerusalem becomes a ‘winburh’ (winecity; l. 58a), laid waste by the ‘ealdfeonda cyn’ (kin of ancient enemies; l. 57b) – a reference to the Chaldeans, who can be compared to the devilry penetrating Israelite minds as they come to invade the city. Looking to the end of the poem, the final speech by Daniel himself identifies the effects of drunkenness on Israelite faculties, noting their ‘windruncen gewit’ (wit [was] wine-drunk; l. 752a). As John Bugge observes, ‘inebriation implies incontinence, and in DOE, s.v. anwadan. OE wlenco may have been an attribute useful in war (Hygelac had ‘wlonces wigcræft’ in his prime, Beowulf, l. 2953). But even here, in the world of Beowulf (where the Old Testament, along with the poet’s Christian perspective or omniscience, intrudes) it has its dangers: it will be the cause of Hygelac’s death (Beowulf, ll. 1206–7).

8

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Old English poetry the two vices seem almost to function interchangeably as symbolic shorthand for “unwisdom”’.9 In the introductory section to the poem, the loss of eternal ræd as it is described in the opening lines leads to the crumbling of Israelite wisdom, the weakening of their bodies and, by extension, the collapse of their city. Again the poetry of Junius 11 turns to the spiritual and political repercussions of communities and rulers turning from the pursuit of good counsel and interpretation, and therefore from God. Documents memorialising political movements and reform from early medieval England suggest why the Daniel poet’s version of the fall of Jerusalem might have focused on how those ruling the city, by descending into unwise sin, endangered the defences of their stronghold itself, and perhaps why such warnings were important for Junius 11 compilers. When Bishop Æthelwold came to Winchester at the request of King Edgar in the early 960s, for example, his aims were urgent, his regulations strict. Establishing Benedictine monasticism at Winchester was a way of securing the city, and by extension the realm, against the kinds of crises that afflict strongholds in which poor learning and sin take hold. Wulfstan of Winchester’s reflections on this overhaul and revival add the detail that the clerics Æthelwold cast out of the ministers at Winchester in the chaotic events of 964 ‘repudiantes uxores quas inlicite duxerant et alias accipientes, gulae et ebrietati iugiter dediti’ (married wives illicitly, divorced them, and took others, they were constantly given to gourmandising and drunkenness).10 The voice of Edgar in the New Minster Charter, the document discussed in relation to Genesis A in Chapter One, offers another perspective: Quod nullis mihi intercessionibus prodesse poterant . sed potius ut beatus ait Gregorius iusti uindictam iudicis prouocarent qui uariis uitiorum neuis contaminati . non agentes quę Deus iubendo uolebat . omnia quę nolebat rebelles faciebant auidus inquisitor aduertens . gratos Domino monachorum cuneos qui pro nobis incunctanter intercederent . nostri iuris monasteriis deuotus hilariter collocaui.11

J. Bugge, ‘Virginity and Prophecy in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 87.2 (2006), 127–47. 10 Wulfstan of Winchester: Life of St Æthelwold, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1991), pp. 30–1. 11 Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and Its Minsters, ed. and trans. A. R. Rumble (Oxford and New York, 2002), p. 81. 9

1 4 2   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

(Because they had been of no benefit to me with their intercessory prayers, but rather, as the blessed Gregory said, they had ‘provoked the vengeance of the Just Judge’, they who were contaminated with diverse blemishes of vices were not performing the things which God wished in his commandments, and were rebelliously doing all things which God did not wish, I, a keen investigator, turning my attention to these matters, have joyously installed, in the monasteries within our jurisdiction, throngs of monks pleasing to the Lord, who might intercede unhesitatingly for us.)

In being represented as marred and rebellious against the commandments of God, the secular canons were banished from the monasteries, and likely from Winchester too, and replaced because of the threat they posed to the city’s spiritual and political state by inviting divine vengeance. The voice of Edgar here is one of ‘inquisitor’, therefore of one who uncovers and inquires and puts to use his mental faculties against the declining and blemished minds of the sinful clerics. Read in the context of Junius 11, and following their successes in Exodus, the Israelites of Daniel represent a forceful warning against ill-discipline in a time of prosperity. Their fall would have offered a strong example of the dangers of abandoning the work involved in fostering counsel and faith for those engaged in the political upheaval of religious reform at a stronghold or city site. Old English wisdom poetry offers another set of examples of the idea that a loss of learning results in weakened defences and devilish invasion and often suggests that the cultivation of wisdom and learning could help moderate and protect life within the burh. Thinking with such poetry alongside Daniel allows us to deepen our sense of some of the ways the Junius 11 poem’s narrative may have offered certain counsels or instructions of its own. In the Exeter Book poem Vainglory, for instance, the speaker is given advice by a ‘frod wita’ (wise counsellor; l. 1a) who is ‘boca gleaw’ (wise in books; l. 4a) about how to distinguish between those welcome in a city and those who are sinful (ll. 5–8). The poem goes on to outline how those allowing their minds to weaken with drunkenness and pride, much like the Israelites in Daniel do, stir up commotion within ‘winburgum’ (wine-strongholds; l. 14b), and this, as ‘win hweteð / beornes breostsefan’ (wine excites a man’s mind; ll. 18b–19a), breeds strife:       Sum on oferhygdo þrymme þringeð,  þrinteð him in innan ungemedemad mod –  sindan to monige þæt. Bið þæt æfþonca  eal gefylled feondes fligepilum,  facensearwum

R ise and Fa l l Again in the Old English Daniel  143

(One in his pride flexes his glory, within him swells an immoderate mind: there are too many like this. He is all filled with the devil’s flying darts of envy, evil devices; ll. 23b–27)12

The idea that the human corpus is a fortress appears to have derived from exegesis, particularly the work of Gregory the Great. In the Moralia in Job, Job’s soul is imagined as a city attacked by the devil and his jacula.13 In Vainglory, the swelling ‘mod’ is unrestrained, there is no room for anything but ‘oferhygdo’, which weakens the defences of the mind to ‘facensearwum’ (evil devices) and these go on to reawaken old feuds in what was formerly a hospitable place. As Britt Mize suggests, it is the ‘ungemedemad mod’ (immoderate mind) and the ambiguous ‘æfþonca’ (with its root þanc) that are key to the meaning of the passage because they make clear that it is concerned with ‘the functions of the mind rather than the immortal soul’.14 By extension, the stronghold that the vainglorious man was supposed to guard loses its protective capabilities and he becomes one who will ‘læteð inwitflan / brecan þone burgweal, þe him bebead meotud / þæt he þæt wigsteal wergan scealde’ (lets the arrows of malice break through the city wall, the battle-place his measurer warned him to watch; ll. 37b–9). As the Vainglory poet ruminates on those who seek to stir up ‘niþum nearuwrencum’ (evil tricks; l. 44a), the poem turns to the example of the fall of the angels as representative of a host seeking to ‘þyrmcyning þeodenstoles / ricne beryfan, swa hit ryht ne wæs’ (deprive the king of glory of the noble throne, as was not right’; ll. 62–3). The apocryphal tale, and the earthly scene in the city, demonstrate the disaster that comes to one who ‘leofaþ in leahtrum’ (lives in vices; l. 76a). In the final lines of Vainglory, the poet suggests that readers should be mindful of these models of weakened defences and weakened minds:

For the poem, see The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. B. J. Muir (Exeter, 1994). The idea that the human corpus is a fortress recurs in the wisdom traditions. Old English poets offer further elaboration on this motif: it is not the soul but the mind that is the stronghold for them, as Britt Mize suggests: ‘Although in exegetical tradition the stronghold that the devil assails is the soul’, Old English poets ‘conceive of the conflict in terms more appropriate to faculties, attitudes and actions of the mind’ as ‘the diabolical attack targets the volitional part of the self ’. For Old English poets, ‘this is generally the mod rather than some aspect of the sawol’. B. Mize, ‘The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry’, ASE 35 (2006), 57–90 (p. 81). 13 PL 75–6. See further J. F. Doubleday, ‘The Allegory of the Soul as Fortress in Old English Poetry’, Anglia 88 (1970), 503–8. 14 ‘Mind as an Enclosure’, p. 84. 12

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Forþon we sculon a hycgende  hælo rædes gemunan in mode  mæla gehwylcum þone selestan,  sigora waldend. (Therefore, always mindful of the counsel of salvation, we must always keep in mind, in each of these speeches, the best ruler of victories. ll. 82–84)

Junius 11 offers us a variety of narratives, histories and examples that encourage the kind of rumination demanded by these lines on holy, salvific or eternal ræd, which in Vainglory emerges as ‘hælo rædes’ and seems to refer not only to those stories from salvation history such as the angelic fall that provide stark warnings against rebellion, but also to those accounts of drunken, fallen communities – like those of the warriors in the burh in Vainglory or the Israelites in Daniel – that become easy prey for the devil. The introductory passages of Daniel and their depiction of Jerusalem’s fall connect to Vainglory’s central idea of the mental state of an individual or community impacting that of their kingdom and its main stronghold or city. Daniel aligns the Israelite abandonment of the kind of eternal counsel achieved through deep reading and hardship, as described in Exodus, with the downfall of the mental faculties of the Israelites and waning protection for their kingdom of Jerusalem. But strengthening the intellect with ræd and with wisdom is not just about defence for the Daniel poet. The poem tells us that the Israelites once conquered unbelievers (ll. 14–15) and that, before they abandoned ‘eces rædes’, they were the ‘dugoða dyrust’ (dearest host; l. 37a), directed by God, who had herepoð (tæhte)  to þære hean byrig, eorlum elðeodigum,  on eðelland þær Salem stod  searwum afæstnod, weallum geweorðod. (taught them the army-path to the high stronghold, to those foreign men in the homeland where Salem stood cunningly fastened, honoured with walls; ll. 38–41a)15

Crafted structures like the city of Jerusalem, fastened with ‘searo’ (skill, cunning), posed no secret, no threat, to the Israelites when they were guided by God. ‘Herepoð’ signals a way, a connecting route, a way in, to the city of Jerusalem, carved out for those who followed Moses, his guidance and his counsels 15

I have been informed by the text of The Junius Manuscript, ed. G. P. Krapp, ASPR 1 (New York, 1931) here, where ‘tæhte’ has been inserted: metrically and narratively, in addition to its relation to the poet’s interest in the ‘mind’, it makes good sense.

R ise and Fa l l Again in the Old English Daniel  145

(as the Israelites did at the end of Exodus). There are echoes at this point in the poem, particularly in the premise that maintaining the kind of ræd that Exodus and Daniel define as long-lasting or eternal leads to protection as well as strength in battle, of some of the translation work associated with King Alfred’s reform. That the adaptation of such works such as the Regula pastoralis into the vernacular was underway at the same time as Alfred’s refortification of strongholds is no coincidence. Both were an attempt to strengthen defences. Alfred’s pursuit of educational reform was put into practice during a brief respite from Viking attack (most likely following the victory at Edington in 878) when the king also commanded the building, refortifying and reoccupation of abandoned or damaged burhs across the country. This fortification project was unparalleled in scale: around thirty fortified centres were constructed or rebuilt and they were connected to each other in a network of trade and communication joined by the kind of pathways the Daniel poet refers to with the word ‘herepoð’ (l. 38a), as mentioned in Chapter 91 of Asser’s Life.16 A link between the mod and the burh, at least metaphorically, is also found in the account of the man who shuns wisdom because it brings no worldly fame or spectacle in section XXXIII (as numbered by Sweet) of the Old English Pastoral Care: Ac hwam beoð ðonne ðas ðyllecan geliccran ðonne ðæm folce ðe on clænum felda weorðlicne sige gefeohtað, & eft innan hira burgum fæste belocene ður(h) hiera giemelieste hie læteð gebindan, oððe suelce hie ær lægen on longre medtrymnesse, & hie ðeah gewierp[ten], & eft cume an lytel febbres, & hie ofslea? Da geðyldegan sint to manianne ðætte hie hira heortan getrymigen æfter ðæs miclan sige, & ða burg hira modes wið stælherigas behealdan, & mid wighusum gefæsðnige, suelce he him ðære adle edcier suiður ondræde ðonne ðone fruman. (But what do such men resemble more than the nation which wins an honourable victory in the open field, and afterwards, when strongly enclosed in their strongholds, through carelessness they allow themselves to be captured; or as if they had lain with a long illness, and yet had recovered, and a trifling fever had come, and killed them? The patient are to be warned to fortify their hearts after so great a victory, and hold the city of their minds against predatory bands, and fortify it with battlements, as if they dreaded the return of the disease more than its beginning.)17 See Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, ed. and trans. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge (Harmondsworth and New York, 1983, repr. 2004), p. 101. 17 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, EETS OS 45, 50 (London, 1871–72, repr. 1988), pp. 227–9. For a more updated but partial 16

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This passage suggests how the city (‘burg’) of the mind (‘mod’) must hold firm against predatory attack, particularly in times of prosperity and victory. Although they are ‘innan hira burgum fæste belocene’ (strongly enclosed in their cities), the men referred to in the lines above do not always defend their minds. Manish Sharma, with reference to Belshazzar who is ‘æt wine wealle belocene’ (Daniel, l. 695), notes that the verb belucan (of which ‘belocene’ is the past participle) can mean ‘to imprison’ as well as ‘to lock’ or ‘to enclose’.18 Alfred’s plans to translate and distribute works like the Regula pastoralis were underway during a period of large-scale Viking threat, attack and plunder. The mod-burh image speaks to and through the hostilities of the King’s time and emphasises strongly the need for learning, divine guidance and literacy in the face of oppression. Daniel promotes a similar message.19 It is fitting that the doom the Daniel poet describes as consuming the Israelites in Jerusalem in the shape of an assault on their ‘hean byrig’ is brought by the Chaldeans, a race that represents arcane lore and invades the city walls through demonic craft as much as military power. Although God often sends ‘gastas’ (angels), bearers of spiritual wisdom, to provide ‘lare’ (learning) and ‘snytro’ (teaching) for the Israelites (see ll. 25–27a), they are repeatedly rejected. This leaves the city, and the minds of the Israelites, open to attack as the Chaldeans come, summoned by the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar:       To þæs witgan foron, Caldea cyn,  to ceastre forð, þær Israela  æhta wæron, bewrigene mid weorcum.  To þam þæt werod gefor, mægenþreat mære,  manbealwes georn. edition see C. Schreiber’s King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis and its Cultural Context: A Study and Partial Edition According to All Surviving Manuscripts Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12 (Frankfurt, 2003). 18 ‘Nebuchadnezzar and the Defiance of Measure in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 86.2 (2005), 103–26 (pp. 119–20). 19 Examining the importance of Alfred’s reform for both medieval and modern poetic communities, Francesca Brooks highlights that one of Alfred’s key words for translation and understanding is OE areccan (a word referring to interpretation in both Exodus and Daniel), which can also have the meaning of ‘to raise up’ as ‘a building’. This suggests again the interconnectedness between Alfred’s rebuilding programme and the restoration of his people’s learning through translation and wisdom. See F. Brooks, Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones (Oxford, 2021), p. 111. See further DOE, areccan.

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(To that place the witan fared, the Chaldean kin, forward to the city, where the possessions of the Israelites were hidden amidst fort-works; to it the troop went forward, the famous force, yearning for baleful murder. ll. 41b–45)

In his notes on these lines, R. T. Farrell observes that ‘it is somewhat unusual for a group of magicians [his translation of ‘witgan’; l. 41b] to attack a city’.20 The OE noun witga and its derivatives (such as OE witan) are important in a poem that deals with the intellectual cores of certain societies and their capacity for understanding God’s power. Emphasis is often placed on the kind of gewit (intellect, knowledge) the Chaldeans misuse or abuse (perhaps in response to their status as ‘arioli, et magi, et malefici’ in the Vulgate; Dan. 2.2). The Chaldean ‘witgan’ are the brittle foundation of Babylon, they are ‘men learned in secular knowledge who have the power to destroy’,21 and their confused lore is at the cruel heart of that city’s government (at least up until the twelfth century, the related noun witan could also refer to a national assembly of royal counsellors). As a group of devilish counsellors, the Chaldeans cement the loss of the good, God-favoured ræd from Jerusalem and the openness of the Israelites, as a result, to the counsels and wiles of those doing Satan’s work. The ‘witgan’ approaching the city in the lines above are part of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom that the poet later tells us ‘ne wiston wræstran ræd’ (did not know a nobler counsel; l. 182b). The Chaldeans coming to Jerusalem are the ‘deofolwitgan’ (devil’s counsellors; l. 128a) who struggle to interpret the ‘wyrda gerynu’ (mysteries of [Godly] providence; l. 149a) contained within Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream. The confusion and tumult of that dream itself, about ‘hu woruld wære wundrum geteod’ (how the world was wondrously made; l. 111), sees the restless tyrant king demand to know its origins and its meaning. The ‘witgan’, however, ‘þa wiccungdom widost bæron’ (who practised their witchcraft most widely; l. 121), have not the ‘dom’ (judgement, ability; l. 128b) to ‘areccan’ (reckon, interpret, reach into; l. 133b) things that are ‘dygle’ (hidden; l. 130a) to them. Their dark arts fail when they are confronted with a work of God.22 To recall Exodus once again, these demonic counsellors cannot Daniel and Azarias, ed. Farrell, p. 49. G. D. Caie, ‘The Old English Daniel: A Warning Against Pride’, English Studies 59.1 (1978), 1–9 (p. 5). 22 R. Frank, ‘Wordplay in Old English Poetry’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1968), notes that ‘the difference between pagan witegdom and Christian prophecy is tested through wordplay. The poet reveals that the Chaldeans are unable þurh witigdom “through divination” to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dream oðþæt witga cwom / Daniel to dome, se wæs drihtne gecoren, “until the prophet Daniel came to judgment; he was chosen by the Lord”. By a kind of morphic division of tmesis, the poet separates the two elements of witigdom, allowing witga and dom literally 20 21

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unlock divine, spiritual meaning with any kind of ‘gastes cægon’ (Exodus, l. 525b). For this is a witan that preys upon those who have lost ‘eces rædes’ (the Israelites) or those who have never known it (Nebuchadnezzar). The annals and legislation from early medieval England make clear that the witan worked closely with the king, in times of strife and struggle, and were involved in matters of lawmaking and judgement. During Æthelred’s reign, for instance, the king’s witan may well have been viewed unfavourably for their bad advice.23 No doubt, then, viewing the Chaldeans as a nefarious set of counsellors spoke to deep concerns about the need for wisdom, and for good ræd, within a king’s circle, and within a king’s city, during the early medieval period – and especially during times of political instability up to and after the first millennium. As they invade Jerusalem, the Chaldeans replace Israelite ‘æcræftas’ (l. 19a, suggesting the craft and power of good law) with ‘deofles cræft’ (l. 32b). When the Chaldean forces ravage Jerusalem, they target the Israelite ‘goldhord’ (gold-hoard; l. 2b) held in Solomon’s Temple: bereafodon þa receda wuldor  readan golde, since and seolfre,  Salomones templ. Gestrudan gestreona  under stanhliðum, swilc eall swa þa eorlas  agan sceoldon, oðþæt hie burga gehwone  abrocen hæfdon, þara þe þam folce  to friðe stodon. (They [The Chaldeans] looted that glory of halls, Solomon’s Temple, of red gold, treasure, and silver. They plundered treasure under the stone-cliffs, all that those men were supposed to possess, until they had broken every stronghold, those which had stood as protection for the people. ll. 59–64)

Underlying this tragedy for anyone reading across the manuscript poems, or anyone with an experience of Exodus (which has close verbal and thematic ties to Daniel, as mentioned above), is that important instruction about unlocking gastlic meaning in text and in the text of the world with spiritual keys. The Israelites gained that ability and their ræd through faith, through tribulation and deep reading, and here in Daniel they fall as their own city, and their own interior mental and spiritual space, is broken through by ‘herige hæðencyninga’ to sandwich between them the concept which distinguishes Christian prophecy from pagan magic: the idea of God’s providence, here embedded in the name of His mouthpiece, Daniel, whose destiny evinces at every turn the omnipotence in history of drihtnes dom, “the judgment of the Lord”’ (p. 91). 23 C. Konshuh, ‘Anraed in their Unraed: The Æthelredian Annals (983–1016) and their Presentation of King and Advisors’, English Studies 97.2 (2016), 140–62, writes that the chronicler of the annals of Æthelræd II refers to misfortune as a product of the bad advice (unræd) of the king’s counsellors (p. 152).

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(an army of heathen kings; l. 54a). This is a demonic unlocking and breaking of fortified space. It is a metaphor for wasteful, bad interpretation, for unræd – for the kind of knowledge-seeking that is destructive to cultures and their people. More specifically in the passage above, the cornerstone of wisdom, Solomon’s Temple, is ransacked. Having the Chaldeans destroy Solomon’s Temple and break every ‘burg’ protecting the people of Jerusalem, the Daniel poet implies that the history and intellectual culture of the Israelites is demolished too. As treasures are taken from within the temple wall, the gems and jewels of the disciplined minds of the Hebrews are also stolen (and it is worth noting here how Old English poetry often imagines the mind as a treasure hoard).24 As the great architect of the ancient world, Solomon was an exemplar of Christian wisdom for several early medieval exegetes, and his temple, containing the Ark of the Covenant, reflected the stability, grace, and mystery of his kingship. In Exodus, the temple and its craftsman are heralded as emblems of lawful rule and good counsel: ‘þær eft se snottra sunu Dauides, / wuldorfæst cyning, witgan larum / getimbrede tempel Gode, / alh haligne, eorðcyninga / se wisesta on woruldrice’ (There, afterward, the wise son of David, the glory-fast king, by the teachings of the counsellor built a temple for God, a holy altar, the wisest of earth-kings in the worldly realm, Exodus; ll. 389–93). Connection to a lineage of great kings, and direction of wisdom, though the teachings of a witgan, towards God rather than against him, results in divine favour. Solomon represented stability in rule, too. In the dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, for instance, he is the wise king locked in a verbal duel with the knowledge-seeking Saturn, who is associated, in these texts, with Chaldea. Of the Chaldeans, Solomon and Saturn II tells us ‘wunnon hie wið Dryhtnes miehtum’ (they struggled against the Lord’s might; l. 151a).25 In the copy of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 Solomon and Saturn I, Solomon makes clear that the search for knowledge is futile without God: ‘Unlæde bið on eorþan,  unit lifes, wesðe wisdomes,  weallað swa nieten, Antonia Harbus writes that words describing the human corpus, and particularly interior mental space, encapsulate the ‘precious’ quality of the mind, as well as the potential and dangerous desirability of keeping the contents locked or hidden away. A. Harbus, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 2002), p. 70. Mize notes that ‘There are proper stores of thought and improper ones; the figurative treasure chamber may become filled with socially beneficial possessions (wisdom, right belief, appropriate attitudes) or harmful ones (deceit, vice, error), and either can be released into the world’ (‘Mind as Enclosure’, p. 86). 25 The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. and trans. D. Anlezark (Cambridge, 2009), p. 86. 24

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feldgongende  feoh butan gewitte, se þurh ðone cantic ne can  Crist geherian’ (‘he is unhappy on earth, useless in life, without wisdom, roams like an animal, like field-going cattle without understanding, he who is unable to worship Christ through the canticle’; ll. 21–4)26

The rupture of Solomon’s Temple in Daniel, therefore, highlights that the Israelites, by abandoning God’s teaching and their former reward of divine counsel, lose all they achieved through struggle and intellectual discipline, as well as those riches and sacred vessels into which they began to pour their worship and their wine. Jerusalem is left in ruins as the Chaldeans lead the Israelite remnant back to Babylon (ll. 65–78), and, as the poem changes its focus towards that place, few would dispute R. E. Finnegan’s claim that Daniel ‘is a poem about cities’.27 Finnegan reads Jerusalem ‘through the glass provided by Augustine’s De Civitate Dei and Enarratio in Psalmum 64’,28 as providing ‘reflections of the spiritual condition of its citizens’: before the Israelite fall, Jerusalem was the City of God; afterwards, it is merely literal, and its people become Augustine’s carnales Israelitae.29 But Daniel’s interest in the rise and fall of cities and the kingdoms and peoples they represent goes further than this: the poet observes in detail the manner in which interior, human intellectual space and exterior, built environments are co-dependent. By strengthening the mind and the faculties against spiritual assailants or mental unrest with good teaching and divine counsel, a culture can by extension fortify its kingdom against attack. The Daniel poet’s portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar, following on from the fall of the Israelites, applies this mind-model further, exploring the interior state of a tyrannical king and his violence against God.

Nebuchadnezzar: rule, right and the city

An in-depth study of the interior state of Nebuchadnezzar in the Old English Daniel allows us to think in more specific terms about the kind of model the Babylonian king might have offered to those concerned with the politics and Solomon and Saturn, ed. and trans. Anlezark, p. 60. Nebuchadnezzar’s madness and exile among wild beasts is envisioned in similar terms by the Daniel poet (Daniel, ll. 622–40) 27 Finnegan, ‘The Old English Daniel: The King and his City’, NM 85 (1984), 194– 211 (p. 204). 28 ‘The King and his City’, p. 195. 29 ‘The King and his City’, pp. 204, 209. 26

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drama of rulership, and the necessity of good counsel, during the early medieval period. Nebuchadnezzar overreaches in his search for knowledge and in his attempt to interpret dreams, violating God’s ordained limits because of his volatile and vengeful mind (or ‘mod’).30 Yet, following the trauma of a seven-year exile, Nebuchadnezzar eventually comes to realise that ‘god sealde gumena gehwilcum / welan swa wite, swa he wolde sylf ’ (God gave to each man prosperity or punishment, as he himself decided; ll. 643–4). In his final conversion, Nebuchadnezzar has ‘leohtran geleafan in liffruman’ (a more enlightened belief in the life-source; l. 642) because ‘him frean godes in gast becwom / rædfæst sefa’ (a mind secure in counsel came into his spirit from the lord God; ll. 650–1). This return to faith sets Nebuchadnezzar apart from other unwise figures punished by God in the manuscript: he can return from criminality and redeem himself, strengthening his mind with good counsel and wisdom. In this portrait of an unstable king, the Daniel poet covers an entire movement from fall and punishment to penance and redemption, and from unræd to a more measured way of reading the world, guided by the advice of prophets like Daniel himself. The kind of instructions prominent in Exodus that seek to move the audience of that poem towards deeper interpretation underlie the portrait of Nebuchadnezzar too and are developed in Daniel in a study of the king’s internal struggle and the eventual effects of beginning to understand divine revelation. This portrait of Nebuchadnezzar allows the poetic Daniel to build on the manuscript’s emphasis on the need for good counsel for those reading through it, or back and forth through it, attentive to those portraits of Lucifer, of Satan in hell, of Moses and of Pharaoh for example (some of the poetry’s models of good and bad kingship). Daniel’s presentation of Nebuchadnezzar provides the manuscript with a character study of an earthly ruler’s internal tumult caused by his refusal of counsel and wisdom, as well as his overblown and prideful belief in his own status over God’s. While he is king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar rules as a tyrant. That a complex figure like the Nebuchadnezzar of Daniel might have been an example of what not to do when in a position or seat of power for early medieval audiences, 30

For concepts of the ‘mind’ in the early medieval period, see L. Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto, 2011): ‘Four of the basic OE terms for the part of the human being responsible for thought are mod, hyge, sefa, and ferhð, all of which are typically translated as MnE “mind”. Mod additionally means “courage” or “pride” in many contexts, while the latter terms belong primarily to the poetic lexicon’ (p. 33). That the mind is being referred to with the more ambiguous terms can often be elucidated from context in the poem and sometimes, where spiritual wisdom is concerned, the operative psychological centre of rationale and memory can be read as the mind as tied to the soul.

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and even early medieval rulers or kings, is probable given that the Babylonian king emerges in other early medieval texts that reflect on earthly kingship. One important example is the reference to Nebuchadnezzar in Byrhtferth’s Vita S. Oswaldi, composed c. 997–1002, which traces Oswald’s virtuous life and the reform of King Edgar and Æthelwold from the perspective of Ramsey Abbey, positioning Edgar’s legacy against the backdrop of a range of biblical models, framing his life and its aftermath as a cycle of prosperity and fall. As Byrhtferth documents Oswald’s journey to the meeting of one of Edgar’s witan, he defines the successful king against Nebuchadnezzar: ‘Me’, inquit, ‘uiuente, non dirus tyrannus neque mordax lupus uobis noceri poterit; sed timeo post obitum mee resolutionis, ut non ursi sed etiam leones adueniunt qui dispergunt male quos mea munificentia congregauerat bene’ (iii. 10) […] Tunc piissimus rex—non ut ille Chaldaicus insaniens contra milites Dei, aut Decius infelix martyrizans pretiosos certatores Christi, sed (ut libet dicere) exemplum gloriosi imperatoris secutus Constantini—misericordia plenus dixit ad episcopum: ‘Trium optionem monasteriorum tibi concedo.’ (iii. 12) (‘While I am alive’, he [King Edgar] said, ‘neither cruel tyrant nor rapacious wolf will be able to harm you; but I fear that, after the dissolution of my mortal frame, not only bears but even lions will come who will disperse wickedly those whom my munificence had assembled kindly.’ […] Then the merciful king, full of clemency – not like that Chaldean tyrant [Nebuchadnezzar] raging against God’s soldiers, or like the wretched Decius martyring Christ’s glorious combatants, but rather (if I may say so) following the example of the excellent emperor Constantine – said to the bishop: ‘I give you the choice of three monasteries’)31

Byrhtferth, of course, works by way of hindsight following the anti-monastic reaction that saw secular clerics, who Edgar had forcefully stripped of their assets and given over to Benedictine houses, return to claim back whichever of these houses they could. But given that Byrhtferth was still in relative proximity to the height of the reform, the portrayal of Edgar here suggests that the Babylonian tyrant may have served the English king as a prime warning against ill-counselled rulership because of the way Nebuchadnezzar’s part in the cycle of biblical history suggested that failure in rule would 31

Byrhtferth of Ramsey: The Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2009), pp. 76–7, 78–9.

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bring fracture, violence and dissolution in the realm, allowing those lions and wolves to attack. Nebuchadnezzar emerges into Daniel as an instrument of God’s vengeance on Jerusalem, following the poet’s overview of the Israelite fall. As discussed earlier, the ruin of the Israelites and their city at the beginning of the poem is a warning against unsuccessful, ill-advised rule, and begins the poet’s investigation into the connection between the stability of the mind through the maintaining of ræd and the upholding of successful rule within a kingdom’s stronghold. When Nebuchadnezzar is introduced into the poem and into the manuscript, his ‘burhstede’ emerges at the same time: Awehte þone wælnið  wera aldorfrea, Babilones brego,  on his burhstede, Nabochodonossor,  þurh niðhete, þæt he secan ongan  sefan gehygdum hu he Israelum  eaðost meahte þurh gromra gang  guman oðþringan. (The lord of men, Babylon’s ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, had awoken the hostile hate through slaughter in his fixed stronghold, so that he began to search in his mind’s thoughts how he could most easily force away men from among the Israelites through an advance of aggressive ones. ll. 46–51)

Verbs such as ‘awehte’ (aweccan), ‘secan’ and ‘oðþringan’ all suggest powerful movement within interior, fixed places: the ‘sefan’ and the ‘burhstede’ (note that references to a ‘hean byrig’ bracket the emergence of Nebuchadnezzar at ll. 38b and 54b). There is tension here between surge and stasis, evoking the tyrannical mind rising within an enclosure. The brutality of Nebuchadnezzar’s inner workings is further emphasised by the nature of his ‘seeking’: it is not a search for God or for wisdom, but for ways to press forth ‘gromra’ forces, which evokes the active nature and physical manifestation of hostile thinking as well as Nebuchadezzar’s adversarial approach to rival nations.32 The particular hostilities ‘awoken’ in Babylon and in Nebuchadnezzar’s mind are ‘wælnið’ and ‘niðhete’, the former having arisen through, or as a result of, the latter. Wæl- situates the nið of ‘wælnið’ in the realm of physical slaughter. Nebuchadnezzar appears to awaken ‘wælnið’ within his own mind and of his 32

Adjectival gram can denote that which is inimical (an ‘enemy’; see Beowulf, l. 762; Andreas, l. 216) as well as glossing Latin molestus and turbatus (often associated with the restless mind). The word is attached to the ‘mind’ elsewhere in the corpus: gramhydig (having hostile thought); gramheort (hostile in heart/mind); grammod (hostile of mind) (DOE, gram).

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own volition. This is a kind of anti-creation (or miscreation) that engenders hostility (OE niþ) and requires suppression (God’s niþ), with play, perhaps, on OE nyðor, the word used to define the ground or gravity, the lower place (as in Daniel, l. 492b, where God ‘set down’ Nebuchadnezzar). Both Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon will be brought low because of their affront to God and inability to read divine signs in the world (Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and the runic writing on the wall that comes to Belshazzar at the end of the poem are resistant and frustrating to Babylonian interpretation). Through Nebuchadnezzar the poet continues the exploration of the way a ruler’s state of mind or wellbeing in relation to God is connected to that of the kingdom and its main stronghold’s security. Because of his aggression and pride Nebuchadnezzar refuses to heed God’s messages, or the counsel of Daniel, and his people therefore remain beyond divine favour and without ræd while the king himself is ‘reðe and rædleas’ (cruel and without good counsel; l. 177a). While Daniel can ‘swefen reccan’ (explain the dream; l. 159a) that Nebuchadnezzar has had ‘þætte rices gehwæs reðe sceolde gelimpan’ (that each kingdom’s end must happen cruelly; l. 114), the prophet cannot make Nebuchadnezzar ‘metodes mihte gelyfan’ (believe in the creator’s power; l. 169). Therefore, instability and idolatry grow in the kingdom of Babylon: þa hie for þam cumble  on cneowum sæton, onhnigon to þam herige  hæðne þeode, wurðedon wihgyld,  ne wiston wræstran ræd, efndon unrihtdom,  swa hyra aldor dyde, mane gemenged,  mode gefrecnod. Fremde folcmægen,  swa hyra frea ærest, unræd efnde,  (him þæs æfter becwom yfel endelean),  unriht dyde. (when they sat on their knees before that image, the heathen nation kneeled to that idol, worshipped the false god, they did not know a nobler counsel, they performed unrighteous judgement, just as their lord did, marred by sin, made violent in mind. The people did as their lord did first, acted with illcounsel, did an unrighteous thing. An evil recompense came to them after that. ll. 180–7)

In this passage, the poem’s language recalls several moments in other Junius 11 poetry, such as the ‘unræd’ and lack of ‘riht’ of the rebel angels and the ‘lean’ they received from God at the beginning of Genesis A, for example, or, in terms of thematic language, the suggested equation of good counsel with righteousness and lawfulness evident in the Daniel poet’s placement of OE ræd and OE riht in proximity. The link in Daniel between the ruler’s own chaotic ‘mod’, led

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astray by ‘unræd’, and his people’s descent into the worship of idols (where they cannot know a better or more noble counsel) is explicit. This is important for two reasons when studying Daniel as a poem contributing to the impressions Junius 11 makes on its audience about good rule and ræd: first, it contributes to the manuscript’s forceful warning about the destructive nature of ill counsel and its ability to lead people towards hell; second, by showing how the decline of the Babylonian people, and their blindness to a heavenly presence, is tied to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of that people and city, the poem gives readers another clear picture of the way a ruler without ræd can destroy nations by leading them away from God’s favour. Later in the poem, Nebuchadnezzar will have to be removed from his city, and his people, and indeed from any kind of powerful position, to restore his own relationship with God. The poem thus makes a strong point about how a king or ruler is always responsible for his people and their heavenly benefits. Daniel’s interest in Nebuchadnezzar’s ill-counselled lust for power and both his internal chaos and the effects it has on his people has similarities with the popular medieval idea of the Rex iniquus, that model tyrannical king, Hilary Fox writes, that ‘exalted wrongdoers and debased the virtuous, gave unfair judgment, and led the country to general calamity’.33 Directions and lessons against such disastrous rule are also evident throughout important early medieval wisdom literature, particularly the Old English Boethius, which often turns to outlining how a king should control his power in knowledge of God’s. Though, like the translation of the Pastoral Care mentioned earlier, Boethius in Old English is associated with the Alfredian reform, it did have a long life and circulated through to the twelfth century. In terms of Old English poetry about kingship, and perhaps in terms of temporal proximity to some part of the Junius 11 project too, the tenth-century manuscript London, BL, MS Cotton Otho A.vi that contains a copy of the verse and prose Old English Boethius (also made in the tenth century and known as the ‘C-Text’) offers a productive comparison with Daniel and its warnings about the control of the mind for those in power. Metre 16, for instance, outlines the need for those ruling a kingdom to maintain mental stability: Se þe wille anwald agon,  ðonne sceal he ærest tilian þæt he his selfes  on sefan age anwald innan,  þy læs he æfre sie his unþeawum  eall underðyded […] 33

H. Fox, ‘Denial of God, Mental Disorder, and Exile: The Rex iniquus in Daniel and Juliana’, JEGP 111.4 (2012), 425–50.

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hwy bið his anwald  auhte ðy mara, gif he siððan nah  his selfes geweald ingeðances  and hine eorneste wel ne bewarenað  wordum and dædum wið ða unþeawas  þe we ymb sprecað?34 (He who wishes to possess power must first strive so that he himself can control his own mind within, lest it ever be all subjected to his vices […]. How is his power any the greater, if afterward he does not have control of his own inner mind and in earnest does not guard himself well in word and deed against the vices we speak about? Metre 16, ll. 1–4, 20–4)

The noun anweald is an important word for the versifier here: it refers at once to power, sovereignty and control.35 That mental control should function responsibly and in unison with power is made clearer in the quotation above through the rhyme that unites ‘anwald’ and the noun ‘geweald’ (also ‘control, power’). Anweald is a concept that recurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where, as Scott Smith writes, ‘it generally signifies political power and dominion over a group of territories and peoples’.36 An ideal ruler in the Old English Boethius, Nicole Guenther Discenza argues, ‘is a man aware of the limitations on leaders and the pitfalls of power’.37 But, as Metre 16 also outlines, and as the portrait of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel makes clear, if the ‘inner mind’ (ingeðances; l. 22a) of a ruler is not strengthened and controlled, vices will break through defences, leading to his downfall.

The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, ed. M. Godden and S. Irvine. Further quotations in this chapter from the Boethius are from this edition. This manuscript also contains the Vita Sancti Edwardi Regis et Confessoris, which was copied in the second half of the twelfth century, and a damaged, thirteenth-century fragment of an account of a group from Norfolk’s pilgrimage to Edward the Confessor’s shrine. The manuscript was damaged in the Ashburnham House fire of 1731. Parts of the Boethius text that are now damaged were recorded in Junius’s notebook (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 12). Both this manuscript and a manuscript that contains a prose translation (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 180) have prefaces that claim that King Alfred was the translator. 35 DOE, s.v. anweald A.1.b.i.a: ‘to have sway, rule, be powerful, keep control (over someone / something)’. 36 S. T. Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2012), p. 151. 37 N. G. Discenza, The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (New York, 2005), p. 85. 34

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Because the Daniel poet focuses on the relationship between Nebuchadnezzar’s mental state and its effect on the kingdom, the characterisation of Nebuchadnezzar in the poem has been called ‘a psychological portrait’ and read for its representation of the effects of exile and dreams on the tyrant king’s sanity in short articles by Gillian Overing and Antonia Harbus.38 Although Daniel has not been examined in major studies of early medieval psychology, such as those by Malcolm Godden, Britt Mize and Leslie Lockett,39 the Daniel poet does trace the journey of ‘Babilones brego’ (Babylon’s lord; l. 47a) from the moment that he ‘secan ongan sefan gehygdum’ (began to seek within his mind’s thoughts; l. 49) for the best way to conquer the Israelites, to his experience when ‘com on sefan hwurfan swefnes woma’ (the sound of a dream came turning [into his] mind; l. 110), through to his cerebral frustrations in the face of God’s mysteries because his ‘oferhygd’ (pride, overmind) is ‘mara on modsefan þonne gemet wære’ (greater in his mind-enclosure than was meet; l. 491). Overing and Harbus were concerned with ‘consciousness’ and ‘psychology’ in broad terms when it came to the poem.40 Furthermore, while the studies of the mod and psychology in Old English literature, such as those by Mize and Lockett, have turned to the early medieval metaphorical concept of the ‘mind as an enclosure’, Daniel contains some extended uses of this enclosure motif and another ambitious metaphor, one that places mental activity alongside or within a burh. This parallel between minds and cities structures several of the Daniel poet’s major episodes (e.g., the fall of the Israelites; ll. 1–45; the introduction of Nebuchadnezzar; ll. 46–103; Nebuchadnezzar’s great boast; ll. 598–621; Belshazzar’s feast; ll. 675–764). It is through this interrelationship G. R. Overing, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Conversion in the Old English Daniel: a Psychological Portrait’, Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984), 3–14; A. Harbus, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 75.6 (1994), 489–508. 39 See M. Godden, ‘Anglo-Saxons on the Mind’, in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 271–98; Harbus, The Life of the Mind in Old English; Mize, ‘Mind as an Enclosure’; and Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies. 40 Overing’s study intended to demonstrate the manner in which the Daniel poet ‘is more interested in the inner transformation [of Nebuchadnezzar], [as] he focuses instead on the development of the king’s consciousness’ (p. 13), and emphasises the ‘reformed consciousness’ (i.e. an ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the bestial) that comes to the king following his exile. Harbus, on the other hand, outlines the agency and character of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, noting the considerable changes the poet makes, in these instances, to the Vulgate source. Hilary Fox has looked into Nebuchadnezzar’s mental disorder and exile and compares the figure to Elesius in Juliana. See further Fox, ‘Denial of God, Mental Disorder’. 38

1 5 8   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

that the poem outlines the way that the mental state of a ruler and the intellectual life and the kind of counsel at large within a city are responsible for its stability (we might recall the poet’s statement that the people of Babylon did not know ‘wæstran ræd’, a better counsel, at line 182b). Part of the Daniel poet’s focus on the mind is also an interest in its chaos. The interior of Nebuchadnezzar is imagined as a unregulated space that often swells over and beyond the boundaries of the king’s corpus. As previously discussed, such a lack of mental control is identified as a by-product of bad counsel and a lack of faith in God. In addition, and in connection with portrayals of Lucifer elsewhere in Junius 11, the king’s aggression and pride against God grow beyond measure (and it seems that lacking the ability, insight and interpretative abilities to perceive God’s power result in this). Nebuchadnezzar’s lack of intellectual control brings belief-relapse: when confronted with a sign or ‘token’ of God’s majesty – ‘swutol tacen godes’ (clear proof of God; l. 488a) – there is brief acceptance of the Lord’s might, before the Babylonian king’s mind falls back into his old ways again (see ll. 168–73a; 444–58; 486–95; 593–7). Nebuchadnezzar recognised (‘onget’; l. 487b) that the Three Youths had ‘wylm þurhwodon swa him wiht ne sceod / grim gleda nið’ (walked through the surge, as the grim hostility of the fire-glades did not harm them at all; ll. 463–4) through the ‘halige mihte, / wise wundor godes’ (Holy might, the wise miracle of God; ll. 472b–473a) but his mind cannot rest or stay firm in its appreciation of this power:       No þy sel dyde, ac þam æðelinge  oferhygd gesceod. Wearð him hyrra hyge  and on heortan geðanc mara on modsefan  þonne gemet wære, oðþæt hine mid nyde  nyðor asette metod ælmihtig,  swa he manegum deð þara þe þurh oferhyd  up astigeð. (He did no better, but pride harmed the prince. A haughtier mind emerged in him, and in his heart’s thinking came more in the mind enclosure than was meet, until the almighty measurer necessarily set him down, as he does to many of those who rise up through pride; ll. 488b–494)

Manish Sharma has drawn attention to ‘metaphorical movement’ within this passage and to the ‘intense focus on Nebuchadnezzar’s interiority’ and the ‘antithetical relation between Nebuchadnezzar’s ascension and God’s reaction’.41 This is evident in the clash of the rising mind (that ‘hyrra hyge’) and 41

‘Defiance of Measure’, pp. 108–9.

R ise and Fa l l Again in the Old English Daniel  159

the word ‘nyðor’ (meaning ‘below’ or ‘downward’ here with, as we shall see, heavy implications of God’s ‘niþ’ (hostility)).42 Babylon is also worshipped by Nebuchadnezzar for its height, as it ‘heah hlifigan’ (towers high; l. 602a), and its fame. Torn away from the city, Nebuchadnezzar comes to his final and immovable realisation, ‘on mode’ (in mind; l. 624a), that ‘metod wære, / heofona heahcyning’ (the measurer should be the high king of the heavens; ll. 624b–625a). Without learning or some kind of cataclysmic alteration (severance from a city, for instance), kings and rulers on earth are ever at risk of overreaching, the poem suggests.43 Belshazzar’s doom, for instance, lies in his drunken boast that ‘his herges hyrran wæron / and mihtigran […] þonne Israela ece drihten’ (his armies were more high and mighty […] than the eternal Lord of the Israelites; ll. 714–16). Elevation through learning and through acknowledgement of God’s omnipotence is what the Daniel poet promotes, while the emphasis on Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘oferhygd’ calls attention to a mind wrongfully overgrown: þa wæs breme  Babilone weard, mære and modig  ofer middangeard, egesful ylda bearnum.  No he æ fremede, ac in oferhygde  æghwæs lifde. (Then the guardian of Babylon was famous, proud and renowned over the earth, terrifying to the children of men. He did not keep the law, but in every way lived in immense pride; ll. 104–7)

Sharma does not mention the movement and resistance suggested in the almost excessive rhyme of these lines (at its most prominent in those enveloped by ‘oferhygd’ (l. 489b) and ‘oferhyd’ (l. 494a)): the mind is ‘hyrra and mara’ than what is ‘gemet’ in the law of the ‘metod’, who ‘nyðor asette as he manegum deð who up astigeð’. 43 Nebuchadnezzar does not heed Daniel’s ‘fæstlicne ræd’ (firm advice; l. 585b) that the great fallen tree, ‘heofonheane beam’ (heaven-high beam; l. 553a) symbolises his city and his glory (‘Swa þin blæd lið’ (so your glory lies; l. 562a)); ‘ac his mod astah / heah from heortan; he þas hearde ongeald’ (but his mind ascended, high from the heart; he paid hard for that; ll. 596b–597). In Genesis B, conflict between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ states is invoked frequently. God, characterised as ‘hearra’ (lord), clashes with Satan, who ‘ongan ofermede micel / ahebban wið his hearran’ (began to raise a great arrogance against his higher/master; ll. 293b–294a). Later, Satan also ‘ongan ofermod wesan, / ahof hine wið his hearran, sohte hetespræce, gylpword ongean […] Ne meahte he æt his hig findan / þæt he Gode wolde geongordome, þeodne þeowian’ (began to be prideful, raised himself up against his Higher, sought hatespeech and boastful words […] He could not find it within his mind that he would serve God, the king in allegiance; ll. 262–7). 42

1 6 0   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

Gillian Overing writes that ‘oferhygd’ is Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘major failing’, for it does not allow him to ‘see outside of himself, to expand his limited sensory understanding and imagine a reality greater than the self ’.44 He cannot uphold law (‘æ’), much like the Israelites he conquers, because his mind does not cultivate the discipline and wisdom required to interpret and understand it. But Nebuchadnezzar also expands his interior thoughts, just in the wrong direction. Potentially virtuous qualities are negated when they are over-applied or internalised, as the passage above suggests: a ruler can be ‘modig’ (brave, as the Israelites were when in God’s favour; l. 7b) and abide by a ‘mære’ (a boundary, limit, confine, border). If the mod stretches over certain limits, however, ‘modig’ turns into ‘pride’ (one of the more negative meanings of the word) and ‘mære’ becomes ‘fame’, fearsome and terrible (OE mære has the meanings ‘renown’, as well as ‘mare’, ‘nightmare’, ‘monster’), growing ‘egesful’ (terror-full). Inability to keep the mind contained is what causes Nebuchadnezzar’s ongoing unrest and uprise, which God must push down. Metre 25 of the Old English Boethius outlines the nature of ‘ofermodum […] eorðan cyningum’ (proud […] earthly kings; ll. 1b–2) who show no regard for ‘freonde ne feonde’ (friend nor enemy; l. 16a) because such a ruler is ‘to up ahæfen inne on mode’ (too elevated within his mind; l. 19). Here we have a definition of an overly ambitious earthly king that resembles the Daniel poet’s representation of Nebuchadnezzar: þæt of ungemete  ælces ðinges, wiste and wæda,  wingedrinces […] sio swiðe gedræfð  sefan ingehygd monna gehwelces,  þonan mæst cymeð yfla ofermetta,  unnetta saca. (that from a lack of measure in all things, sustenance and clothing, the drinking of wine […] it (ofermod) greatly stirs up the inner mind-thoughts of every man, when very often comes evil over-measure, useless antagonism. ll. 38–9, 42–4)

The versifier goes on to detail the ‘hatheortnesse’ (hot-heartedness; l. 47a) of such figures, who are also ‘gebolgene’ (l. 45), and is almost resigned to the notion that these worldly men will never attain ‘awuht goodes’ (anything good; l. 59b). The Daniel poet targets similar mentalities in his recreation of the biblical Nebuchadnezzar whose mind was swollen beyond rational bounds.

44

Overing, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Conversion’, p. 10.

R ise and Fa l l Again in the Old English Daniel  161

Yet, the biblical story of the king’s conversion provides the poet with the foundation on which to construct a particularly mind-focused solution. Throughout Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar’s pride is linked with a lack of intellectual cultivation, and with the absence of counsel and wisdom within the kingdom of Babylon. Misdirected belief is at its most extreme in Nebuchadnezzar’s final boast (the final straw for God, who forces the Babylonian king into exile ‘for ðam gylpe’ (for that boast; l. 612a)): ‘Ðu eart seo micle  and min seo mære burh þe ic geworhte  to wurðmyndum, rume rice.  Ic reste on þe, eard and eðel,  agan wille’ (‘You are mine, the great and famous city that I wrought to my worth of mind, a roomy kingdom. In you I rest, dominion and homeland I will possess’; ll. 608–11)

There is irony in the stability Nebuchadnezzar sees in his city, which to him is a place of peace and rest, when considering the poet’s use of it as a model of the king’s prideful mind, constricted (rather than ‘roomy’). The only way to God for Nebuchadnezzar is through the psychologically traumatic severance of his body and mind from his city stronghold as ‘seofon winter samod susl þrowode, / wildeora westen, winburge cyning’ (The king of the wine-stronghold suffered torture in the wilderness of wild beasts for seven winters altogether; ll. 620–1). The movement from one extreme place to another is expertly evoked by the clash of ‘westen’ and ‘winburg’ in the same line. Detachment from the wine-city is also a relocation to physical and mental wide open space in which no opposition or enmity between human nations is permitted to exist. As such, the hostile nature of mental unrest resulting from high ambition, faith in artifice, misguided counsel (and, in this case, the king’s witan) and absence of measured thought is cured: following his long rehabilitation, Nebuchadnezzar ‘metod onget’ (understood the measurer; l. 630b), became ‘mætra in modgeðanc’ (more measured in his mind-thought; l. 634a) so that ‘him ofer eorðan andsaca ne wæs / gumena ænig’ (no man over the earth was antagonist to him; ll. 668–669a). The poet’s message and the poem’s own ræd crystallise in these lines, and the strong impressions made by the accounts of the Israelite fall and Nebuchadnezzar’s rise, fall and eventual faith in God ring out: a strong mind is one cultivated from a measured, faithful and disciplined life. This is achieved, the poet suggests, by seeking the qualities connoted by ‘eces rædes’ – eternal and divine counsel, and ways of interpreting God’s messages and the counsel he sends to earth through his subjects and his mysteries. Such a mind does not seek satisfaction in works of human creation

1 6 2   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

but aspires to God, to the afterlife, through wisdom and care (not through war or aggression) and, in strengthening the mind in such a way, rulers may defend themselves against hostilities arriving from without but also, as the final lines of Nebuchadnezzar’s historiographical portrayal make clear, a widespread cultivation of ræd and wisdom might extinguish antagonism altogether. The Daniel poet, it seems, allowed himself some belief in that premise. The work of the scribe who copied Genesis A and B, Exodus and Daniel comes to a halt with the last surviving lines of Daniel, before a group of new scribes enter the fray with their copy (our only copy) of Christ and Satan, a poem that revisits many of the events of the Junius 11 book it came to join. Those working on ‘Liber II’ thought it was very important that the manuscript had this kind of final section, one that looks back through the other poetry from a more explicitly Christological perspective. As piecemeal and broken as the poetry of Christ and Satan can be, it demands recall and re-reading of the other poems, demands a re-circling through much of the history already accounted, in the last, but largest and most forceful, exhortation concerning good ræd and rightful interpretation in the codex.

5 Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle On page 213 of Junius 11 a new kind of poetic text begins, running through to page 229 (see Fig. 8). It differs dramatically from the other poems in the sequence: it is in a different script to that of the hand that copied the Genesis, Exodus and Daniel poems and there is little evidence that it was to be illustrated in the same way as the poetry that precedes it.1 Here and there the text is cramped into a page. At times it is worn, even rushed, and the ink has been smudged (pages 214 and 224 are good examples of the latter) and it shows signs of interference by a later ‘corrector’ who attempted to rework its language into late West Saxon.2 Modern editors have sought to repair and amend a substantial number of words that would otherwise be incomprehensible, or have filled in gaps where the alliteration is incomplete.3 There is a sense of disorder lingering around this poetry. The text on these final surviving pages of the last gathering of Junius 11 has been called Christ and Satan since 1857 at the latest,4 although editors and There are some drawings, however. On page 225 there is an incomplete carpet design in the bottom half of the page, which I discuss below; on page 229, where the text of this poem and of Junius 11 comes to its end, there is an apparent space for an illustration; and on page 230, there are two incomplete sketches of what seem to be interlace circle patterns. 2 The same corrector also turned their hand to Genesis B, which might suggest ways in which the latter pages of Junius 11 encouraged early readers to revisit earlier pages in a more non–linear practice of interaction and comparison (Genesis B, of course, offers versions of the angelic fall and the strife in Eden and both of these events are depicted in different ways in Christ and Satan). Emily V. Thornbury points out that some of the poetry of Christ and Satan is the work of the ‘Renovator’ (Section II, for example), viewing ‘the substantial differences of metrical style between parts of Christ and Satan’ as ‘the working practices of at least two poets’. See E. V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 177–82 (p. 177). 3 When quoting Christ and Satan from Finnegan’s edition, I have noted the emendations of the editor (and sometimes of other editors) of manuscript forms when relevant, or when the meaning of a particular poetic passage has been altered. 4 Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Poesie, ed. C. W. M. Grein, 4 vols. in 3 (Göttingen, 1857–64), I. 1

Figure 8.  MS Junius 11, page 213: the beginning of Christ and Satan. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 6 5

critics working with that title have yet to agree on just how many poems are present. Some see one unified poem, while others see two or three fragments of verse roughly melded together.5 This poem contains passages of instruction and homiletic calls to interpret the world and asks the reader to be mindful of the tragedies that have befallen figures from salvation history. Given that Christ and Satan was added to the manuscript some time after work had halted on the project that gives us ‘Liber I’, those who picked the work up again were keen to see that the Old Testament portion of the manuscript continued towards an appropriate end with poetry in which Christ’s defeat of devilry, and hold over all time, takes centre stage. Yet, as it exists now in the Junius 11 codex, Christ and Satan is more than a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. It is a sequence of interrelated passages that are arranged into a pattern offering the opportunity for each of its twelve, numbered sections to be compared or contrasted with one another. Historical cataclysms in Christ and Satan, such as the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement, are positioned so that they are in proximity, so that one might intensify and charge the other. In a similar fashion, as Christ and Satan became part of Junius 11, it altered the way other poems in the manuscript could be re-read. Its inclusion created the potential for an audience to read backwards through the codex from the perspective of another poem that offers explicit instructions, encourages penance, and has concerns about the approaching end of time. In this chapter, I want to address Christ and Satan not as a conclusion to the Junius 11 poetry, but rather as a poem that re-ignites and returns to the concerns and reiterations that are threaded through the poetry of Genesis, Exodus and Daniel. At times there are direct links between the poetry of Christ and Satan and these ‘Liber I’ poems on the level of vocabulary. With some frequency, Christ and Satan echoes important guidance offered in other parts of the manuscript too: one example, a passage that instructs readers to ‘unlock’ Christ’s ‘locks’ in order to read deeply and in a gastlic fashion (Christ and Satan, ll. 298–300), recalls the important passage on the ‘keys of the spirit’ found Critics have usually fallen into two camps, one arguing stridently for the poem as a deliberately unified work, the other – symptomatic of much earlier scholarly approaches to the poem, such as that in J. J. Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. W. D. Conybeare (London and New York, 1826, repr. 1964) – for it as a mutilated and fragmentary meshwork. See Christ and Satan, ed. Finnegan, pp. 26–36 for an argument in response to early scholars like Conybeare for the poem’s thematic unity. In addition, see readings by C. R. Sleeth, Studies in Christ and Satan (Toronto, 1982), pp. 3–26. D. Anlezark, ‘Lay Reading, Patronage and Power in Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, in Ambition and Anxiety: Courts and Courtly Discourse, c. 700–1600, ed. G. E. M. Gasper and J. McKinnell (Toronto, 2014), pp. 76–97, notes that Christ and Satan is ‘made up of three poems’ (p. 77).

5

1 6 6   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

in Exodus (ll. 523–34). Christ and Satan, through its depictions of the fallen angels, but also through its attentiveness to Christ’s power and his victories over evil, also reflects the themes of ‘Liber I’ in its focus on the need for good counsel and on the importance of seeking out deeper, even hidden, divine signatures in the world (a pursuit also connected to the application of ræd, of course). As with the poems that have come before it in the manuscript, Christ and Satan’s emphases are political in nature. They offer advice and warnings against misinterpretation and against the abuse of power that are like those we see by Wulfstan of York, or what we find in the proems or prologues to charters and laws, such as those associated with the kings of the late tenth or early eleventh centuries. But the poetry that takes up the final sections of the Junius manuscript is charged with more urgency than the other poems that go before it. Why it reads or ‘feels’ more pressing than the narratives and instructive elements of ‘Liber I’, or more anxious about its readers and the state of their souls, can be difficult to describe and pin down. As I argue in this chapter, though, this urgency most likely stems from the ways Christ and Satan adds to the manuscript’s calls for counsel and rightful interpretation with more explicit instructions on how to read events like the angelic fall and with guidance for its audience that seeks to move individuals towards penance and amends. Such advice goes hand in hand with a focus on the reader’s contemporary moment and the approaching end of time. To put it another way, Christ and Satan offers to readers more directly the kind of counsel – the ræd – that so much of the other poetry in the manuscript documents through its accounts of either those who did not pursue it, like Lucifer, or those that cultivated it, like Moses, and the ‘Liber II’ poem does so within an overarching framework that is eschatological in nature. In what follows, this chapter will examine the make-up of Christ and Satan, demonstrating that its non-chronological or non-linear arrangement, in combination with the teaching and instruction it offers, allows for events from salvation history to be correlated or compared across the poem, before addressing how its themes of seeking amends and penance generated from such reading could have directed the political interests of the ‘Liber I’ poems towards dealing with the imminent Last Days.

Counsel and instruction

At least three hands copied Christ and Satan, which suggests that the task of including it with the other poems, even if decided on at a later stage, was a collaborative effort of some labour and also one that might have been under strain, whether from financial or from more troubling or disastrous

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 6 7

circumstances.6 The material state of the poem certainly marks it as something produced in a different situation or cultural moment than that of the ‘Liber I’ poems, which means that its place in Junius 11 can be difficult to explain. Janet Schrunk Ericksen suggests that a beneficial reading of Christ and Satan might be gained from looking ‘outward’ from Junius 11 and placing emphasis on the ways the poem is dissimilar to its companions in the manuscript. Taking this further, Ericksen examines the ‘distinctiveness’ of the poem from the perspective of wisdom literature, writing that arguing for ‘the unity of the manuscript’ as, for instance, J. R. Hall has done, ‘seems not to be the end of the story, for doing so does not fully address distinctions, material or literary, that define the contents of the manuscript and that separate Christ and Satan from the poems that precede it’.7 While Ericksen’s reading outlines that the poem ‘may have encouraged identifying with texts outside the manuscript’,8 more can be said about those elements that the restrictive label of ‘biblical poetry’ and studies of the manuscript’s ‘unity’ often overlook: the poem’s thematic vocabulary and connections with other Junius poems on the level of language as well as its interest in those themes evoked by OE ræd (counsel, interpretation, deep reading, for example) which are explored by the other poems in the codex. If Christ and Satan looks outward from Junius 11, it can do so with and for the other poems, not towards another genre necessarily, but towards the contemporary moment of its readers who, the poem seems to suggest, are at risk of damnation more than ever. It speaks to early medieval political instability and can also be understood in that context as a poem that has the potential to combine with its partners in the manuscript in order to encourage its readers to avoid eternally repeating their errors the way Satan is doomed to do in the final lines of poetry at the end of the Junius 11 codex. While criticism often makes a choice between defining Christ and Satan as a conclusion to the manuscript, as with J. R. Hall’s study of Junius 11 as an ‘epic of redemption’, or as a poem that can be understood from the perspective of traditions beyond the Junius manuscript,9 the poem continues to pose The first of these scribes, the second in the manuscript, wrote pages 213–15 (ll. 1–124 of the modern edition), the next wrote pages 216–28 (ll. 125–709), and the last wrote page 229 (ll. 710–29). 7 J. S. Ericksen, Reading Old English Biblical Poetry: The Book and the Poem in Junius 11 (Toronto, 2021), p. 125; J. R. Hall, ‘The Old English Epic of Redemption: The Theological Unity of MS. Junius 11’, Traditio 32 (1976), 185–208, repr. in The Poems of MS Junius 11, ed. Liuzza, pp. 20–52. 8 Old English Biblical Poetry, p. 125. 9 Take, for example, the aforementioned argument for Christ and Satan’s connection with the wisdom tradition outside of Junius 11, in Ericksen, Old English Biblical 6

1 6 8   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

difficulties and they lie in attempting to solve those issues that afflict Junius 11 itself, such as questions of linear narrative and chronology. The arrangement of events in the poem resists chronological order and is disruptive to any notions of linear time. Christ and Satan opens with an account of Christ’s creation of the universe (ll. 1–21), followed by passages about the fall of the angels and their lamentations (ll. 22–364), Christ’s Harrowing of Hell (ll. 378–440), his Ascension to heaven (ll. 557–563a), final Judgement (ll. 579–641), and finishes with what Jill Fitzgerald has called an ‘abrupt time-warp to Christ’s Temptation in the Wilderness’ (ll. 665–729).10 It is a disordered and piecemeal poem, with several passages that call out to the audience directly. As R. E. Finnegan suggested in his edition, the presence of different kinds of poetry in Christ and Satan, such as the ‘narrative-dramatic’ and the ‘homiletic hortatory’, works to manipulate the ‘linear chronology of Christianity to demonstrate what for want of a better term may be called moral chronology’.11 And yet, section or fitt numbers suggest that for scribes or those involved in some stage of its composition the poem had some kind of order, one that reflects cyclical time or at least synergies across time (with sections that can be compared), despite the fact that the poem copied onto the latter pages of Junius 11 might have been several different poems at some point earlier in its transmission. The poem’s non-linear ‘chronology’ is not a defect and does not seem to be a mistake: to recall the way the manuscript itself seems to provide opportunities for audiences to build readings and comparisons back and forth across different poems, Christ and Satan’s structure calls on readers to craft connections between events and episodes and to accumulate advice and impressions with which to aid them in the face of Christ’s return. If we look to the sections of the poem that portray the fallen angels (I–III, V–VIII, for example), key representatives of unræd and fallen power in Junius 11, and the way they are interspersed with instructions and counsel for the audience, we gain some sense of how the poem asks to be read, and how, as a tessellation of poetic sections, Christ and Satan places events – in this case, the angelic fall and the demonic confessions that continue in its wake – in arrangements that allow audiences to move back and forth through time, and Poetry; or with teaching traditions, to take the example of Christina M. Heckman’s work in Debating with Demons: Pedagogy and Materiality in Early English Literature (Cambridge, 2020), p. 125 (both of which, Ericksen and Heckman note, are also found within the other Junius poems). 10 Fitzgerald, ‘Measuring Hell by Hand: Rogation Rituals in Christ and Satan’, RES 68 (2017), 1–22 (p. 3). 11 Christ and Satan, p. 36.

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 6 9

through the poem and, by extension, through the manuscript, from a Christological standpoint. Points at which the poet will interject into the laments of the angels with instructions about how contemplation might take place appear to be carefully selected. At the beginning of Section IV (ll. 189–222), for instance, the poet offers direction. This comes after the section in which Satan has lamented in a way that reflects his inner chaos, moving from an acknowledgement of ‘Ne mæg ic þæt gehicgan hu ic in ðæm becwom / in þis neowle genip’ (‘I cannot understand how I came into this profound darkness’; ll. 178–179a) to ‘Wat ic nu þa / þæt bið alles leas ecan dreamas / se ðe heofencyninge heran ne þenceð, / meotode cweman’ (‘I know now that he who does not think to praise the heavenly king, the measurer, will be without all eternal joy’; ll. 180b–183a): the swift shift from an inability to understand to claiming to ‘know’ about the absence of everlasting joy in this speech suggests unstable knowledge that is not to be trusted. Following these words by Satan, the poet calls on the audience to read the fall of the angels as an ‘example’: ‘Forþan sceal gehycgan hæleða æghwylc / þæt he ne abælige bearn waldendes. / Læte him to bysne hu þa blacan feond / for oferhygdum ealle forwurdon’ (Therefore every person must resolve not to bring to anger the son of the ruler. Let it be an example to him how the black fiends all perished because of their pride; ll. 193–6). There is potential here for such advice to apply to images and poetry depicting Lucifer’s fall both elsewhere in the manuscript and in Christ and Satan, and for readers to apply it while ruminating on Christ and his approach, when, as this passage of instruction puts it, as readers we must Beoran on breostum  bliðe geþohtas, sibbe and snytero;  gemunan soð and riht þonne we to hehselde  hnigan þenceð, and þone anwaldan  ara biddan. (bear in our breasts joyful thoughts, peace and teaching; remember truth and rightfulness when we think to kneel to the high throne and pray the ruler for mercy. ll. 204–207).

In combination with having to be mindful of ‘soð and riht’, which echoes the prologue to Genesis A and the reference to the angels having ‘riht and soð’ before they fell (l. 21b), the poet’s recommendation to view the pitfalls of the angels as ‘bysne’ (as an ‘example’) is especially important because it shows us that this poetry (and indeed the poetry of Genesis A and B that also documents Satan’s failures) is intended to offer audiences of the manuscript models of behaviour. In this case, such behaviour would lead to failure to overthrow a lord and to eternal damnation. Reflecting on the fallen angels’ pitfalls, the

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poet’s instruction advises, can lead to an understanding of the tragedy and its lessons, providing the foundation for the right kind of prayer for mercy when Christ returns. Viewing the fallen angels as examples of the kind of striving that will anger Christ is important within the context of the poem because the angels confess their crimes in their own voices and later in the poem, as I will discuss, the speech by Eve (in Section VIII), who prays to Christ for mercy, invites comparison with the devils’ admissions (both Eve’s and the devil’s speeches are referred to as prayers that call for mercy). Emphasis falls on readers to examine just what in the speeches of the fallen angels might distinguish them from those who will be saved. In doing so, the poem also asks its audience to contemplate how the disastrous attempt to deny the power of Christ and heaven leads to damnation, encouraging its readers to think through how a community can be led astray. By focusing on confessions, on admissions of mistakes, the poet offers readers the chance to look back with and through the fallen angels, but at a remove that allows for those readers to release themselves from the same kind of fate. During the confessions and reminiscences of the fallen angels, key warnings also emerge for readers without the explicit comments of the poet, and these have the potential to be intensified by the other works in Junius codex through verbal echo. At the end of Section V, Satan outlines how he was able to stand out and create the illusion that he was prophet and teacher while in heaven:       ‘Ongan ic þa steppan forð ana wið englum,  and to him eallum spræc: ‘Ic can eow læran  langsumne ræd, gif ge willað minre  mihte gelefan…’’ (‘I stepped forward then, alone amongst angels, and spoke to them all: ‘I can teach you long-lasting counsel, if you will believe in my power…’’; ll. 246b–249)

These lines are revealing, both for an audience that recalls other poetry in the manuscript and for an audience attentive to Christ and Satan as a poem that guides them away from deceptive counsel and teaching. By having Satan confess that he misled his followers with the promise of ‘langsumne ræd’ (long-lasting counsel), the manuscript’s impression of ræd that has developed through usage in different, but related, poems and contexts becomes even more complex: at the beginning of the poetic Exodus, of course, the benefits of ‘langsumne ræd’ would come to the Israelites who followed the teachings of Moses towards their salvation and prosperity (ll. 1–7). But here in Christ and Satan the admission by Satan that he offered this quality of counsel warns

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readers of the possibility that promises of such counsel may be deceitful, and that they must guard against falling prey to the wrong kind of counsel, the wrong kind of ræd (the unræd of hell, perhaps, that was described in Genesis A). As highlighted in my chapter on Exodus, ‘langsumne ræd’ is also a quality mentioned by Wulfstan in his Institutes of Polity as a key characteristic of successful rule and kingship and as a quality obtained by following ‘Godes lare’ (God’s teaching). Noting these occurrences of the term in the Junius Exodus and in Wulfstan’s political writing helps us understand that long-lasting ræd offered by Satan, a figure distant from and resistant to God’s teaching, while it may appear to offer benefit, is in fact destructive – it is ‘langsumne’ only in the damnation it brings. Satan’s confession suggests that the audience of Christ and Satan should be wary of false counsel, and of the promise of salvation that does not come from God and Christ, while it also asks them to look elsewhere in the Junius book, and to other points in salvation history, for the right kind of long-lasting ræd. Christina M. Heckman has written that Satan’s guise as a deceptive teacher would have provided ‘a particularly instructive trope for a lay audience of the later tenth or early eleventh century’ and that this identity of Satan might be read as a ‘unifying trope’ of the poem.12 At this point in Christ and Satan, Satan offers to teach (‘læran’) the angels what can only be gained by following the examples of the Christian faithful. Revealing that he offered ‘langsumne ræd’ to his potential followers in a poem in which homiletic and instructional interruptions by the poet encourage watchfulness and deliberation, Satan’s words ask the early medieval reader to uncover the inherent paradox and deceit of his language: he has, after all, offered his potential followers something he has misread and cannot attain. One wonders if the potential for readers of the manuscript to recall Moses’ gift of eternal ræd at the end of Exodus provides them with their own opportunity to circle back through the manuscript purposefully. Rather than circling around like Satan, whose whirling is endless and unfruitful in Christ and Satan, readers tracking back through Junius 11 from the vantage-point of ‘Liber II’ might find purposeful ways of combating such a demonic relationship to time. As the present book has argued, the conflict between ræd and unræd is one of the central themes of the Junius 11 manuscript, and these are concepts closely tied to matters of learning, teaching, interpretation and wisdom. Towards the end of section VI (the section which follows Satan’s admission that he offered 12

C. M. Heckman, ‘Dialectic and Dispossession: Demonic Disputatio in the Old English Christ and Satan’, in Transitional States: Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. G. D. Caie and M. D. C. Drout (Tempe AZ, 2018), pp. 213–34 (p. 215).

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‘langsumne ræd’), the Christ and Satan poet offers another homiletic passage, one that occupies an important place between the long sequence of demonic laments and the accounts of Christ’s Harrowing, Ascension and Judgement (which will dominate the second half of the poem). This passage turns once again to the ways in which the audience can avoid the kind of unræd that destroyed the rebel angels and left them beyond any hope for absolution: Deman we on eorðan,  ærror lifigend, onlucan mid listum  locen waldendes, ongeotan gastlice!  Us ongean cumað þusend engla,  gif þider moton, and þæt on eorðan  ær gewyrcað. Forþon se bið eadig  se ðe æfre wile man oferhycgen,  meotode cweman, synne adwæscan. (Let us consider, while we are living on earth beforehand, to unlock the ruler’s locks with skill, to understand spiritually. A thousand angels will come to meet us if we are permitted there and if we worked for that before on earth. Therefore, he who is ever willing to renounce crime, please the creator, and wash away sin will be blessed. ll. 298–305a)

Christ and Satan will frequently refer to the end of time, as it does here, where, specifically, the emphasis falls on the rewards that will come to those who are able to read both text and world for Christian meaning and renounce their sins. There are echoes of the final passages of Exodus here too, where an account of Judgement Day is preceded by the image of unlocking through the ‘lifes wealhstod’ (interpreter of life, or intellect; l. 523b) with ‘gæstes cægon’ (keys of the spirit; l. 525b) so that ‘ræd forð gæð’ (good counsel will go forward; l. 526b). This refers to the unlocking of Old Testament scripture with a Christological key, but also to a deep reading of signs in the world informed by Christ’s teachings. If examined with the confession by Satan that he sought to teach ‘langsumne ræd’ in mind, this homiletic passage in Christ and Satan stands as a reminder of the benefits of contemplating Christ’s mystery and strength, and a pointer for those who do penance, who renounce or confess their crimes on earth while they can: they will not find themselves in the Satanic position of eternal guilt and expectation, or be drawn into his errors or false promises, and will be able to ‘adwæscan’ their sins. Read alongside Satan’s admissions of guilt and false teaching in previous sections of the poem, ‘adwæscan’ has special relevance, and its associations will also be important for the later sections of the poem in which Eve seeks penance through confession. The verb has a broad semantic range. It occurs

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 7 3

frequently in contexts where it means ‘to extinguish, put out (fire, lamps, etc.; that which burns or shines acc.)’, but it often has figurative implications when it comes to ‘putting out’ or ‘dousing out’ sin, while in homiletic writings of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, such as those by Ælfric, it most often has the sense of ‘to eliminate, put an end to (something); to annul, blot out (sin, etc.); to subdue, extinguish (a practice, faith, or doctrine)’.13 In the context of the poem, achieving the extinguishing or washing away of sin through confession or penance will be suggested as a way to repeatedly defeat devilry and its darkness, its wrongful teaching, its unræd. Achieving this, this homiletic passage suggests, comes through unlocking the ‘locks’ of the ruler (those ‘locen waldendes’; l. 299b), an image qualified by the reference to ‘ongeotan gastlice’ (suggesting a recognising, understanding, or reading, spiritually; l. 300a). As Exodus has taught us, these locks suggest the intimacy required when reading scripture and poetry, as well as the concealed meaning – or presence of Christ – beneath biblical texts; and they highlight too the need to be ever watchful of signs and phenomena that can reveal important spiritual messages. But the lock image also has the potential to bring to mind both the role of St Peter at the Judgement, depicted in several Old English homilies and in numerous forms of early medieval art as locking the doors of hell,14 and of Christ as the key of David (clavis David): Jesus opens Old Testament scripture and fulfils its prophecies; opens the doors of heaven; and batters down the doors of hell at the Harrowing.15 Heckman suggests that the idea of understanding things in ‘gastlice’ terms in this passage in Christ and Satan is a reference to ‘inventio, the discovery of the arguments that will produce right belief rather than the flawed propositions of the devil’ and that skill ‘can release it, but only with the exercise of wise and sound reasoning, the ratio God implants in the mind’.16 DOE, s.v. adwæscan. C. E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001), draws the connection between the image of Peter on page 9 of Junius 11 with his role as a ‘gate-keeper’ elsewhere in early medieval art, such as the depiction in the New Minster Liber Vitae (c. 1031), where he opens heaven with a key in the upper parts of the page, and clubs a demon with the key in the middle register (p. 56). 15 See Karkov, Text and Picture, p. 59. In Christ I of the Exeter Book, for instance, Christ ‘locan healdeð, lif ontyneð, / eadgum upwegas’ (holds the locks, opens life, the ascent to heaven; ll. 18–19a). There is an emphasis here on the connection between unlocking and illumination or enlightenment, gesturing to the ways opening wisdom through Christ’s teaching is a reflection of the way Christ will unlock the gates of heaven for the enlightened, for those who have through penance and confession extinguished their sins. 16 Debating with Demons, p. 116. 13 14

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This homiletic passage in Christ and Satan paves the way for the poem’s movement from the angelic fall and its aftermath to other major events from the life of Christ by making clear that this poetry has underlying, hidden, signals beneath the textual surface. But the events documented by the poem, such as the Harrowing of Hell, point both back and forth in time (the Harrowing being a precursor of the Judgement but also featuring Eve’s memories of her fall in Eden), as if to challenge readers to avoid what Emily V. Thornbury calls ‘the potential pitfalls of their own minds’ and ‘the hazards of inward misjudgement’17 – that is, while giving instruction, and representations of those who failed to implement it, the poetry of Christ and Satan also demands that readers begin to apply it while moving through the latter sections of Junius 11. Events of the last portions of Christ and Satan, particularly those taking place within the frame of the cycle of Christian history (rather than the lot of the fallen angels, which lies outside of it), are characterised by an interest in penance and futurity. In the next section, I will examine the arrangement of the poem in more detail while beginning to look ahead to those sections of Christ and Satan that focus on Christ’s Harrowing, the event that encourages confession and amends in the lives of its readers because of the way it prefigures but also resembles the Last Judgement in this poetry. The Last Judgement and the end of time were political concerns, too, in the later decades of the early medieval period: the passages of Christ and Satan detailing Christ’s descent into hell can be usefully understood in the context of early medieval writings from the reign of Æthelred II and its aftermath, when the desire to move the country towards acts of penance in order to gain divine favour became prominent, intensified by a growing sense of the end times, which filtered through into political action.

Time and symmetry

In the bottom half of page 225 of Junius 11 there is an unfinished line drawing of a geometric shape, a repeating acanthus pattern ‘of diamonds and quatrefoils filled with foliate rosettes’, that may be the work of Junius 11’s second artist (see Fig. 9).18 Whatever the purpose of this image – Catherine Karkov 17 18

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, p. 182. Karkov, Text and Picture, p. 26. B. Raw, ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 13 (1984), 187–207 (p. 203), also believes the rosette was there before the copying of Christ and Satan (because ‘the double line marking the bottom of the text was ruled above the sketch instead of at the bottom of the page and the outer edge of the text itself curves inwards towards the drawing’). J. R. Hall has a different view, arguing that the rosette was added after the text. Referring to

Figure 9.  MS Junius 11, page 225: rosette illustration. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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suggests it is a design intended for part of the manuscript binding, maybe even the outer cover19 – it occupies an interesting place in the codex, being the only illustration found on the same pages as the text of Christ and Satan. It was designed to be symmetrical, its top a reflection of its bottom, its left of its right. Yet it remains incomplete. While it is unclear if this drawing was there before the copying of Christ and Satan onto this page, it offers a fitting visual representation of the poetry it sits beside: Christ and Satan’s ending, with Christ commanding Satan to ‘measure’ hell’s ambit, parallels and inverts the poem’s opening account of Christ, the ‘meotod’, mapping out the cosmos and the days (ll. 1–18). As a repeating but incomplete rosette, the image gestures towards the circling, tessellating nature of the organisation evident in Christ and Satan. This striking visual pattern is a fitting illumination of the way the poem places disparate events within a larger design. As the sequences of angelic laments seem to repeat themselves, or rather have the fallen angels circle around and around unable to follow a clear course, they can be compared with speeches by the saved, which have a similar emphasis on confession and memory, such as those by the prisoners in hell and Eve during the Harrowing. Passages closer in proximity in the poem ask to be compared in such a fashion too. Sections of the poem, such as V (ll. 223–53) and VI (ll. 254–314), for instance, are more distinct parts than continuous narrative, yet their arrangement allows for comparison, back and forth. Combined with the poet’s frequent, direct instructions, this is part of the way the poem provides ræd: good counsel can be drawn from rumination on how the state of the devils in hell, for example, which the fallen angels themselves recall, differs to that of those saved at the Harrowing, thus offering certain guidance for an audience to escape everlasting darkness, and this includes awareness of Satan’s ability to offer the kind of ‘langsumne ræd’ an audience must avoid through their own skilful reading of the world. As with the unfinished drawing, Christ and Satan also has things missing. The poem is keen for sections to be compared yet it reflects, in its state but also in its subject matter, chaos and disintegration. This stems from the poem’s representation of time as designed intricately by Christ as well as its conception of the dissolution that will precede and propel the end of time itself. The poem often invokes the idea that knowledge of time and its end lie with Christ or God. The opening lines tell readers ‘Þæt wearð underne Raw’s work, he writes that ‘what was added as an afterthought to Junius 11 was not Christ and Satan but the incomplete sketches on p. 225 and p. 230’. See J. R. Hall, ‘“The Old English Epic of Redemption”: Twenty-Five Year Retrospective’, in The Poems of Junius 11, ed. Liuzza, pp. 53–68 (p. 66). 19 Karkov, Text and Picture, p. 26.

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eorðbuendum / þæt meotod hæfde miht and strengðo / ða he gefestnade foldan sceatas’ (It was revealed, unconcealed, for earth-dwellers, that the measurer had might and strength, when he fastened the surfaces of the earth; ll. 1–3). The adjective ‘underne’, a form of OE undyrne, suggests the might of the ‘meotod’ becomes ‘unconcealed’, as the OE word dyrne itself connotes concealment and unknowability and, as Benjamin Saltzman writes, OE undyrne implies ‘passive forms of manifestation over which human agents have little control’.20 The idea that things are less ‘revealed’ than ‘unconcealed’ is significant: Christ and Satan demands its audience to engage with the premise that there are things hidden from earthly inhabitants that can be revealed, others than can be drawn out through deep reading and counsel, but that there is nothing hidden from the creator: Deopne ymblyt21  clene ymbhaldeð meotod on mihtum,  and alne middangeard. He selfa mæg  sæ geondwlitan, grundas in heofene,  godes agen bearn, and he ariman mæg  rægnas scuran, dropena gehwelcne  daga enderim seolua he gesette  þurh his soðan miht. (the measurer in his might embraces around the deep expanse, and all middleearth. He himself, God’s own son, can look through the sea, the foundations in heaven, and he can count the showers of rain, their every drop. The finite number of days he himself set through his true power. ll. 7–13)

Delay of the subject, ‘godes agen bearn’, in these opening lines makes it an unexpected one, and it emerges late (it is far from the action, but also a different subject from the creation accounts in the Genesis poems), highlighting the unpredictable nature of divine revelation. Emphasis falls on the creator’s knowledge of time and space and, implicitly, on the knowledge of when it will end: days are numbered, they have been set out (‘gesette’; l. 13a) and reckoned. Christ and Satan refers to the knowledge of the creator as a mystery beyond the grasp of humankind, whose knowing is rooted in temporality, in earthly time. B. A. Saltzman, ‘Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf’, PMLA 133.1 (2018), 36–55 (p. 45). For secrecy in early medieval England more widely see Saltzman, Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2019). 21 The MS reads ybmlyt, not ymblyt, and, as Finnegan notes, the line has a jarring alliterative pattern, but the MS ybmlyt is likely to be a scribal misplacement of ‘bm’ for ‘mb’, making it likely to be a form of ymbliðan (‘to surround’). See Christ and Satan, ed. Finnegan, p. 91. 20

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This encourages acknowledgement of powers beyond the temporal world and of the deeper history than that covered by the conception, or measuring, of time itself. At the end of this passage on creation, the poet asks ‘hwa is þæt ðe cunne / orðonc clene nymðe ece god?’ (who except eternal God is able to know his ingenuity completely? ll. 17b–18), for example, and, following the first reference to the angelic fall in the poem, states that ‘God ana wat / hu he þæt scyldige werud forscrifen hefde’ (God alone knows how he condemned that guilty host; ll. 32b–33). The interests here at the beginning of Christ and Satan are in line with what the other poems in the Junius manuscript have explored through their early medieval representations of biblical and apocryphal figures: divine power cannot be out-thought, as the examples of Lucifer or, say, Belshazzar tell us, but faith and good counsel, the kind we see in the work of Abraham or Moses, moves those who follow them towards the unlocking of important mysteries and instructions. Most of the first seven sections of Christ and Satan, right up to line 365, deal with events that are also repeated in text and image elsewhere in Junius 11: the creation of the world and the fall of the angels. But these are related in more explicitly Christological terms by this poem at the end of the codex. This has potential effects on the Old Testament poetry, of course. It might prompt readers to revisit and recall images such as that on page 7 of Junius 11, which shows the third to the sixth days of creation in intersecting circles, with a cross-nimbed God, within a mandorla where the word ‘salvator’– evoking God and Christ and Spirit in their eternal presence – is written on the left-hand side, but also recasts certain events with a greater eschatological emphasis.22 Many of the lamentations of the fallen angels that follow this opening depiction of Christ’s creation call out to an ambiguous ‘nu’ and the poem makes clear that the fallen angels’ hold on time, and knowledge of the cycle of history, has disintegrated. The cries of Satan, ‘the ancient one’ (se alda; l. 34a), are shot through with references to past and present and what is or 22

The reference to the ‘grundas’ of heaven in the opening passage of Christ and Satan presents a geocentric model of the cosmos, familiar in scientific writings from Pliny and Isidore to Bede, and present in Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion (composed around 1012) wherein there are waters above the earth, between the higher heaven and the world’s atmosphere. But the ‘firmamentum in medio aquarum’ (firmament in the midst of the waters) could also point to the end of time. See On Genesis, ed. and trans. C. B. Kendall (Liverpool, 2008), p. 188. Bede, for instance, believed that these waters were released during the Flood of Noah’s age, and that this was a foreshadowing of the fire that would consume the world on Judgement Day. See D. Anlezark, Water and Fire: The Myth of the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England (Manchester, 2006), p. 78. The references to the water above the world, to Christ’s counting each drop of rain and to his reckoning of the days, reminds readers that the stability of this creation will not last, and the end can come at any time.

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what is not to come. These are confused, circulating speeches, as Satan ‘cleopað’ (cries out; l. 34a),23 reflecting the confusion of the fallen and their inability to locate themselves in space or time:       ‘Nis nu ende feor þæt we sceolun ætsomne  susel þrowian, wean and wergu,  nalles wuldres blæd habban in heofnum,  hehselda wyn. Hwæt, we for dryhtene iu  dreamas hefdon, song on swegle  selrum tidum, þær nu ymb ðone ecan  æðele stondað, heleð ymb hehseld,  herigað drihten wordum and wercum.  And ic in wite sceal bidan in bendum,  and me bettran ham for oferhygdum  æfre ne wene.’ (‘Now the end is not far, when we will have to suffer torment together, woe and misery, and have no abundance of glory in heaven, no joy in its high halls. What! We had joys from the lord formerly, singing in the sky in better times, where now the noble ones stand around the eternal, warriors around the high throne, praising the lord in words and works. But I must abide bound in torture, and never hope for a better home for myself because of my pride.’ ll. 40b–50)

Given that this speech comes from hell, Satan’s references to an approaching end suggest that the fallen host lies in eternal expectation of further punishment. The multitemporality of this speech, merging past loss with anxiety about the future, highlights that the course of time is confused and knotted in hell. Unlike the holy ‘meotod’, the fallen host cannot know the ‘daga enderim’ (l. 12b), nor even the days themselves. Hell does not have the benefit or hope of approaching day:       feond seondon reðe, dimme and deorce,  ne her dæg lyhteð for scedes sciman,  sceppendes leoht (fiends are angry, dim and dark. Here the creator’s light, day, does not illuminate, because of the shadow’s shade; ll. 103b–105)

23

The manuscript reads cleopad, but editors, including Finnegan and Mary Clayton in her Old English Poems of Christ and his Saints (Cambridge MA, 2013), agree on this emendation. The present tense of Satan’s action here adds to the temporal displacement of his speech.

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Fallen angels are ensnared in self-perpetuating nostalgia without a hold on time, which is also complete dislocation. In hell, memories afflict, but they cannot be precisely located in time, or arranged into a coherent order.24 To return to Satan’s reference to ‘nu’ and to the end not being far (‘Nis nu ende feor’; l. 40b) in Christ and Satan, and the poem’s opening passage that refers to the finite number of days allotted by the creator to his creation, we begin to see that the events of the angelic fall and of the creation that the Junius manuscript has covered in other poetry and illustration are now charged with more Christological and eschatological intensity. The Junius compilation itself reflects an ambition to evoke the cyclical nature of time, and of salvation history, with its overarching scheme moving forward, from its own versions of the events of Genesis to those of Exodus for example, but that ‘narrative’ is often interrupted with interpolations, or digressions, all the while charting rises and falls through history. Christ and Satan suggests that the cyclical nature of history was important to those who added it to the manuscript and, moreover, that they wanted it to be re-emphasised as in Christ’s control, and within his power to bring it to its end. The Christ and Satan poet’s references to an approaching end, and insistence on the misery of the rebel angels in hell, also aid the poem’s exhortation and encouragement of penance, which make up much of the counsel it offers to readers. Throughout Christ and Satan, the fallen angels are unable to gain penance despite their confessions. Satan acknowledges the indelible markings of his own guilt throughout those sections up to VII (beginning at line 365), when the focus shifts to Christ’s death, descent and ascension. The poet uses OE fah in Satan’s speeches: ‘ic eom fah wið god’ (‘I am hostile against God’; l. 96b) and ‘Nu ic dædum fah’ (‘now I am stained by my deeds’; l. 155b); ‘niðsynnum fah’ (‘stained by evil sins’; l. 179b) and ‘iudædum fah’ (‘stained by former deeds’; l. 185b). Former deeds seem consistently re-enacted through what is an ongoing recollection and lament. In this way, Satan himself is ‘fah’: at once stained by the marks of his former actions, ironically decorated by his failed deeds, but also in a consistent state of hostility, defeated by Christ’s vengeance following the rebellion in heaven.25 As the later sections of Christ and Satan turn to the saving of repentant sinners, including Adam and Eve during the Harrowing, the state of the devils in the earlier portions of the poem becomes ever more terrifying as a prospect: it is an endless cycle of confession without absolution. Fitzgerald, ‘Measuring Hell’, notes that the demons in hell parody early medieval rogation practices by constantly circling around in their laments as they ‘fail to understand the eschatological outcomes set in motion by their crimes’ and reveal that ‘both eschatological time and the divine plan are occluded in hell’ (p. 14). 25 DOE, s. v. fah. 24

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Following the account of the Harrowing, the poet’s reflection on that event in Section IX (lines 441–511) will stress this again:       Nalles wuldres leoht habban moton,  ah in helle grund; ne hi edcerres  æfre moton wenan seoððan. (they may not have the light of glory at all, but rather the abyss in hell, nor can they expect to ever return. ll. 447b–450a)

In the numbered sections V (ll. 223–54) and VI (ll. 254–315), the fallen host and their leader, whom they will often berate on account of his failures, continue to admit their wrongs again and again. The poet identifies the laments of the fallen angels as confessions explicitly at the start of Section V: ‘þa get ic furðor gefregen feondas ondetan’ (then I heard that the devils confessed still more; l. 223). The Toronto Dictionary of Old English defines andettan ‘as a religious act: to confess, acknowledge sin or sinfulness, especially, to confess sins in sacramental confession’.26 As the DOE demonstrates, andettan is a word common in homilies that stress penance and, of course, in the Old English penitentials.27 The irony of a collective confession that will not receive absolution, without a confessor to grant it, could not have been lost on, or failed to prompt, an attentive audience attuned to, or at least in earshot of, calls to repent in the face of approaching doom around the time of the first millennium. That a need for amends and confession might be reinforced in expectation of an imminent Last Judgement is suggested by the writings of homilists such as Ælfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan of York, and by the political situations leading up to and after the first millennium, which all offer useful contexts for understanding why there might have been a need to continue with the Junius project and see through the addition of Christ and Satan. Ælfric and Wulfstan consistently addressed the unknowability of the end and portrayed what Malcolm Godden has called a ‘cyclical sense of time’: an interpretation of history as a circling or backward-and-forward movement of recurring conflict after conflict, each with a kind of variation, until at last the Judgement would

DOE, s.v. andettan. This verb occurs in VI Æthelred, quoted above, to define one of the things Christians should do to gain mercy before it is too late. 27 For the Old English penitentials, including the Scriftboc and the Handbook for the Use of a Confessor, see S. Jurasinski, The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 133–41. 26

1 8 2   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

be at hand.28 Writings emerging up to and beyond the first millennium suggest a greater interest in the Last Days and penance, as well as an interest in looking back through history for examples of good conduct for the purposes of making amends and finding salvation (it may have been that the idea to add Christ and Satan to the Junius book was motivated by similar concerns to re-read salvation history and, at the same time, encourage penance). We know from the surviving charters and ordinances of Æthelred II’s reign that in the later 990s and early 1000s there was an attempt at political reform hearkening back to Edgar’s time, a penitential programme of sorts, one that sought divine favour. Following the defeat at Maldon, and rising Viking devastation, the charters produced from the mid-990s onwards suggest that the king wanted to atone for his unwise, youthful despoiling of religious houses following the death of Æthelwold in 984. Diplomas marking the king’s ill-counselled youth, such as the one recording the restoration of liberty to Abingdon in 993 drawn up at Winchester (which opens with a long contemplation of the fall of man) and then S 891 of Easter 997 (restitution of land to Old Minster, Winchester) and S 893 of Easter 998, stress the widespread need for repentance, but also make clear that Æthelred himself wanted to initiate a reforming project that might bring divine mercy. The expansion of this push for penance beyond the royal circle, and to the nation at large, becomes more explicit in later laws. Those codes drawn up at Enham, dated to 1008, known as V Æthelred and VI Æthelred, outline forms of penance applicable to all Christians. VI Æthelred encourages Christians to work with the king and ‘ure misdæda andettan georne and geornlice betan’ (yearningly confess our misdeeds and yearningly make amends), a sentence that recalls the Christ and Satan poet’s description of the devils’ confessions (‘ondetan’; l. 223).29 The Old English version of Wulfstan’s VII Æthelred, written c. 1009, opens by acknowledging that it is a response to ‘the great army’ (‘se micele here’) afflicting the country (most likely the great host brought by Thorkell as reported in the ASC), going on to command that Such a sense of history might also be reflected in the ways Ælfric and Wulfstan were ‘rethinking and rewriting their earlier works on the ending of the world’ after the year 1000. See Godden, ‘Millennium, Time and History for the Anglo-Saxons’, in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. R. Landes, A. Gow and D. C. Van Meter (Oxford, 2003), pp. 155–81. See also L. Roach, ‘Apocalypse and Atonement in the Politics of Æthelredian England’, English Studies 95.7 (2014), 733–57 and C. Cubitt, ‘Apocalyptic and Eschatological Thought in England around the Year 1000’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015), 27–52. For a study of Ælfric’s and Wulfstan’s homilies and their rumination on the Last Days see C. A. Lees, Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Minneapolis and London, 1999). 29 See Councils and Synods, pp. 338–73.

28

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all people should fast as ‘gemænelice dædbote’ (general penance) and to go ‘to scrifte’ (to confession). The aim of this is to receive God’s ‘mildheortnesse’ (mercy) and, through that, be able to ‘feondum wiðstandan’ (withstand (our) enemies). These sources demonstrate that the political discourse of late tenth and early eleventh century England was defined by a king under pressure to atone for past deeds in the face of approaching destruction. On a related note, the calls made in Christ and Satan for readers to consider how events from salvation history, such as the plight of the rebel angels, offered examples and models of fallen communities would have reaffirmed the warnings of ‘Liber I’ from a perspective more explicitly focused on the nearness of the End, encouraging its audience to contemplate their folly and repent. As a part of Junius 11, Christ and Satan continues to re-emphasise the catastrophic potential of misrule seen in the Old Testament poems that precede it because it gives further background to the angels’ place in hell, it charges ideas of creation and history with more of an eschatological and Christological urgency, and it references the ‘nu’ of its audience several times. In the next section, this chapter will examine the portrayal of the Harrowing and of Christ’s defeat of devilry from the perspective of the poem’s interest in cyclical history and making amends in expectation of the end times. By depicting the defeat of Satan and the sinful by Christ as well as the ascension of the faithful, Christ and Satan also presents possible futures for its early medieval audience, suggesting that the history covered by the manuscript, into which this audience is imbricated, will end with Christ, but the nature of that ending for its readers depends on how they heed the counsel of the poem and of the history it reflects.

Harrowing, judgement and penance

The Harrowing of Hell had an important place in salvation history as it was understood by vernacular writers in early medieval England. The story had been developing from the fifth-century apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, but other strands of influence are evident.30 Versions of Christ’s descent into the 30

While the Gospel of Nicodemus also survives in three Old English translations from the Latin (Cambridge, UL, MS Ii. 2. 11, from the latter half of the eleventh century; London, BL, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, Pt I, from the middle of the twelfth century; and London, BL, MS Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, 87v–100r, also from the middle of the twelfth century), Thomas N. Hall has demonstrated how difficult and perhaps unnecessary it is to read the Gospel as a source for Old English Harrowing accounts, noting that ‘by the late Anglo-Saxon period the story of the Harrowing had become so thoroughly a part of Christian lore’ that any connections with the Gospel might also be traced to other sources. See T. N. Hall, ‘The Euangelium

1 8 4   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

abyss were manifold, and brief accounts survive in poetry beyond Junius 11, while prose texts such as the Old English Martyrology and the later Blickling Homily VII, for Easter, demonstrate ways the story could stress the need for penance and invoke the question of humankind’s fate at the Last Judgement, for which the Harrowing offers a precursor. Blickling VII has close verbal and structural parallels with Christ and Satan, enough to suggest that the poem’s interest in the event lies in its potential to instruct penance (this is the aim of the Easter homily too), while the copying of the Blickling group near the turn of the millennium also suggests the importance of concerns about the Last Judgement during this period. Christ and Satan devotes a great deal of attention to the Harrowing (along with the Exeter Book Descent into Hell it is the most extensive account in Old English poetry), placing it between the laments of the fallen angels and the description of what will happen at the end of time.31 Section VIII and much of section XI of Christ and Satan detail the Harrowing and begin by making clear that Satan ‘wrohte onstalde’ (originated strife; l. 368b) in heaven, referring again to his attempt to repent for it and his inability to ever receive re-entry into the salvific kingdom (ll. 373–378a). This passage turns to Christ’s entry into hell suddenly, perhaps reflecting the inability of the demons to measure the temporal distance between their fall and Christ’s approach:       Þa him egsa becom, dyne for deman,  þa he duru in helle bræc and begde.  Blis wearð monnum þa hi hælendes  heafod gesawon. (Then a terror approached them, the din from the judge, when he broke and bent the doors in hell. Blissful were the men who saw the saviour’s head; ll. 378b–381)

Christ descends with noise and terror. Punctuating the passage from line 378 here to the beginning of Eve’s speech at line 408 (despite the likelihood of some lines having been lost at around 382) are references to ‘egsa becom’ (l. Nichodemi and Vindicta saluatoris in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Two Old English Apocrypha and their Manuscript Source: The Gospel of Nichodemus and the Avenging of the Saviour, ed. J. E. Cross (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 36–82 (p. 55). For the Harrowing more broadly, see K. Tamburr, The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2007). 31 For the Exeter Book poem (and a proposition for a new title), see John the Baptist’s Prayer or The Descent into Hell from the Exeter Book: Text, Translation and Critical Study, ed. and trans. M. R. Rambaran-Olm (Cambridge, 2014).

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 8 5

378b, l. 404b) or ‘egsa com’ (l. 391b), which, in a similar fashion to the poetics of the approach of Grendel in the early part of Beowulf (ll. 710–20), heighten the growing sense of doom and inevitability pervading a community awaiting something terrible. Christ enters hell as the dema (deemer or judge), a role he will take on in his last descent at the end of the ages. Breaking down the locked doors of the underworld, Christ casts his ‘leoht’ (l. 387) into the dark realm, which suggests the illumination that can come for those at risk of the darkness that defines Satan’s abode and his identity. At the core of re-enacting the Harrowing in the early medieval Easter liturgy were performances that represented light overcoming darkness, which incorporated early medieval penitents into the drama of salvation history. Bradford Bedingfield writes that ‘the Harrowing of Hell can have dramatic force not just because it makes an exciting story, but because those reading the story, or hearing the sermon, or partaking in the liturgy are being freed from the darkness of hell, mimicked by the darkness of the church before the lighting of the Paschal candle’.32 That Christ and Satan dramatises liturgical performances has been demonstrated by Jill Fitzgerald, who has argued for the influence of rogation rituals, those acts of public penance through perambulation, on the poet’s representation of Satan’s homeland as one ‘that cannot be mapped and a space where sacral ritual has lost all potency’.33 The liturgical importance of the Harrowing in the performances of Holy Week may have had an influence on the way the poem positions the event: it sits between the futile confessions of the angels in hell (sections I–VII) and the account of Judgement and defeat of Satan (section X). In Holy Week, the tale of Christ’s descent encouraged penance and prayer, and offered penitents a space in which to contemplate the Last Judgement, which, typologically, the Harrowing prefigures. It asks the audience of the poem to read Christ’s redeeming power in relation to both the impossibility of Satan’s situation and as a precursor for the end of time, when the audience will find themselves in a similar position facing the Judgement as hell’s inhabitants at the Harrowing. Again, this demands readers find certain connections between sections of the poem, employing their abilities to ‘unlock’ (as the poem has it) deeper, or more spiritual meanings, using their ræd, gaining further counsel and guidance in the process (viewing the Harrowing in relation to the Last Judgement, for instance, asks for the penance and confession described in the past event, which, as we will see, involves Eve

B. M. Bedingfield, The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 145. 33 ‘Measuring Hell’, p. 5. 32

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admitting her sins, to direct readers towards how to prepare for the future event of Christ’s Second Coming). As if to encourage readers to see through the eyes of those in hell during the account of the Harrowing, the Christ and Satan poet begins the account of Christ’s entry from the perspective of the fallen, before narrating the descent itself:       ‘Nu ðes egsa com, dyne for drihtne;  sceal þes dreorga heap ungeara nu  atol þrowian. Hit is se seolfa  sunu wealdendes, engla drihten.  Wile uppe heonan sawla læden,  and we seoððan a þæs yrreweorces  henðo geþoliað.’ Hwearf þa to helle  hæleða bearnum, meotod þurh mihte;  wolde manna rim, fela þusenda,  forð gelædan up to eðle.  Þa com engla sweg, dyne on dægred;  hæfde drihten seolf feond oferfohten.  Wæs seo fæhðe þa gyt open on uhtan,  þa se egsa becom. (‘Now this terrifying thing has come, the din from the Lord, very soon now this miserable gathering will have to suffer terror. It is the son of the ruler himself, the Lord of angels. He will lead the souls up from here, and forever we will suffer the humiliation from that anger-work.’ Then the creator turned to hell, to the children of men, through his might; he wanted to lead forth many thousands of people up to their homeland. Then came the sound of angels, the din at red dawn; the Lord himself had overthrown the enemy. The feud was still open in the pre-dawn, when the terror came. ll. 391b–404)

This passage is enclosed by the acknowledgement ‘Nu ðes egsa com’ at line 391b and the ‘þa se egsa becom’ at line 404. As previously mentioned, this repetition highlights the fear that Christ’s coming instils in those that are unprepared and unworthy. At the same time, perhaps ironically, lines 403– 404 also refer to ‘seo fæhðe’ still being ‘open’ in the ‘uhtan’, a period in the final hours or even moments before the sun rises, just before the ‘dægred’, the dawn-time of the Harrowing itself. As discussed in my Introduction, the reference to a fæhþ is not found in other Old English accounts of the Harrowing, and its use here recalls Genesis A, the last poem in Junius 11 to use the word, when Eve admits her deception has instigated or created a ‘fæhðe’ (a

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 8 7

feud or cycle of violence requiring recompense; Genesis A, line 900b), which refers to the foundation of hostilities between Satan and humankind. The potential for such a verbal connection to take place across the manuscript is significant precisely because it allows an observant manuscript reader to understand how the Harrowing amends the disaster that took place in Eden, and because, framed in this way, the cycle of history that was set in motion by the spread of ill-counsel in Eden is shaped by the concept of fæhþ and the early medieval legal and cultural philosophy that violence requires recompense. As such, Christ’s descent and, in what follows in Christ and Satan, Eve’s penance, amend or pay for the transgression in Eden, closing the cycle of the rise and fall of people and nations, and of conflict between God and peoples, set in motion by the devil’s deceptiveness in Paradise. Defining that long conflict with the word fæhþ, which occurs frequently in early medieval legislation as a term for political or local earthly conflicts,34 asks readers to understand that earthly ideas of compensation and amends can be redirected to a greater cause. As the fæhþ is still open (it is ‘þa gyt / open’; ll. 403b–404a) until Christ closes it, so too Eve, in hell, is not able to receive mercy until she offers her prayer to the Saviour: ‘and ne moste Efe þa gyt wlitan in wuldre / ær heo wordum cwæð’ (and Eve was not permitted to gaze on glory until she spoke these words; ll. 406b–407). Eve’s confession that follows returns to those crimes committed in Eden, which were also described in the Genesis poems: ‘Ic þe æne abealh,  ece drihten, þa wit Adam twa  eaples þigdon þurh næddran nið,  swa wit na ne sceoldon. Gelærde unc se atola,  se ðe æfre nu beorneð on bendum,  þæt wit blæd ahton, haligne ham,  heofon to gewalde. Þa wit ðæs awærgdan  wordum gelyfdon, namon mid handum  on þam halgan treo beorhte blæda.  unc þæs bitere forgeald þa wit in þis hate scræf  hweorfan sceoldon, and wintra rim  wunian seoððan, þusenda feolo,  þearle onæled. Nu ic þe halsige,  heofenrices weard, for þan hierde  þe ðu hider læddest, engla þreatas,  þæt ic up heonon mæge and mote  mid minre mægðe.’

34

DOE, s.v. fæhþ.

1 8 8   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

(‘I once angered you, eternal lord, when we two, Adam and I, ate of an apple because of the adder’s enmity, as we never should have done. The terrible one, he who will now burn in bonds forever, deceived us into thinking that we would possess bounty, a holy home, power over heaven. Then the two of us believed the words of the accursed, seized with our hands the bright fruit on that holy tree; we paid bitterly for that when we had to turn into this hot grave, and for thousands of generations, many winters, had to dwell, cruelly kindled. Now I pray you, guardian of the heavenly kingdom, before the host that you lead here, throng of angels, that I may be able to ascend from here with my kindred.’ ll. 408–23)

Christ and Satan presents the only detailed poetic account of Eve’s role in the Harrowing, where the poem evokes that gesturing to Christ as a prayer or pleading, as stressed by the OE verbs halsian and bidan. Thus, her voice, her confession, stands in marked contrast to the long laments of the devils in the previous sections. Eve’s prayer works, and the poem calls on its audience to contemplate the reasons why. Eve is able to read the event from her past, and from the past of the poem’s audience, and understand its place in the cycle of human history and why what was promised to her through devilish design – ‘heofon to gewalde’ (power over heaven; l. 413b) – was an impossibility (for the manuscript’s audience, the political nature of OE geweald resurfaces here to highlight that seeking rule of a kingdom out of ill-counsel leads to disaster, and that seeking power over God is a mistaken reading of his omnipotence). Acknowledging this and doing penance for it for thousands of generations gives Eve the opportunity of being absolved and saved. The devils in hell, because they may never understand their wrongs through good counsel, are unable to achieve this. Readers of Junius 11 that could recall Genesis B would be reminded of those deceptions that were planned by Satan from his position in hell to take Adam and Eve away from God’s teaching, allowing Christ and Satan to reinforce the warnings of that poem through its presentation of Eve’s own recalling. Eve’s contemplation of her place in Christ’s plan and in salvation history means she can call on Christ’s mercy by invoking Mary: Ræhte þa mid handum  to heofencyninge, bæd meotod miltse  þurh Marian had: ‘Hwæt, þu fram minre dohtor,  drihten, onwoce in middangeard  mannum to helpe. Nu is gesene  þæt ðu eart sylfa god ece ordfruma  ealra gesceafta.’ (She reached out her hands to the heavenly king, bade the measurer for mercy through the nature of Mary: ‘Hear! You were born from my daughter,

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 8 9

lord, in middle-earth to help humankind. Now it is visible that you are god himself, the eternal origin of all created things.’ ll. 435–40)

Invoking her kinship with, as well as her biological connection to, Mary, Eve demonstrates her understanding of Christian time and of the ways in which events that occur later in the cycle of history can amend previous ones, especially if understood in a gastlic fashion. Eve’s pleas for kinship are an important part of the Harrowing as it was presented in the vernacular in early medieval England. It appears in a number of texts including the Easter homily in Junius 121, folios 148v–154v, and Blickling VII, as well as the earlier Old English Martyrology, where it is written that ‘Eua hine halsode for Sancta Marian mægsibbe ðæt he hire miltsade’ (Eve begged him [Christ] there for the sake of her kinship with St Mary to have mercy on her).35 By ‘seeing’ this and seeing Christ in Christ and Satan, Eve does what the poem instructs its readers to do by understanding the relationship between key events of salvation history (and by acknowledging that some events, like Christ’s Harrowing, amend others, like the fall in Eden). Through her prayer and confession, both she and Adam are saved and pulled from hell, while the devils, who cannot grasp these things or interpret the parallels between events across history as signs of God’s plan, remain, doomed. Blickling VII (‘Dominica Pascha’) has some very close connections with Christ and Satan, especially in Eve’s plea for mercy and her biological link with Mary, as she prays and confesses in the homily: ‘Ic þe halsige nu, Drihten, for þinre þeowene, Sancta Marian, þa þu mid heofonlicum wuldre geweorþodest. Hire innoþ þu gefyldest nigon monaþ mid ealles middangeardes weorþe’ (I pray you now, Lord, for your servant, Saint Mary, whom you have honoured with heavenly glory. For nine months you filled her womb with the worth of all the world).36 This homily also demonstrates the way, particularly at Easter, the Harrowing and Judgement were placed side by side to encourage participants or audiences to make amends for past deeds, confess, and think on the end of time. In the homily itself, the extensive account of Judgement and the days leading up to it, when ‘heofon biþ befealden swa swa boc’ (heaven will be folded up like a book), immediately follows references to Christ’s descent and ascension. The link the homilist of Blickling VII forges between Harrowing and Judgement is made through the suggestion that the audience, on the brink

The Old English Martyrology: Edition, Translation and Commentary, ed. and trans. C. Rauer (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 75–7. 36 The Blickling Homilies: Edition and Translation, ed. and trans. R. J. Kelly (London and New York, 2003), p. 62.

35

1 9 0   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

of Christ returning, should consider how those who were saved during the descensus repented: Nu we gehyraþ, men þa leofestan, hu manigfeald þing Drihten for us geþrowade, þa he us mid his blode abohte of helle hæftnede. Uton we forþon geþencean hwylc handlean we him forþ to berenne habban, þonne he eal þis recþ and sægþ æt þisse ilcan tide þonne he gesiteþ on his dom setle; þonne sceolan we mid ure anre saule forgyldan and gebetan ealle þa þing þe we ær ofer his bebod gedydon (Now we have heard, most beloved, what manifold things the Lord suffered for us when he rescued us from the captivity of hell with his blood. Let us therefore contemplate what recompense we have to bring forth to him, when he will re-tell and speak all this at the same time he will sit on his seat of Judgement, we with our souls must repay and make amends for all those things that we did before against his command)37

The homily places a great deal of importance on Christ retelling his suffering and on the way the act of retelling will move repentant sinners to ‘gebetan’ (compensate) for their erroneous lives. Retelling and variation are thus presented as key features of the Judgement and of salvation. In Christ and Satan, Christ responds to Eve’s confession by recounting his own version of salvation history (and by doing the kind of ‘retelling’ Blickling VII states he will do). Christ tells Adam and Eve that, following the deceptions of the devil in Eden, God ‘þæt wite ær to wrece gesette’ (set that earlier punishment in vengeance; l. 492). The poem asks that the Harrowing serve as an event through which the originary events and disasters of cyclical history can be revisited. This would certainly have allowed the versions of events referred to by Eve, Adam and Christ during the Harrowing that are present on the earlier pages of Junius 11, such as the expulsion, to have been re-read or recalled with new knowledge, new detail and new significance by manuscript readers. But the Harrowing is also an event that gestures forward in time to the end of this history. Illustrations of the Harrowing in the Tiberius Psalter (London, BL, MS Cotton Tiberius C.vi), for instance, dated to the first half of the eleventh century and drawing on another famous psalter book, the Utrecht Psalter, also collapse time in this way. On fol. 14 of the Tiberius Psalter, a giant Christ bends down into the hell-mouth (common in illuminations of the angelic fall in both Junius 11, the New Minster Liber Vitae, and the Old English Illustrated Hexateuch) and rescues those imprisoned in hell while trampling the Satanic beast, which, Kathleen Openshaw writes, ‘underlined visually the relationship 37

Blickling Homilies, ed. Kelly, p. 62.

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 9 1

between the conquest of Satan at the Temptation and his complete defeat at the Harrowing’.38 Christ and Satan places the Judgement in close proximity to the Harrowing, but it also works to recharge earlier images and accounts of the manuscript that resemble these events implicitly (the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea in the poetic Exodus, for example, has connotations of the Last Judgement). Such looking back would only serve to re-ignite poetic episodes and illustrations once again, allowing the audience to contemplate the ways Christ’s battle with Satan might linger behind it, or beneath it, in a myriad of ways.39 The idea that Christ amended the disasters that took place in Eden when he harrowed hell was a theological and typological commonplace (developing from the production of the Gospel of Nicodemus in the fifth century), but the framing and utilising of the Harrowing in Christ and Satan, and its representation of Eve’s confession and her will to amend past mistakes, would have had strong resonance during times of political disintegration and rising Viking incursion. This is suggested by the royal diplomas and the surviving vernacular homilies from the turn of the first millennium and its immediately following decades, which reflect the feeling that the country, facing Viking attack and disintegration, was under the shadow of divine vengeance, on the cusp of a final Judgement, and in need of penance more than ever. Indeed, those diplomas produced by Æthelred around the millennium at Easter, a time when the Harrowing played a key role in liturgical performances, suggest that the political climate generated an anxious, maybe even panicked, demand for widespread repentance – a ‘penitential state’ in fear of the end times.40 In the Easter of 998, for instance, Æthelred, or those writing under his guidance K. M. Openshaw, ‘The Battle between Christ and Satan in the Tiberius Psalter’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989), 14–33 (p. 19). As Openshaw also points out, ‘the psalter contains various penitential texts to aid the sinner in his own battle against evil. The penitential preoccupation is clearly evident in the long confessional ordo, which gives a detailed recitation of sins and expression of hope for salvation. There is a reference to the end of time, and the sinner begs that he may be saved from the Devil on the day of Judgement’ (p. 29). 39 For more on the image of Peter from p. 9, see B. Raw, ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48 (pp. 140–1) (Raw notes that Peter and Michael, who is also present at the top of this page, together are common in last Judgement scenes in early medieval art), and Karkov, Text and Picture, p. 56. For more on Peter’s relationship to the Judgement in the Liber Vitae see C. E. Karkov, ‘Judgement and Salvation in the New Minster Liber Vitae’, in Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. K. Powell and D. G. Scragg (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 151–63. 40 Cubitt, ‘Apocalyptic and Eschatological Thought’, p. 40. 38

1 9 2   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

(or to guide him), wrote in the proem of the diploma granting restoration to Rochester that Christ ‘qui in extremo caducorum margine per uterum beatę uirginus incarnatus’ (who having been made flesh at the outermost margin of perishable things through the womb of the blessed virgin), died for the redemptione of mankind. Christ, the proem continues, euangelicis nos edocet institutis . ut quanto magis mundane uolubilitatis dies sicut umbra pretereunt . et caduca labentis seculi momenta uelut fumus deficiunt . tanto instantius illuc tendat nostre mentis intentio . ubi non annua sed continua est et ineffabili dulcedine referta pascalium deliciarum refectio. (instructs us through evangelical decrees that the more the turning world’s days pass by like shadow and the expiring world’s doomed moments fade away like fume, so the focus of our mind should reach more urgently to the place where there is refreshment filled with the ineffable sweetness of paschal delicacies not annually but continually.)41

There is urgency in diplomas like this, which were key ideological instruments in Æthelred’s attempt to restore, rebuild and bring back the golden years of Edgar’s reform. Perhaps this involved acts of public penance by the king and his advisors, who would have looked to lead by example in such fearful times. The diploma above is notable for its placement within the regenerative festival of Easter,42 when eschatological time and cyclical history come to the fore, and when Christ’s final return would never be far from the minds of those involved. The voice of Æthelred grows increasingly attentive to such matters in charters produced between 1000 and 1010, too, and the sense of the growing end intensifies. In a grant of 1012, of a tenement in Winchester to his queen Ælfgifu, for example, Æthelred’s proem forcefully and dramatically states that lawbreakers will boil in Satan’s cauldron unless they do ‘publice penitudinis’ (repentance in public).43 While my reference to these documents here does not seek to make a case for the date of the addition of Christ and Satan to the Junius 11 manuscript, it does suggest that concerns about the end of time and S 893. S. T. Smith, Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2012), notes that the ‘reference to “paschal delights” explicitly aligns the diplomatic text with the festival of Easter, situating the tenurial act within sacred history and effectively juxtaposing the king’s local act of restoration with Christ’s redemption of mankind’ (p. 58). 43 S 925; Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester: Documents Relating to the Topography of the Anglo-Saxon and Norman City and Its Minsters, ed. and trans. A. R. Rumble (Oxford and New York, 2002), p. 218. 41 42

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 9 3

about falling out of divine favour motivated the encouragement and focus on penance and amends during the early 1000s, and that those who added this poetry to the Junius book were themselves no doubt also pressured and concerned about the nearness of the Judgement. The sections of Christ and Satan structured around Christ’s life and its impact on history occupy the centre of the poem. Section IX offers the account of the ascent of the saved following the Harrowing and Christ’s account of the events in Eden; Section X is a short account in which the disciples, Simon Peter and Didymus, have Christ’s nature revealed to them; and Section XI is another short vignette that tells of Christ’s own ascent and of the eternal state of Judas in hell. Section XII turns to the Last Judgement, in which Christ ‘wile þone gesceawian wlitige and unclæne / on twa healfe, tile and yfle’ (will exhibit the illumined and the unclean into two halves, good and evil; ll. 608–9). Placed here, this Judgement section of the poem, offering a glimpse of the future for its audience, clearly outlines the fate of the guilty who will join the fallen angels in hell. This is indicated by the reference to the ‘unclæn’ and then, a few lines later, to the ‘forworhtan, þa ðe firnedon’ (ruined, those who have sinned; l. 619), re-invoking the OE word forweorðan used to define the ruin of the fallen angels at the beginning of the poem (l. 21). As if to offer an alternative, or inverted, kind of descent into hell at this moment, the poet describes how Christ will send those stained by their deeds into the abyss and has Christ command them: ‘Astigað nu, awyrgde,  in þæt witehus ofostum miclum.  Nu ic eow ne con.’ Sona æfter þæm wordum  werige gastas, helle hæftas,  hwyrftum scriþað þusendmælum,  and þider leaðað44 in þæt sceaðena scræf,  scufað to grunde in þæt nearwe nið,  and no seoððan þæt hie up þonan  æfre moton, ah þær geþolian sceolon  þearlic wite,45 clom and carcern,  and þone caldan grund deopne adreogan  and deofles spellunge, hu hie him on edwit  oft asettað Finnegan notes that the corrector has amended here, changing leaðað (‘call’) to lædað (‘lead’), but that l. 588 (also leaðað) suggests the poet wants contrast between the saved and the damned being called and that the correction is an error. Christ and Satan, ed. Finnegan, p. 118. 45 The manuscript reads earmlic here, which Finnegan does not accept. 44

1 9 4   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

swarte suslbonan,  stæleð feondas46 fæhðe and firne,  þær ðe hie freodrihten, ecne anwaldan,  oft forgeaton, þone þe hie him to hihte  habban sceoldon. Uton, la, geþencan  geond þas worulde, þæt we hælende  heran onginnen! (‘Descend now, accursed ones, into that torture house with great haste. I do not know you now.’ Right after these words the weary spirits, hell’s captives, will glide contortedly up in their thousands, and call them there into that scathers’ grave, shove them into the depth, into that oppressive underworld, and never will they be allowed to return upwards, but they will have to suffer wretched torment there, clamps and incarceration, endure the deep frozen ground, and the spelling of devils – how dark torturers will often set them in scorn. The fiends will charge them with feuds and crimes of continuously forgetting their lord, the eternal all-ruler, in whom they should have placed their hope. Lo, let us contemplate how throughout this world we can begin to pay homage to the saviour! ll. 626–43)

With play on OE astigan, which can mean ‘to ascend’ as well as ‘to descend’ (and it is used to describe Christ’s ascension at line 562) the poet identifies the moment of hope. Those awaiting Christ’s decision ‘wenað þæt heo moten to þære mæran byrig’ (hoping that they will be able to go there to the famous city; l. 622b) soon fall into horror: recalling the homiletic passage from earlier in the poem (ll. 298–305), in which the poet asked readers to be mindful of the Judgement when a thousand angels will come to meet them, here the fate of those who have not repented is sealed by thousands of devils flying up from hell to take them down into the abyss. Christ’s denial of the sinful places them not only beyond his knowledge, but beyond an ability to know him. There are echoes in the subsequent passages that turn to Christ’s defeat of Satan, whose knowledge will be of hell rather than heaven, following the Temptation, where Christ commands the ‘accursed one’ to know hell by measuring it: ‘Wite þu eac, awyrgda, hu wid and sid / helheoðo dreorig, and mid hondum amet’ (Know you, accursed one, how wide and far and dreary is the vault of hell, and measure it with your hands; ll. 698–9).47 There is an irony in the poem’s Last The scribe seems to be rushing things even more than usual here. Both Clubb and Finnegan supply feondas to complete the line and, in the following line, both add freo to drihten to complete alliteration. 47 Ruth Wehlau suggests that Christ’s ‘unmasking’ of Satan here highlights the ways in which the battle between Christ and Satan continues ‘in another form in the conflict between Satan and each individual reader’. R. Wehlau, ‘The Power of 46

Christ and Satan: the End of the Cycle   1 9 5

Judgement passage, too: like the devils in hell, the guilty and unredeemed at the end of time cannot know Christ or the significance of the history he mapped out and so they will be overcome by devilish voices forever – the kinds of voices that dominated the first half of the poem, and themselves went round in circles unable to know Christological meaning or eschatological time. While the exhortation at the end of the Judgement passage encourages readers to contemplate the ways they might praise or pay homage to Christ (l. 643), Christ and Satan itself does not end neatly with this depiction of futurity and finality. As if to intensify the threat of an imminent Judgement, the final lines as they stand are given to the voices of devils who, like those described in the earlier Judgement passage, accuse and condemn: ‘Laþ us beo nu on yfele! Noldæs ær teala!’ Finit Liber II. Amen.

Line 729 here involves the spirits of hell cursing Satan who must eternally circle round measuring the abyss,48 but that ‘nu’ has a presentness to it that also turns these voices back on the poem’s audience. These last ‘crabbed’ pages of the manuscript, from the Judgement passage onwards, reflect a scribe who was ‘obviously hurrying’ and given to ‘lapses’ even more so than the other occasionally cramped and heavy work of earlier pages of Christ and Satan.49 What is left of the poem gives the final words to the devils, amidst pages marked by anxiety, possibly arising out of the need to finish the book project. It is tempting to read these pages as reflective of a declining world, as markers of a scriptorium, a court, a manuscript-making project, or even a country undergoing strife and turmoil and feeling the imminence of the end of the world. Perhaps to end in such a way as this, without an ending at all, is fitting for Junius 11, a manuscript of poetry that, if read from its first surviving pages to its last, generates more and more a conviction that history is cyclical and the world is imperfect and fallen, but this is coupled with a belief that within both this world and its history there are opportunities to defeat unræd and find some kind of path to God’s favour. Christ and Satan’s eschatological concerns and its homiletic intrusions intensify this idea more urgently and in some ways they re-direct the other poetry of the manuscript towards an ongoing present on the cusp of final Judgement. Those final lines may reflect the terrifying Knowledge and the Location of the Reader in Christ and Satan’, in The Poems of Junius 11, ed. Liuzza, pp. 287–302 (p. 287). 48 Lines 712b–716 repeat the OE word hwilum (‘at times’ or ‘all the while’) to mark each kind of measuring of hell Satan does, which suggests the ongoing, constant, circular ways he continues to enact this punishment. 49 Christ and Satan, ed. Finnegan, p. 118.

1 9 6   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

prospect that the abyss was very close by, but by turning on the reader, who might shudder at slipping into an identification with Satan for a moment, these lines also offer some hope that the Judgement is yet to happen, and the poem itself offers a variety of instructions for making sure hell does not become one’s eternal home.

Afterword

T

he poetry we find in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 has been split into modern editions of individual poems. As noted at various points in this book, criticism has often viewed the manuscript poetry as part of a deliberately constructed sequence, one that, in J. R. Hall’s terms for instance, has the overarching unity of a theological epic of redemption. Studies of the poems in Junius 11 have often focused on their ‘heroic’ themes, verbal patterns, or on their response to apocrypha; studies of the manuscript as a compilation, on the other hand, have often (though not always) moved away from sustained close readings of the poetry and focused on what its palaeographical features can tell us about when it was made, or on the transmission histories of combined poems such as those that make up the Junius 11 Genesis. Translations of the Junius 11 poetry have reworked the first part of the codex (‘Liber I’), taken the second part (‘Liber II’, or Christ and Satan) out of its material context, or re-arranged the texts into new sequences. Digital facsimiles have also encouraged us to view manuscript pages and illuminations in single, stand-alone images, rather than offering clearer representations of the manuscript open at its spine as it would appear to a reader in touching distance of the material object itself. Throughout the history of scholarship on this manuscript, one line of approach has usually meant the absence of another, and Junius 11, while it demands we engage with it through a combination of critical perspectives, proves resistant to such methods still. How do we read the empty gaps left for illuminations alongside the section numbers that suggest a desire to have this verse read in sequence? How can we fully explain the addition of Christ and Satan to the project after the initial work on ‘Liber I’ had slowed down? There are other things to consider, too. Offering a reading of a single poem like Genesis A soon runs into a need to acknowledge its interpolation, Genesis B, thus changing the very shape of the ‘poem’ as a composition to be studied. Attempts to recover the historical and cultural forces that led to the bringing of poems together in Junius 11 might have to address different and obscured legacies, such as Genesis B’s relationship to the Saxon Genesis, for example, or the possibility that Christ and Satan was at one time several different poems. We cannot escape the fact that the codex itself has a complicated transmission history – that it may have been worked on in stages, at various points in time, by various artisans. Pondering these factors, these paradoxes even, I keep returning to the manuscript’s own

1 9 8   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

interest in containing and encircling. I think of the description of the creator’s control of the entire circumference of the universe at the beginning of ‘Liber II’ (Christ and Satan, ll. 1–22) and of Junius 11’s concern with circularity and repetition (that rosette image on page 225, for example). The manuscript’s evocations of going round in circles, such as that depiction of Satan in those final passages of poetry in ‘Liber II’ as we have it, also come to mind. We are always in danger of losing our direction, our path, when moving through an early medieval book that makes some effort to represent the cycle of salvation history but does so with an arrangement of poetry that repeats certain events and asks for non-linear interactions with its episodes (and with time itself ). Perhaps there is nothing we can do other than acknowledge that the problems Junius 11 poses to us are not too distant from the temptations it would have proffered to its early medieval audiences or readers: it does seem to tempt its audience towards repeating their readings of the poetry (that ‘keys of the spirit passage’ from Exodus; that addition of ‘Liber II’) and, given the manuscript’s many depictions of fallen figures repeating their errors and misreading the consequences of their pitfalls, they may risk doing so ad infinitum, or at least until the Judgement, if they are unable to take the book’s counsel and instruction out into the world. An examination of the interests shared by the poems collected in Junius 11, as well as a tracing of the Old English language for such common themes and interests, has led my own study towards the manuscript’s depictions of good and bad counsel and right and wrongful reading. Whether it is through narrative-dramatic poetry or through more homiletic or instructional guidance, the Junius poems are all invested in pronouncing the benefits of ræd and its associated qualities, such as divinely directed interpretation and governance, as core elements of the pathway to spiritual prosperity for those on earth. This suggests that Junius 11 itself could have provided advice for those in early medieval England who found themselves in related or relatable positions to figures from biblical history, such as political leaders or even kings. While this does not ‘solve’ Junius 11, or seek to, it does argue for a way of thinking through the manuscript’s complicated ‘unity’ from the perspective of Old English poetry and through deep and close engagement with the language of the poetry the manuscript contains. An approach to the manuscript as a book that unpacks its wisdom much like Old English poetry does but on a larger scale, through verbal echo, variation and apposition, for example, offers us further insights into the specific interests of those who set out to craft such an immense, illustrated book of vernacular verse because it allows us to make connections through and across poems on the level of thematic and poetic language. Such an approach also provides ways of thinking further about how these poems reflected history

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in ways that could warn early medieval audiences against ill-counsel through the force, ingenuity and drama of vernacular poetry.

One last reader

I began this book by mentioning briefly how Franciscus Junius, who came into possession of the manuscript in the 1650s, represented an early reader attempting to find unity for the collection of poetry that had come into his hands. For Junius, the poet Cædmon served this purpose and, in thinking of Cædmon as the author of all the manuscript’s verse, Junius initiated an important new phase in this early medieval book’s history as he edited the poems. For Junius’s desire for unity and his own study of the manuscript not only present us with instances of this codex inciting developments in book technology and offering knowledge, but also show us how it resisted an attempt to contain it. It is worth considering Junius’s relationship with ‘the Cædmon Manuscript’ as a significant example in the record of the manuscript’s status as a poetic compilation – and as an example of the way Junius 11 can encourage re-reading but can easily lead its readers to fall and fail in their attempts to ever be finished with it. Junius was no stranger to political and religious strife. His upbringing had placed him on the front line of the golden age of the Dutch Republic. His father, Franciscus Junius the Elder, was a second-generation Calvinist, a scholar and an internationally renowned theologian who had translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin and written a treatise on Mosaic law. The affinities between the subject matter of Junius the Elder’s scholarship and the poetry of the manuscript now known as Junius 11 were there for Junius the Younger to find. While lingering over the early pages of the codex, Junius might also have reflected on the career of his uncles, Johan van den Corput, a military engineer who fortified cities, and Franciscus Gomarus, a theologian ‘whose views of the hot issue of predestination at the Synod of Dordt (1618–19) gave the definitive course to the Dutch Reformed Church’.1 Junius the younger also moved among networks of elite intellectuals and by the time he was in contact with what he understood to be the poetry of Cædmon in For these details on Junius’s family, see R. H. Bremmer Jr, ‘Preface’, in Franciscus Junius F. F. and his Circle, ed. R. H. Bremmer Jr (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA, 1998), pp. vii–viii and C. S. M. Rademaker SS.CC., ‘Young Franciscus Junius: 1591–1621’, in Franciscus Junius F. F., ed. Bremmer Jr, pp. 1–19. For a detailed study of Junius’s editing work with later medieval manuscripts, especially those containing Chaucer, see M. L. Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 (Philadelphia, 2019), pp. 186–98.

1

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the early 1650s, he had for some time been meticulous and passionate in his search for the best typographical representation of early medieval languages and script. In a letter written to Johannes F. Gronovius on December 7, 1651, Junius reveals how he came to see a distinction between medieval manuscripts and their later copies or transcriptions by his more immediate predecessors who ‘horribly mutilated’ them: he lamented ‘the great darkness spread over all most ancient documents by those who give them to unskilled people to be transcribed’.2 A couple of years later, in the period 1652–53, Franciscus Junius began to plan his reproduction of the partly illustrated manuscript of poetry he believed had connections with the first English poet, and Junius conjured as much as, if not more than, any other scholar that aura of the origins of English poetry around the Junius 11 manuscript because of his belief that its poems were the work of Cædmon. Views of Junius’s understanding of Old English have always highlighted his etymological interests: he was, after all, working on his great etymological dictionary (his Etymologicum Anglicanum) in the last years of his life, and it was published posthumously by Edward Lye in 1743.3 But there is much to suggest that the fascination for Junius was with the manuscript’s poetry as much as it was with word-history or theology. In 1653 Christoph Arnold, a professor in various disciplines including vernacular and classical poetry, wrote to Junius, who was in Amsterdam, from Nuremburg. Arnold informs his correspondent that he is thinking of publishing a book on the ‘wisdom’ of ‘ancient poetry’, recalling that he and Junius had discussed a manuscript that collected ‘the primeval poetry of nine hundred years ago among the East Saxons’. Arnold’s letter suggests that Junius’s knowledge of Old English poetry was rich: ‘I would especially like to know’, Arnold writes, ‘whether the vernacular poetry of the ancient Saxons was rhythmic, or at least in metre, and in which field or area of studies it made its course’.4 The very title Junius gave to the edition he made of his Cædmon specified it was poetic paraphrase (paraphrasis poetica), while letters that seem particularly etymological in their focus also reveal that Junius was drawn in to making cross-manuscript verbal connections, moving between poems sensitively: in a detailed discussion of OE lichama in a letter to Johan Caluberg on 13 August 1660, for instance, Junius ‘For My Worthy Freind [sic] Franciscus Junius’: An Edition of the Correspondence of Franciscus Junius F.F. (1591–1677), ed. and trans. S. Van Romburgh (Leiden, 2004), pp. 822–3. 3 Cædmonis, ed. Lucas, p. xvi. For the dictionary itself, see F. Junius, Etymologicum Anglicanum ex autographo descripsit & accessionibus permultis auctum, ed. E. Lye (Oxford, 1753; repr. Los Angeles, 1970). 4 Correspondence, ed. and trans. Van Romburgh, pp. 837–9. 2

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Figure 10.  Photograph of Franciscus Junius’s punches, by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press.

outlines occurrences of the compound in Cædmon’s poetica (at lines 1204 and 1219 of what we would now call Genesis A), noting that the term ‘gains light’ if connected or compared with OE feðerhama (which occurs twice in the poem we would now call Genesis B). Junius’s attentiveness to the poetic pointing in the manuscript clearly influenced his transcription of the Old English Boethius from London, BL, Cotton Otho, MS A.vii (containing Old English prose and verse translations of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy), as he inserted a point between half lines which fragments surviving from the Cotton fire suggest were not in that manuscript.5 Junius evidently worked closely with the poetry of his Cædmon manuscript. The historical tale of Junius and this codex is one D. Donoghue, ‘The Enlightened Innocence of Franciscus Junius Encounters The Meters of Boethius’, in Old English Tradition: Essays in Honor of J. R. Hall, ed. L. Brady, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 578 (Tempe AZ, 2021), pp. 251–61. I like to think that Junius may have noted connections between the Alfredian concerns of the vernacular Boethius and the representation of poor and tyrannical rule in the poems Genesis B and Daniel. Junius’s own editing practice and printing also drew me to a poetic echo I had not seen in the manuscript itself: on page 1, the verbal connection between ‘Us is riht micel’ (Genesis A, l. 1a) and

5

2 0 2   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

of an early reader giving precedence to the poetry, and that very act leading to certain innovations as well as certain failures. The manuscript’s effect on Junius inspired creative activity and also led to ambitions that were never fully achieved. Preparing his edition, Junius turned his attention to having what he called ‘punchons’ cast for the purposes of printing Old English script in a quality that had not been seen before. These made possible his facsimile of the first edition of Old English poetry ever made, that very Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica published in 1655,6 which would go on sale at Adriaan Vlack at The Hague, which, Peter Lucas writes, was ‘one of the most prominent Dutch booksellers of the period’.7 Junius had written to his associate John Seldon in May 1654 that the ‘Anglo-Saxonick types (I know not whether you call them “punchons”)’ were being cast and would be ready within two months, suggesting that he required such new technology to make the edition he had in mind.8 Today these ‘punches’, which Junius likely had made by the punchcutter Christoffel Van Dijck (1601–69), as identified by Peter Lucas, rest in the archive at Oxford University Press, kept in paper in a wooden box (see Fig. 10). They are made of heavy steel with the meticulously carved letterform at the end and they are of fine craftsmanship.9 Put to use for some time after Junius’s work, on projects like George Hickes’s Institutiones grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae (1689),10 the punches are remnants that also represent the way the Junius 11 manuscript demands adjustments and advances (and new directions) in how we respond to it as an illustrated book of poetry. The punches also remind us that the poetry of Junius 11 has impacted literary history in transformative ways. Without them the first edition of an Old English poetic manuscript would never have been accomplished to such a degree. The steel objects are also fragments of Junius’s own project to grasp and explain the manuscript, one with clear



6



7 8



9

10



‘hæfdon gielp micel’ (l. 25b, referring to the great boast of the angels), juxtaposes the call to praise in the first line with the rebel angels doing the very opposite at l. 25. The same year Junius also published Observationes in Willerami abbatis francicam paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum (Amsterdam, 1655) with these punches. See P. J. Lucas, ‘Junius, his Printers and his Types: An Interim Report’, in Franciscus Junius F. F., ed. Bremmer Jr, pp. 177–99 (pp. 178–9). P. J. Lucas, ‘Printers and Types’, p. 184. Correspondence, ed. and trans. Van Romburgh, p. 848. Lucas, ‘Printers and Types’, p. 178. I am grateful to Dr Martin Maw at the Oxford University Press Archives for his assistance and for letting me see and handle the punches. Lucas, ‘Printers and Types’, p. 180.

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overarching meaning. For Junius, this was a book of parts united under the figure of Cædmon, representative of the earliest English poetry. Junius did not reproduce the illustrations in his edition and his attempt to reproduce as well as focus on the poetry led to several editorial ‘falls’. Writing a version of the ‘historical narrative’ of Junius 11, Catherine Karkov notes that Junius’s edition was ‘criticized for its many errors of transcription, particularly in its metrical points’, and that it ‘omitted the decorated capitals and sectional divisions, creating a false sense of uninterrupted continuity between the poems and their constituent parts’.11 From the perspective of the modern edition, Junius’s version of the manuscript might thus be viewed as an artefact of failure and as evidence of Junius falling as he attempted to reach new heights of scholarly book production. Junius’s own project of remaking ‘the Cædmon’ was unfinished, echoing the gaps left for illustrations that emerge in Junius 11 itself as one reads through it. But Junius’s ambitions are telling, and an important part of the reception history of the codex: reproducing, or containing, the entirety of Junius 11’s contents is a task destined to make us fall. Part of this is a result of the manuscript’s narrative circularity and its effect, and part of this is happenstance. Junius wrote in 1656 of providing ‘illustration to’ the Cædmon, which suggested he intended further commentary and detailed work to supplement his edition (the unfinished notes rest now in the manuscripts known as MS Junius 73 and MS Junius 113).12 His readings and editing of the book gave him a great deal and were a gift to philology, but his need to return to it again is symptomatic of the way Junius 11 tempts us back to it and asks to be re-read, generating always the sense that just as the codex itself may never be ‘finished’, we may never be finished with it either.

A poetic manuscript

MS Junius 11 and its Poetry has sought to read Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 from the perspective of Old English poetry. A close study of the poetry in Junius 11 allows us ways of navigating the disjunct between some of its fracture and patchwork make-up and the kind of larger history of fyrngewinn (originary strife) the whole codex seeks to encompass. Such an approach opens a way of understanding reiterations (the eruptions of the fall of the angels story in Genesis B, in the midst of Genesis A, and on the latter pages of the manuscript in Christ and Satan, for example) and dramatic expansions C. E. Karkov, Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001), p. 184. 12 Correspondence, ed. and trans. Von Romburgh, pp. 867–9. The in-process commentary is available in Cædmonis, ed. P. J. Lucas, Appendix. 11

2 0 4   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

(such the extensive description of the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea in Exodus), as significant parts of the manuscript’s poetic art. By focusing on the shared themes between and across the poems written out in Junius 11, and on the vocabulary within these poems that represent such consistencies and reiterations, this book has called for more of an attuning to the importance of Old English poetry in contributing to the way this manuscript may have demanded, and looked to provide, good counsel and advice to its audiences. The opening sections of Junius 11, containing the ‘frontispiece’ of the creator in majesty and the prologue to Genesis A, represent the creativity and energy of the initial manuscript makers, who may well have set about their project with those opening lines of the poetry – advising us to ‘praise in words the glory-king of hosts’ (wereda wuldorcining wordum herigen; l. 2) – guiding their work, foreground a poetic narrative of creation that traces the move of the rebel angels from ‘ræd’ (l. 24a) towards ‘unræd’ (l. 30a). In this version of the origins of the world, God’s payment of compensation to Lucifer and his followers is the construction of hell, a ‘rædleas hof ’, a built kingdom full of the disorder caused by ill-counsel. Chapter One argued that the most prevalent thematic oppositions that will recur through the codex – specifically, those that circulate around those Old English words ræd and unræd – structure the conflict in the prologue to Genesis A, which, instead of being a 111-line prologue or exordium that exists separately from the poet’s closer work with the biblical Genesis, is fully integrated into the longer poetic project. The Genesis A poet crafts a foundation to their reworking of Genesis that explains what led to the earthly creation in terms of early medieval political tumult: the presence of the angelic fall, and of what David F. Johnson has called a ‘radical’ concept of replacement,13 in Bishop Æthelwold’s New Minster Charter suggests that versions of the angelic fall like the one we find in Genesis A would have offered stern warnings to any would-be rebellious clerics or lords involved in situations ignited by the tenth-century reform (the values of which were returned to by later writers like Wulfstan of York). In line with such warnings against rebellion or misrule, Genesis B serves to re-charge the manuscript’s threat of punishment for those who seek to overstep God’s position at the height of the cosmic order. It enters the fray as part of the Junius 11 Genesis, and without much announcement other than a change in diction and poetic style, on page 13 of Junius 11, circling back to the event of the angelic fall depicted in the prologue to Genesis A but offering another perspective on it. Chapter Two argued that viewing Genesis B 13

See Johnson, ‘The Fall of Lucifer in Genesis A and Two Anglo-Latin Royal Charters’, JEGP 97.4 (1998), 500–21.

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only as an ‘interpolation’ – as something viewed separately to the Junius 11 arrangement, rather than as a poem that has connections to the Continent and is an important, integrated part of the Junius poetry – risks overlooking its role as a significant interruption in the poetic cycle of the manuscript. As it returns to the tale of Lucifer’s rebellion and his lust for requital, Genesis B takes on the role of expanding the Genesis A poet’s take on the breaking apart of the heavenly kingdom, reinforcing the manuscript’s impressions of hellish punishment and the nature of Satan as an ill-advised, disastrous ruler. Genesis B’s study of Satan, and the long speeches it gives him, outlines that the devil views humankind as having had ‘ræd gescyred’ (counsel, benefit, allotted [to them]; l. 524b) and, thus, Satan’s justifications for his actions repeatedly betray him as a fallen figure who misunderstands law: he seeks recompense for his own miscreation when he himself is the criminal. Satan’s misinterpretation of law and hierarchy in Genesis B offers an extensive gloss on what the prologue to Genesis A suggested was the ‘unræd’ at work in Satan’s ‘mod’. Continuing the manuscript’s concern with reading and interpretation, the poetic Exodus offers a long account of what it means to achieve OE ræd, which involves unlocking the meaning beneath the world and gradually coming to spiritual salvation through God’s teaching. Chapter Three posited that, while the Israelite journey in Exodus offers ways of thinking about the toil of the pathway to ‘langsumne ræd’, the quality of everlasting good counsel, the Egyptians in the poem misinterpret God’s signs, misreading the Tenth Plague as an attack on them for which they can receive compensation. Exodus, with its passage on the ‘keys of the spirit’ near its end, which suggests how one might uncover meaning beneath the surface of texts, encourages readers to revisit the earlier parts of the poem and, by extension, previous portions of the manuscript, from such a perspective. Doing so might reveal much about the Israelite transitus as representative of the Christian’s journey through life. But it also indicates that Junius 11 was compiled with re-reading in mind. The ‘keys’ offered in Exodus encourage the retracing of one’s journey through the codex in the search for deeper significances, clearer warnings, and more beneficial and long-lasting counsel. The poetic Daniel concludes the Old Testament-based poetry in Junius 11. In Chapter Four, I examined the poem as one concerned with how ill-advised kings or rulers come to disaster. The poem continues the cycle of history the compilation represents as one of continuing rise and fall and re-emphasises Junius 11’s interest in ræd as the cornerstone of good rule. The psychology of the failed and then reformed king Nebuchadnezzar is brought into metaphorical relation with the burh of Babylon, highlighting for an early medieval audience the way kingship is tied to its realm. The fall of the Israelites in the

2 0 6   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

poem is a reminder, though, that success on earth is temporal, and that the cultivation of ræd must never cease. Christ and Satan is likely to have been several different poems at some point before it came to Junius 11. Chapter Five demonstrated that, despite the poem’s patchwork nature, and the difficulties the three scribes seem to have had writing it out, it reaches for a symmetry between its sections and passages and reflects on a smaller scale the way Junius 11 itself has been designed. Christ and Satan’s forceful emphasis on Judgement and the need to repent, and on the Harrowing which was an important event in the liturgy, suggests impending disaster in the world around it. The poem itself wants to demonstrate that the feud between man and devil was initially amended by Christ in the Harrowing, which prefigures the coming Judgement, but that the ‘nu’ of the reader and the contemporary moment of the viewer looking over the manuscript’s final lines are where the battle to avoid becoming lost in the repetitions of the manuscript, in misinterpretations of its messages, rages on. Christ and Satan is intercut with direct calls to its audience and with more explicit instructions than the other poems in the manuscript. In addition, long passages of confession from the devils in hell, including admissions by Satan that he offered ‘langsumne ræd’ to his followers, encourage audiences to look for penance. The poem exhorts its readers to be on guard against the wrong kind – the arcane or fallen kind – of instruction and advice that may press upon them, particularly in situations relatable to the one described in the kingdom of heaven, where rebellion and ill-advised rule led to breakage and disorder. There are a variety of depictions of the Harrowing and the Judgement that survive in literary and material culture from early medieval England. Some of these, such as the Gospel of Nicodemus and the Old English poetry of the Exeter Book, were discussed in Chapter Five. Others, like the early eleventh century stone discovered under the floor of the Chapter House at Bristol Cathedral in 1831 following a fire, which depicts a giant Christ bending down to rescue repentant sinners from a hell mouth, as well as the scene of the Last Judgement in London, BL, MS Stowe 944 (fol. 6v), share with the Christ and Satan that came to exist in Junius 11 the potential to encourage penance. The inclusion of Christ and Satan in the Junius 11 codex also altered the other poetry in the book and changed the shape and inflection of the manuscript itself. It allowed readers to circle back through poems of ‘Liber I’ in a way that could counteract Satan’s own circling around hell detailed on the last pages of text in ‘Liber II’. Political crises of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries offer helpful parallels here, especially if we consider the motivations for the addition of ‘Liber II’ to ‘Liber I’: we can think with the ways Æthelred II and his circle clung to a destabilising kingdom by encouraging confession (as

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we see, for example, in Wulfstan’s laws for the king), seeking to court divine favour amidst increasing devastation. The push for penance in the face of an imminent Judgement was an attempt to save the souls of the kingdom and the king himself, and, reading Christ and Satan closely, it is not a stretch to imagine the work on ‘Liber II’ – reprised, no doubt, after work on the first portion of the manuscript came to a pause – being motivated by similar energies and anxieties. Those early medieval bookmakers committed to the work of ‘Liber II’ thought that it was vital that the poetry of Genesis, Exodus and Daniel was re-invigorated or re-read from the perspective of poetry that instructed and advised confession by detailing Christ’s power, the saving of the hell-bound at the Harrowing and the proximity of devils to the reader’s contemporary situation. The fact that David Johnson has established that Ælfwine, the figure in the portrait back on page 2 of Junius 11, could very well have been Æthelred’s scriptor and minister,14 and may have been the intended recipient of the manuscript at some point in its making, only adds to the connections between the final sections of the codex and the politics of the early eleventh century.

An open book

Junius 11 has frequently been on display, sometimes brought out at the Bodleian Library for exhibitions. However, it mostly exists at a remove from the page-turning touch, or the image-tracing finger, of the literary scholar. During the winter of 2018, manuscripts produced in early medieval England were brought together on a scale never seen before at the British Library, in an exhibition entitled ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War’.15 The focus was primarily historical, with objects and manuscripts positioned in roughly chronological order as they spoke to particular periods of kingship in early medieval England. Some way into the exhibition sat the four major poetic codices, each one in its own glass case, open to well-known pages (the Exeter Book, for example, was open to the short ‘moth riddle’, alongside the ‘key’ and ‘dough’ riddles). Junius 11 was open to pages 34 and 35. This placed an illustration of Adam and Eve having fallen, naked and ashamed in Eden (page 34), alongside a full page of poetry (page 35), serving to emphasise Junius 11’s nature as an illustrated, ‘biblical’ manuscript produced in the late tenth and early eleventh See Johnson, ‘Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Date and Provenance of MS Junius 11’, in The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick Conner, ed. E. J. Christie (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 27–62. 15 See now the exhibition catalogue, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, ed. C. Breay and J. Story (London, 2018). 14

Figure 11.  MS Junius 11, page 35: circle of hell imprint from page 36. By permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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centuries. In one of the largest exhibitions of early medieval manuscripts ever curated, with a focus on kings, kingship and kingdoms, the poetic books sat to one side, and Junius 11 was open to an illustration of the fall from Genesis, as if at a remove from any of the politics or paradigm-shifts that took place through the period. Yet, when viewing the Eden illumination and the poetry on pages 34 and 35, as I and thousands of others did in that exhibition, the black, sharp-toothed circle of hell on page 36 can be seen imprinting itself onto the poetry of page 35, as if burning through or suggesting that the assembly of material in Junius 11 is one that intensifies moments from the Old Testament and apocrypha with the pressing concerns of the compilers themselves (see Fig. 11). That kind of intrusion and encroachment of the circle of hell, no less, was a sign that the arrangement of the Junius book allows its different parts to collide with and fuse with others. Furthermore, Junius 11 might be best understood if its contents, in that glass case at the ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms’ exhibition, were aligned with the world represented by the charters, laws and historical documents that populated and dominated the exhibition rooms and may have overwhelmed poetry with history for all onlookers. As this book has argued with reference to Junius 11, the poetic manuscripts that survive from early medieval England can be viewed as generating their impressions like Old English poetry, but on a large scale: they can be studied as imperfect literary objects, intricate in their design and layered in meaning, their material states readable or occasionally unreadable but important parts of how we build our interpretations. Old English poems are not always read in their manuscript contexts from a literary perspective. Study of the possible historical circumstances motivating their arrangement does not always lead to a contemplation of poetry itself as having something important to say about the concerns and ambitions of the codex and the cultural and political world that may have created it or needed it. Junius 11 is designed to represent the cyclical drama and intensity of a salvation history that, for compilers, was edging towards its end. Because the poetry collected within the Junius 11 codex predates the makings of the manuscript itself, there have been too few studies of the whole manuscript as it survives that read that poetry as returning to a similar set, or at least related set, of concerns as the manuscript cycle moves forward. Similarly, Junius 11 is not often viewed as a sequence of poetry that, as it keeps re-visiting and offering variation on such themes and interests, re-invokes a set or field of language and vocabulary that tells us about these interests in specific ways. In the case of Junius 11, the poems are preoccupied with the conflicts between what is best represented by ideas of good and bad ræd – that is, good or bad

2 1 0   MS Junius 11 and its Poetr y

counsel and interpretation (we can think of the meanings of OE rædan here too: to decipher, to read, to interpret, to give counsel). The poems reflect on biblical narratives from the perspective of early medieval understandings of well-advised and ill-advised rulership, and through deep cultural concerns with the risks of misunderstanding how God and his power exist in relation to earthly history. Because of the way meanings of ‘counsel’ accumulate through the manuscript, and because the poems offer different perspectives or narratives relating to that subject, Junius 11 also asks its audiences to compare episodes and events from the cycle of salvation history to gain a deeper sense of the kinds of qualities associated with divine favour or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, with hell and Satan. The manuscript itself offers audiences the opportunity to take counsel with them out into their own lives. Thinking with Junius 11 in the ways I have outlined here and throughout this book suggests a way of interpreting this poetry beyond its nature as only Old Testament-based vernacular verse or as typology. The poetry of the Junius 11 book will always be at risk of being misread, of making us fall, partly because skewed reading and fallenness are concerns of its narratives and of its makers. But, as its poems work together, they also generate a large-scale and almost overwhelming network of ideas upon us that form into the sense that history is cyclical and the very world we inhabit is imperfect and, yes, fallen. Yet, there are chances amidst this to defeat unræd and find a path through the labyrinth towards God’s favour. The manuscript asks for an active reader to move back and forth across its pages, to gather its accounts, store them in mind and think with them while trying to survive in a world that moves towards destruction.

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2 1 2   Bibliography Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church. Volume I A.D. 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock (Oxford, 1981) Daniel and Azarias, ed. R. T. Farrell (London, 1974) Dictionary of Old English: A to I online, ed. A. Cameron, A. C. Amos, A. diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto, 2018) A Digital Facsimile of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 11, ed. B. J. Muir, Bodleian Digital Texts 1 (Oxford, 2004) English Historical Documents c. 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock, English Historical Documents 1, 2nd edn (London, 1979) The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501, ed. B. J. Muir (Exeter, 1994) Exodus, ed. P. J. Lucas, 2nd edn (Exeter, 1994) Genesis A: A New Edition, Revised, ed. A N. Doane, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 435 (Tempe AZ, 2013) Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. F. Liebermann, 3 vols. in 4 (Halle, 1903–16) Der Heliand und die Angelsächsische Genesis, ed. E. Sievers (Halle, 1875) Heliand und Genesis, ed. O. Behaghel, rev. B. Taeger, 9th edn (Tübingen, 1984) Hincmar of Rheims, The Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberga: Hincmar of Rheims’s De Divortio, ed. and trans. R. Stone and C. West (Manchester, 2016) Hincmar of Rheims, Hincmar of Rheims: On Kingship, Divorce, Virtues and Vices, ed. and trans. P. Throop (Charlotte VT, 2014) John the Baptist’s Prayer or The Descent into Hell from the Exeter Book: Text, Translation and Critical Study, ed. and trans. M. R. Rambaran-Olm (Cambridge, 2014) Junius, F., Etymologicum Anglicanum ex autographo descripsit & accessionibus permultis auctum, ed. E. Lye (Oxford, 1753; repr. Los Angeles, 1970) Junius, F., ‘For My Worthy Freind [sic] Franciscus Junius’: An Edition of the Correspondence of Franciscus Junius F.F. (1591–1677), ed. and trans. S. Van Romburgh (Leiden, 2004) Junius, F., Observationes in Willerami abbatis francicam paraphrasin Cantici Canticorum (Amsterdam, 1655) The Junius Manuscript, ed. G. P. Krapp, ASPR 1 (New York, 1931) King Alfred’s Old English Translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis and its Cultural Context: A Study and Partial Edition According to All Surviving Manuscripts Based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 12, ed. C. Schreiber (Frankfurt, 2003) King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, EETS OS 45, 50 (Oxford, 1871–72) Klaeber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, ed. R. Bjork, R. D. Fulk and J. D. Niles (Toronto, 2008) Lantfred of Winchester, Translatio et miracula S. Swithuni, in The Cult of St Swithun, ed. M. Lapidge (Oxford, 2003), pp. 217–335 The Laws of Alfred: The Domboc and the Making of Anglo-Saxon Law, ed. S. Jurasinski and L. Oliver (Cambridge, 2021) The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, ed. M. Godden and S. Irvine, with a chapter on the Metres by M. G. and contributions by R. Jayatilaka, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009) The Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, ed. and trans. D. Anlezark (Cambridge, 2009)

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2 1 4   Bibliography Biddle, M., ‘Felix Urbs Winthonia: Winchester in the Age of Monastic Reform’, in Tenth Century Studies, ed. D. Parsons (Chichester, 1975), pp. 123–40 Blum, P. Z., ‘The Cryptic Creation Cycle in MS Junius xi’, Gesta 15.1/2 (1976), 211–26 Breay, C. and J. Story, ed., Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War (London, 2018) Bredehoft, T. A., Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto, 2009) Bredehoft, T. A., ‘Old Saxon Influence on Old English Verse: Four New Cases’, in Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. E. Story (Tempe AZ, 2011), pp. 83–111 Bremmer Jr, R. H., ‘Preface’, in Franciscus Junius F. F. and his Circle, ed. R. H. Bremmer Jr (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA, 1998), pp. vii–viii Bright, J. W., ‘The Relation of the Cædmonian Exodus to the Liturgy’, Modern Language Notes 27 (1912), 97–103 Brockman, B. A., ‘“Heroic” and “Christian” in Genesis A: The Evidence of the Cain and Abel Episode’, Modern Language Quarterly 35.2 (1974), 115–28 Broderick III, H. R., ‘Metatextuality, Sexuality and Intervisuality in MS Junius 11’, Word & Image 25 (2011), 384–401 Broderick III, H. R., Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (Notre Dame, 2017) Brooks, F., Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones (Oxford, 2021) Bugge, J., ‘Virginity and Prophecy in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 87.2 (2006), 127–47 Caie, G. D., ‘The Old English Daniel: A Warning Against Pride’, English Studies 59.1 (1978), 1–9 Carroll, J., ‘Engla waldend, rex admirabilis: Poetic Representations of King Edgar’, RES 59 (2007), 113–32 Cherewatuk, K., ‘Standing, Turning, Twisting, Falling: Posture and Moral Stance in Genesis B’, NM 87 (1986), 537–44 Clayton, M., ‘Christ and Satan, line 729’, N&Q 59.1 (2012), 1–2 Clayton, M., ‘The Old English Promissio regis’, ASE 37 (2008), 91–150 Clemoes, P., Interactions of Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995) Conner, P. W., Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge, 1993) Conybeare, J. J., Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. W. D. Conybeare (London and New York, 1826, repr. 1964) Cook, M. L., The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635 (Philadelphia, 2019) Cross, J. E. and S. I. Tucker, ‘Allegorical Tradition and the Old English Exodus’, Neophilologus 44 (1960), 122–7 Cubitt, C., ‘Apocalyptic and Eschatological Thought in England around the Year 1000’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015), 27–52 Cubitt, C., ‘The Tenth-Century Benedictine Reform in England’, Early Medieval Europe 6.1 (1997), 77–94 Davies, J., Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (Manchester, 2018)

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2 1 6   Bibliography Godden M., ‘Millennium, Time and History for the Anglo-Saxons’, in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950-1050, ed. R. Landes, A. Gow and D. C. Van Meter (Oxford, 2003), pp. 155–81 Greenfield, S. B., ‘Exodus 33a: ingere, a New Suggestion’, N&Q 26.4 (1979), 296–7 Gretsch, M., The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform (Cambridge, 1999) Grimes, J., ‘Tree(s) of Knowledge in the Junius Manuscript’, JEGP 112.3 (2013), 311–39 Haines, D., ‘Unlocking Exodus ll. 516–532’, JEGP 98.4 (1999), 481–98 Haines, D., ‘Vacancies in Heaven: The Doctrine of Replacement and Genesis A’, N&Q 44.2 (1997), 150–4 Hall, J. R., ‘Exodus 449a: beorhhliðu’, American Notes and Queries 22 (1984), 94–7 Hall, J. R., ‘The Old English Epic of Redemption: The Theological Unity of MS. Junius 11’, Traditio 32 (1976), 185–208, repr. in The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New York, 2002), pp. 20–52 Hall, J. R., ‘“The Old English Epic of Redemption”’: Twenty-Five Year Retrospective’, in The Poems of Junius 11, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New York, 2002), pp. 53–68 Hall, T. N., ‘The Euangelium Nichodemi and Vindicta saluatoris in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Two Old English Apocrypha and their Manuscript Source: The Gospel of Nichodemus and the Avenging of the Saviour, ed. J. E. Cross (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 36–82 Harbus, A., The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 2002) Harbus, A., ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Dreams in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 75.6 (1994), 489–508 Heckman, C. M., Debating with Demons: Pedagogy and Materiality in Early English Literature (Cambridge, 2020) Heckman, C. M., ‘Dialectic and Dispossession: Demonic Disputatio in the Old English Christ and Satan’, in Transitional States: Change, Tradition and Memory in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. G. D. Caie and M. D. C. Drout (Tempe AZ, 2018), pp. 213–34 Henderson, G., ‘The Programme of Illustrations in Bodleian MS Junius XI’, in Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice, ed. G. Robertson and G. Henderson (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 113–45 Hieatt, C., ‘Divisions: Theme and Structure of Genesis A’, NM 81 (1980), 243–51 Hill, J., ‘Ælfric: His Life and Works’, in A Companion to Ælfric, ed. H. Magennis and M. Swan (Leiden, 2009), pp. 35–65 Hoffman, P., ‘Infernal Imagery in Anglo–Saxon Charters’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2008) Hönncher, E., ‘Über die Quellen der angelsächsischen Genesis’, Anglia 8 (1885), 41–85 Hopkins, S. C. E., ‘Snared by the Beasts of Battle: Fear as Hermeneutic Guide in the Old English Exodus’, Philological Quarterly 97.1 (2018), 1–26 Hough, C., ‘An Ald Reht’: Essays on Anglo–Saxon Law (Newcastle, 2014) Howe, N., ‘The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Old English Literature: Critical Essays, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New Haven CT, 2002), pp. 1–23 Howe, N., Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven CT, 1989) Howe, N., Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography (New Haven CT, 2008)

Bibliography  2 1 7 Hume, C., Middle English Biblical Poetry: Romance, Audience and Tradition (Cambridge, 2021). Huppé, B., Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (New York, 1958) Hyams, P. R., Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (New York and London, 2003) Jager, E., The Tempter’s Voice (Ithaca, 1993) Johnson, D. F., ‘The Fall of Lucifer in Genesis A and Two Anglo–Latin Royal Charters’, JEGP 97.4 (1998), 500–21 Johnson, D. F., ‘Winchester Revisited: Æthelwold, Lucifer, and the Date and Provenance of MS Junius 11’, in The Wisdom of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Honor of Patrick Conner, ed. E. J. Christie (Berlin and Boston, 2020), pp. 27–62 Jones, C. A., ‘Early Medieval Chaos’, in Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, ed. A. Harbus and R. Poole (Toronto, 2008), pp. 15–39 Jurasinski, S., ‘The Ecstasy of Vengeance: Legal History, Old English Scholarship, and the “Feud” of Hengest’, RES 55 (2010), 641–61 Jurasinski, S., The Old English Penitentials and Anglo-Saxon Law (Cambridge, 2015) Karkov, C. E., The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2011) Karkov, C. E., ‘Judgement and Salvation in the New Minster Liber Vitae’, in Apocryphal Texts and Traditions in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. K. Powell and D. G. Scragg (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 151–63 Karkov, C. E., The Ruler Portraits of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2004) Karkov, C. E., Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript (Cambridge, 2001) Ker, N. R., Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford, 1957) Ker, W. P., The Dark Ages (London, 1955) Keynes, S., ‘A Conspectus of the Charters of King Edgar’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 60–80 Keynes, S., The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘The Unready’: A Study in their Use as Historical Evidence (Cambridge, 1980) Keynes, S., ‘Edgar, Rex Admirabilis’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 3–59 Keynes, S., ‘England, 900–1016, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume III: c. 900–c. 1024, ed. T. Reuter (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 456–84 Konshuh, C., ‘Anraed in their Unraed: The Æthelredian Annals (983–1016) and their Presentation of King and Advisors’, English Studies 97.2 (2016), 140–62 Lambert, T., Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2017) Lees, C. A., Tradition and Belief: Religious Writing in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Minneapolis and London, 1999) Leneghan, F., ‘Royal Wisdom and the Alfredian Context of Cynewulf and Cyneheard’, ASE 39 (2010), 71–104 Lenz, K., ‘Ræd’ and ‘Frofer’: Christian Poetics in the Old English Froferboc Meters, with a Foreword by Kurt Otten (Amsterdam, 2012) Liuzza, R. M., ed., The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings (New York, 2002) Liuzza, R. M., ‘The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 36 (2003), 1–35

2 1 8   Bibliography Lockett, L., Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto, 2011) Lockett, L., ‘An Integrated Re-examination of the Dating of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 31 (2002), 141–73 Lucas, P. J., ‘MS Junius 11 and Malmesbury’, Scriptorium 34 (1980), 197–220 Lucas, P. J., ‘MS Junius 11 and Malmesbury (II)’, Scriptorium 35 (1981), 3–22 Lucas, P. J., ‘Junius, his Printers and his Types: An Interim Report’, in Franciscus Junius F. F. and his Circle, ed. R. H. Bremmer Jr (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA, 1998), pp. 177–99 Lucas, P. J., ‘Loyalty and Obedience in the Old English Genesis and the Interpolation of Genesis B into Genesis A’, Neophilologus 76 (1992), 121–35 Lucas, P. J., ‘On the Incomplete Ending of Daniel and the Addition of Christ and Satan to MS. Junius 11’, Anglia 97 (1979), 46–59 Major, T., Undoing Babel: The Tower of Babel in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Toronto, 2018) Marafioti, N., ‘Crime and Sin in the Laws of Alfred’, in Languages of the Law in Early Medieval England: Essays in Memory of Lisi Oliver, ed. S. Jurasinski and A. Rabin (Louvain, Paris and Bristol CT, 2019), pp. 59–87 Marafioti, N., The King’s Body: Burial and Succession in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2014) Marafioti, N., ‘The Legacy of King Edgar in the Laws of Archbishop Wulfstan’, in Remembering the Present: Generative Uses of England’s Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries, ed. J. P. Gates and B. O’Camb (Leiden and Boston, 2019), pp. 21–51 Marafioti, N., ‘Secular and Ecclesiastical Justice in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Speculum 94.3 (2019), 774–805 Marsden, R., The Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 1995) McKill, L. N., ‘The Offering of Isaac and the Artistry of Old English Genesis A’, in The Practical Vision: Essays in Honor of Flora Roy, ed. J. Campbell and J. Doyle (Waterloo ONT, 1978), pp. 1–11 Michelet, F. L., Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford, 2006) Mittman, A. S. and S. M. Kim, ‘Locating the Devil “Her” in MS Junius 11’, Gesta 54.1 (2015), 3–25 Mize, B., ‘The Representation of the Mind as an Enclosure in Old English Poetry’, ASE 35 (2006), 57–90 Nelson, J., ‘Kingship and Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c.1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988, repr. 2007), pp. 211–52 Nelson, J., ‘The Second English Ordo’, in J. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 361–74 Niles, J. D., God’s Exiles and Old English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry (Exeter, 2019) Niles, J. D., ‘The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England’, JEGP 114.2 (2015), 163–200 Novacich, S. E., ‘The Old English Exodus and the Read Sea’, Exemplaria 23.1 (2011), 50–66 O’Brien O’Keeffe, K., Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge, 1990)

Bibliography  2 1 9 O’Camb, B., ‘Toward a Monastic Poetics: Exeter Maxims and the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2009) Ohlgren, T., Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Catalogue c. A.D. 625 to 1100 (New York, 1986) Oliver, L., The Beginnings of English Law (Toronto, 2002) Olsen, K., ‘The Dual Function of the Repetitions in Exodus 447–515’, in Loyal Letters: Studies on Mediaeval Alliterative Poetry and Prose, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1994), pp. 55–70 Olsen, K., ‘“Him þæs Grim Lean Becom”: The Theme of Infertility in Genesis A’, in Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies for Roberta Frank, ed. A. Harbus and R. Poole (Toronto, 2008), pp. 127–43 Openshaw, K. M., ‘The Battle between Christ and Satan in the Tiberius Psalter’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989), 14–33 O’Sullivan, W., ‘Ussher as a Collector of Manuscripts’, Hermathena 88 (1956), 34–58 Overing, G. R., ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Conversion in the Old English Daniel: A Psychological Portrait’, Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984), 3–14 Overing, G. R., ‘On Reading Eve: Genesis B and the Reader’s Desire’, in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. A. J. Frantzen (Albany, 1991), 35–63 Owen-Crocker, G. R. and B. W. Schneider, ed., Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2013) Parkes, M. B., ‘Rædan, areccan, smeagan: How the Anglo-Saxons Read’, ASE 26 (1997), 1–27 Paz, J., Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Material Culture (Manchester, 2017) Pelle, S., ‘Ræd, Unræd, and Raining Angels: Alterations to a Late Copy of Ælfric’s Homily “De Initio Creaturae”’, N&Q 57.3 (2010), 295–301 Pope, J. C., The Rhythm of Beowulf: An Interpretation of the Normal and Hypermetric Verse Forms in Old English Poetry (New Haven CT, 1942) Portnoy, P., ‘Ring Composition and the Digressions of Exodus: The “Legacy” of the “Remnant”’, English Studies 82.4 (2001), 289–307 Pratt, D., ‘Kings and Books in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 43 (2014), 297–377 Pratt, D., The Political Thought of King Alfred the Great (Cambridge, 2007) Pratt, D., ‘The Voice of the King in King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’, ASE 41 (2013), 145–204 Rabin, A., Crime and Punishment in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2020) Rabin, A., ‘Witnessing Kingship: Royal Power and the Legal Subject in the Old English Laws’, in Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. G. Owen-Crocker and B.W. Schneider, pp. 219–36 Rademaker SS.CC., C. S. M., ‘Young Franciscus Junius: 1591–1621’, in Franciscus Junius F. F. and his Circle, ed. R. H. Bremmer Jr (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA, 1998), pp. 1–19 Raw, B., ‘The Construction of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11’, ASE 13 (1984), 187–207 Raw, B., ‘The Probable Derivation of Most of the Illustrations in Junius 11 from an Illustrated Old Saxon Genesis’, ASE 5 (1976), 133–48

2 2 0   Bibliography Reinhard, B., ‘The Opening Image of MS Junius 11’, Old English Newsletter 42 (2010), 15–25. Remley, P. G., Old English Biblical Verse: Studies in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel (Cambridge, 1996) Roach, L., ‘Apocalypse and Atonement in the Politics of Æthelredian England’, English Studies 95.7 (2014), 733–57 Roach, L., ‘A Tale of Two Charters: Diploma Production and Political Performance in Æthelredian England’, in Writing, Kingship and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. R. Naismith and D. A. Woodman (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 234–59 Rubin, S., ‘The Bot, or Composition in Anglo-Saxon Law: A Reassessment’, The Journal of Legal History 17.2 (1996), 144–54 Rumble, A. R., ‘The Laity and the Monastic Reform in the Reign of Edgar’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 242–52 Saltzman, B. A., Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2019) Saltzman, B. A., ‘Secrecy and the Hermeneutic Potential in Beowulf’, PMLA 133.1 (2018), 36–55 Salvador-Bello, M., ‘The Edgar Panegyrics in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations, ed. D. Scragg (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 252–73 Scheil, A. P., Babylon under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth (Toronto, 2016) Scheil, A. P., The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor MI, 2004) Scheil, A. P., ‘Sacred History and Old English Religious Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. C. A. Lees (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 406–26 Scragg, D., ed., Edgar, King of the English 959–75: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2008) Scragg, D., ‘Old English Homilies and Poetic Manuscripts’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume I, ed. R. Gameson (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 553–62. Sharma, M., ‘The Economy of the Word in the Old English Exodus’, in Old English Literature and the Old Testament , ed. M. Fox and M. Sharma (Toronto and London, 2012), pp. 172–95 Sharma, M., ‘Nebuchadnezzar and the Defiance of Measure in the Old English Daniel’, English Studies 86.2 (2005): 103–26 Shippey, T., Old English Verse (London, 1972) Sleeth, C. R., Studies in Christ and Satan (Toronto, 1982) Smith, S. T., ‘The Edgar Poems and the Poetics of Failure in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, ASE 39 (2011), 105–37 Smith, S. T., ‘Faith and Forfeiture in the Old English Genesis A’, Modern Philology 111.4 (2014), 593–615 Smith, S. T., Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2012) Sowerby, R., Angels in Early Medieval England (Oxford, 2016)

Bibliography  2 2 1 Speirs, N. J., ‘Hermeneutic Sensibility and the Old English Exodus’ (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990) Stokes, P., English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990–circa 1035 (Cambridge, 2014) Tamburr, K., The Harrowing of Hell in Medieval England (Cambridge, 2007) Thomson, S. C., Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf Manuscript’: Towards a History of Reception for the Nowell Codex (Leiden and Boston, 2018) Thornbury, E. V., Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge, 2014) Tyler, E., Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England (York, 2007) Vickrey, J. F., ‘Exodus and the Battle in the Sea’, Traditio 28 (1972), 119–40 Vickrey, J. F., Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative (Bethlehem PA, 2015) Walton, A., ‘“Gehyre se ðe Wille”: The Old English Exodus and the Reader as Exegete’, English Studies 94.1 (2013), 1–10 Wehlau, R., ‘The Power of Knowledge and the Location of the Reader in Christ and Satan’, in The Poems of MS Junius 11: Basic Readings, ed. R. M. Liuzza (New York, 2002), pp. 287–302 Withers, B. C., The Illustrated Old English Hexateuch, Cotton Claudius B.iv: The Frontier of Seeing and Reading in Anglo-Saxon England (Toronto, 2007) Withers, B. C., ‘A “Secret and Feverish Genesis”: The Prefaces of the Old English Hexateuch’, The Art Bulletin, 81.1 (1999), 53–71 Wormald, P., The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1999, repr. 2001) Wrenn, C. L., A Study of Old English Literature (New York, 1967) Wright, C. D., ‘The Blood of Abel and the Branches of Sin: Genesis A, Maxims I and Aldhelm’s Carmen de uirginitate’, ASE 25 (1996), 7–19 Wright, C. D., ‘Genesis A ad litteram’, in Old English Literature and the Old Testament, ed. M. Fox and M. Sharma (Toronto and London, 2012), pp. 121–72 Wright, C. D., The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge, 1993) Wyly, B. W., Figures of Authority in the Old English Exodus (Heidelberg, 1999) Yorke, B., ‘Introduction’, in Bishop Æthelwold: His Career and Influence, ed. B. Yorke (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 1–13 Zacher, S., Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (London, 2013)

Index Abraham  102, 114, 178 in Genesis A 37 Illustration in Junius 11  3 in Old Saxon Genesis 74 Adam 207 exile in Genesis A  45 n.18, 66 role in Genesis B  67, 75, 95–7, 99 Ælfgifu 192 Ælfric of Eynsham  46, 71, 107, 123, 173, 181 De initio creaturae 46–8 Dominca in Media Quadragesime  118–19 Letter to Sigeweard  46, 47, 107 n.11 ‘Preface to Genesis’  39, 117–18, 119 Ælfthryth 63 Ælfwine  30–1, 207 Æthelred II  26, 29, 31, 52, 56, 128 n.62, 148, 174, 191, 206–7 betrayal 20 laws 182–3 penance  182, 192 Æthelwold, Bishop  22, 36, 63, 115 n.33, 141, 152, 182 as builder  64–5 Aldhelm Carmen de virginitate 46 Alfred, King  6, 66, 72, 81, 88, 89, 94, 101 Domboc  6, 85–6, 109–12, 113 Pastoral Care  145–6, 155 Preface to the Old English Boethius 6–7 reform project  145, 146 angelic fall  35–6, 122 n.52, 144, 178 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  17–18, 110 n.21, 156, 182 Arnold, Christoph  200 Asser  6, 145 Augustine of Hippo  58, 132 De catechizandis rudibus 11

De civitate Dei  36, 150 Enarratio in Psalmum 64  150 Enchiridion ad Laurentium 36 Azarias 138 Babylon  58, 138, 147, 150, 151–2, 154, 159, 161 Battle of Maldon, The 78 Bede  1, 178 n.22 Belshazzar  134, 140, 146, 159, 178 Benedictine Reform, the  16, 73, 152 and building projects  60 and Genesis B 71 Beowulf  56, 57 n.44, 153 n.32, 185 Beowulf manuscript, the (London, Cotton Vitellius, A.xv)  2, 17 Blickling Homily VII  27, 184, 189–90 Byrhtferth of Ramsey  26 Enchiridion  178 n.22 Vita S. Oswaldi  116, 152 Cædmon  1–2, 199, 200, 201, 203 Cædmon’s Hymn 56 Cain  37, 66 slaying of Abel in Genesis A 45–6 Cassian 119 Chaldeans  42, 95, 138, 140, 146, 147, 148, 149 Charlemagne, King  110 Charles the Bald  52, 81, 83 n.26 Christ  43, 115, 120, 165, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 186, 190, 193 Christ and Satan  13–14, 162, 163–97, 203, 206 critical history  165 n.5, 167–8 fallen angels in  168–9, 170, 176, 178, 180, 181, 184, 193, 195 instruction  169–70, 174 interpretation  9, 26, 29, 168 and ‘Liber II’, see ‘Liber II’

2 2 4   Index penance  173, 174, 180, 181–2, 185, 187 verbal echo of Exodus  165–6, 172 verbal echo of Genesis A  27–8 Cnut, King  52, 53 n.36 coronation ordines  81, 89 creation  19–20, 42, 43, 178, 180 Daniel  135–63, 205–6 as continuation of Exodus  18, 135–8, 139, 142, 148 fall of Jerusalem  136, 139–41, 142, 144, 146–50, 153 mind as city metaphor  146, 150, 154, 155, 157–8, 161 and misreading  45, 104, 154 pride  140, 158, 159, 160, 161 role of Daniel in  139, 140, 151, 159 n.43 translatio imperii  25, 138 Descent into Hell  27, 184 Dunstan, Archbishop  82 Edgar, King  36, 60, 88, 116, 141, 152, 192 ‘The Coronation of Edgar’  17 ‘The Death of Edgar’  17 as good ruler  25–6, 63 ‘King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’ 62–3 laws  89, 108–9, 125, 128–9 in the New Minster Charter  61–2, 141–2 Edmund, King  88–9 II Edmund 128 Eve  66, 174 confession in Christ and Satan 27, 170, 172, 176, 185–6, 187–9 deception in Genesis A  28 exile from Paradise with Adam in Genesis A  45 n.18 fall in Genesis B  67, 74, 75, 90–1, 95, 98 Exeter Book, the (Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501)  2, 16, 138, 142, 173 n.15, 206, 207 Exodus  102–35, 173, 204, 205 as challenge or riddle  23, 105, 134

compensation  106, 108, 109, 111, 126, 129, 132 critical history  104, 105, 121 Egyptians in  23, 42, 105, 106, 107, 108–9, 116, 122, 123–8, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 191 ‘keys of the spirit’  24–5, 120–2, 130, 148, 172 longlasting ræd  53–4, 111–12, 113, 122, 130, 132, 145, 170 misreading  45, 108, 109, 113, 125–6, 132 Tenth Plague, the  122–6 vengeance in  106–7, 111, 125, 131 feud created in Eden  27–8, 186–7, 206 and counsel  28 Genesis A  34–67, 169, 204 critical views as paraphrase  22, 38–9 fall of the angels  17, 19–20, 35–6 ‘frontispiece’  42, 48–9, 60 prologue as foundation  37–60, 65, 139 and Vulgate Genesis  28, 35 Genesis B  67–102, 137, 159 n.43, 163 n.2, 188, 204–5 and Adam see Adam allowance  74–5, 76, 77, 79 compensation in  57, 76, 82, 83–4, 88, 89, 92–3, 106 critical history  73 and Eve see Eve interpolation into Genesis A  18, 22, 67, 69, 74, 79, 87, 197, 203, 205 Satan’s boda  67, 75, 90, 95, 97 Satan’s pursuit of vengeance in  22, 82–3, 84, 87–8, 89–90, 100, 205 Tree of Death  74, 75, 95 Tree of Life  100 gift giving  93–4 Gospel of Nicodemus  183, 191, 206 Gregory the Great, Pope Homiliarum in evangelia  36 n.4 Moralia in Job 143

Index  2 2 5 Harrowing of Hell, the  26–7, 28, 165, 172, 173, 181, 183–91, 193, 206 prefiguring Judgement  29, 174, 184, 185, 189 Heliand, the  39, 71, 97 n.54, 99, 100 hell  14, 125, 176, 180, 209 as architectural in Genesis A  57, 61, 65 associations with the north  49 creation of  21, 35, 52 as rædleas  55–7, 65, 112, 204 Hexateuch, the  3, 39, 102, 107, 117, 123, 190 Hickes, George  202 Hincmar of Rheims  20, 71, 81 Israelites  7, 105, 106, 107, 109, 114, 122, 125, 132, 134, 136, 138, 140–1, 148, 160 Junius, Franciscus  156 n.34, 199–203 and Cædmonis monachi paraphrasis poetica  2, 200, 201, 202 Etymologicum Anglicanum 200 and his ‘punches’  202 kingship  70–1, 80–1, 83 Carolingian ideals  22, 71, 80 Lantfred of Winchester  62 Last Judgement, the  27, 165, 172, 182, 193, 195, 196, 198 Liber Vitae, the  173 n.15, 190 Lucifer see Satan ‘migration myth, the’  24, 105 Moses  102, 106, 125, 127, 151, 166 in Daniel  137, 139 and the Domboc  6, 110, 111 in Exodus giver of counsel  104, 112, 122, 130, 132, 136, 178 as leader  105, 113, 114, 116, 134 and ‘rod’  115 in Hexateuch  117 in ‘Preface to Genesis’  118 Nebuchadnezzar  25–6, 139, 146 lack of ræd in Daniel  134, 135, 138, 148

mental state in Daniel  136, 150–62 New Minster Charter  16, 21, 31, 36, 60, 65, 204 creation in proem  61–2 keys in  115 n.34 Nimrod 58 Noah  44, 114 oaths  83, 87, 126, 127, 130, 139 Old English Boethius, the  25, 155, 160, 201 Old English Martyrology  184, 189 Old English poetry  12, 198 as advice  6–7 as political  17–18, 32–3, 209 wordplay 43 Old Saxon Genesis  66, 70, 71–2, 74, 81, 99, 101 Old Testament, the  110, 120, 121, 173 Vulgate  33, 37–8, 123 n.54, 147 and wisdom  6 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 as a book of counsel  4, 6, 33, 39, 60, 134, 198 as compilation  3–5, 11–12, 16, 29, 76, 136–7, 180 and date  10, 15–17 illustration cycle  2–3, 9 n.23, 32, 197 ‘Liber I’  8–9, 10, 15–17, 26, 34, 69, 162, 167, 197, 206 ‘Liber II’  8–9, 10, 13, 15–17, 26–7, 29, 34, 162–3, 197, 198, 206, 207 provenance 31–3 penance 112 see also Christ and Satan Peniarth Diploma, the  16, 31, 36 Pharaoh  23, 106–8, 114, 123, 126–7, 129 plague  106, 108–9, 122 Promissio Regis 81–2 Ræd  113, 167, 170, 198, 209–10 and counsel  5–6, 20, 44, 47, 53, 54, 76, 79, 91, 99, 122, 135, 136, 139, 147, 151, 158, 166 and interpretation  24, 113, 121, 130, 166, 171

2 2 6   Index and reading  7, 25, 105–6, 109, 120, 172 and speech  59 Red Sea  115, 122, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131–2, 135, 137 Regula S. Benedicti 62 Regularis Concordia 63 replacement doctrine, the  21, 31, 36 riht  42–4, 49, 54, 76, 80, 91, 104, 154 Satan  115, 147, 151, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 176, 178–9, 185, 195, 196, 198 creation of unræd  19, 42, 47–8 miscreation  29, 44, 46–52, 184 rebellion  19–20, 44–5, 69, 76, 77, 87, 121 throne  49–52, 53, 57, 77, 79, 98 Seasons for Fasting  117 n.38 Sodom and Gomorrah  66 Solomon and Saturn 149–50 prose 46 Solomon’s Temple  148–9 ‘St Dunstan’s Classbook’  115 n.33 Tiberius Psalter, the  190 Tower of Babel  37, 58–9, 64 Unræd  5–6, 154–5, 172, 173, 195, 205, 210 and betrayal  20 and hell  35, 46, 54–7, 59–60, 65, 171 and ill-counsel  45–6, 48, 104, 149

and misinterpretation  23, 25 Ussher, James  2 n.3 Utrecht Psalter  117, 190 Vainglory 142–4 Vengeance  110, 124 n.58, 137 of Egyptians see Exodus of God  20, 23, 54–5, 57, 65, 142, 191 in law  128 of Satan see Genesis B Vercelli Book, the (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS CXVII)  2 Vikings  26, 127, 145, 191 Winchester connection to continent  72 New Minster  32, 64 Nunnaminster 64 Old Minster  64 as place of production for Junius 11 29–32 and reform  64–5, 141 wisdom  138, 142, 144, 148, 149, 162 Wulfstan of Winchester Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno 64 Vita S. Æthelwoldi  64, 141 Wulfstan of York, Archbishop  52, 71, 112, 166, 181, 182, 204, 207 Institutes of Polity  53–4, 112–13, 171

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS PUBLICATIONS York Manuscript and Early Print Studies This new series builds on and expands York Medieval Press’ Manuscript Culture in the British Isles. It aims to further the study of handwritten and early print sources for literature and intellectual history in the pre-modern period, and champions an interconnected mode of analysis for the textual, material and cultural, whether the focus is local, regional, national or transnational. It welcomes contributions providing critical approaches to manuscript studies, history of the book, cultural history, philology and editing, whether monographs, edited collections, or catalogues. Series Editors Orietta Da Rold (Cambridge) Holly James-Maddocks (York) Advisory Committee Alexandra da Costa (Cambridge), Marilena Maniaci (Cassino), Linne Mooney (York), Nicola Morato (Liège), Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Cambridge), David Rundle (Kent), Elaine Treharne (Stanford) 1 Manuscript Culture and Medieval Devotional Traditions: Essays in Honour of Michael G. Sargent, edited by Jennifer N. Brown and Nicole R. Rice 2 Saints’ Legends in Medieval Sarum Breviaries: Catalogue and Studies, Sherry L. Reames 3 Scribal Cultures in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Linne R. Mooney, edited by Margaret Connolly, Holly James-Maddocks and Derek Pearsall 4 Re-using Manuscripts in Late Medieval England: Repairing, Recycling, Sharing, Hannah Ryley 5 Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition, Sarah Wood Details of other York Medieval Press volumes are available from Boydell & Brewer Ltd