Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. 9781442682931

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UNLOCKING THE WORDHORD Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr

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UNLOCKING THE WORDHORD Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr

Edited by Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4822-6

(po) Printed on acid-free paper

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Unlocking the wordhord : Anglo-Saxon studies in memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr. / edited by Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4822-6 1. English literature - Old English, ca. 450-1100 - History and criticism. 2. English literature - Old English, ca. 450-1100 - Criticism, Textual. 3. English philology - Old English, ca. 450-1100 I. Irving, Edward B. (Edward Burroughs), 1923- II. Amodio, Mark C. III. O'Keeffe, Katherine O'Brien PR176.U54 2003

829.09

C2002-904167-8

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

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Introduction 3 Mark C. Amodio, Vassar College, and Katherine O'Brien University of Notre Dame

O'Keeffe,

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 14 Nicholas Howe, University of California, Berkeley ^Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 38 Paul E. Szarmach, Western Michigan University 'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 62 A.N. Doane, University of Wisconsin, Madison How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 76 John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia A Reading of Brunanburh 109 Donald Scragg, University of Manchester

vi Contents 'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 123 Sarah Larratt Keefer, Trent University Cynewulf and the Passio S. lulianae 147 Michael Lapidge, University of Notre Dame King Cnut's Grant of Sandwich to Christ Church, Canterbury: A New Reading of a Damaged Annal in Two Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 172 Timothy Graham, University of New Mexico The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 191 Gail Ivy Berlin, Indiana University, Pennsylvania N.F.S. Grundtvig's 1840 Edition of the Old English Phoenix: A Vision of a Vision of Paradise 217 Robert E. Bjork, Arizona State University Hrothgar's 'admirable courage' 240 Jane Roberts, King's College, London Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 252 Antonette diPaolo Healey, University of Toronto Bravery and the Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon 274 Janet Bately, King's College, London Sex in the Dictionary of Old English 302 Roberta Frank, Yale University A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Edward B. Irving, Jr 313 Bibliography 315 Contributors 347 Index 351

Acknowledgments

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, and in part by support from the Vassar College Committee on Research. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their roles in the publication of the volume. We should like to acknowledge the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to publish the illustrations from CCCC 173 and the kind permission of the Trustees of the British Library to publish illustrations from Cotton Domitian A. viii. The editors would also like to thank Ms Katrina Bartow, Vassar '03, for all her assistance, and Ms Renee Trilling for preparing the index to the volume.

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Abbreviations

ANS Anglo-Norman Studies ASE Anglo-Saxon England ASMMF Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile ASPR The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records BGSL Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur BJRL Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library Manchester BNJ British Numismatic Journal CCCC Cambridge, Corpus Christi College CSASE Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England EEMF Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile EETS Early English Text Society ELN English Language Notes ES English Studies EStn Englische Studien GS Grundtvig Studier HBS Henry Bradshaw Society /EPS Journal of the English Place-Name Society JMH Journal of Medieval History JTS Journal of Theological Studies LSE Leeds Studies in English MLR Modern Language Review MS Mediaeval Studies NLH New Literary History NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen N&Q Notes & Queries

x

Abbreviations

OE OEN OT PBA RB RES RHS SBVS SEHB SM SN SP SS TSLL TSL YSE

Old English Old English Newsletter Oral Tradition Proceedings of the British Academy Revue Benedictine Review of English Studies Revue d'Histoire de la Spiritualite Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research Studies in the Early History of Britain Studi Medievali Studia Neophilologica Studies in Philology Scandinavian Studies Texas Studies in Literature and Language Tennessee Studies in Literature Yale Studies in English

UNLOCKING THE WORDHORD

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Introduction Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

Early in Beowulf, a company of armed Geatish warriors sail from their homeland in what is now southern Sweden to Denmark, where they are confronted by a Danish coastguard who asks them, in 'mej?elwordum' (236) [formal words], to explain who they are and why they have arrived, unbidden and unannounced, upon the shore of his country. The situation is precarious for both parties: the coastguard must determine whether this troop ought to be allowed to enter or if they ought to be repelled, forcibly if necessary, and the troop must establish their own merit and that of their visit. The young leader of the Geatish troop, Beowulf, responds to the challenge by unlocking his 'wordhord' (258b) in a speech demonstrating the depths of his cultural and political knowledge: he carefully establishes both his tribal affiliation and his paternal lineage before explaining that he and his band have been sent in friendship to help rid Denmark of the terrible creature that has been plaguing the kingdom for twelve years. Beowulf's skilful resort to his 'wordhord' allows him successfully to navigate the culturally and politically complex situations in which he finds himself thrust, both in Denmark and back home in Geatland. In this scene the poem calls on a potent word to mark the source of Beowulf's power to resolve this confrontation. In unlocking his 'wordherd,' at once thesaurus and archive, Beowulf is shown to draw on what the poem envisions as a wealth of knowledge, not just 'words' but words filled with meaning. Similarly when Widsith, the widely travelled poet of the Exeter Book, begins his catalogue of peoples, places, and rulers, 'wordhord onleac' (Ib) suggests the copious infor-

4 Mark C. Amodio and Katharine O'Brien O'Keeffe

mation that follows.1 If these contexts suggest the oral world and the individual's ability to articulate his culture, both to remember the past and to put it to use, Vainglory shows the lettered dimension of the storehouse, in which 'beorn boca gleaw' (4a) [a man skilful in books] reveals a 'wordhord/ presumably filled by reading. Command of the 'wordhord' is indispensable to the wise, as Order of the World recommends that a 'deophydig mon' (18a) [thoughtful or meditative man] should 'bewritan in gewitte wordhordes craeft' (19) [inscribe in his mind the power or skill of the 'wordhord']. Wisdom itself, the figure Alfred and his helpers put in Philosophy's place in the Old English translation of Boethius's Consolation, 'wordhord onleac' in singing of the transitory nature of earthly things: Eala, baet on eordan auht faestlices weorces on worulde ne wunad aefre!2 In all of these instances of 'wordhord/ the speaker, writer, or thinker unlocks the storehouse, chooses his words, and makes them work. But when the tongues have long been silenced and the language has grown old, a different kind of unlocking is required, not by stealth but certainly by skill. The lines that Wisdom sings on the transitory world are themselves a poignant image of the operation of time on the Old English 'wordhord/ The translation of the Consolation with both prose and verse passages is transmitted uniquely in London, British Library MS. Cotton Otho A. vi,3 a manuscript that suffered badly in the Cotton fire of 1731. Among many other losses to the text, including some ten leaves, the words 'faestlices' and 'weorces' were burned away and would have been beyond recovery had it not been for the copies of the Cotton metra inserted by Franciscus Junius into his seventeenthcentury transcription of the Old English prose translation of Boethius, now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Junius 12 [SC 5124]. If Junius did not imagine the use to which his transcript would be put, neither did the Tremulous Hand imagine his place in a line of readers and interpreters of Old English texts. From as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, continuing through Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and later Lasamon, readers after the Conquest have come to the 'wordhord' of Old English to unlock its treasures. In seeking to open it, they share with the Antiquarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no less than readers of the present day, a desire to make the culture of Anglo-Saxon England speak to their time.

Introduction 5

The title of this book invokes both the Old English language's image of its own store of knowledge and contemporary scholarship's varied engagements with current issues, methodologies, and approaches to reading and interpreting the written remains of Anglo-Saxon England. In the essays contained in this volume, an international group of scholars in the field engage the 'wordhord' through critical, textual, and lexical studies. Their subjects include comparative work on Old English and Latin (Keefer and Lapidge) and on Old English, ancient Greek, and South Slavic (Foley); notions of authorship and textual integrity (Doane, Graham, Lapidge, and Szarmach); techniques of editing (Graham, Lapidge, and Szarmach); heroic poetry (Doane, Foley, Roberts, and Scragg); religious verse (Howe and Keefer); lexicography (Bately, Frank, Healey, and Roberts); oral tradition (Doane and Foley); and material textuality (Berlin, Graham, and Lapidge). Throughout the collection, these essays talk to and through each other and create a dialogue that resonates across genres, techniques, and approaches. Their engagements offer fresh readings of some popular pieces, invite attention to some less-familiar texts, and illustrate the latest state of particular techniques for literary/critical analysis, textual recovery, and lexical studies. In gathering together these essays in memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr, we hope to offer a snapshot of current scholarship in the field and to stimulate further discussion as it enters its second millennium. The collection opens with a series of literary/critical interpretations written from an array of contemporary theoretical perspectives. Leading off this section is Nicholas Howe's 'Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book.' In the body of Old English poetry that explores the thematics of exile, Howe discovers two distinct voices, that of the anhaga [solitary figure] who is driven from the communal group and that of the folc displaced from terra cognita to terra aliena, a displacement that 'imperils the poetic voice by which a people praises God and locates its place in His creation' (14). Taking as his starting point the vision of history as the lament of a folc that he finds powerfully articulated in Psalm 136, Howe explores the geographical dynamic of the poems that comprise the Junius Book - Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan - and argues that they constitute 'an ongoing narrative or flow of biblical history.' Through a subtle interweaving of allegorical and historicist perspectives, Howe establishes the Junius Book as a site for reassessing notions of place, displacement, and territory within the twin axes of secular and divine history. './Elfric' is a name familiar to students of Anglo-Saxon culture as the

6 Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

writer of a considerable body of homilies, saints' lives, and other writings in Latin as well as Old English. In a literature where there are precious few names (and, thus, precious few authors to pursue), ^Elfric offers comfort to modern sensibilities. Paul Szarmach's essay, ',/Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author,' disturbs that comfort by scrutinizing the very notion of author at the turn of the first millennium. The revisions evident in the versions of JEfric's Life of Martin contained in Catholic Homilies II and Lives of Saints reveal him to be an 'author at variance with his immediate tradition' (54). Szarmach further brings to bear Foucault's dissolution of the author into a function ('the author-function') on received notions of how Mlfric may (or may not) have perceived himself as a writer. A.N. Doane also focuses on textual mouvance, but concentrates on the scribe's, rather than the author's, role in creating it. Rather than heaping opprobrium upon them for 'damaging' the texts they copied by making unsanctioned changes, Doane sees scribes as playing a dynamic role in the transmission and preservation of vernacular texts. Thus textual variations ought not to be judged on the basis of how greatly they diverge from some romanticized, idealized, and conveniently absent wr-text, but rather should be seen as evidence of 'a performance of a specialized kind, which in its physicality and uniqueness is an analog to oral performance' (63). The evidence of the two scribal hands responsible for producing the unique manuscript of Beowulf affords Doane the opportunity to illustrate the ways in which the different types of textual variances discovered in their respective sections of the poem reveal Scribe A to be more literate and visual and Scribe B to be more closely attuned to his tradition's oral poetics. John Miles Foley also engages the Anglo-Saxon oral tradition and adopts a comparatist perspective in his 'How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse.' Old English is unusual among traditional poetries in its generic make-up. Whatever the individual genre might be - epic, charm, hagiography, elegy, maxim - the metrical shape is basically the same: the four-stress, alliterative prosody that characterizes the canonical Beowulf similarly informs virtually all Old English poetry, including such varied poems as the 'Charm for Unfruitful Land,' Elene, and the late Durham. This metrical continuity supports an easy migration of phraseology and narrative patterns from one genre to another, so that we may find riddling lines in lyric, for example, or discover the 'Beasts of Battle' or 'Hero on the Beach' scenes in a variety of generically different works. In terms of reception, this sharing of language and motifs

Introduction 7

brings the entire poetic tradition into play as the referent of any one poem. In other words, the traditional referentiality of any single genre is not simply that genre alone, but also all of the other forms within the Old English poetic repertoire. Genres leak, but very productively. To provide comparands to the Old English tradition and its unique multigeneric resonance, Foley turns to traditional poetries in ancient Greek and South Slavic and demonstrates that genres in these two traditions leak as well, but more selectively than they do in Old English. Donald Scragg, in 'A Reading of Brunanburh/ takes a broadly historicist view of the Battle of Brunanburh, a poem that, unusually for the period, survives in four manuscript versions, and reads the poem not in isolation but against the rich background of its manuscript contexts. Because it is recorded as part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, thus within a historical and prose tradition, Brunanburh has not been fully explored by commentators interested in its poetic form, while the fact that its subject is a historically recorded battle has led to ill-advised critical comparison with the Battle ofMaldon. The Chronicle tradition is a written one, and the Brunanburh poem, from internal evidence, would appear to be part of a written tradition too, one that the author of Brunanburh exploits in the service of establishing the successors of Edward as legitimate and effective rulers of Britain and as kings of all the English. The final essay in this section, Sarah Larratt Keefer's "Tc" and "We" in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse/ moves us from one main branch of Old English poetry, the world of secular, heroic texts, back to its other main branch, the world of religious and devotional texts that Howe considered. Reading this poetry as social phenomena leads Keefer to probe the ways in which it evidences specific cultural formations in late Anglo-Saxon England. She analyses the social and spiritual concomitants of Benedictine (and indeed pre-Benedictine) monastic practice and surveys the relationship between the Latin canticles and a range of Old English 'minor' poems. Apart from examining the social conditions that gave rise to this genre of Old English poetry, she works to distinguish between the types of poetic voices found in vernacular verse based upon the liturgy: communal voices (in Keefer's terms the Liturgical and Devotional voices) that derive from (even as they exemplify) the poetic tradition's performative, collective nature and the private, single voice (the Meditational) that is always 'truly personal' and recalls the voice that is so central to our modern conceptualizations of the self.

8 Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

From the work of the earliest glossators to that of contemporary editors, textual work has been a central component of Anglo-Saxon studies, and as the four essays that follow demonstrate, working closely with the manuscript records and making those records more widely available through the production of critical editions remain important endeavours today. Although Anglo-Saxon culture was insular, it was far from isolated; archaeologists and historians have detailed the period's complex social and economic milieux and literary scholars are continuing to unpack its rich textual milieu as well as they work to understand the intra- and intertextuality of the manuscript records. In 'Cynewulf and the Passio S. lulianae/ Michael Lapidge engages in a two-pronged examination of Anglo-Saxon material culture. After detailing the transmission history of the Passio, Lapidge first offers a careful consideration of individual readings found in both the Latin and Old English texts before turning to consider divergent readings in the two texts. By arguing that the version of the Passio contained in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, lat. 10861 is very similar to the exemplar Cynewulf followed in composing his Juliana, he illuminates Cynewulf's authorial praxis and, by extension, his relationship to the traditional register Anglo-Saxon poets employ. Because this version of the Passio has hitherto attracted little scholarly attention, and because it is not widely available, he provides an editio princeps of it in the second half of his essay so that students of Cynewulf can continue the provocative dialogue he has begun. As does Lapidge, Timothy Graham both focuses on Anglo-Saxon manuscript culture and provides us with a critical edition that will prove foundational to future studies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. His contribution, 'King Cnut's Grant of Sandwich to Christ Church, Canterbury: A New Reading of a Damaged Annal in Two Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle/ brings to bear historical research, the most current technical resources, and the full range of editorial strategies to read and reconstruct a previously lost annal from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The focus of his study is the six-line erasure within the annal for 1031 in the Parker Chronicle, an annal which spans eleven lines and which records King Cnut's grant to Christ Church of rights over the port of Sandwich. Janet Bately's 1986 edition of MS A of the Chronicle includes portions of the erased text as read by the then Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, R.I. Page, but recent re-examination of the annal using technologies unavailable to Page, and a comparison of this text to other Old English and Latin accounts

Introduction 9

of the same grant, have resulted in the recovery of nearly all the erased text. Before providing a new edition of the annal, together with an edition of the equivalent Old English annal in the bilingual Old English and Latin copy of the Chronicle, MS F, made at Christ Church in the late eleventh or early twelfth century Graham reassesses whether the scribe of the 1031 annal is identifiable as the scribe of MS F on the basis of an evaluation of the differences between the annal for 1031 in MS A and the equivalent annal in MS F. He further examines the question of why the two manuscripts report the grant of Sandwich under different dates, both of which are at variance with the date in the charter itself, and traces the nature of the dispute that arose in the 1030s between Christ Church and St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury concerning the rights over the port of Sandwich. Gail Ivy Berlin shifts our attention from the materiality of written texts and from the words inscribed upon the surfaces of manuscript pages to that of a pictorial 'text' in 'The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective.' The Bayeux Tapestry, a remarkable embroidery depicting the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, consists of a central strip containing the main narrative events flanked by decorative margins. Although the plan for the main narrative seems to be of French design, the workmanship has been proved to be English and the margins seem not to have been a part of the French program of design. Berlin focuses on the vignettes representing ^sop's fables that appear in the border of the tapestry below the main portion showing Harold boarding his ship and sailing for Normandy, and addresses the largely overlooked question of how those fables relate to the narrative found in the main body of the tapestry. Situating the images embroidered into the tapestry's borders within the historical and cultural circumstances of their production, Berlin argues that they serve as counterpoints to the tapestry's main, authorized pictorial narrative, through which the Anglo-Saxon artisans responsible for their production were able to comment, perhaps subversively, upon the events leading up to their subjugation. Robert E. Bjork, in 'N.F.S. Grundtvig's 1840 Edition of the Old English Phoenix: A Vision of a Vision of Paradise,' turns his attention to one of the greatest of the many great nineteenth-century scholars and editors of Old English texts, the Dane N.F.S. Grundtvig, and explores not only the place of Grundtvig's Phenix-Fulgen in that poem's nineteenth- and twentieth-century editorial history but also the nationalistic and political tensions that kept this prolific scholar from completing

10 Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe

his ambitious plan to publish a ten-volume collection of Old English texts. Bjork also unpacks the arguments that underlie Grundtvig's introduction and calls our attention to the 'Grundtvigian polemic about the nature and importance of figurative language' that serves as 'the key to the entire book as both valuable cultural artefact and aesthetic unity' (220). Bjork rounds out his study by offering evidence of Grundtvig's considerable artistic achievements both as a translator of Old English and as a poet. The essays that comprise the volume's final section bring us squarely into the world of lexical investigation, another central component of Anglo-Saxon studies. The four essays presented here are especially timely, given the renewed interest in specific study of Old English language initiated by the recent decision of the editors of the Dictionary of Old English to mount it online and on CD rom. Jane Roberts leads off this section with an essay entitled 'Hrothgar's "admirable courage/" in which she argues that a recent shift in the way that the Old English weak masculine noun 'aglaeca' has been interpreted brings into sharper focus a passage from Beowulf that has long proved especially resistant to interpretation. Beginning with J.J. Conybeare's early nineteenth-century translation of selections of the poem, lexicographers and editors of Old English poetry have consistently attributed the central meaning 'monster/ 'wretch/ to this term. Several important early editors of the poem, including Walter J. Sedgefield (1913) and Friedrich Klaeber (in the edition of the poem which has remained the critical standard since it first appeared in 1922), engaged in some legerdemain regarding this term by alternately translating it as 'monster/ 'demon/ 'wretch/ or 'fiend' when they took it to refer to Grendel, his mother, the dragon, or the evil king Heremod, and as 'hero' or 'warrior' when it was used to describe Beowulf or Sigemund. The editors of the authoritative DOE rightly reject both the translation 'monster' and the context-sensitive argument that produced the 'monster'/ 'hero' dualism editors have historically relied upon to explain this slippery term. Instead, they have suggested that 'aglaeca' would be better translated by such phrases as 'awesome opponent' or 'ferocious fighter/ phrases that more aptly reflect the complex work the word is meant to do in the narrative world of Beowulf. Relying on these more nuanced and flexible translations enables Roberts to remove the distorting filter which editorial practice has placed upon this term. Antonette diPaolo Healey's 'Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul' also focuses on the Old English lexicon, but rather than

Introduction 11

approaching it from the perspective of a literary scholar wishing to broaden our understanding of a particular text or moment within a text, as Roberts does, Healey approaches it from the perspective of a lexicographer who is deeply involved in charting the contours of English as it is preserved in the written records of Anglo-Saxon England. Beginning with a consideration of the Indo-European roots of 'fair/ she sets out the senses that it and its related terms have in Old English and traces the transformations that it has undergone throughout the past thousand years, as it loses some of its earlier meanings and acquires new ones. Of particular importance are those paradoxical usages of the lexemes where, for example, what is depicted as 'fair' is actually 'fair-seeming/ where the external and the internal are divided and conflicting. Foundational to her close analysis of language in differing contexts is the theoretical concern with how language and culture interact. Her essay works along two lines of attack: establishing the historical circumstances for the use of these three adjectives and speculating on the conclusions we may draw about Anglo-Saxon culture from a careful analysis of its language. In mapping the meanings of words, Healey reminds us, we must always be alert to their cultural situation (and to our rather different one) and to the semantic puzzles their polysemy gives rise to, puzzles that continue to tease and engage our minds. Janet Bately offers a complementary study of the words for bravery in 'Bravery and the Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon.' Bately analyses the types and distribution of individual words for bravery in two heroic poems and demonstrates the centrality of the lexicographer's art to the study of the cultural world of Old English heroic poetry. Both Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon deal with deeds of what we today might consider great courage, set off and heightened by instances of the converse, the action of cowards. 'Courage' and its synonym 'bravery' have arguably played central roles in the history of the poems' scholarly and popular receptions (and, by extension, of Old English heroic poetry in general), but because both these terms are loanwords, borrowed after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, Bately calls into question both the role of 'bravery' in the two poems and the degree to which Modern English terms such as 'bravery' and 'courage' can accurately render the meaning of the Old English lexemes they 'translate.' In an attempt better to align the modern reception of the poems with that of their Anglo-Saxon audiences, Bately considers the distribution of Old English words identified in

12 Mark C. Amodio and Katharine O'Brien O'Keeffe

modern studies as capable of bearing the meanings 'brave, bravery' and so forth in the context of the poets' depictions of valorous deeds and their portrayals of heroic behaviour. By calling attention to the culturally specific resonances of these Old English terms and to the ways that our modern equivalents distort (and perhaps even destroy) them, Bately's essay joins with Roberts's and Healey's to remind us that we must remain sensitive to the ways our modern sensibilities colour our understanding of the past. Roberta Frank, in 'Sex in the Dictionary of Old English/ turns her attention to some of the 'four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms' preserved in the Dictionary Corpus and considers the problems that attend translating these terms euphemistically (and often in Latin, to boot), a practice common to many earlier Old English dictionaries. Modern readers, she argues, neither need nor want euphemistic translations. However, unlike the editors of modern English dictionaries, who now regularly include blunt, no-nonsense translations of our language's sexual vocabulary, the editors of the Toronto Dictionary find themselves in somewhat of a bind: were they to offer similar translations, they would force upon these terms a directness sharply at odds with the sense of propriety that dominates their usage in the Dictionary Corpus. As Frank notes, the Corpus reveals that the Anglo-Saxons suffered from no shortage of dirty words and were certainly capable of describing the full range of human sexual behaviours and proclivities, but in translating these terms we need to remain sensitive to the literary and cultural contexts in which they occur, contexts that often reveal that Anglo-Saxon authors prized indirectness over explicitness. At our great temporal and cultural remove, we cannot hope actively to engage what was very much a living register for Anglo-Saxon poets and their audiences; rather, we can only gain entry into the world of the Anglo-Saxons through consideration of the 'wordhord' they have bequeathed us, through, that is, those literary, historical, and cultural artefacts that have survived, in varying degrees of intactness, to the present day. Throughout his long career as a scholar and a teacher, Ted Irving strove to uncover the rich and strange beauty of Old English poetry and the culture that produced it. In the body of critical work that survives him, Ted has not only left behind evidence of his own success in unlocking the Anglo-Saxon 'wordhord' but has left us many, many promising points of departure for future inquiries as well.

Introduction 13 Notes 1 The phrase functions similarly in both its occurrences in Andreas (316b and 601b). 2 Krapp, Meters ofBoethius, 159, metrum 6.16-17. Alas that on earth no lasting work ever remains in the world. 3 Ker, Catalogue, item 167, 's. x med.' There was at least one other copy, a fragment known to Napier, but this was one leaf of prose.

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book Nicholas Howe

The story of their wandering is the story of their belief.' - Elias Canetti on the Jews1

'Super flumina Babylonis/ Psalm 136 in the Vulgate, is perhaps the most haunting lament in the Hebrew Bible. Its fearful burden is that an exiled people will lose its collective memory and thus fail to honour its covenant with God. The bitter knowledge of the psalm is, in turn, that the exile of a people must end in the violent destruction of those who forced that people out of its homeland. Under these conditions of historical and spiritual extremity, the psalmist must ask the question that threatens the very existence of an exiled people: 'quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena' [How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?]. The loss of Jerusalem and the banishment to Babylon, the displacement from terra cognita to terra aliena imperils the poetic voice by which a people praises God and locates its place in His creation. For both people and poet must have some native ground of language and terrain from which to shape their collective identity and fulfil their obligations to God. Exile, as the loss of that ground, puts communal identity in danger.2 'Ofer Babilone bradum streame/ the Old English version of Psalm 136, acquires a particular resonance when read within a vernacular lyric tradition that most famously portrays the exile as a solitary figure, or anhaga.3 For this psalm laments the enforced exile not of a lonely individual but of a religiously defined people; its nominative pronoun

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 15

throughout the Old English version is not ic but we. In marked contrast, such representative figures as the Wanderer and the Seafarer, the speakers of The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, even the figures known as Deor and Widsith open themselves to psychological and spiritual interpretation as individuals. Each embodies in its own way an aspect of the human condition; each suggests a possibility of how one is to fare through this world; and some go further to ask what place the soul will find in the heavenly home. However we allegorize or psychologize these representations, we must remember that each envisions exile as an individual rather than a collective condition.4 Or, more exactly, each depicts exile as the fate of an individual sundered from the communal group: the retainer without lord and retinue, the woman without husband and kin. One hears in these poems the voice of the anhaga, not that of the/o/c as it appears in a poem such as the Old English Exodus. From this distinction between anhaga and/o/c emerges a further question about the conventions of biblical representation as they function in Old English poetry, namely, is there any causal relation between the historical condition of a people and the spiritual condition of an individual? Put another way, how do these two forms of exile coexist within the historical memory valorized by the psalmist? This question can be pursued, at least briefly, by turning from textual to visual representations of exile. The illustrator of Psalm 136 in the Utrecht Psalter portrays, on the far right side of the panel, the Israelites as a group sitting beside the river of Babylon with their musical instruments hanging in the trees above them.5 They are balanced by a group of Babylonians in a manner that establishes the collective nature of experience in this psalm and, by extension, throughout Israelite history. In a more delineated illustration for this same psalm, the artist of the Harley Psalter offers a very different image by filling the frame with a walled city (most probably the Sion of the psalm's first verse) at the far left and the river of Babylon at the far right.6 Set between city and river are seven figures seated beneath flame-like trees from which hang musical instruments, most notably the large harp of David. From the upper right-hand corner of the frame emerges the hand of God extended in a gesture of blessing. The Babylonians as a people are not represented in this image, as if thereby to emphasize both the singularity and the exile of the Israelites as a chosen people within the Old Testament. The Harley illustrator portrays the narrative of the Israelites, set between the Sion of their home and the river of their captivity, as a condition blessed by God and thus as interpretable within providential

16 Nicholas Howe

history. At the centre of this illustration is the hanging harp, untouched by human hand, that poses in all but words the urgent question at the centre of the psalm: 'quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena?' Beneath that harp the Israelites appear as a group that knows Sion and Babylon, native ground and domain of exile. Psalm 136 thus sets religious history within the terms of wandering, captivity, and suffering. As it laments the condition of displacement, it also inspires the Israelites to remember their covenant with God. The Old English version renders this force of displacement both through the imperative of the Babylonians - 'Singad us ymnum ealdra sanga / Ipe ge on Sione sungan geneahhige' [Sing us one of the old hymns that you often sang in Sion] - and also through the unanswerable question by which the psalmist responds - 'Hu magon we singan sangas drihtne / on f>aere foldan J?e us fremde is?' [How can we sing a song to the lord in a land that is alien to us?].7 To sing the song of Sion in Babylon is to utter the lament of an exiled people. This Old English poem, for it is more than a simple translation, must be read within the larger history of human exile that runs throughout the Hebrew Bible.8 For the Babylonian Captivity lamented in Psalm 136 followed in time from the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan, which in turn followed from the exodus of the Israelites as a people across the Red Sea and through the desert, where they wandered for forty years. The search for the new home promised by God's covenant with Abraham follows inevitably, if belatedly, from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Within the Christian interpretive tradition, this sequence of events from Israelite history had a later, figurative life, another form of fulfilment or homecoming in the story of Christ in the Wilderness and in his Harrowing of Hell. Christ's forty days re-enacts and validates the Israelites' forty years in the desert; his spiritual triumph over Satan's temptation reenacts and validates figuratively the Israelites' triumph over the Egyptians. Christ's Harrowing of Hell releases his followers from another state of exilic captivity, one enforced by Satan rather than Nebuchadnezzar. As a sequence of movements, the expulsion from Eden, the exodus of the Israelites to Canaan, the forced deportation to Babylon, and the journey of Christ into hell and His victorious emergence all belong to history as it unfolds along a geographical rather than chronological dimension. Each event occurs, unavoidably, within place; more pointedly, each is about place in deep and haunting ways that register loss, exile, displacement, return. Psalm 136 articulates this vision of history

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 17

as the lament of a folc and thus offers a way to read the Old English poems known as Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan as they constitute the Junius Book, that great collection of poetry about events set elsewhere.9 Elsewhere means, in this context, places beyond the borders of Engla land or, more specifically, places across the channel that separates it from the continent and all that lies far beyond, such as the lands that Abraham, Moses, Daniel, and Christ knew, or hoped to know, as their earthly home. Within this sense of cultural geography, Junius 11 bears striking affinities with Cotton Vitellius A. xv and the Vercelli Book, for they are also poetic books of elsewhere. From reading the poems in these three great codices, one would have no idea that, at the level of literal geography, there was any such place as Engla lond. Only the language of the poems would suggest that such a place might exist because there had to be somewhere populated by those who spoke and understood this same language. The Exeter Book can also be read in large measure as a book of elsewhere because, leaving aside the obvious inclusion of Guthlac as saint and poem, it too makes little reference to Engla lond. For Old English poems explicitly about that place - The Battle of Brunanburh, The Battle of Maldon, Durham, The Menologium - one turns most immediately to the non-poetic codices, in fact, commonly to the collective manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Indeed, these manuscripts might be described as making up the book of her, that is, the book of the 'here' of Engla lond, of the space on the vellum leaf, of the year to be registered in the annal.10 Even the most cursory reading of the Book of Genesis shows that the fall of Adam and Eve was a fall into time and its inexorable workings: into human aging, mortality in nature, seasonal change, and all the other markers of revealed time that were so ruefully evoked by Old English poets.11 This expulsion was also an act of falling into place or, more exactly, of falling into a knowledge of places. After the loss of Eden there would be no fixed home on earth, but only the restless shuttling of lone exiles and transplanted peoples from place to place. The price that humans pay for the sins of their ancestors, as we learn from the Bible, is the burden of place and displacement. Wandering, exodus, enforced captivity, spiritual struggle in a figuratively bounded place: these are the settings of Christian experience and history. Central to this reading of the Junius Book, as is most fitting for a celebration of Edward B. Irving Jr, is the Old English Exodus.12 The

18 Nicholas Howe

reading of the poem that I offered in Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England falls within this historicized and historicizing sense of place, that is, of place as a history-making argument.13 Here I want to consider how this logic of place was used not simply to inscribe the transformative migration of the Germanic tribes to Britain, but also to denote a larger pattern of human history within the fallen world: that of movement, of the restless search for a place to call home.14 In the sweep of the Junius Book, the exodus matters because it leads a chosen people to its new home through a divinely ordained movement. Exile in Babylon matters to the Israelites because there they remember Jerusalem and their true faith with heartbreaking poignancy. The desert matters because there the experience of moving from place to place yields its full significance in the promise of a heavenly home. Adam, Moses, Daniel, Christ; Satan, Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Satan: such are the names that attach themselves to the stories of place in the Junius Book. The four poems in the Junius Book amount to some 5019 lines, more than half again the 3182 that make up Beowulf.15 The extended length of this manuscript offers, I would suggest, an ongoing narrative or flow of biblical history that can be recognized most immediately by locating a few crucial moments in each poem. My argument for describing the Junius Book as a book of elsewhere tacitly assumes that an Anglo-Saxon reader would have found meaning in its deployment of historical and theological themes. I do not address the vexed and probably unanswerable question of why some compiler brought these four poems together in a single manuscript. In that regard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's conclusion is salutary: 'the book which Junius 11 presents was produced less by design than by accretion/16 By reading these poems for their references to place as a subject and for their uses of place to structure narrative, we can gain an immediate sense of their literal significance. The reading I trace in the following pages is not meant to displace readings based on the manuscript's theological or liturgical unity,17 nor on its complex program of illustrations.18 My concern is less to identify the compiler's intentions than to explore the ways in which an alert and informed reader might interpret (whether by eye or ear) these poems as four books of religious history, that is, as parts of an improvised but necessary quadrateuch.19 Within this reading of the manuscript, the defining passage is most obviously God's speech after the disobedience of Adam and Eve. The

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 19

events in the Old English Genesis follow the familiar sequence and the outcome is equally familiar: Ahead eac Adame ece drihten, lifes leohtfruma, Ia5 aerende: 'I>ii scealt oderne edel secean, wynleasran wic, and on wraec hweorfan nacod niedwaedla, neorxnawanges dugedum bedaeled; be is gedal witod lices and sawle.'20

These lines contain the irrevocable sentence passed by God: that the first experiential suffering human beings must know in the world, and the first atonement they must perform, is to seek another homeland: 't>u scealt oderne e6el secean.' This speech announces the only exile from which there can be no literal return: Eden is gone forever and can only be redeemed, spiritually and thus obliquely, through the sacrifice of Christ and the attainment of heaven. The dislocation of Adam and Eve from Eden, the sundering of human beings from the first place, is accompanied inescapably in this speech by the separation of body from soul. Other Old English poets will at times use the separation of body from soul to represent a form of spiritual exile; the poet of Genesis works differently by establishing that the inescapable duality of the separated body and soul is a consequence of the separation of Adam and Eve from Eden. This consequence is, more specifically, historical because it takes place in, and must be understood by later readers within, the dimension of time. The parallel in these lines exists as both historical and spiritual experience; the fact of having been driven from paradise into the confusions of place coexists with the tearing apart of the ineffable soul and the physical body. What holds the two terms of the parallel together is the presence of mortality. To know places, in the plural, is to live in a fallen world; to have a sense of place, within the terms of God's pronouncement in these lines from Genesis, is to know the presence of time and thus of death. The punishment inflicted on Adam follows sequentially from that of Eve, who is made subordinate to her husband and allotted pain in childbirth, and that of the snake, punished with the promise that women will tread on its head with their feet. But the Old English poet also prepares for the punishment Adam will know by having God speak thus to the snake:

20 Nicholas Howe Pa naedran sceop nergend usser, frea aelmihtig fagum wyrme wide sidas and ba worde cwaed: 'Pu scealt wideferhd werig binum breostum bearm tredan bradre eordan, faran fedeleas, benden be feorh wunad, gast on innan.'21

The serpent's banishment into the wide tracks of the broad earth is less precisely demarcated than is Adam's punishment because its consciousness is less elevated (and thus less violated by the fall) than is his. But the snake, in its low-to-the-ground way, must also know dislocation on the earth. The terms of punishment for both Adam and the snake are not arbitrary but proceed directly from Eve's earlier encounter with Satan in the poem. As she tells Adam, the fruit Eve had from God's angel gave her knowledge so that she could see across the span of God's creation: 'Ic maeg heonon geseon hwaer he sylf sited, (baet is su6 and east), welan bewunden, se 6as woruld gesceop; geseo ic him his englas ymbe hweorfan mid federhaman, ealra folca maest, wereda wynsumast. Hwa meahte me swelc gewit gifan, gif hit gegnunga god ne onsende, heofones waldend? Gehyran maeg ic rume and swa wide geseon on woruld ealle ofer bas sidan gesceaft, ic maeg swegles gamen gehyran on heofnum.'22

Eve's pride before the fall is to imagine herself possessing a divine knowledge of place, of having a God's-eye view of creation. Her sin finds its inevitable conclusion in the displacement that she will know when she lives in the world under the dominion of Adam. She will suffer as an exile on earth because, in terms inverting this passage, she has no geographical or spatial vision, no ability to trace a divinely drawn map that relates place and time back to God's design. Exile thus acquires through Eve's experience of banishment a more generalized quality, that is, the loss of any direct ability to see the coherence of the broad creation. Exile means that human beings are trapped within the

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 21

particularities of their fallen sense of place; they cannot see with the sweep and wholeness of God's vision. For the generation of Adam and Eve, this directly experienced fall into place marks their sin and their dispossession from Eden. For the generations that follow from them within the Old English Genesis, this sense of place becomes fixed as a topos of dislocation that manifests itself in the recurring human fate of exile. A few instances of this topos, all of which follow God's speech of banishment to Adam, suffice to illustrate this claim. After leaving Eden, Adam and Eve live in a more sorrowful land: 'Gesaeton J?a aefter synne sorgfulre land, / card and e3yl unspedigran' (961b-2) [They settled after their sin in a more sorrowful land, a poorer region and homeland]. The comparative forms of the adjective sorgful and unspedig designate precisely the nature of their experience: before the fall there was only Eden and thus no possibility or need for the comparative degree when speaking of a place. In later years, after he has murdered his brother Abel, Cain will suffer exile at God's order: 'forj)on J>u flema scealt / widlast wrecan, winemagum lad' (1020b-l) [thus you, hateful to your people, must wander widespread paths]. Cain himself knows that his fate will be to wander on foot from place to place as the dispossessed of God: 'for^on ic lastas sceal / wean on wenum wide lecgan' (1026b-7) [therefore I must go far away, expecting sorrow]. That living in the world means knowing dislocation runs as a topos throughout the Old English Genesis, and gives the poem a resonant sadness. Yet this same sense of human dislocation will become the means for achieving new possibilities of life. That the fall was not entirely unfortunate, that the movement from place to place can yield a new homeland, is articulated through the experience of the Hebrews. As the sons of Eber (Genesis, 1645), the Hebrews set out from the east to find a new homeland: Pole waes anmod; rofe rincas sohton rumre land, o3J?aet hie becomon cordrum miclum, folc ferende, ]?aer hie faestlice aeSelinga beam, eard genamon.23

The green and pleasant land they settle is called Sennar (or Shinar). As the setting for the Tower of Babel it becomes in time the site for a further act of dislocation, as the tribes of humankind are sundered into

22 Nicholas Howe

mutual incomprehensibility (1695b-6). The fact of linguistic difference, in the old sense of the term, becomes another quality of displacement or exile. Read within the flowing narrative of the Junius Book, the most resonant passages in Genesis about the fate of place in a post-Edenic world are those which evoke the covenant God makes with Abraham. These passages establish ideas about place that will become central in the three subsequent poems in the manuscript. For they are about the redemption of place as the site of something other than loss and suffering. Arriving in Canaan, Abraham travels through that country and there hears the promise of God: Pa nine cyning engla Abrahame iewde selfa, domfaest wereda and drihten cwaeQ: 'Ms is seo eorde J?e ic aelgrene tudre binum torhte wille waestmum gewlo on geweald don, rume rice.'24

This vision of a verdant and abundant homeland influences later episodes in Abraham's life. It underlies, for example, his refusal of Abimelech's offer of a home in his realm: 'Wuna mid usic and be wic geceos on bissum lande J?aer be leofost sie, edelstowe, J?e ic agan sceal.'25

The definition of homeland as the place from which exile must occur plays itself out in the stories of Abraham's sons, Ishmael and Isaac. This turn to the next generation establishes as well that a people can maintain itself over time through possessing a sense of its own place. Such knowledge is sustaining but it can never, finally, be separated from the pain of displacement. Thus we are to understand Abraham's grief at driving Ishmael into exile: 'da waes Abrahame / weorce on mode baet he on wraec drife / his selfes sunu' (2791b-93a) [Then was Abraham afflicted in spirit because he had driven his own son into exile]. Moreover, this vision of a green and pleasant homeland defines by contrast the desolate place where Abraham must go to sacrifice his other son, Isaac:

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 23 'SidSan bu gestigest steape dune, hrincg baes hean landes, be ic heonon getaece, up pinum agnum fotum, baer bu scealt ad gegaerwan, baslfyr bearne pinum, and blotan sylf sunu mid sweordes ecge, and bonne sweartan lige leofes lie forbaernan and me lac bebeodan.'26

Abraham must lead Isaac along steep slopes into the highlands because the injunction of sacrifice can only be fulfilled in the wastelands, the marches, that territory no one calls home. Genesis ends with the sacrifice of the ram (instead of Isaac), and Abraham's prayer of thanksgiving re-establishes the bond between God and the Israelites, but it takes place along the margins of settlement. This scene thus calls into question the very idea of a homeland. That such a question must arise again and again across generations is itself proof of the fall into place. The story of Exodus follows ineluctably from that of Genesis: they are as conjoined in the Junius Book as in the Hebrew Bible. That the Old English poet of Exodus should offer very early in his poem a reminder of the creation story of Genesis, in the form of a summary of God's lesson to Moses (Exodus, 22b-9), establishes the link between these two narratives, whether as biblical books or vernacular poems. As a telling of the Genesis story, however, these lines from Exodus are woefully inadequate; they are at best a brief sketch or aid to memory so that the audience can locate the Exodus story within the unfolding of biblical history. As an allusion to that same story, one meant to be registered by an audience that had just heard or read the 2936 lines of Genesis, this passage on the Creation (as well as the lines that relate Moses to Abraham, which come before it) deftly evokes the necessary pre-history of the Israelites' utgang. Yet more striking in setting the link between the first two poems in the Junius Book, I would argue, is the opening of Exodus: 'Hwaet! We feor and neah gefrigen habad / ofer middangeard Moyses domas' (1-2) [We have heard far and near over the earth of Moses' laws]. That human beings far and near over the earth know of Moses' laws is itself stark testimony to the nature of post-Edenic history. For not only are laws necessary after the fall, they must be known across the regions designated by the conventional measures of space found in Old English poetry. 'Feor and neah' and 'ofer middangeard' are poetic formulas, but they are arguably all the more evocative for that because they denote the

24 Nicholas Howe

accepted and comprehensible ways in which the Anglo-Saxons placed themselves within the sphere of God's creation.27 Reading Exodus within the flow of the Junius Book leads the reader to place great emphasis on a passage late in the poem that evokes - at a time of terrible crisis in the utgang - the moment when God stays Abraham's hand and spares Isaac's life in the steep hills and highlands of the Old English Genesis: 'Ne sleh J>u, Abraham, J)in agen beam' (Exodus, 419) [Do not slay, Abraham, your own child]. For in that moment God's covenant with the Israelites is affirmed and given the explicit promise of a homeland: ac hie gesittad be saem tweonum od Egipte incadeode land Cananea, leode Jjine, freobearn faeder, folca selost.28

These lines introduce another trope ('be saem tweonum') for demarcating the expanse of earthly habitation. I have argued that this trope is part of the poet's means to accommodate a distinctively Anglo-Saxon rereading of the exodus story, by which the ancestral Germanic tribes who crossed the North Sea are aligned with the Israelites who crossed the Red Sea.29 Without modifying that earlier reading in any way, I would add that the reference here to the two seas within the larger text of the Junius Book establishes the fundamental geographical range of its four poems. For all are set within the space between the two biblical seas, if we read that phrase as functioning in a manner comparable to the boundary clauses of Anglo-Saxon legal charters. That is, they designate the outer limits of a region without providing any specific description of the area that falls within these bounds. Immediately following this flashback to God and Abraham in the Old English Exodus appears a break of uncertain length in the manuscript.30 When the text resumes, it portrays the Egyptians struck with terror at the onrushing waters that will drown them. At that moment they will suffer the displacement of death, the poet tells us, and the loss of their homes: Waeron Egypte eft oncyrde, flugon forhtigende, faer ongeton, woldon herebleade hamas findan, gylp weard gnornra. Him ongen genap

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 25 atol y6a gewealc, ne 5aer aenig becwom herges to hame, ac behindan beleac wyrd mid waege.31

This extended passage (from 1. 419 through 1. 458a) evokes the closin verses of Psalm 136, with their almost apocalyptic sense that the liberation of one people can only be accomplished through the horrifying destruction of the people that enslaved it. The Israelites remember their promised homeland and thus are emboldened to continue their utgang at the same moment when the Egyptians are about to perish and lose their homes. On two occasions in the poem (139, 534), the Israelites are said to be edelleas [without a homeland] because they have been displaced from Egypt and have yet to reach Canaan. In the Old English version of the Exodus, a version truncated sharply for political reasons according to my reading, the narrative ends with the Israelites having safely crossed the Red Sea. There they give thanks for their deliverance and recover their treasures from the drowned Egyptians: 'Heo on riht sceodon / gold and godweb, losepes gestreon, / wera wuldorgesteald' (587b-9a) [Rightfully, they shared out the gold and fine cloth, the treasure of Joseph, the glorious possessions of men]. The Israelites have yet to reach their home and complete their escape from the Egyptian exile. That part of the psalmist's prophetic knowledge lies in the future of the next generation. The other part, however, has been fulfilled. In the last line and a half of Exodus, the poet assigns the Egyptians to their final place: 'Werigend lagon / on deadstede, drihtfolca maest' (589b-90) [The guardians, the greatest of troops, lay in the place of death]. A certain closure is achieved by that use of 'deadstede/ a closure that is as grim for the Egyptians as it is hopeful for the Israelites. The Exodus poet traces the lines of sacred history through a multivalent sense of place that closes off the past (or parts of it) at the same moment that it opens up the past (or parts of it). There can be no wandering in the desert for forty years if the drained bed of the Red Sea is not the killing ground of the Egyptians; there can be no forward movement or continuation of figurative history without the division of drowned Egyptians and saved Israelites, without the fatality of the water and the saving ground of the shore. To our minds, there may be something brutal about an evocation of place that serves not as the sustaining ground of human existence but rather as the site where one people survives because another meets its end. Yet for that very reason,

26 Nicholas Howe

the Old English poet would probably not have been mystified by the belief that Judaism begins with Exodus because it is a religion sustained by the idea of Covenant as it was fulfilled within collective experience. For the Old English poet saw that the continuing spiritual history of the Israelites, and thus the figural history of Christians, followed from the utgang as that event followed in its turn within a continuing story that began with the original displacement from Eden. Within the Junius Book, the fullest description of the Israelites in Jerusalem, as well as of the city itself, appears in Daniel. This poem about the exilic captivity of the Israelites in Babylon as punishment for their sins of pride opens with a passage about Jerusalem that will come to seem, as the poem progresses, more like an evocation of absence than of presence: Gefraegn ic Hebreos eadge lifgean in Hierusalem, goldhord daelan, cyningdom habban, swa him gecynde waes, siddan J>urh metodes maegen on Moyses hand weard wig gifen, wigena masnieo, and hie of Egyptum ut aforon, maegene micle. I>aet was modig cyn!32

The reference at the end of this passage to the going out from Egypt drives one back to the Old English Exodus in so striking a manner that some readers have argued that these lines were written specifically to join the two poems in the manuscript.33 While tempting, such a reading risks valuing a moment of manuscript collocation above the demands of narrative continuity. That is, it fails to ask how a poem about the Babylonian Captivity could avoid evoking the lost city of Jerusalem and the exodus from Egypt that had earlier led the Israelites there. The story that will unfold around Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar has its beginnings in the stories of Abraham and Isaac, and of Moses and the flight of his people out of Egypt. The poet of Daniel recognized this genealogy for his story, as is evident from the next lines in his opening section: I>enden hie f>y rice raedan moston, burgum wealdan, waes him beorht wela. Penden J?aet folc mid him hiera faeder waere

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 27 healdan woldon, waes him hyrde god, heofonrices weard, halig drihten, wuldres waldend.34

In this passage of dense variation, which uses four epithets to honour God, the poet emphasizes the keeping of the covenant by the Israelites in Jerusalem as their fathers had kept it in earlier times. The past is evoked in these lines so that the poet might all the more powerfully move to his subject within the present moment of the narrative. The experience of exodus and wandering provides the poet of Daniel with the resonant image by which he will describe the Israelites' turn into pride and error in Jerusalem: 'I>a geseah ic J>a gedriht in gedwolan hweorfan, / Israhela cyn unriht don / wommas wyrcean' (22-4a) [Then I saw that nation, the people of Israel turn to error, work unrighteous judgment and commit sins]. Similarly, the poet evokes the Israelites as an exiled people who had been led by God to the 'edelland': Wisde him aet frymde, 5a 5e on fruman aer don waeron mancynnes metode dyrust, dugoda dyrust, drihtne leofost; herepad taehte to J?aere hean byrig, eorlum eldeodigum, on edelland J?aer Salem stod searwum afaestnod, weallum geweordod.35

With this evocation of the holy citadel, the Old English poet affects a brilliant transition into the present time of his narrative, for the subsequent lines introduce the enmity of the Chaldeans and the plans of Nebuchadnezzar to lay waste to Jerusalem. In a passage of no more than twenty lines, the poet moves from remembering the road that led the Israelites to Jerusalem to describing the destruction of that city by the Babylonian king. Such is, in miniature, the knowledge of the Junius Book: the entry into a place, the loss of that same place; the triumph of possession followed by the tragedy of exile. This bitter knowledge comes from living in a fallen world of many places and no final habitation. It suffuses the brief passage in which the Daniel poet describes the march of the Israelites east into Babylon: 'and gelaeddon eac on langne si6 / Israela cyn, on eastwegas / to Babilonia' (68-70a) [And they also led the people of Israel on a long journey, over the eastward roads, to Babylon].

28 Nicholas Howe

The great bulk of Daniel concerns the fate of the Israelites in Babylon as they are embodied in the prophetic figure of Daniel, as well as in the three young men, Annanias, Azarias, and Misael, put through the ordeal of the fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar. As these three survive torture, they demonstrate that the faith of the Israelites can endure in Babylon, even as earlier it had not been honoured in Jerusalem. Such is the logic of place: the faith neglected by many in Jerusalem is redeemed by the few in Babylon. The return to the covenant can only be signalled through a geography of displacement, as Azarias himself says: Siendon we towrecene geond widne grund, heapum tohworfene, hyldelease; is user lif geond landa fela fracod and gefraege folca manegum, £>a usic bewraecon to J?aes wyrrestan eordcyninga aehta gewealde, on haeft heorugrimra, and we nu haedenra J?eowned J?olia5.36

Azarias beseeches God not to abandon the Israelites because of the covenant given earlier to Abraham and Isaac (309-14), that great scene of recognition which concludes the Old English Genesis. Almost halfway through Daniel the reader of the Junius Book must pause to remember that passage some one thousand lines earlier, in which a father takes his son into the desolate highlands. To suggest that the Junius Book has at such moments its own intertextuality seems rather beside the point, for the connections that the poems weave among themselves by virtue of being in this one manuscript are the same as those inscribed in the larger historical record. The poems no more create these moments of readerly connection than they could evade them. Such moments come, quite literally, with the territory of exile and homecoming. Or, put another way, it is the reader's ranging across the poems that yields such connective moments. Within this territory, the exile of Nebuchadnezzar is one of the most remarkable aspects of Daniel37 For Nebuchadnezzar, like the Israelites, is punished, though his pride is that of a powerful ruler rather than that of a people. He serves as a countertype to the Israelites by embodying the individual outcast rather than the captive people. The poet's description of this episode is thus notably different from that provided of the Israelites' exile:

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 29 Swa wod wera on gewindagum geocrostne sid in godes wite, data be eft lifigende leode begete, Nabochodonossor, si66an him nid godes, hre6 of heofonum, hete gesceode. Seofon winter samod susl browode, wildeora westen, winburge cyning.38

In these seven years, Nebuchadnezzar inhabits a wilderness filled with beasts rather than the historically determined landscape of the utgang. He knows a spiritual exile, a term of despair, from which he can return to God and his own people after having been a 'nacod nydgenga' (632a) [naked and wretched wanderer] and a 'wundorlic wraecca' (633a) [wondrous outcast]. This episode is, I would suggest, the depiction of exile most like those found in the lyrics of the Exeter Book in the sense that Nebuchadnezzar is an anhaga, though one reduced to that state more by spiritual pride than by falling out of favour with a worldly lord. Yet even in making this claim, I recognize that Nebuchadnezzar is hardly to be confounded with any of those solitary exiles in Old English poetry, for he enjoys a happy end to his state. Unlike these others, he lives to know the promise of Dear's refrain 'J?a2s ofereode, Jnsses swa maeg' [That passed away. So may this].39 Nebuchadnezzar returns to Babylon and his throne (Daniel, 640-74); there, he tells his people of his experience as an exile. Above all, he fulfils through his life the prophecy Daniel made about him in his time of pride: that he would be humbled. In its current state, the poem ends with an episode in which the prophet Daniel interprets for Belshazzar and his court the meaning of the words that the angel of God writes on the wall of the hall in crimson letters (712-23). Within the larger reading of the Junius Book, I suggest, this episode is significant because it is precipitated by the sacrilegious use made by the Medes of the Jewish holy vessels seized in earlier generations by the Chaldeans when they conquered Jerusalem. That which is taken from a people when they are driven into exilic captivity and then turned to base uses by unbelievers remains holy. So it must be with the exiled people themselves. Read in this way, the narrative of Daniel teaches that a people can keep the faith of its homeland even in a strange land, that exile is not permanent, that there is an answer to the fearsome question of Psalm 136: 'quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena?'

30 Nicholas Howe

Within the large narrative of the Junius Book, the final answer to the psalmist's question is provided in Christ and Satan. If it is in many ways the least achieved poem in the manuscript, more a gathering of episodes than a coherent vision of biblical history, Christ and Satan nonetheless moves the thematics of place and displacement from earthly to cosmic realms by narrating at length the fall of the angels from heaven into the exile of hell.40 The poem enlarges the territory of the Junius Book by moving beyond the narrowly confined sense of sacred space that we conventionally designate as the Holy Land. More radically, Christ and Satan leaves the confines of the earth to translate this thematics of place and displacement onto a larger cosmography so that it can, in turn, be resolved on earth. With Christ and Satan, the Gospel of Christ and the promise of redemption explicitly enter the Junius Book. Christ's sacrifice and victory over Satan give a finality or closure to the thematics of place and displacement and allow these four poems to be read as a quadrateuch: the fallen angels will be bound eternally in exilic captivity just as the worthy souls rescued by Christ's intervention will enter their true home in heaven. By introducing the figure of Christ into the manuscript, Christ and Satan makes possible a figurative reading of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel in Erich Auerbach's sense of the term: Tigural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life/41 After learning that the worthy souls exiled in hell have been saved, the reader can resolve the patterns of exile, exodus, captivity, and return found in Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel into a final journey, that of the soul to salvation. There is in this resolution a move towards abstraction, a sense that the historicized geography of the Hebrew Bible will give way to an allegorized vision of human experience. Or, to speak more polemically, the gripping narrative of the Old English Exodus will end with the homilies of Christ and Satan. Yet for Christ and Satan to play its concluding part in the Junius Book, it must offer some sense of geographical specificity. The poet begins with the story of the creation in ways that make the reader recall the opening lines of the Old English Exodus and the text of Genesis: I>aet weard underne eordbuendum, baet meotod haefde miht and strengdo da he gefestnade foldan sceatas.42

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 31

The poet of Christ and Satan goes on to emphasize a different element of the creation story than do the poets of the first three poems in the manuscript. For he turns his gaze away from the earthbound stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Israelites, Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar to tell of the rebellion of the heavenly angels and their fall into hell. This displacement may cast its shadow over the first three poems of the Junius Book, but it becomes the explicit, unavoidable subject in Christ and Satan. The poet's sense of place invokes the infernal regions directly and vividly as the terrain of spiritual combat. With his very first words, Satan bewails his loss of heaven precisely because it registers so profoundly in the home of darkness: Hwaer com engla 6rym, J?e we on heofnum habban sceoldan? Pis is deostrae ham, dearie gebunden faestum fyrclommum.43

For Satan, true understanding of his spiritual condition comes through the recognition of his physical displacement: he is in another place and thus has fallen. As he says to his fellow fallen angels: 'Nu ic eow hebbe to haeftum ham gefaerde / alle of earde' (91-2a) [Now I have led all of you from your native place into a home of bondage]. In this way, Satan stands as an antitype of Moses as the leader of a people: 'Nu ic feran com / deofla menego to Sissum dimman ham' (109b-10) [Now I have come to lead a company of devils to this dark home]. Satan also tells his followers that this fall will be eternal and will never end with a return to their homeland (114-17a). Instead, he must wander as an exile: 'ForSon ic sceal hean and earm hweorfan 6y widor, / wadan wraeclastas' (119-20a) [Thus I sad and wretched must wander the more widely, know the paths of exile]. Laments of exile run like a threnody through Satan's speeches in Christ and Satan.44 As these passages demonstrate, Satan is the figure of exile in extremis because he and his band are collectively removed forever from the saving grace of God. They become in the Junius Book the only figures to fall into place without any chance of earthly liberation or heavenly salvation. Their region thus becomes the great ground of struggle between Christ and Satan in the Harrowing of Hell. That episode can be read in ways that parallel the Exodus story: the worthy exiles are redeemed and brought to safety; the evil oppressors are, through death or eternal damnation, forever denied entry into the

32 Nicholas Howe

heavenly home. The significant difference between the Israelites of Exodus and the rescued angels of Christ and Satan lies in the irrevocable entry into the heavenly home. For that edel alone is eternal. Christ's mission in this poem is very much that of the guide to the homeland, a figure who fulfils but also completes Moses because he is allowed to finish his journey and that of his followers: 'wolde manna rim, / fela busenda, for6 gelaedan / up to ec51e' (399b-^401a) [he wished to lead forth countless men, many thousands, upwards to their homeland]. The poet celebrates the arrival of the rescued angels in terms designed to evoke the exile of the Israelites and the Covenant: t*aet, la, waes faeger, baet se fe5a com up to earde, and se eca mid him, meotod mancynnes in ba maeran burn! Hofon hine mid him handum halige witigan up to edle, Abrahames cynn.45

As the poet goes on to explain, the Lord conquers death in ways that the prophets had foretold in past days (460-2). Within the text of the poem, this statement can be read as entirely self-contained because it expresses a conventional sense of religious history; within the context of the Junius Book, the statement also serves to remind the reader to think back on the poems that precede Christ and Satan in the manuscript, because there one will learn the history of Abraham and his people. In its explicitly didactic style, Christ and Satan can bring a certain powerful clarity to the thematics of place and displacement in the Junius Book. Perhaps nowhere in that collection is the distinction between the eternal home of salvation and the eternal site of punitive exile set forth as clearly as it is towards the end of Christ and Satan. In the space of eleven lines, God delivers two brief speeches that signal the final resolution of place. The first is addressed to those who shall be saved: Ge sind wilcuman! Gad in wuldres leoht to heofona rice, baer ge habbad a to aldre ece reste;46

the second to those who will be damned: 'Astigad nu, awyrgde, in baet witehus / ofostum miclum. Nu ic eow ne con' (626-7a) [Fall now with great haste, you damned ones, into the house of torture. I cannot know

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 33

you now]. From these judgments, there can be no recourse, no further motion. Place is fixed within the eternal scheme of God's will; exile and displacement are no longer; the legacy of Adam and Eve's sin is cancelled. Once the fall is abolished, a human sense of place fades away because there is no movement, only the stasis of 'ece reste,' or eternal peace. Until that time, however, human beings are bound to live on earth and thus are possessed by a sense of place. Or so the poems of the Junius Book teach, each in its own way. Within a sense of the past that is determined more by genealogical than chronological specificity, that reveals greater concern for the turn of generations than for the exact demarcations of years, the crucial framework for recording and interpreting events becomes place and the movement between places. In the Hebrew Bible, that sense of place has its dramatic geography. The expulsion from Eden comes before the flight from Egypt and yet also prepares for it. These two events precede the Babylonian Captivity, yet both also prepare for that as well. Where events happened is also a measure of when they happened sequentially within human time as it was brought onto the earth with the fall. The scope of the Junius Book, from the Creation to the Last Judgment, is enormous even for a manuscript of 5000+ lines. Much between these two events is elided or omitted, but much remains and is held in its narrative moment through the thematics of place and displacement. The Junius Book makes yet one more geographical reckoning as a quadrateuch because it demands that its audience respond to the issues posed implicitly by its use of the vernacular. In its cultural and geographical specificity, English was not a universal language around the year 1000, the putative date of the manuscript. It possessed none of the universalist pretensions of Latin. Nor was it a scriptural language. Even the great vernacular prose stylist of that time, /Elfric, had deep anxieties about translating the Bible into English, especially the books of the Old Testament that were historical in nature and thus told of practices forbidden to good Christians.47 The poems in the Junius Book are free of controversial topics, such as polygamy, that posed interpretive difficulties for JElfric and his contemporaries; but they remain deeply historical in nature. The use of the vernacular poses a problem of figural - that is, historicist - interpretation to the readers of this manuscript, for they must close the geographical distance between themselves and the inhabitants of the Holy Land. Through this act of reading, Israelites, Egyptians, Chaldeans and the like are made part of

34 Nicholas Howe

the native history of Engla lond just as much as are the fallen angels damned in hell and the rescued angels freed into heaven. The terrain of belief begins with the fall into place. Notes 1 Canetti, Crowds and Power, 39. 2 See further, Buruma, 'Romance of Exile.' 3 The locus dassicus for this term is the opening line of The Wanderer. 'Oft him anhaga are gebided' [often the solitary one awaits favour]. All quotations from Old English poetry refer to The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. This quotation is from Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 134. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 4 See Greenfield, 'Formulaic Expression of the Theme of "Exile."' 5 DeWald, Illustrations of the Utrecht Psalter, Plate CXIX for illustration; 59-60 for commentary. On the relation of the Utrecht Psalter to the illustrations in Junius 11, see Broderick, 'Observations on the Method of Illustration in MS Junius 11'; and Brantley, 'Iconography of the Utrecht Psalter.' 6 This illustration is reproduced most accessibly in Ohlgren, Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration, 241; for commentary, see 39. 7 Krapp, Paris Psalter, 132. 8 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 5-26. 9 For a description of the physical manuscript, see Raw, 'Construction of... Junius 11'; O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song, 179-86; and Karkov, Text and Picture, chap. 2.1 am deeply grateful to Professor Karkov for allowing me to read her book in proof. 10 See further, Howe, 'An Angle on This Earth.' 11 T. Hill, 'Fall of Angels and Man.' 12 Irving, Old English Exodus; Irving, 'New Notes on the Old English Exodus'; and 'Exodus Retraced.' 13 Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, chap. 3. It is a pleasure to recall that Ted Irving was the first scholar to invite me to read a section of this study at the Modern Language Association in 1987. 14 See Battles, 'Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon "Migration Myth."' 15 Genesis: 2936 lines; Exodus: 590 lines; Daniel: 764 lines; and Christ and Satan: 729 lines. 16 O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song, 180. 17 Among many such studies, see first, Hall, 'Old English Epic of Redemption'; Godden, 'Biblical Literature'; J. Hill, 'Confronting Germania Latina';

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 35 Schrader, Old English Poetry, chap. 2; Orchard, 'Conspicuous Heroism'; Pasternack, Textuality of Old English Poetry, 179-95; and Marsden, Text of the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon England, 441-3. 18 See Raw, 'Probable Derivation'; Ohlgren, 'Illustrations of the Old English Cxdmonian Genesis'; and Karkov, Text and Picture, esp. chap. 6. 19 In this regard, I note but do not consider relevant for my reading the existence of Genesis A and Genesis B, as well as the composite nature of Christ and Satan. My concern is with the manuscript as it exists in its current state. In this regard, I follow the argument of Pasternack, Textuality of Old English Poetry, esp. 'The Reader,' 21-6. 20 Genesis, 925-31 a: The eternal lord, the light of life, likewise passed on Adam a hateful sentence: 'You must seek another homeland, a more joyless place, and wander in exile as a naked wretch, deprived of the heavenly host; for you there is certain separation of body and soul.' All quotations from Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan are from Krapp, Junius Manuscript. 21 Genesis, 903-9a: Then our Saviour, Lord Almighty ordered for the snake, the guilty serpent, a long journey and said these words: 'You must, weary in your heart, tread forever the bosom of the wide earth, journey footless, for as long as life and spirit remain in you.' 22 Ibid., 666b-76a: I can see from here where he himself sits - that is to the south and east - encircled with riches, he who shaped this world. I see his angels move about him with wings, the greatest of all peoples, the most joyful of bands. Who could give me such perception if God, the guardian of heaven, had not sent it straight to me? I can hear broadly and see so widely over all the earth across the wide creation, I can hear the joyful songs in heaven. 23 Ibid., 1650b^4: The people was resolute; the brave warriors sought a roomier land, a journeying people in great multitudes, until they came to where they, offspring of nobles, could steadfastly occupy a homeland. 24 Ibid., 1784b-90a: Then the king of angels, the just ruler, showed himself to Abraham and the lord said: 'This is the green earth, the roomy kingdom adorned with fruitfulness, that I will give into the possession of your offspring.' 25 Ibid., 2723-5: Live with us and choose a place in this land which is most lovely to you, a dwelling place. I must keep you. 26 Ibid., 2854-9: When you have climbed up the steep hill on your own feet, the border of the highland, which I will show you hence, then you shall prepare a pyre, a sacrificial fire for your child, and yourself slay your son with a sword's edge, burn up the body of the beloved one with the dark fire, and offer it to me as a sacrifice.

36 Nicholas Howe 27 Pasternack, Textuality of Old English Poetry, 183-5. 28 Exodus, 443-6: But they, your kinsmen, free-born of their fathers, the best of peoples, shall settle, between two seas as far as the nation of Egypt, the land of Canaan. 29 Howe, Migration and Mythmaking, 89-92. See also North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature, 58-64. 30 See Lucas, Exodus, 8-15. For a discussion of the illustrations in Exodus, see Karkov, Text and Picture, 115-19. 31 Exodus, 452-8a: The Egyptians turned back, they fled in fear, they perceived their danger; they wanted coward-like to find their homes, their boasts turned sadder. The frightening rolling of the waves darkened toward them, none of the army there made it back home, but fate trapped them from behind with a flood. 32 Daniel, 1-7:1 have heard that the Hebrews lived blessedly in Jerusalem, sharing the goldhoard, holding the kingdom, as was proper, when through the might of God an army was given into Moses' hand, many warriors, and they departed out of Egypt by a great miracle. That was a bold race. 33 See, for example, Kennedy, Cxdmon Poems, Ixi. For general readings of the poem, see Bjork, 'Oppressed Hebrews'; and Anderson, 'Style and Theme.' 34 Daniel, 8-13a: For as long as they were able to govern the realm, hold the city, there was bright wealth among them. For as long as that people was willing to hold the covenant of their fathers, God, the guardian of heaven, the holy lord, the ruler of wonders, was a shepherd to them. 35 Ibid., 35-41a: He had led them at the beginning, those who before were the dearest of mankind to the lord at the start, dearest of peoples, most beloved of God; he showed to these foreign nobles the military road to the high city in the homeland where Salem stood, fortified skilfully and adorned with walls. 36 Ibid., 300-7a: We are scattered across the wide earth, dispersed in groups, without protection; our life is in many lands thought to be vile and infamous by many people, who have banished us as slaves into the power of the worst of earthly kings, into bondage under savage men, and we now suffer the oppression of heathens. 37 Harbus, 'Nebuchadnezzar's Dreams.' 38 Daniel, 615-21: So he travelled in days of strife the harshest journey of men under God's punishment, of those who while living find their people once more; so it was with Nebuchadnezzar, after God's sudden attack on him from the heavens violently oppressed him. For seven years together the king of the joyous city endured torment in the wilderness of wild beasts. 39 Krapp and Dobbie, Exeter Book, 178-9.

Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book 37 40 Wehlau, Tower of Knowledge.' 41 Auerbach, 'Figura,' in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 53. See further Howe, 'Figural Presence of Erich Auerbach.' 42 Christ and Satan, 1-3: It was known to earthdwellers that God had might and strength when he fixed the regions of the earth. 43 Ibid., 36b-9a: Where has the glory of the angels gone, which we should have in heaven? This is a dark home, bound painfully with fiery fetters. 44 See, for example, ibid., 176-7; 187b-8; 256b-9a. 45 Ibid., 455-9: There was joy that the band came up to the homeland, and the eternal one with them, the lord of mankind into the glorious city. The holy prophets, the race of Abraham raised him with their hands up to the homeland. 46 Ibid., 616-18: You are welcome! Come into the light of wonder, the kingdom of heaven, where you will always have forever eternal rest. 47 See esp. his preface to the translation of Genesis, in Wilcox, ^Elfric's Prefaces, 116-19.

/Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author Paul E. Szarmach

In the introduction to his edition of Catholic Homilies I (CH I), Peter Clemoes analyses the evidence of the manuscripts and their tradition to discern some six main phases in ^Ifric's treatment of his text, 'the first three being marked by revision and the second three mainly by supplementation and reorganization.'1 Developing the ideas first set forth by Kenneth Sisam, and ensuring a distinction between authorial changes and scribal interventions, Clemoes presents in admirable textual detail observations regarding JElfric's treatment of his own work that complement /Elfric's patent interventions in London, BL, Royal 7 C. xii, where in the first person ^Ifric cancels passages and may have also intervened directly or indirectly elsewhere in the codex.2 The totality of the evidence for CH I gives a rare picture of an early medieval author at work and in active engagement over time with his own literary production. Doctrinal issues or matters of content aside, a large number of ^Ifric's changes might be considered a function of 'style.' In contemporary lexicons the word can be written without capitalization so as to denote a preference for, say, one case over another with a particular preposition, or with capitalization to suggest a movement, be it Romanesque or Baroque. To suggest a possible range of styles in the work of ^Ifric, while yet avoiding the Scylla of minutiae and the Charybdis of generalization, I wish to bring forward here an apposite illustrative pair of texts: the Life of Martin in Catholic Homilies II (CH II) and the Life of Martin in the Lives of Saints (LS). If the changes in the tradition of CH I form a 'horizontal' set of changes to indicate ^Ifric's varying idea of style because they are within the tradition of one text,

jElfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 39

CH II Martin and LS Martin are, rather, Vertical' in that ^Ifric apparently moves from one version to another, fuller treatment; indeed, Malcolm Godden suggests the possibility that the CH II Martin 'was discarded before the second recension [of CH II], since ^Elfric had by then produced' the LS Martin.3 This vertical pair may not only extend the portrait of ^Ifric the reviser and even stylist, but it may also throw light on the issue of prose style at the turn of the first millennium. At the same time the comparison may also bear upon the second millennium's pursuit of the idea of the author in a rather complex way. What do the revisions in ^Ifric's works tell us about ^Elfric as author? The beginning of the answer naturally lies in what the manuscript witnesses tell us. There are three manuscript witnesses to CH II Martin (Cameron number B.I.2.42):4 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198 [Ker 48 art. 56; Gneuss 64], III. Idus Novembris Depositio Sancti Martini Episcopi, fols. 378-85v,

from Worcester, xi1 [E]; Cambridge, University Library, Gg.3.28 [Ker 15 art. 84; Gneuss 11], III Idus Novembris Depositio Sancti Martini Episcopi, fols. 234V-8V,

from Durham, x/xi [K]; London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii [Ker 222 art. 17; Gneuss 406], IIII. Idus Novembris Natale Sancti Martini Episcopi,

fol. '96,' provenance uncertain, ximed [fk].

CUL Gg.3.28 (K), which Benjamin Thorpe uses as his base text for both the First and Second series in his edition, is Godden's base text as well.5 K, a comparatively unbusy manuscript overall, includes /Elfric's Latin and OE Prefaces to both series, and indeed all the works in K of whatever genre, including prayers, admonitions, creeds, and a few letters, are by AJlfric. The Letter for Wulfsige, likely the latest item, helps date the contents to as early as 993-5. The quality of the text and the nature of the script also supports this dating.6 K, though not as close to ^Elfric's Second Series as Clemoes's Royal text [A] is to ^Ifric's First Series, is nevertheless very close to the author. Godden summarizes the state of play: 'K is either a product of ^Elfric's own scriptorium or a remarkably faithful copy of such a manuscript.'7 CCCC 198 [E], while it is a generation later than K, more or less, is still part of the 'first recension' of CH II, despite some remarkable compositional features.8 As an overlay, E, as a whole, shows the activity of the Tremulous Hand,

40 Paul E. Szarmach

who struggles to understand the text and the scribal practice in front of him.9 The Main Hand of E is sometimes inattentive, most egregiously in an eyeskip on 'halgan' (CH 11.31.169-71), often errant in word spacing and occasionally careless by omissions.10 The Tremulous Hand, considered to be a Worcester glossator of the thirteenth century, intervenes whenever he sees fit, but he seems not to catch the major eyeskip and, here and there, problems get by him or are missed.11 Though he knows the name 'JElfnc/ the Tremulous Hand gives no indication that he knew whose homily he was annotating here.12 There is as well an eleventh-century corrector who intervenes.13 All in all, E is a very busy manuscript, presenting more complications now than it did in its beginning, but the Worcester connection through the Tremulous Hand and other evidence that points to Worcester establish that CH 11.34 was not a dead text. Cotton Vitellius D. xvii, shrunken and defective, is a casualty of the Cotton Library fire of 1731, having lost 123 leaves, but the Life of Martin was apparently complete.14 Godden considers it a first recension manuscript based on an archetype similar to those behind K and E.15 When K and E conjoin in their readings, one can have relative confidence that the reading is more likely to be authorial than scribal. Note that K and E have the same title. Somewhat outside the text of the CH Martin, and appended to it, is the conjunctive 'Excusatio dictantis/ which has no direct relevance to the readings of the Life. In this note /Elfric announces that he realizes that he has omitted many Gospel passages but, even with his impulse to keep the book length under control, he will offer items on apostles, martyrs, confessors, and holy women. All of this comes with an Augustinian aside on the Passion of Thomas, evidently already turned into verse 'gefyrn' [a longtime ago], and otherwise worthy despite problematical features.16 K and E contain the 'Excusatio/ f k does not, but the first recension Bodley 340/342, which does not have the CH Martin, has the 'Excusatio/ as appropriate, before the 'common' of the saints. Perhaps more important is the heading within the text that announces 'de eius obitu/ Martin's last days and death. In K, the Main Hand has left about a quarter of the line blank for the lubricator, who inserts the heading in an orange-red ink (fol. 238r4). In E, the Main Hand has left about a quarter of a line blank, marking it with a cross, but no one filled the blank until the Tremulous Hand did with his own brownish 'de obitu eius' (fol. 384rll).17 In fk, the heading 'de obitu eius' does not appear, as expected on fol. 51V7.18 No doubt, JElfric would nod his head in knowing approval that the

Aflfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 41

scribes of E and K are marking a structural highpoint in his account of Martin, as he himself patently had done in his narration. There are three manuscript witnesses to the LS Martin (Cameron number B.l.3.30):19 London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. xiv [Ker 138 art. 1; Gneuss 310, the 'Caligula Troper'], no title [begins imperfectly at line 374], fols. 125-30V, medieval provenance uncertain, ximed [Y]; London, British Library, Cotton Julius E. vii [Ker 162 art. 42; Gneuss 339], Incipit Vita Sancti Martini Episcopi et Confessoris, fols. 179V-203, from Bury St Edmunds, xP [W]; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 343 [Ker 310 art. 18; Gneuss N/A], Incipit Vita Sancti Martini Episcopi .III". Idus Novembris, fols. 35-9v, from the West Midlands, xii2 [B]. Cotton Julius E. vii provides the base text for the Skeat edition. The consensus omnium is that W is not Ailfric's autograph, thanks in major part to the inclusion of several pieces not by ^ilfric, but that it is the closest extant manuscript to ^Elfric's ur-text of LS.20 The LS Martin shows some deluxe treatment, with its preface set off from the Life proper and fifty-five numbered sections in the Life. This capitula approach may not be very distinctive, but it could have been inspired by Latin texts, such as the Martinellus in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 9, where, for example, Sulpicius's Dialogues II and III, are enumerated in sections. The Latin note at the end, unique to W, suggests a close link to the author: 'Olim haec trastuli, sicut ualui, sed modo praecibus constrictus plenius.'21 Clemoes points out that the Main Hand wrote the Latin in insular script, in contrast to the Caroline forms he used in the Preface,22 but it seems very transparent that the sentiments are ^Elfric's. Tlenius' it was surely written, for the 1495 lines in Skeat's edition mark this Life the longest in the collection. W is the only witness to contain this note. Cotton Caligula A. xiv was probably comparable to W in many ways, similarly containing numbered sections, but its imperfect state now complicates and confuses possible conclusions and observations. Bodley 343 not only represents the latest stage of JElfric's LS 31 chronologically, it also suggests another development of the text for, as Skeat documents, sections 4, 7, 8,10,13, 16, 17,19-22, 24, 25, 27-33, 35-9, and 41-7 out of the original 55 are omitted. The reduction in size likely implies that the compiler of B sought to provide a text for delivery that would be manageable.23 B has no sec-

42 Paul E. Szarmach

tion numbers, but sometimes a larger capital that might designate a section. The absence of enumeration might support the departure from a text originally designed for devotional reading. The state of B may not represent ^Ifric's authorial intention, but B shows that an enterprising compiler can adjust a work to his own intention. The manuscript evidence, though it will never get us as close to jElfric's authoritative text as Royal 7 C. xii does for the First Series, gives us two reasonable manuscripts to follow for CHII and LS, K and W respectively, and enough secondary or implied evidence to shed good light on ^Elfric's two versions of Martin, their reception, and the subsequent adaptation of them. The number of witnesses to either text is not many, but the chronological spread is wide. The Prefaces to the works help refine the dating issue further and give authorial statements about intentions. In the Latin Preface to CH II ^Elfric addresses the work to Archbishop Sigeric, as he did in the Latin Preface to CH I, which helps establish their composition and completion to the period 990-4. Sigeric became archbishop in 990 and died on 28 October 994.24 In the Latin Preface to LS JElfric cites ^3elweard and ^delmaer, pere et fils, the former a Latin author in his own right, both literary patrons, and both ealdormenn. ^delweard likely died in 998. The three ^Ifrician works here mentioned are easily within a decade of composition and completion, ^Ifric could then have been writing both lives of Martin at the same time in one sense or another, or LS more or less immediately after CH II. That ^Elfric wrote the two lives of Martin at about the same time receives further support from the Prefaces when in the Latin Preface of CH I jElfric states that he is explaining not only the tracts on the Gospels Verum etiam sanctorium passiones vel vitas ad utilitatem idiotarum istius gentis/25 and he looks ahead to the Second Series 'qui illos tractatus vel passiones continet quos iste omisit.'26 The presence of saints and saints' lives in a series of homilies has ample precedent as a review of the Homiliary of Paul the Deacon or Alain of Farfa would demonstrate, for even the feast of Martin is marked in those collections.27 In the Latin and OE Prefaces to LS ^ilfric offers an explanation for this third collection of his: Nam memini me in duobus anterioribus libris posuisse passiones uel uitas sanctorum ipsorum, quos gens ista caelebre colit cum ueneratione festi diei, et placuit nobis in isto codicello ordinare passiones etiam uel uitas sanctorum illorum quos non uulgus sed coenobite officiis uenerantur. no

JElfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 43

jElfric would seem to be offering a special collection based not on public practice but on cloistered observance, and in that distinction there may be an attempt to show honour and respect to two magnates who, perhaps, were the only intended audience - and indeed were his patrons. Since Martin is a major saint for the untonsured and the tonsured, ^Ifric has an interesting dilemma emerging from his grand compositional strategy: he has already completed one life of Martin for one set purpose, and can he avoid a second Life here for an equally important, if not more important, situation? Clearly, in the decade-long time period described above, /Elfric concerned himself with saints' lives in a very focused way, especially in regard to audience, situation, and occasion. Source criticism gives yet another perspective on the authorial situation and an important form of internal evidence.29 Early source critics were able to trace the big picture without too much difficulty. Max Forster's inaugural dissertation pointed out the broad direction to Sulpicius Severus, Martin's biographer, and his Vita Martini, Dialogorum Libri Tres, and Epistulae as well as to Gregory of Tours' Historia FrancorumJ*0 Gordon H. Gerould amplified Forster's results by stressing that ^Ifric turned from Sulpicius to Gregory of Tours, showing evidence of his wider reading and independence as well as the development of his own 'curious style,' that is, alliterative prose.31 The next level of source engagement, however, displaced Gerould and others who went to opera omnia editions instead of manuscript witnesses, when Patrick H. Zettel made the case for a Latin legendary that stood in relation to the Lives of Saints much as Paul the Deacon's Homiliary stood for the Catholic Homilies.32 Zettel, never claiming that he found the precise collection that ^Elfric followed, nevertheless came to the conclusion that a collection belonging to the same family as what he called the 'Cotton-Corpus' collection provided 'some 50 of /Elfric's sources, some not previously identified, as well as a large number of individual source readings.'33 For the study of /Elfric on Martin, Zettel's suggestions short of ironclad proof are most significant: (1) ^Ifric draws his Martiniana out of a legendary, where there is a martinellus, or a collection of works about Martin assembled from various sources; (2) Ailfric does not know Gregory of Tours directly, but only through a legendary; (3) JElfnc uses Alcuin's Laudationes, which he probably knows from a legendary such as a Cotton-Corpus, where it occurs. Peter Jackson and Michael Lapidge, citing the cautions of others and the difficulties of dealing with a manuscript source later than ^Ifric,

44 Paul E. Szarmach

nevertheless accept the broad view that some legendary like CottonCorpus was available to ,/Elfric.35 Yet, however much closer the documentary evidence may bring scholarship to JElfric's authorial situation, there is still ample scope for interpretation, as Frederick M. Biggs has shown in his subtle, post-Zettel shady of ^ilfric's possible use of Alcuin's Laudationes and Sulpicius's Dialogues.36 Implicitly, Biggs asks us to imagine a situation where JElfric receives newer or better information in the compositional process, which one may on the whole describe for the creation of the two Lives of Martin. In that process jElfric chooses to reject or replace Alcuin's account with a more accurate version of Martin's Life from Sulpicius's Dialogues, and by that replacement or rejection ^Ifric improves the truth value or historical accuracy of the LS Martin. Biggs couches such a reading of the available evidence in caution, for, after all, new evidence may appear in the future and there are similarities in treatment of incident or theme that may or may not be coincidental (and, if proven not to be, might reinstall a later use of Alcuin), and re-emphasizes ^Ifric's pursuit of historical evidence (much as Bede does, as most scholars believe). Further, the absence of the CH Martin from the second recension of CHII could very well be seen to be a function of just the sort of process that Biggs is describing, and thus the 'new, improved' LS Martin becomes ^Ifric's 'authorized' treatment of the great saint. The corollary here would also be that the witnesses to CH II that comfortably post-date the time of composition, E and f^, may represent instances where /Elfric failed to recall the text in time, where others ignored or did not receive his revocation, or where the text took on a life of its own in dissemination and distribution. These possibilities exist within the active transmission history and continuing revision that Godden describes for the Second Series, but again the CH II Martin has no certain witnesses beyond the first recension of the Second Series.37 Whether all the specifics of Biggs's analysis will stand the test of time is not as important as his description of the possible process that ^Elfric may have followed in creating his second Martin. There is one remaining important factor in the composition of the two Lives of Martin, viz., that 'curious style' as Gerould would have it. Thorpe's editorial practice in the Catholic Homilies is to print all pieces as margin-to-margin prose texts, while Clemoes-Godden follow manuscript punctuation, which may place the reader closer to ;Elfric (or at least his scribes), but requires the reader to be on guard for rhythmical variations.38 These editorial choices for CH II help mask the develop-

JElfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 45

ment of ^Elfric's rhythmical prose and obscure JElfnc's various rhythmical choices. As John C. Pope indicates in his classic shady, the rhythmical form emerges in the Second Series, most notably in six of the homilies where it is a major feature and in others where it is intermittent.39 One of these major six is the CH II Martin, except for the opening paragraph. Pope considers these efforts in CH II, composed at nearly the same time, to 'represent a somewhat experimental stage/40 a comment that helps establish the scholarly expectation that subsequent works will show a more mature treatment. Yet Pope's solid empiricism prevents him from the simple 'excelsior' trope, whatever others might do with his observation, as he is willing to point out that some 'homilies, early and late, show a higher proportion of irregularities' than the self-conscious and regular Life of Eadmund, which may serve as the benchmark.41 Pope's call for a thorough study of the alliterative style has not received any comprehensive response, and the specific issue of ^Elfric's 'improvements' in alliterative style beyond his possible experimental stages remains more or less where Pope left it. But the two Lives of Martin provide a special case for comparison, particularly in the light of the evidence drawn from manuscript and source study, for, after all, ^Ifric on Martin is the only treatment of a saint to occur in both CH and LS.42 The comparison of the two Martins that follows aims only to be suggestive. Both Pope and Godden agree that the 'first paragraph' of CH II is not in the rhythmical style and that the rest of the homily is.43 Effectively, then, CH II is written in two different registers or modes. This first paragraph of CH II, however, is directly part of the mainline narrative in giving information on Martin's birth, youth, relations with family, and christening, which are narrative elements standard in hagiography. There would appear to be no particular reason to lessen stylistic effect here. By contrast the first paragraph of the LS Martin is a brief introduction to the source author and his work in nine alliterating lines before the Life of Martin properly begins. Such an introduction could have reasonably appeared as non-alliterating because it is a prologue outside of the work - much as such a mention in non-alliterating prose of Abbo of Fleury and his circumstances of composition appears in the first paragraph of the Life of Eadmund, which follows immediately in Cotton Julius.44 No doubt, the mixed mode of CH II is one reason to consider it as part of ^Elfric's experimentalism, and correspondingly the uniform style of LS a reason to consider it a more mature production. But direct comparisons of the same incidents in

46 Paul E. Szarmach

the respective Lives might tell more about jElfric and the rhythmical style he was developing in the 990s. LS contains an amplified version of Martin's early days, which takes up the whole of the first numbered section, lines 10-57 in Skeat, and relates Martin's military upbringing and service, his difficulties with his heathen parents, and yet his strong interest in becoming a Christian and in following the monastic life. By contrast, CH II, which occupies lines 1-26 in Godden and about halfway through slips into the alliterative style, downplays radically the parental difficulties, and yet gives the detail that Martin had a servant - whom he served as readily as the servant served him. LS adds the detail that the two ate together. Both versions contain a line that epitomizes Martin's military youth and his conduct: LS: swilce he munuc waere swifior £>onne cempa CH II: lybbende swa swa munuc. na swa swa modig cempa. The CH II line seems to be the stronger in its use of the alliterating 'modig,' which echoes 'munuc/ and yet offers the thematic clash, for the m-elements link two unlike, disparate realities, the monastic and the military lives. The looseness of the alliterating line offers the opportunity to put in two more syllables, but JElfric chooses not to insert 'modig' in LS. The comparative length of LS gives scope for an amplified treatment of a recurrent hagiographical motif common to both versions, that is, an exemplary youth anticipates later demonstrated virtue. Thus, CH offers lines 24-6, which relate how Martin helped the poor ['waedligum and wanscryddum'], though he was not baptized, and LS offers lines 51-7, which comprise a minor list of Martin's good works, performed when he was unbaptized (a repeated theme in LS). In LS, Martin's disregard for material comforts leads to the citation (and fulfilment) of the New Testament line, 'de crastino non cogitare.' Both versions have, in treating the early Life of Martin, laid the foundation, in varying detail, for the great iconic moment at Amiens. How Martin shares his cloak with the beggar at Amiens receives a different treatment in the two accounts. In the longer LS JElfric names the city as Amiens and emphasizes the 'wintres cyle' mentioned in CH II, line 27, with the amplification that 'on swa swiSlicum cyle . j^aet sume men swulton J?urh J?one.'45 CH II occurs in no place, so to speak, while LS has a specific setting. The moral theme in CH II is somewhat more stark for ^Ifric stresses that no one paid attention to the beggar

JEltric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 47

though he 'mid hreame' begged those who rode by for something, while in LS the beggar asks specifically for 'sum reaf': LS:

Pa gemette he £>aer aenne J^earfan nacodne biddende J>a riddon J>aet hi him sum reaf sealdon. ac hi ridon him fore* ne rohton his clypunge. CHII: J>a gemette martinus on middes wintres cyle aenne nacodne J>earfan. and his nan man ne gymde. |?eah 6e he mid hreame. da riddan J>aes baede.46

In LS the alliterative pattern on r, which admittedly 'cheats' by repeating forms of 'ridan/ helps influence the use of 'reaf/ making LS more specific and telegraphing in part what will happen next. CH, on the other hand, has the more startling and aurally effective 'mid hreame/ perhaps more effective if pronounced as [hr] rather then [r], but still carrying enough r-alliteration. Indeed, human sounds and voices make up a leitmotif in the story of the beggar, who turns out to be Christ after all. In both accounts Martin's companions laugh at him ('hlogon'), for example, and tellingly, in LS, Christ appears to Martin and addresses him 'mid beorhtre stemne' [with a clear voice - perhaps 'loud and clear'], which echoes the beggar's voice, and orders Martin to look on the 'reaf he had given Him. CH II rounds out the dream vision with a quick mention that Martin took joy in it and was thereafter baptized, while LS continues to draw out rather explicitly the meaning of the incident, which is the fulfilment of Matthew 25:40-5, and how Martin did not glory in the vision but rather recognized the goodness of God.47 At that point LS announces Martin's baptism and his continuance in military service for two more years. Ailfric provides Martin with an alibi for continuance in service nolde f>eah git forlaean . for his leofan ealdormann f>one folclican campdom . ac for his benum swa wunode48 -

which is necessary given the conflict with Julian to follow. Here ^Elfric seems to put himself into a corner: if Martin is more monkish than military, how to explain his continuance in service, especially when in the next incident he depicts Martin's face-to-face repudiation of it before Julian? ^Ifric is thus trapped by his intention to amplify the Life of Martin, for in giving more detail about Martin's military life, he needs to give more explanation. Sulpicius faced the same trap, where Martin's

48 Paul E. Szarmach

life would not imitate a hagiographer's art, and likewise explained at length that his tribune's entreaties kept Martin in the army two years, where he 'nomine militauit' [did military service (only) in name]. Some measure of personal loyalty was able to mitigate higher loyalties. CH simply avoids mentioning the matter altogether, demonstrating its tendency towards a rather more severe, abstractive narrative line. Martin's conflict with Julian brings the theme of 'monk vs. military man' to a climax. In one sense the agon between Martin and Julian exemplifies the theoretical conflict between Christian and heroic values, which runs through much of the discussion of Old English poetic literature, and in a narrative sense the structure of one-on-one conflict or confrontation echoes a standard architectural feature of poetry. Martin asks Julian for release from military obligation just as Julian faces an invasion, and issues of fear and cowardice in the face of the enemy arise directly. Before the expected battle Julian distributes donatiuum [bonus;49 'cynelice sylene' in LS and CH] personally, evidently trooping the line (or perhaps meeting his soldiers face to face, for either is possible in the Vita), and when he gets to Martin, Martin refuses, saying in CH that he was unwilling to take the gift, 'ne on 3am gefeohte his handa afylan/50 but would rather serve Christ in spiritual warfare according to the precepts of Christianity. Julian accuses Martin of fear in the face of the enemy. Thus far in CH, the exchange is in indirect discourse, but JElfric now gives Martin speaking lines: Ic wille durhgan orsorh done here mid rodetacne gewaepnod . na mid readum scylde. o36e mid hefegum helme. o65e heardre byrnan.51

Martin speaks the words of a hero, a Christian counterpart to Bryhtwold in Maldon, negating the implements of war but choosing the only necessary tacn for a Christian. The alliteration, diluted from the classical standard by function words and reminiscent of the prosaic style in, for example, Vercelli II, offers the contrastive link of heroisms on r in line 52. The choice of 'here,' a word associated with Viking armies, has a special resonance in the 990s. It is easy to see 'heardre' as a transferred epithet, referring to Martin's resolve as well. In the Vita the Latin is straightforward, and the nouns without alliterating adjectives: ... crastina die ante aciem inermis adstabo et in nomine Domini lesu, signo crucis, non clipeo protectus aut galea, hostium cuneos penetrabo cesurus.52

^Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 49

Julian is unmoved, and indeed orders Martin to be thrown 'ungewaepnod 6am here' (55-6) [unarmed to the invading army], but in one of those anti-climaxes that can only be acceptable in Christian literature, where God may intervene suspending the expectations of narrative, there is no miraculous test. While the narrative is pointing towards a suspension of the laws of nature so as to aid the saint and prove his special status, the resolution of the narrative tension is rather that Julian's enemies sued for peace, God ensuring that his servant not be abandoned. Christian and heroic values may be at odds, but so are their narrative expressions, and a climactic, victorious battle, even a Christian battle, would undermine the Christian logic of the theme of Christian peace. In CH lines 45-58, ^Ifric fashions a narrative of compression where, against the flat surface of indirect discourse, the Christian hero Martin gets speaking lines that are effective in themselves and further emphatic of the theme, thanks to the alliterative style. The LS version amplifies motive and meaning and gives Martin one more passage of direct speech. Certainly the donatiuum in the Roman army (and its other expressed or implied customs) requires further explanation in the late tenth century. Whereas in CH Martin refuses 'gife' [gift?], in LS /Elfric explains that Martin's refusal is more like honest business dealing for, if Martin does not wish to fight for the emperor, then it is only right that he should refuse donatiuum. Martin speaks out that he has fought in the Emperor's army, but henceforth he wishes to do military service for God, for 'ic com Godes cempa ne mot ic na feohtan.'53 This blunt line is artless, especially in comparison with so many others with strong alliteration. ^Elfric alters Martin's main speech of rebuke to: 'Gif 5u to yrhde bis telst. and na to geleafan . nu to mergen ic stande on mines Drihtnes naman aetforan bam truman . and ic fare orsorh mid rodetacne gescyld . na mid readum scylde . odde mid helme burn baes heres werod[.]/54

The LS version follows the Latin equivalent more closely in the opening of the sentence with a conditional clause, but the sharply worded saintliness of the CH Martin is diluted. The patterns of the main clause are, one may argue, less effective in LS. CH 'wille durhgan/ strong as the infinitive is, yields to the alliterative and less kinetic 'fare' (to link

50 Paul E. Szarmach with 'aetforan'). Line 114 has a double alliteration on [r] and [s ] but '-scyld' is repeated, which seems to suggest a weakness in expression. LS 'helme' is no longer 'heavy/ an adjective arguably usable in the long line, and 'heres werod' substitute for 'heardre byrnan/ thus making the last in the list after 'mid' an entity, not a thing as the preceding three items (I take 'rodtacn' as a thing, not a gesture). The use of 'trum' and 'here' would seem to pick up on a distinction in the Vita not admitted in CH. In the Latin Martin promises to stand in front of the Roman battle-line ['aciem'] and to penetrate the enemies' wedge ['hostium cuneos'], while in CH Martin promises to go through the enemy line without reference to an apparent starting point. LS is more specific, CH more direct. LS also draws out the meaning of the non-battle more fully than CH. In lines 121-30 Mlfric follows Sulpicius in explaining at length how God could not have granted Martin a better victory than that no one die before his eyes. Martin's first meeting with Hilary of Poitiers offers another brief example of a contrast that now becomes a part of a pattern. In CH jElfric says little about Hilary except to characterize him with the imagistic line 'scinende swa swa tungel. in sodre lare.'55 At this point in LS jElfric gives Hilary straightforward praise for his teaching, but no similes, as he relates how Hilary sought to bring Martin into the church hierarchy first unsuccessfully, as a deacon, and then, successfully, in the lower office of exorcist. Presumably ^E6elweard and ^Edelmaer, the apparent original audience, would find this information more pertinent than the memorable comparison. As a final example of differences between CH and LS the iconic incident of the scealfras is apposite. Martin, on his way to reconcile a monastic house full of hostility, pauses to watch waterfowl diving to capture fish out of a stream. Martin likens the birds to demons who snatch souls. CH offers: Da geseah he swymman. scealfran on flode. and gelome dopettan. adune to grunde. ehtende dearie. J?aere ea fixa; pa cwaed se halga wer to his geferan; 'Pas fugelas habbaS feonda gelicnysse. 5e gehwilce menn unwaere beswicad. and graedelice gripad to grimre helle; .../56 Showing his power over nature, Martin commands the birds to depart, which they do. The harsh but effective gr- alliteration has great aural impact here, if not a flamboyant impact. In LS JElfric tries somethingie else. He introduces the vignette with essentially the same wording as

JElfnc Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 51

the first sentence of CH, adding after 'fixa' 'mid fraecra graedignysse' [with voracious greediness], but then chooses this variation: Pas fugelas habbad feonda gelicnysse be syrwiad sefre embe da unwaran . and graediglice fod . and gefangene fordod. and of bam gefangenum gefyllede ne beod.57

The crunching alliteration of CH II yields to a dilutive rhyme in the two halves of LS1321, and if the intent is to rhyme the end of 1321 with 1320, the effect is, well, feeble. The insatiability of the bird-devils may make for a good moral point, and the prominence of [f] in this passage creates some aural linking of words and ideas, but CH II still seems superior. Did jElfric have too much to say? These selections comparing the two versions of Martin suggest that ^Elfric experimented variously with his alliterative and rhythmical style. It is not the case that the later LS Martin is always better stylistically. The CH Martin and its severe, generally unamplified narrative line have some remarkable moments. One might argue that the effective alliteration in CH appeals to the ear more than to the eye, and so as a preaching text to a general audience CH may entertain effects that a reading text for two, whether for open reading or for quiet meditation, ought not. The abbreviation of the Bodley version of LS may support the real divide of audience or purpose as the more lengthy LS gets trimmed to a smaller size. One may reasonably assume that as a writer y^Elfric, however sane, sober, and clear literary historians may paint him, had a restless streak in him, as his horizontal interventions in CH I and his vertical experimentations suggest. For ^Elfric, composition was a process, not an event. The foregoing comments derive from a tight but selective comparison of authorial versions, duly circumscribed, by scribal mediation, as all Anglo-Saxon work must be. The attempt has been to distinguish between scribal activity and authorial activity so as to arrive at a characterization of an author and his experiments in style. Yet there are two other broad contexts that will help complicate an understanding of ^Ifric's revisions. The first of these contexts challenges the entire, traditionalist approach that has constituted the analytical method in this essay. Deriving from contemporary literary and cultural theory, the centra-position disputes the pursuit of the author and the idea of authorship as commonly received. Michel Foucault's questioning title

52 Paul E. Szarmach

'What is an Author?' provides a postmodern perspective for the issues surrounding JElfric as an author. Foucault ranges widely in his essay, covering ground that is often post-medieval. Thus, Foucault's implicit questioning of Romantic ideas of authorship are not germane except in so far as they are imposed on medieval literature by Romantic critics (as indeed they have been!). Foucault's interest in legal and juridical restraint and particularly practical issues such as copyright are almost all non-relevant; Augustine, after all, indicated in his own terms that no one has a property right to the truth when he sanctioned holy plagiarism in De doctrina Christiana for those who, unable to preach well themselves, were told to take the work of others.59 And indeed it is the truth that Foucault could never accept as a proposition. It may be painfully obvious to observe that as in foxholes, so in the Middle Ages: there were no atheists or agnostics, and no relativists. The Bible was the word of God, after all, and its status was not merely sublunary. When Foucault then offers his celebrated criticism of Jerome and his four criteria for defining an author, which Foucault sees as the beginning of the construction of the author, he does not factor in the Christian necessity for the search for divine truth and its saving value. These four criteria are: (1) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value); (2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity); (4) finally, passages quoting statements that were made or mentioning events that occurred after the author's death must be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events).60

Mark Vessey suggests that Foucault took these ideas from an article by K.K. Hulley, and that in the process he garbled some ideas and cited Jerome's De uiris illustribus misleadingly as the source, for Jerome's principles are found in a range of works, 'notably the preface to Jerome's Commentary on Philemon.'61 Foucault's grounding of these four criteria is somewhat dubious as evidence and unreckoning of the histo-

/Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 53

ricity of truth. When applied directly to JElfric and his two versions of Martin, as discussed above, criterion (4) has no place, criterion (1) does not seem relevant (neither work is rejected, but '^Ifric' has some implied constant of value), criterion (2) does not seem relevant (neither work is rejected, but 'JElfric' is defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence), and criterion (3) is overturned, for the point is that VElfric' is not a stylistic unity but a stylistic variety, especially within the terms of comparison. However difficult applying these criteria might prove in critical practice, Foucault offers other insights that may help illuminate ^Ifric and his two Martins. The foregoing discussion of the two Martins establishes, I would argue, that JElfric very much conceived of himself as an author: his outright interventions in his work, the inferred restlessness of the texts (its authorial mouvance), and the comparison of two closely related versions of Martin, establish the self-consciousness of his literary production. ^Ifric, like the Church Fathers before him, sought the truth (for our contemporary times one would add 'as he conceived it') and did not wish his 'name' associated with error.62 But the scribal tradition of vernacular literature did not see ^Ifric so much as an author. Rather, given that ^Elfric's sermons and homilies are so often unattributed, the scribal tradition must have presented, operationally, texts that had no author or 'name/ only an author-function; that is, the scribes were Foucauldian in their interest in texts. In this respect the literary history of Old English sermons and homilies, where we know no names beyond '^Ifric' and 'Wulfstan' as homilists and by and large texts are unattributed even when analysis can attribute the unattributed to the 'names,' would appear to replicate the condition that Foucault seeks to promote in his discussion of discursive literary practices: there are texts and no names. Of course, Old English sermons and homilies may be unattributed ultimately because of Augustinian thinking and the pursuit of truth not names, and not at all because of a postmodern interest in texts. To this patristic framework one may add the native tradition of anonymous composition in poetry, where the only certain names are 'Caedmon' and 'Cynewulf,' if 'Alfred' be not a third, and Wulfstan possibly a fourth. This long tradition in poetry may have thus been another factor supporting anonymity of prose. An irony of the Foucauldian position is that the subject of Old English literature is indeed vexed by the absence of names. It would be so much more convenient if we had a recognizable authorial name to

54 Paul E. Szarmach

attach to Beowulf, which would fix the poem in time and place - and actually substantiate Foucault's major point that the name serves as a way to classify the work. Foucault would rightly point out that this irony is not the problem of the academic subject, but rather of its interpreters, who have acquired poor, post-medieval discursive practices and seek to impose them on the past. A rejoinder to Foucault is that while he can outline major theoretical positions that provoke rethinking of the grand subject, the method to discuss this text or that one is not all that clear. Close reading, old-time philology, and empiricism will not go gently into the critical night - at least in Anglo-Saxon studies, or 'pre-modern' cultural studies. What Ailfric's two Martins may also reveal is that ^Ifric is an author at variance with his immediate tradition. His interventions and the restlessness sketched above come from his well-documented concern for right and true doctrine, for Romantic solipsism is after all culturally impossible, as is a concern for royalties, ^Elfric does not wish to promote misunderstanding or 'gedwyld' [heresy]. Yet he realizes that the scribal tradition gives ample scope for the introduction of inaccuracy and error of every sort. This discomfort with his tradition may have a connection with the second broad context for JElfric, that is, his connection to stylistic movements of his time. Mechthild Gretsch offers a new historical context for an understanding of JElfnc's stylistic experiments, which may shed light on the stylistic swirl at the end of the first millennium.63 Accepting the premise that Anglo-Saxon high culture is bilingual, which can only be self-evident, Gretsch uses traditional analysis founded upon shared stylistic choices, mainly lexical items (glosses) to show the link between ^thelwold of Winchester and his circle and the development of the vernacular as a medium of scholarly discourse. A central feature of this development is the revival of interest in Aldhelm and the hermeneutic style, whose extravagant vocabulary inspired glossing that not only sought to explain the Latin but also turned decisively towards the vernacular, ^thelwold's well-documented interest in translating from Latin to the vernacular is equally important to the latter's development. The general case that Gretsch makes from the remarkable evidence that she amasses places ^Elfric, alumnus Adelwoldi, in an unusual position. JElfric is a most un-hermeneutic stylist, and is then that JElhic chose not to accept the influence of the Aldhelmian movement sponsored by his mentor? It can only be a suggestion at this time, and it may never be demonstrable, but ^Elfric's alliterating style might just be his response to developments in late-tenth-century stylis-

/Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 55

tics. jElfric has an Attic temperament, not an Asiatic one that could receive late hermeneuticism, and so the extravagance of the Aldhelm revival would press him hard. Furthermore, the incorporation of difficult vocabulary into vernacular expression would make darker all his intentions to explain Christian texts and their meaning. Rhythmical effects, on the other hand, would enhance his style at no necessary complication and invoke with some effect associations with poetry. Some stylistic heightening would no doubt appeal to the hermeneutic tooth of ^Edelweard, which he demonstrates in his Chronicle.6* For the purpose at hand it is enough to suggest that ^Elfric has taken up at least a semiindependent position in the matter of prose style at the end of the tenth century. Gretsch has described a wider context than the vernacular, but in her convincing proof ^Ifric seems again to be at some variance with the high culture around him. Perhaps his stylistic choice within the wider context is further confirmation of his sense of authorship. AJlfric's two lives of Martin, whose scribal tradition gives a remarkably firm textual basis for discussion, help suggest that ^Elfric is a writer very conscious of his burden as an author. His 'horizontal' and 'vertical' changes, which one must assume always occur within a broader context of the pursuit of Christian truth, demonstrate a writerly concern for some level of appropriate style. Specific comparisons between the two works document AJlfric's varying, but not unerring, response to the material he is presenting. Apparently differing audiences and possibly different sources may account in part for the experimental variations between the two lives. In his evident concern for his work y^Elfric seems to embody a particular reflex to his time. He is at variance with a scribal tradition that would seem to meet the postmodern interest in texts, not in authors, and the dynamics of literary style in the late tenth century point to directions away from his curiosa felicitas. These last two points, viz. the presence of author-function but not author, and the idea of late-tenth-century bilingual prose style, await further study. And it will be ^Ifric and his work that will provide the point of departure. Notes

1 Clemoes, CH 1,64. The '^Ifric project' is really three volumes, in logical but not chronological order: the Clemoes edition of CH I (which Malcolm Godden shepherded through publication after Clemoes's death in 1996);

56 Paul E. Szarmach

2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9

Godden, CHII; and finally, Godden, CH III. The Clemoes-Godden volumes replace Thorpe, Homilies. In order to move between the Godden edition of CH II and the Thorpe equivalent, readers must be aware that Godden presents forty homilies, not Thorpe's forty-five; see Godden, CH II, xvii, for the concordance of homily numbers. Pope, Homilies of&lfric, collects various non-series items, while providing valuable information about and analysis of ^Ifric and his works. While scholars continue to talk about replacing Skeat, Lives of Saints, it remains the reigning edition of ^Elfric's work. For a bibliography on ^Elfric through 1982 see Reinsma, ALlfric. Aaron J. Kleist offers a continuation through 1996 in '/Elfric.' The Old English Newsletter (Summer issues) and Anglo-Saxon England provide annual bibliographies. For a quick overview of yElfric and his work see Leinbaugh, VElfric,' or Godden, '^llfric.' Sisam, 'MSS Bodley 340 and 342'; Clemoes and Eliason, JElfric's First Series of Catholic Homilies, 28-35,19-22, and 19 n. 8. Godden, CH II, 375. J. Hill, 'Dissemination,' 249, notes that the Life of Martin is the only life by ^Ifric that is intentionally modified. Cameron numbers are those established in Frank and Cameron, Plan. Ker references are to Ker, Catalogue. Gneuss numbers are those established in Gneuss, Handlist. Bodley 343 does not appear in the Gneuss list because it is dated twelfth-century. Manuscript sigla correspond to those used by Clemoes as well as, appropriately, here by Godden, CH II. Pope, when he cites the same manuscripts, uses the same system. The textual divergence between Thorpe and Godden will obviously be narrower than between Thorpe and Clemoes. Since Thorpe was present at the start of the subject, his edition and his facing translation have had a formative influence on the study of ^Ifric. Some appropriate corrective within the ongoing discussion on JElfric will need to occur as the Clemoes-Godden .^ilfric project takes its place in the knowledge base. For discussion and background, see Pope, Homilies ofALlfric, 34-5, Godden, CH II, xliii, and Clemoes, 'Chronology/ 222 and 223 n. 7 (in OEN Subsidia, 12 and 13 n. 7; in Old English Prose, 39 and n. 35). Godden, CH II, xliii. Godden, CH II, xxviii-xxxi and Ix-lxv, for its discussion of dissemination and the stemma (at Ixi). Pope, Homilies of^Elfric, 20-2. See Franzen, Tremulous Hand, 51-3, for a general description of the Tremulous Hand and his methods in CCCC 198. Franzen identifies seven different 'layers' of activity by this Worcester glossator (5-15); for CCCC 198 Fran-

^Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 57 zen, 5, sees that most of the glosses are layer 'M (for "mature")/ but there is evidence for other interventions. 10 Many of the problems in E are described in the textual apparatus of Godden's edition. The treatment of proper names in the text, whether they should be in small caps rather than minuscule, or touched with colour rather than unrubricated, is a practice not reflected in Godden's apparatus. Christ names Martin in small caps (no red) when he comments on his generosity in sharing the cloak (E, fol. 378V25), but most other times, except for fol. 38112 (where a new section begins) and fol. 383V3, Martin's name is in minuscule form. Only initial M at the beginning of the homily is in red (as is the title). In K Christ names Martin in a capital M (fol. 235r9) touched with red. Elsewhere in K, M is touched with red (fol. 238r5), as is Maria (fol. 237r28), which is in rustic-style capitals. Petre, Paule, Tecla, and Agna mentioned in fol. 237r29 - are all touched with red and in minuscule, as is Tetradius (fol. 23710). 11 Since Franzen, Tremulous Hand, has paved the way with her important study, it might prove profitable to work more closely on this text (and any of a number of other texts) for a more particular view on the welter of detail that the Tremulous Hand presents. 12 Franzen, ibid., 33-4, observes, in connection with Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, that the Tremulous Hand had problems glossing Wulfstan but apparently found ^Elfric's texts easier. The Tremulous Hand knows Mltric's name, but confuses him with Alcuin in the Worcester Fragments (= Worcester, Chapter Library MS 174), most readily available in Dickins and Wilson, Early Middle English Texts, 2, lines 6-7: '-/Elfric abbod, be we Alquin hoteb / He was bocare ...' Franzen, 94, notes that Worcester 174 also shows that the Tremulous Hand 'generally understood what he was reading, particularly with jClfrician prose.' See her larger discussion of this manuscript, 84-102, where the Tremulous Hand works in Old English, Middle English, and Latin. My thanks to Malcolm Godden for pointing out the Worcester Fragments to me. 13 See Ker, Catalogue, 82, for a general characterisation of the activity of correctors. There is an eleventh-century hand on fol. 384r23, in the right margin opposite the ms. line, that gives 'in eples/ whose referent in the text is unclear. At the end of fol. 384V5 'nu' (= Godden, CH 11.34.287) is crowded in, likely in an eleventh-century hand. The Tremulous Hand, e.g., is stymied when he comes to 'scealfran' (E, fol. 38418), the waterfowl who snatch fish just as the devils snatch souls. The Tremulous Hand underlines this first occurrence, but offers no gloss, and he lets the second go unmarked (fol. 384r23). The context identifies the

58 Paul E. Szarmach

14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23 24

25 26 27

28

'scealfran' as 'fuglas' (fol. 384r24). The Tremulous Hand does gloss 'eafixas' (fol. 39419) as 'pisces fluminum.' In another passage where the Main Hand offers 'Be Sin willa a weroda drihten/ the Tremulous Hand stumbles by offering 'semper in secula' for 'a weroda.' E reads 'hwaetlice' (fol. 381 r24), where K has 'hraedlice' (fol. 236V1; Godden, CH 11.34.148) is surely correct, but the Tremulous Hand does not correct it. E offers 'winbeam' (fol. 381V15), and K 'pinbeam' (fol. 236V12; Godden CH 11.34.162), the variation appearing to be simply the substitution of/? (wynn) for p, the reading 'pinbeam' being confirmed by Sulpicius Severus's Vita 13.1, 'arborem pinum' (Fontaine, Vie, 280). Ker, Catalogue, 295. Godden, CH II, lix. Ibid., 297-8. Cf. LS 36, the Life of Thomas, Skeat, Lives, 398,400, for a similar statement, in Latin. For some issues regarding the practice of editing prose see Szarmach, 'Abbot ^Elfric.' Ker, Catalogue, 295. The LS Life is no. 31 in Skeat, Lives, vol. II, 218-313. The siglum I have chosen for Cotton Caligula A. xiv has no warrant in Pope-ClemoesGodden, who do not consider this manuscript. J. Hill, 'Dissemination,' 235-42, gives an overview of the textual state of LS with special reference to Julius E. vii. Skeat, Lives, 312:1 translated this before, as best as I could, but now, pressed by requests, more fully. O of 'Olim' is a rubricated small capital, executed in the manner of the capitals for the numbered sections in this copy. Clemoes, 'Chronology,' 220 (in OEN, 10 n. 2; in Old English Prose, 62 n. 18). See J. Hill's comment in 'Dissemination,' 249. Rosser, 'Old English Prose Saints' Lives/ offers a detailed study of this version and its abbreviation. Wilcox, JElfric's Prefaces, is the starting point for the study of the prefaces,. providing texts, translations, backgrounds, and analysis. Lapidge, '^Ifric's Sanctorale,' 116-18, clarifies the issues regarding dating. Clemoes, CH 1,173: but also the passions or lives of the saints for the benefit of the unlearned of this people. Ibid.: which contains those tracts or passions omitted here. Gregoire, Homeliaires liturgiques medievaux; for Paul the Deacon, II, 108, a sermon of Fulgentius for Martin, 474; Alain of Farfa, II, 76-8, extracts from Sulpicius Severus and Gregory of Tours, 180-1. Skeat, Lives, 2; Skeat's trans., 3: For I call to mind that, in two former books, I have set forth the Passions or Lives of those saints whom that illustrious nation celebrates by honouring their festival, and it has now pleased me to

^Elfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 59 set forth, in this book, the Passions as well as the Lives of those saints whom not the vulgar (better, 'common people'), but the monks honour by special services. The OE, ibid., 4: 'Pu [^delweard alone] wast leof baet we awendon on bam twam aerrum bocum baera halgena 5rowunga and lif . be angelcynn mid freolsdagum wurbad. Nu geweard us baet we bas boc be baera halgena drowungum and life . gedihton be mynstermenn mid heora benungum betwux him wurdiad.' [Trans, ibid., 5: Thou knowest, beloved, that we translated in the two former books the Passions and Lives of the saints which the English nation honoureth with festivals; now it has seemed good to us that we should write this book concerning the suffering and lives of the Saints whom monks honour amongst themselves.] 29 Fontes Anglo-Saxonici summarizes the source work on the two Lives on its website, managed by Rohini Jayatilaka, available at: http://fontes.english .ox.ac.uk. See for CHII Martin, Godden, 'Sources of Catholic Homiles.' For LS Martin see, Jayatilaka, 'Sources of Lives 31 (St Martin).' 30 Forster, liber die Quellen von ^Elfric's Homiliae Catholicae, 41-2. Halm, Sulpicii Severi libri, contains all three works. Fontaine edits the Vita and Epistulae in Vie de Saint Martin, vol. I, 249-345, with detailed commentary and discussion. Sulpicius's works on Martin acquired miscellaneous fellow travellers to form the Martinellus (alternatively, Martiniana), a variable collection of pieces relevant to the cult dateable to the early ninth century and generally written in France or Germany. See now Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles, esp. 308-10. Stancliffe, St Martin and His Hagiographer, offers a reassessment of Martin and his biographer with special reference to the contemporary context. For Sulpicius in Anglo-Saxon England see Szarmach, 'Sulpicius.' 31 Gerould, VElfric's Lives of St. Martin.' 32 Zettel, 'Saints' Lives/ derives from his dissertation, VElfric's Hagiographic Sources.' Zettel, 'Saints' Lives,' 21, specifically invokes as models Smetana and his groundbreaking source studies on the Catholic Homilies, '^Ifric and the Early Medieval Homiliary,' and '^Ifric and the Homiliary of Haymo.' Zettel, 'Saints' Lives,' 24-7, offers JElfnc's two Lives of M an especially cogent example of an intermediary legendary such as CottonCorpus. 33 Zettel, '^Ifric's Hagiographic Sources/ 326 (abstract). 34 Zettel, 'Saints' Lives/ does not discuss Alcuin, but he does in 'jElfric's Hagiographic Sources/ 64-7. 35 Jackson and Lapidge, 'Cotton-Corpus Legendary.' See, ibid., 146 n. 20, where they cite Brett, 'Universal Chronicle at Worcester/ 283 n. 28, and also Webber, Scribes and Scholars, 70.

60 Paul E. Szarmach 36 Biggs, '^Elfric as Historian.' See my remarks, xiv-xv, in the Foreword to the volume in which his essay appears. 37 Godden, CH II, Ixxviii-xciv, and esp. xciii-xciv for an overview of the Second Series post-Sigeric. 38 For some issues regarding the practice of editing prose see Szarmach, 'Abbot JElfnc.' 39 Pope, Homilies af&lfric, 1,105-36, at 113. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 127. 42 The Vercelli Martin (Cameron no. B.3.3.17), available in the Blickling Homilies (Scheide Library, Princeton, NJ) and in Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 86, is the only other Life in OE. See my characterization of it in 'Vercelli Homilies/ 258-61. The Vercelli Translator remains close to the Latin text of the Vita and the Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam, but whether an intermediary like Cotton-Corpus had any role in the transmission of the Latin is as yet undetermined. For an edition of Vercelli Martin, which is homily XVIII, see Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 289-309. 43 Pope, Homilies of&lfric, 113; Godden, CH II, Ixxxi-lxxxii. 44 Skeat, LS, 314. 45 Ibid., 222,1. 60: in such severe cold that some men died of it. 46 LS, 61-3: Then he met there a naked beggar begging those who rode by to give him any kind of garment, but they rode on, disregarding his outcries. CH II, 27-9: Then Martin met a naked beggar in the mid-winter chill, and nobody paid attention to him even though he was asking those riding by for something with his screaming. 47 See Fontaine, Vie, II, 496 and n. 1. 48 Godden, CH II, 91-2: he was unwilling to leave the people's army because of his beloved leader, but rather he stayed because of his requests. 49 Hoare, Western Fathers, 16. 50 Skeat, LS, 48: nor foul his hands in that fight. 51 Godden, CH II, 52—4:1 am willing to go through the invading army, safe from danger, armed with the sign of the cross, not at all with red shield, or with heavy helmet, or with hard coat of mail. 52 Fontaine, Vie, 1,260: tomorrow I will stand unarmed before the battle-line and in the name of the Lord Jesus I will make my way through the enemies' wedge unharmed, protected by the sign of the cross, not the shield or the helmet. 53 Godden, CH II, 106:1 am God's fighter, I am not permitted to fight at all. 54 Ibid., 111-15: If you reckon this as cowardice and not at all faith, tomorrow I will stand in the name of the Lord before [our] army, and I will go, safe

JElfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author 61

55 56

57

58

59 60

61 62 63 64

from danger, through the multitude of that invading army, shielded with the sign of the cross, not at all with a red shield or with helmet. Ibid., 61: shining as a light in the sky in [his] true teaching. Ibid., 275-9: Then he saw divers (= waterfowl) swimming on the stream and continually diving down to the bottom, eagerly pursuing the river fish. Then the holy man said to his companions: These birds are like devils, who deceive all men, and greedily grab them to grim hell.' Skeat, LS, 1318-21: These birds have a likeness to fiends, who are always laying snares about the unwary, and greedily seize them and destroy those they seize, and are not at all filled from those they have seized. Foucault, 'What is an Author?' Citations of Foucault will be to The Foucault Reader. See also Barthes, 'The Death of the Author' and 'From Work to Text.' Some of Barthes's comments seem very useful to the discussion of medieval literature, among other points his analysis of T in the earliest poets. It is beyond the scope of this essay to include Barthes and to resolve the differing emphases he places on the matter relative to Foucault. Martin, Sancti Aurelii Augustini De doctrina Christiana IV. xxix, 165-6. Foucault, 'What is an Author?' 111. Foucault's comments on author functions and texts are often useful, as on 103 where he considers 'papers' or 'collections of remarks' as authorial, or 109-10 where he considers author function and anonymity. Vessey, 'Forging of Orthodoxy,' 506-9, and esp. nn. 30 and 31; Hulley, 'Principles of Textual Criticism.' Foucault emphasizes how the 'name' of an author is problematic and important, at 105-8. Gretsch, Intellectual Foundations. Campbell, Chronicon.

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance A.N. Doane

What the ear of the 'oralist' seeks to distinguish in the continuous stream of the real are discourses rather than texts, messages in the making and not finalized statements, a pulse rather than stasis ... The object or substance has to be ensnared; but first we have to invent the means of snaring it, and we are still only at the first fumbling stages. One point at least is certain: it is only by perceiving - and analyzing - the oral work in its life as discourse that we will get a handle on its textual existence.1

It is increasingly acknowledged that scribal activity was not merely a relatively faulty process of reproduction; it was also an intentional activity demonstrating in its own right certain intellectual and cultural investments and habits of reception. In other words, scribal texts within a tradition have their own stories to tell, beyond the traces of pre-existent texts they bear on their surfaces. It is with that in mind that I have been working for the past several years on what I call the ethnography of scribal writing of late Anglo-Saxon scribes.2 When transmitting traditional vernacular texts, scribes were not outsiders, as they were when they copied, say, a Latin Prudentius; they were themselves part of the traditional culture that generated and preserved this type of text by means both oral and written. Individual native scribes must have been more or less familiar with traditional performances, meaning that the texts they copied came to them not only via the exemplar but also through the mother tongue and memory. And as they copied such texts they inevitably refashioned them

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 63

according to their own competencies within the tradition. The traditions of vernacular poetry remained primarily oral, even after long centuries of writing had modified those traditions. Scribes who wrote what they saw, also heard what they wrote. The scribe's writing, linked to the past by memory and the exemplar and imbedded in the present by the scribe's intentional activities, was a performance of a specialized kind, which in its physicality and uniqueness is an analog to oral performance. Whatever else it is, a manuscript text is more than a text; it is also an exact record of myriad particular somatic events amounting to a performance, which we can still experience soundlessly if we pay attention. These manuscript performances, marked by gaps, errors, and unauthorized modifications - there was never a happier time of textual purity - always presented an audience with a fallen and fluid textuality. It was the charge of the individual readers to deal as best they could with these imperfect texts, according to individual traditional or textualist competencies. Hence, as John Dagenais has recently called it, the 'ethics of reading in manuscript culture,'3 the need for the reader to make choices and modifications to allow a text to yield the meanings demanded of it at particular times and places. A scribe is of course one of these readers, forced to focus his attention on a text as it passes through eye, brain, and hand and to make it come out 'intentionally,' 'meaningfully.' The work of the individual scribe, however 'error-prone' it might seem to be from a textual critic's point of view, is from a synchronic point of view coherent and of a piece; it presents a unified object of apprehension for reception in its own time. The 'usus scribendi' has therefore to include more than characteristic errors and spellings that editors focus on as the scribe's faults and deviations, for the scribe is also making something. To attempt to locate the 'authorial' text beyond the parchment is already to move into an ahistorical space that a medieval reader could hardly have conceived and could never have experienced, as he and she struggled with the hard surfaces that met the eyes, removed as they were from previous and parallel versions. Even the author, if there was one, and if he could have and did write the first copy himself, would have been 'only a scribe' in his writing performance. The *original *text itself would, for the modern editor seeking the 'text-behind-the-texts,' be full of textual *hotspots, to use Dagenais's term,4 as are, indeed, autograph copies of works of Byron and Keats when interrogated against a background of received printed

64 A.N. Doane

editions.5 But in manuscripts, beyond this are the ineffaceable miswritings, hesitations, ambiguous letters, and physical defects that always accompanied any scribal presentation. No doubt many a modern editorial emendation can be seen as rightly dominating some form or other found in a unique vernacular manuscript: correcting a grammatical lapse (using grammar constructed in the face of historically ungrammaticalized vernaculars); improving syntax (on a comparative basis); regularizing meter (according to hypothesized rules); exchanging a 'prosaic' variant for a more pointed 'poetic' alternative (as dictated by modern concordances and canons of taste). Such changes require no reference to 'exemplars' and indeed editors would be obliged to ignore them if they were contradicted by the superstructures of scholarship. Nevertheless, such editorial authority is granted at a certain price, for it obscures the very features of old texts that make them what they existentially are, given their original imperfection combined with gradual abrasion over time. I see an analogy with the cleaning and repairing of a Sistine Chapel ceiling or the performance of early nineteenth-century piano music on 'authentic' instruments following retro-edited scores. Can we really recapture the original? And even if we could, ought we to perfect the flaws such time travel reveals in a production that was never perfect, to occlude all intermediate states of presentation and subsistence when a 'pure' textual milieu apart from performance and mutability never existed? No old text poses these questions more starkly than 'Beowulf.'6 A fundamental feature of the physical text of 'Beowulf as it is preserved in its unique copy, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius A. xv, fols. 129r198V, is that it is written by two scribes. Two scribes, from the perspective just outlined, implies two 'Beowulfs,' a concept which I will explore briefly in the rest of this paper. Scribe A of 'Beowulf wrote the first eighty-seven sides plus three manuscript lines (fols. 129r-172v/3=1939 long lines of verse as edited),7 or 61 per cent of the text; when he abruptly stopped writing in mid-sentence, Scribe B took up from there and wrote the remaining seventeen lines on fol. 172V plus fifty-two sides (fols. 172v/4-198v), 1243 poetic lines, or 39 per cent. Scribe A also wrote three Old English prose texts on the thirty-eight folios preceding 'Beowulf.'8 His work, the three prose pieces and 'Beowulf up to folio 172 verso, line 3, is meticulously planned and executed in a uniform style and layout, including, in The Marvels of the East, a well-integrated cycle of illustrations. Scribe B in essence continued the work of Scribe A, by keeping his work on

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 65

'Beowulf to the same layout and dimensions. He also wrote the fragmentary Old English poem 'Judith' that follows 'Beowulf in the manuscript, though scholars now agree that 'Judith' was not originally part of the main codex and was only added to the 'Beowulf Manuscript later.9 The differences in the hands of the two scribes are striking and immediately recognizable. Scribe A writes a relatively refined and calligraphic hand, even if not up to the highest standards, showing great lateral compression and a fine nib. Scribe B's hand strikes one as rougher and bolder, with its thick nib and large ductus.10 The differences are not primarily personal, but chronological. Scribe A writes the new laterally compressed hand that can first be dated in the script of annal 1001 in the Parker Chronicle.11 Scribe B writes a late version of 'Anglo-Saxon square minuscule/ the type of script which had been in use for vernacular writing throughout the tenth century, but which had all but disappeared by its end. Thus we must infer that the first part of 'Beowulf was written by a younger man, trained presumably soon after the turn of the century, and the rest was subsequently written by a scribe a generation older whose working life overlapped that of Scribe A and who for some reason took over his work. Because the writing of Scribe B is chronologically subsequent to that of A we must date the manuscript to close to the turn of the eleventh century, probably no later than around the year 1010. Although of different generations and therefore of somewhat different training, learning, and culture, the actual differences in what the scribes wrote, or rather, how they approached the material they found in their common exemplar, has been paid almost no attention. Friedrich Klaeber has summarized the purely orthographic data, such as the obviously different treatments of eo/io spellings, the tendency of the older scribe to preserve older spellings, and the tendency of the younger to modernize the spelling in all the texts he wrote. Both scribes also show minor orthographic idiosyncrasies that run over their entire respective stints.12 Orthographic factors reflect training and habit, probably involving a minimum of intentional choice as practice interacts with an exemplar having its own orthographic standards. I will focus on differences that may mark more intentional activities on the part of the scribes as they proceed with their work: (1) their differing attitudes to general appearance; (2) their differing approach to spacing; (3) the textual content of their corrections; and (4) what the modern canon of accepted emendations can tell us about their practices. Obviously, in a short paper, I can

66 A.N. Doane

only indicate anecdotally a few examples which will have to stand for larger tendencies that need more thorough study and documentation. In general one can say that Scribe A is more 'literate' and 'visual/ and approaches the copying of 'Beowulf in much the way he approaches the prose texts: he takes care with layout and overall appearance, giving all his texts, prose and verse, the same twenty or twenty-one line layout in a 175 X 105 mm writing space, producing a very uniform, uncrowded and legible appearance. He makes his corrections unambiguously, fairly uniformly, and neatly, generally inserting corrections above the line using a fine-nibbed correcting pen and erasing cleanly. His word spacing is coherent and consistently serves a disambiguating purpose, as will be discussed in a moment. His contributions to the text, as both corrections and canonical emendations tend to show, are in the direction of clarifying meaning, so that he omits unnecessary words, supplies variant words that do not match the poetic rules, and generally flattens the text in a way that would matter less to one used to reading texts than hearing them aloud. So at fol. 159V/1 he writes '[swylc sco]lde eorl wesan aergod swylc aesc[here | was].'13 All editors since Grundtvig print aepeling before xrgod to make up the half-line.14 This seems to be a case of the scribe leaving out a word because the sense does not require it, flattening the text so that it satisfies the reading eye but not the ear.15 Scribe B, on the other hand, is more orally inclined and in tune with the tradition: his corrections at times substitute for semantically acceptable but unpoetic readings ones that match the rules; there are in his work fewer detectable variances, presumably not because he did not introduce plentiful free variances - all scribes writing Old English did 16 but because he knows how to choose variances that fit the traditional practices; he seems to be more interested in and knowledgeable than Scribe A about proper names at the core of the tradition. But to visual features, Scribe B, tuned as he is to ear rather than eye, is fairly indifferent: he carries on with Scribe A's layout, rulings, and writing space even though his writing is rather too large for it and yields a heavy, confusing surface;17 he does not appear to care that his corrections are randomly and awkwardly inserted, variously symbolized, and even sometimes incomplete or ambiguous. His erasures are often desultory. For example, at fol. 187r/13, in beginning to write 'haafde,' he first wrote 'he' and then improvised an 'ae' that looks more like 'ee.'18 On the next leaf, fol. 187v/2, he wrote 'aglaegcean' and then carelessly erased only the bottom loop of the g, so there appears 'aglae>cean.'

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 67

We can epitomize the visual and mental differences of the two scribes by their method of numbering the sections, or fitts, of the poem. Such markers are a purely visual device and could have no meaning in an oral setting, where such divisions, if marked at all, would have to be marked by words of some kind. Scribe A seems to take the fitt divisions seriously as primary semiotic markers. He skips a line between fitts and conspicuously enters the fitt number, set off by dots in the intervening space. Scribe B does not provide space for fitt numbers, writing them on the line in any available space. Scribe B seems to regard the fitt divisions as irrelevant or mysterious, sometimes omitting the number of a fitt otherwise indicated by a capital, or even failing to mark the division altogether (fitts 29 and 30 for example), and before long he loses track of the series. A similar symptom can be seen in the word spacing of the two scribes. Anne-Marie Cusac, in an unpublished paper on spacing in the whole manuscript,19 has found that Scribe A uses consistently higher rates of capitalization and pointing in the three prose texts than is found in his or B's portion of 'Beowulf or in 'Judith,' presumably reflections of usages in the exemplars of all five texts. It would seem that the more writerly Latin-derived prose texts favour these purely iconic, visual features and the more 'oral' poetic texts do not. On the other hand, Scribe A uses consistent spacing conventions throughout his work. Cusac finds that grammatically linked words, such as articles and nouns, appear to be written more closely together, consistently about 2.5 mm apart, while spaces between words grammatically unlinked are consistently about 3.5 mm apart. This consistent spacing serves a disambiguating purpose through a purely iconic or visual device, which Cusac thinks points to a greater degree of emerging literacy in Scribe A, and probably in his audience as well.20 On the other hand, the older Scribe B, in both his texts, 'Beowulf and 'Judith/ which certainly go back to different exemplars,21 does not appear to use spacing systematically. Rather than a regularized iconic, disambiguating function, the spacing seems neutral, or if it contrasts, it does so ad hoc, as if responding to mechanical handwriting happenstance or vocalic suggestions. For example, on Scribe B's first page of work, fol. 172V, spacing is 'invisible' to the scribe at line 19, 'baesse lestan/ that is, 'baes selestan/ emended since Thorpe to 'bone selestan' [the best]. On the other hand, Scribe B uses many more abbreviations and many more accent marks than Scribe A, implying a greater expectation of the audience's ability to supply information and vocalize it. In

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short, from the standpoint of Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe's theory of emerging literacy, still in negotiation with traditional oral competencies, Scribe B is definitely more orally inclined in his culture and practices than A, as we might expect from a man perhaps thirty to fifty years older than the other scribe. Scribal variance is another factor where we can see difference between the two scribes. A variance is not a variant: a variant is a textual alternative seen from the perspective of the modern fixed text. By variance I mean textual sites where we can discern that the scribe has contributed on his own to a basically fluid text from an indefinite store of memorial possibilities intersecting with an individual poeticolinguistic 'competence/ substituting not necessarily his own for the 'author's' reading, but at least probably departing from his immediate exemplar. Some of the instances doubtless may be the contributions of earlier scribes, doing the same thing, which are simply carried over to the existing copy. It should be said that variances are detectable because of the modern ability to check the text against explicitly formulated metrical, grammatical, and lexical canons that were unavailable before the late nineteenth century. It appears that readings that made minimum prose sense were usually unproblematic for Scribe A and were produced or accepted as allowable variances within his linguistic competence, though they of course provoke emendations now. To take one example to stand for many, Scribe A wrote 'hild-plegan' [battle-play] at fol. 153V19; editors emend to 'lind-plegan' [shieldplay] for the alliteration. That he also introduced variances, and they were not considered entirely indifferent, is shown at fol. 138V/20, where he wrote the common (three times elsewhere in Beowulf) compound adjective 'heado-rof [war-brave man] and another hand, or maybe two,22 corrected it to what must have been the exemplar's form, a noun and a hapax legomenon, 'heado-reaf' [war-booty]. Scribe B seems to have applied a different orally derived standard to variance. For example, at fol. 173v/4 he wrote 'J?aBt reced' [the house]. He then added 'side' [broad] above the line in different ink, probably in a later campaign of correcting. Since side does not meet the demands of alliteration (modern editors emend it to heal [hall-]), and it is not required for the sense, it is unlikely that the scribe found this in the exemplar. More likely he noted that something was wrong with the rhythm of the line and added a rhythmic element. This suggests a greater attunement to the verse in Scribe B than in A, since A does not appear to make ad hoc adjustments if the sense is adequate, whatever the rhythm.

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 69

Any modern edition of 'Beowulf is a welter of emendations, both traditional and peculiar to specific editions; beyond that is a great forest of doubts and suggested readings that clog the notes and commentaries. The textual surface at almost every point is contested. But contemporary readers saw a relatively unvexed textual surface, dominated by the scribal performance in front of them; indeed, sometimes they perhaps even saw a better text. Though it would have presented little problem to the original readers, this sequence on fol. 152Y10-18 by Scribe A has been exquisitely problematized by modern editors: 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

forgeaf ba beowulfe brand healfden[es] segen gyldenne sigores toleane hro[den] hilte cumbor helm jbyrnan maere m[a9] Pu sweord manige gesawon . beforan be[orn] beran beowulf gebah ful on flet te . no [he] baere feoh gyfte for scotenum scami[gan] borfte nege fraegn ic freond licor feow[er] madmas golde ge gyrede gum man na fela in ealo bence odrum gesellan.

The scribe has made several corrections: in line 13 he wrote 'beferan' and altered the e to o (somewhat ambiguously); in line 14 the b of 'beowulf is altered from another letter.23 There are several other letters that might be altered or touched up, such as the second n in 'gyldenne' (11), and possible several others on the lines that appear to have erasures or rubbing (on 'brand' [10], and extensively in lines 11-13). He has left a miswritten or misspelled 'scotenum' (sceotendum), which can perhaps be regarded as merely a phonetic variant. Moreover the pointing is erratic (probably because the pointing derives imperfectly from a copy with more systematic pointing). Some of these might have induced hesitations in contemporary readers. But otherwise the passage reads clearly, its pacing and structure helped by the systematic morphemic spacing: (He, Hrothgar) gave then to Beowulf the sword of Healfdane a golden banner as reward for victory a decorated hilted banner a helmet and a byrnie (the) famous treasure-sword many saw, before (the) man borne Beowulf received (the) cup in (the) hall; He did not

70 A.N. Doane need of those money-gifts to be ashamed in front of the warriors nor have I heard many nobles give more generously four treasures decorated with gold to another on the ale-bench.

The list of four gifts is plain: (1) a famous and deluxe sword, once belonging to Hrothgar's father, (2) a golden banner, decorated and having some sort of handle, bracket or 'hilt/ (3) a helmet, (4) a mailshirt. The action is clear, the spectators gape at the famous sword, the greatest of all these treasures and then Beowulf receives a ritual drink celebrating the victory. Then a comment: this is the sort of gift, the four items making up a complete regalia of a kingly war-leader, that is seldom given. Too clear? Lynx-eyed modern editors have created several problems in this clear passage (as in countless others): they find hiltecumbor impossible because hilt is usually neuter, while admitting that it is also sometimes feminine or masculine and emend to the lectio facilior hilde-cumbor [battle-banner], exactly the kind of variance deplored when imputed to scribes. This non-problem is created by the modern over-grammaticalization of an as yet ungrammaticalized language, something which would not have occurred to contemporary audiences, even learned ones. Secondly - and more seriously, since it diminishes the magnitude of the gift - from the beginning of Beowulf studies, everything has been done to get rid of Healfdane's sword. Some commentators have attempted to explain 'brand Healfdenes' as a kind of kenning for Hrothgar - that he was the 'sword of his father/ as he is 'helm Scyldinga' [helmet of the Scyldings]. But there is not much enthusiasm for this explanation and most editors simply emend to 'beam Healfdenes' [son of Healfdene] (i.e., Hrothgar), since that is what they want it to. mean; this has no paleographical justification (note Klaeber's bizarre form, 'beam'). This early and, it seems to me, clearly incorrect emendation should have been exorcised once and for all by Kuhn's detailed argument for retention of brand, where both plain sense and style (omission of the subject at the head of a clause) demand the manuscript reading. But the inertia of the scholarly tradition makes an editor reluctant to introduce a change away from the canonical text.24 Let us grant for a moment that the *poet *wrote 'beam Healfdenes/ or that he wrote 'brand Healfdenes' and meant 'beam Healfdenes' - who can imagine that an eleventh-century audience could have understood such? In this manuscript, at any rate, Beowulf got Healfdane's sword

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 71

and I am sure he was quite pleased to have it. But this passage demonstrates the way in which editors 'play at being scribes/ or 'act like scribes/ in substituting their own 'competencies' for what the manuscript has already 'performed.' This is not to say that modern editors were the first to make readerly corrections; one early example is found on fol. 186r/4, a comment on Scribe B's 'redes yhattres' [of angry ones and hot(?)] which must have made little sense; it is clearly a corruption of oredes ond attres [of breath and poison (sc. the dragon's breath)] and which an early reader (not either of the scribes) has recognized, putting a cancelling cross-stroke through the h. Malone 'cannot say' what this stroke means because he is thinking exclusively of scribes transmitting fixed texts rather than readers harmonizing and rationalizing fluid ones. This is the kind of half-correction that the traditional reader would allow himself, as he thought or said oredes and attres. An intervention of Scribe B further illustrates this perfectly. On fol. 160V16-17, Scribe A has written 'aer | he in wille hafelan.' Scribe B has marked the missing verb after hafelan by means of a colon-like mark, but he has not supplied a word, which Malone implies is an oversight, since he takes it as a mark of insertion. Modern editors, with characteristic confidence (or feeling the need to complete the text definitively) supply a verb, some hydan, some beorgan [before he (will go) in, (hide/ protect) the head], so that, paradoxically, editorial totalizing confidence produces an undecidable textual crux. The contemporary reader simply did not feel so confident (the gesture itself seems enough) and merely marked the felt lack of a verb, leaving the user to supply whatever came to mind. Apparently Scribe B's more nearly oral approach did not demand hard-and-fast textual solutions. Sometimes he had no solution, though he saw a problem. At fol. 173v/5 Scribe B wrote hxdnu and then erased the d.25 Editors emend to hxledum, which corrects the sense and meter, but ignores the explicit intention of the scribe, to get rid of the d. Most likely, the scribe found the word in the exemplar and, making a Dagenaisian 'ethical' choice on an ad hoc basis, considered it inappropriate - he did not want to call the Geats 'heathens' - and so defaced the word without correcting it.26 From a text-critical point of view, 'heathen' deserves consideration as a genuine word to be applied to the Geats; 'haeden gold' (Beowulf 2276) is used of the dragon's hoard. Scribe B's overall performance can be briefly illustrated by his interest in proper names, an interest which suggests an investment in the

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tradition: Scribe A on fol. 167Y1 had written 'see deninge/ perhaps taking the second morph as meaning 'the Danes.' Scribe B altered the first n to g, giving 'scedenigge' ([Scandinavia] = the Danish realm).27 Perhaps he consulted the exemplar, or perhaps he knew this from the tradition; at any rate, it seemed important enough to him to constitute one of the dozen emendations B made to A's work. In his own work on fol. 193V10, a place rife with old names and ambiguous attributives, Scribe B writes what must finally be interpreted as 'merewioingas milts' [mildness of the Merovingian]: the scribe first wrote 'mere wio ingannilts' then altered the first minim of n to 'high' s and let the second minim of n stand for the first minim of an m. Malone explains that the scribe wrote original m with one extra minim, but this seems improbable, and would imply, if accepted, that the scribe understood inga as a genitive plural. The spacing suggests that at first he did not recognize he had a proper name, and then did, but of course the spacing remains as he wrote it, and was probably of no significance to him in any case. Contemporary readers - and that includes first of all scribes, who were readers and interpreters perforce - knew they had to apply considerable modifications to the text in order to be able to use it: this was the normal state of texts. Texts, especially traditional ones, were in any case from one writing to the next fluid, not fixed, open to the immense variational possibilities inherent in the tradition. This now increasingly recognized situation doubtless induced experienced scribes silently to introduce emendations and recompositions into poetic texts as they copied and was the mindset that fathered many of the variances we can spot as well as many others that we cannot. Probably a text, as a visual field substituting for an aural experience, was a very inefficient way of conveying traditional poetry to an audience, even as late as the eleventh century. The efficient way remained vocality, and it is probably best to see the poetic manuscript as an isolated 'score' that was intended in the end less to preserve a song, still less to present it to a reader, than to cue its oral performance. It would have been in the vocalizing of the song (including the inevitable variances that would have taken place randomly during any orally realized performance of it), that the poem continued to live. The more oral-influenced responses of Scribe B are therefore not merely rooted in the oral tradition but also in an earlier tradition of 'vocalic' writing, while the more Visual' or 'iconic' or 'literate' work of Scribe A is drawing the text of 'Beowulf into a field of reading and cognition where it hardly belonged.

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 73 Notes 1 Zumthor, 'Text and Voice/ 82. 2 Doane, 'Oral Texts'; 'Editing Old English Oral/Written Texts'; 'Ethnography of Scribal Writing'; 'Spacing.' 3 Dagenais, Ethics of Reading. 4 Dagenais, 'Bothersome Residue/ 254.1 follow Dagenais's practice of marking sensitive terms with an asterisk. 5 See McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, especially the chapter 'Final Intentions and Textual Versions' at 60-1. See also the conclusions I draw from McGann for texts preserved in manuscripts in 'Oral Texts/ 89-91. 6 I enclose 'Beowulf in quotation marks to indicate its status as a stretch of written discourse in manuscript. If I refer by this title to a particular edition, it will be italicized. The editions referred to in this article by editors' names are those of Klaeber; Wrenn; Wrenn and Bolton; Dobbie; Mitchell and Robinson. All discussions of manuscript features are derived from consultation of the three facsimiles edited by Zupitza and Davis; Malone; and Kiernan et al. I make the same distinction with 'Judith.' 7 I follow the 'old' foliation used by Klaeber and Zupitza. The 'new' foliation followed by Ker is two numbers higher. 8 These are edited by Rypins. Facsimiles appear in Malone and in Kiernan's CD-ROM edition. 9 See Kiernan, Beowulf Manuscript, 150-67. Ker, Catalogue, 282, considered Judith displaced from its original position, probably at the head of the manuscript. 10 To be noticed particularly are the different forms of a, the triangular looping shape of Scribe A and the square three-stroke shape of Scribe B, and the s's, where Scribe A uses almost exclusively the Caroline 'high' s, while B has a mixture of 'high' s, the old-fashioned insular 'low's, and uncial s. 11 Dumville, 'Beowulf/ 54-5, dates the writing of 'Beowulf to about 1000 or shortly after, on the strength of the resemblance of Scribe A's hand to that of the Parker Chronicle entry of 1001. It is an early form of the type of minuscule that becomes common in the eleventh century. See also Ker, Catalogue, 282, who notes that Hand A is influenced by Caroline minuscule; Ker, less precisely than Dumville, dates the manuscript 'x/xi/ i.e., somewhere around the turn of the century. 12 Klaeber, Ixxxix-xci, xcvii-ciii. Unlike his discussion of the differing linguistic forms, Klaeber's discussion of differences attributable to the scribes is very cursory and unsystematic. The situation is not simple: Sisam, 'Beowulf Manuscript/ 92-3, points out that Scribe B freely uses io for historical eu, a

74 A.N. Doane practice almost entirely avoided by Scribe A throughout his whole stint; yet Judith, written by Scribe B, has no occurrences of io spellings at all. 13 Beowulf1329: So a warrior ought to be glorious just as ^schere was. In the following discussions of manuscript features, the references are equally, unless otherwise noted, to the facsimiles and transcriptions by Zupitza and Davis and to the CD-ROM by Kiernan et al.; occasional references to Malone's facsimile and commentary will be noted. The letters in brackets are from the Thorkelin transcripts (A and B combined unless otherwise noted). 14 Consensus editorial readings will not be sourced. Details are conveniently given in B. Kelly, 'Formative Stages,' Part I and Part II. 15 This reading raises the issue of 'cuing': if the text is for performance, it would be easily emended in a thousand particulars as it was read orally from a script, even more so if memorization intervened. This is quite aside from the issue of oral-formulaic composition, though if that term is the equivalent of 'poetic linguistic competence' it is of some relevance when discussing any participant in the culture familiar with the poetic tradition to any degree. 16 See esp. Doane, 'Ethnography of Scribal Writing.' 17 This in itself suggests Scribe B's relative indifference to visual features: he will continue with the convenient surface-spaces as already prepared rather than modify them to fit his handwriting (but neither does he seem to modify his handwriting to fit the space). 18 Kiernan (CD-ROM) says ae is altered from ea, but this does not seem right: cf. e.g., ea in wealdan, line 8 of the same folio. 19 Cusac, 'Scribal Insertions.' Quoted and used with permission of the author. 20 O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song, 19-21, briefly discusses the literacy, in relation to spatial cues and orthography, of the 'Beowulf scribes. 21 Kiernan, Beowulf Manuscript, 150-2. See also Sisam, 'Beowulf Manuscript/ 93. 22 The e is probably not by Scribe A and certainly not by B, while the alteration of o to a by the crude addition of a curving stroke around its right side looks like the work of Scribe B. 23 Probably/, as Kiernan (CD-ROM) suggests: the flat top of the bowl of b suggests this; Zupitza-Davis say it is altered from/? (wynri). 24 Kuhn's defence of brand [sword] appeared nearly sixty years ago and has not been seriously engaged since. He shows that 'brand Healfdenes' is both grammatically justified as the object following an understood subject and sociologically probable as a magnificent gift. The emendation beam originated in Grundtvig's Danish translation of 1820 (p. 282) and was adopted

'Beowulf and Scribal Performance 75 by, among others, Klaeber and Dobbie (the latter feebly argues that 'bringing a sword into the picture at this point would make matyumsweord, 1. 1023, a rather awkward repetition' [!]). Marquardt, Tiirsten- und Kriegerkenning,' 391-2, defended the manuscript reading by explaining that 'brand Healfdenes' is a kind of kenning for Hrothgar, the 'sword of his father' as he is 'the helmet of the Scyldings'; she repeats this in her book on kennings, Altenglischen Kenningar, 255, in a section listing terms for 'Der Fiirst als Volks- und Heerfuhrer'; ironically, the next section, on the same page, is called 'Der Fiirst als Schatzspender.' Marquardt's interpretation, which is to be tolerated in a book studying kennings, seems bizarre as admitted in the editions of Wrenn and Wrenn-Bolton. There is no way to explain editorial decisions at this point of the text except to assume that an editorial incursion, repeated enough over the decades, has become canonical and authoritative thereby; that is, there is a craft respect among editors that trumps their regard of scribes' doings: in this case, even when the particular editorial act (emending to beam) is judged to be wrong, the editorial intentio is assumed to be correct (thus brand is construed as if it meant beam). I am happy to notice that in their edition Mitchell and Robinson (82) accept 'brand healfdenes' in its natural, pre-Grundtvigian sense. 25 The CD-ROM confirms with an ultra-violet photo that the erased letter is 6. 26 This small change may illustrate what doubtless was happening over time on a larger scale, as the religious posture of the poem and its attitude to its protagonists was changing through various performance situations within an evolving religious culture. Dozens of small inconsistencies in this regard make themselves felt in the received text, a subject I hope to develop at length in another place. 27 The resultant manuscript form is actually 'see denigge.'

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse John Miles Foley

Not sui generis but omnium generum

Prolegomenon Genres do leak in oral traditional verse; that much is patent. Features from one poetic form turn up in others. The question becomes how and with what effect this transfer occurs. What are the structural criteria, the dynamic rules, and, most importantly, the implications for our reception of cross-pollinated genres? The answers developed here are offered as an appreciation of Ted Irving's lasting contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies, and specifically his typically clear-headed comments in the preface to Rereading Beowulf. Here is an excerpt from that introduction: '... my critical imagination was fired a few years ago by the "oral" theory of Old English literature, and as a result my whole point of view towards the poem shifted. What used to seem like troublesome flaws in a remarkable poem, cracks to be anxiously papered over, now seem merely structural features of this kind of early poetry, features that are now open not only to our understanding but also to our fresh appreciation/1 This perspective strikes what seems to me a productive balance between tried and true methods of reading AngloSaxon poetry, methods developed from regarding this verse tradition strictly as a collection of texts, and newer methods that credit its nourishing roots in an oral poetic tradition. We do not require an entirely new poetics, any more than A Reading of Beowulf will ever be

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 77

superseded. But we do need to pay attention to what the expressive texture and provenance of Old English poetry can tell us about how to read it. The present essay is an attempt to follow Ted Irving's stated vision. Intertextuality without Texts? In the present critical climate we hear a great deal about intertextuality, and justifiably so. Literary works act and react to one another in response to realities that we have only recently come to appreciate: political context, social history, authorial anxiety, and the radical instability of texts. What was once fixed in stone - or at least on acid-free paper is now understood from many different perspectives as an entree into the project of reading, a project that will never be final or complete. But how do we understand verbal art for which the term 'intertextuality' proves etymologically inapposite? Suppose we had to confront a situation in which text was in fact a reduction rather than an epitomization of a poem, and in which inter, which presumes to describe a relationship between two or more discrete 'things,' could not fairly perform its assigned duty. I am speaking of oral and oral-connected poetry,2 which exists in a networked tradition and which therefore cannot produce the kind of isolatable 'things' that intertextuality undertakes to relate. Such poetry, which I here call traditional in an effort to stress its fundamental expressive strategy rather than its superficial form, will likewise respond to political, social, and other contexts, though with an inertia born of its idiomatic adherence to a specialized language and the implied field of reference accessible only via that language. If anything, traditional poetry will be even less stable than contemporary critical theories have shown written literature to be.3 Finally, the study of oral and oral-connected poetry will require an ongoing reading project tolerant of diverse perspectives and concerns, including some that may be technologically foreign to those of us more familiar with paperbacks than performances. Traditional Morphology and the Ecology of Genres For the reasons described above I advocate two fundamental approaches to the study of oral and oral-connected poetry. The first of these is traditional morphology. At one level, alternate performances of a poem may directly illustrate this functional pliability, showing how a

78 John Miles Foley

poetry lives not by fixation and epitomization but by endemic recasting and mutation, by varying within limits. This may seem counterintuitive for those of us who toil over the making of editions, ever fighting the battle of the variant and the stemma. But living oral traditions have revealed firsthand how this process of renewal and regeneration works, and the explanation has been fruitfully extended to illuminate otherwise puzzling problems in manuscript-based poems from the ancient and medieval periods. More subtly, oral-connected poems composed in writing (as must have been the case with many ancient and medieval materials) also demonstrate a thoroughgoing allegiance to traditional language. Even within autograph texts we find formulaic structure, typical scenes, and other traditional devices for the effective and economical communication of meaning. This fact has serious consequences, since not only the grammar of oral tradition but also its referentiality survive into texts. Put simply, the language and its word-power persist,4 and this survival has crucial implications for our reception of a wide variety of traditional verse. The second approach, and the subject of this essay, is treating the identity of traditional verse not as an unordered hodgepodge of forms or a well-ordered group of airtight categories, but as an ecology of genres. In concert with anthropological and folkloristic research on living oral traditions,5 I propose viewing oral poetries as generic systems that, like organic systems in nature, foster interactions among constituent elements that are themselves constantly shifting.6 Such verbal ecosystems are vulnerable to influences outside themselves as well, but any change that takes place will be filtered through their interactivity, which is not at all the same phenomenon as intertextuality. Viewing an oral poetry as an ecology of genres begs the question of precisely how the genres influence one another. Are the individual components of the system largely immune to their environment, guided principally by their own genetic codes? Certainly, no one would dispute a strong intrageneric force in any tradition's biology. Or do factors outside the immediate environment come into play in some major way? Again, as noted above, contexts of all sorts are active even if their direct influence is refracted by other dynamics.7 These contextual aspects of the overall process are self-evident and need no further comment. What will occupy us here is, to maintain the metaphor, the role of cross-species fertilization. That is, to what extent do the genres that make up the larger ecosystem demonstrably share properties with one another? Do characteristics and signals cross species boundaries

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 79

and, if so, under what conditions? Can one genre actually contribute to or take something from another, and what rules govern the migration? I will be maintaining, perhaps surprisingly, that cross-species fertilization is a fact of systemic life in an oral poetry, that it occurs as a matter of course. Traditional genres leak not by accident but regularly, predictably, and productively. While any poetic strategy can suffer from inept usage, in the hands of a talented poet generic exchange can produce a brilliant hybrid. The Ecosystems to Be Investigated In attempting to show how the process works and what impact it has on our reading of oral and oral-connected poetry, I will proceed comparatively. Thus, while the multigeneric corpus of Old English poetry will be a primary focus, I will also advert to evidence in ancient Greek poetry, and especially to the living tradition of South Slavic oral verse. To preview the results of this examination, I argue that no one set of rules explains all three poetries. In other words, traditional genres leak idiosyncratically, according to the set of rules governing the various forms within a given tradition. As to impact, we will discover examples of imported signals that contribute materially to the poem's reception, that is, keys or signs from one genre that bring with them attached fields of reference. Skilful poets know how to use such telltale details - be they single words, larger phrases, rhetorical structures, or narrative patterns - in the composition of complex, multilevelled verse. For them, generic interplay is a built-in opportunity to deepen the resonance of their art. This essay will champion a corresponding responsibility on the part of latter-day readers to recognize the generic signals and understand their implications. One caveat before we begin. For the purposes of this essay, and more widely as well, I understand oral poetry as a broad and inclusive designation. Reports from the field and the archive in recent years have shown that the Great Divide typology of oral versus written simply does not reflect reality, that oral poetry can involve and interact with reading and writing in interesting ways. In order to accommodate this natural variety, and to avoid having to throw out the baby with the bathwater, I advocate thinking of oral poetry as a spectrum encompassing a number of typical forms: (1) oral performance, (2) voiced texts (composed in writing but specifically for live performance), (3) voices from the past (ancient and medieval poetry of uncertain origins but composed in an

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oral traditional style), and (4) written oral poetry (composed in writing and never intended for performance, although written in an oral traditional style). Each of these forms also shows tremendous variety in its own right.8 Of the three oral poetries under consideration here, South Slavic reaches us chiefly as oral performance, while Old English and ancient Greek fall into the category of voices from the past. More to the onomastic point, all three traditions are understood here as oral poetry, and all three show clear evidence of functioning as traditional verse. Hexametrical Diction: The Case of Ancient Greek Homer's Iliad and Odyssey stand virtually alone in the world of archaic Greece, towering over all that surrounds them in more ways than one. In addition to occupying a central position in the Greek mind from at least the eighth century BCE to Plato and beyond, the surviving epics apparently exerted a canonizing influence on the repertoire of portrayals in red- and black-figure vase-painting. Indeed, vase-painters themselves seem to have used some of Homer's and his tradition's compositional techniques.9 Even the lost poems of the so-called Epic Cycle were described in relation to the Iliad and Odyssey. From a cultural point of view, it would be hard to imagine a more dominating presence. If we understand the verbal arts of earliest Greece as an ecosystem, epic was by far the most prominent of its constituent organisms. No small part of this dominance was the hexameter, the six-foot or four-colon line that undergirded the heroic exploits of Achilles and Odysseus, the sufferings of Andromache and Penelope, and not least the divine machinations of Zeus and Athena. The hexameter is a notoriously difficult prosody whose origins and dynamics are still under active discussion.10 It can be readily explained as a mix-and-match sorting of four cola or segments, the combination of which draws from a total of twelve possibilities according to certain rules for regular word-breaks. Here is the structural menu of twelve possible cola, with the symbol - standing for a quantitatively long syllable, u for a quantitatively short syllable, and x for a syllable of indifferent quantity:

a. b. c. d.

1

-uu

_uu _

2

3

uu-

u-

4 -uu-x

uu-

uu )_uu

uu - yu

-uu-

-uu-u

u-uu

uu_uu

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 81 Thus a line consists of one of two possibilities in the first position, one of four in the second, one of four in the third, and one of two in the last. If we observe the usual equivalence of dactyl (- uu) with spondee (—), which in turn means that one long equals two shorts (- = uu), then we can scan these two examples as follows:11

- - - - -- - -- - - _ uuux la 2c 3b 4b and cast many strong-hearted souls to Hades -

u u - u u -u u-uuu -uu- x la 2d 3c 4a Sing many-turning man in me, O Muse, the one who very many times...

The aptness of the four-colon approach lies in the fact that it solves the riddle of the hexameter internally and compositionally, whereas the six-foot structure etymologically encoded in the term hexameter has no correspondence with words or phrases and can only enumerate a sequence of longs and shorts. From either perspective, however, this is a complex meter, one that has been described by various scholars as both 'Aegean' and Indo-European, and as a hybrid of various other forms. The theory and pattern of four segments, each with strictly limited possibilities, not only produces structurally cleaner results than the sixfoot thesis; it is also more diagnostic of oral epic poetry in ancient Greek. That is, it explains how each and every line of the Iliad and Odyssey works as traditional phraseology. Research over the past sixty to seventy years has established that traditional poetic diction exists in a symbiosis with whatever prosody the genre employs.12 The issue of primacy - of which came first, meter or phraseology - is at origin a chicken-or-the-egg question, and only becomes more blurred as both meter and phraseology, especially the more volatile but still conservative diction, continue to evolve. The major point is that the symbiosis between the two is a part of any genre's continuing self-definition, part of the way it defines and maintains itself. In a real sense the hexameter serves as a gatekeeper for poetic diction. Because of the relationship between the two, traditional phraseology tends to remain more stable than the much more quickly

82 John Miles Foley

evolving everyday language. This conservatism is traceable in the unusual mix of dialects and archaisms alongside more standard Ionic and contemporary forms in Homeric language.13 More to the point for our purposes, hexametrical diction is both an avenue for and a bulwark against generic exchange within the overall ecosystem of ancient Greek traditional verse. That is, since no prosodic barrier exists between genres that employ the hexameter, there is nothing metrical to inhibit the free flow of phraseology from one poetic form to another. On the other hand, such diction is in another respect truly sui generis: it does not transfer easily or regularly to a genre that uses another prosody. In practical terms this principle means that Homeric epic generally does not directly share phraseology with archaic Greek lyric poetry, whether by Pindar, Sappho, Bacchylides, or any of the other poets whose works survive, fragmentarily, to us. Critics have argued on both sides of the issue of primacy - whether epic gave birth to lyric or vice versa - but there is little evidence either way, precisely because (I would contend) these were coexistent genres within a traditional ecology that did not share a prosody-phraseology symbiosis. In keeping with the metaphor I have proposed, these two species may have influenced one another at some level, but not genetically. Themes, mythic concerns, performance contexts, and other dimensions can be fruitfully compared with an expectation of direct correlation, but not their diction.14 In that dimension epic and lyric are segregated members of the ecosystem. Not so with ancient Greek genres that share the feature of hexametrical diction. Most obvious are the poems attributed to Hesiod, especially the Theogony and the Works and Days, which are not epic but which employ hexameter prosody. Distinct from the Iliad and Odyssey in many ways - the one a divine genealogy, the other a handbook for living - these two poems nonetheless share a great deal in the area of phraseology.15 The idiomatic power wielded by this shared diction should not be underestimated. Up to this point the common phraseology has been little studied for its expressive effect, with most researchers content to establish the structural linkages as fodder for arguments about the relationship between and relative dates for the oeuvres attached to these two great figures. Dated even before Hesiod, certain epigraphical inscriptions from within the first century of alphabetic writing in Greece sound very much like Homeric lines. These hexametrical bits command a certain

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 83 authority merely via the prosodic form they take, and deeper echoes or correspondences might well be established by thoroughgoing analysis against the Homeric and Hesiodic corpus. One especially interesting inscription is the inverted double-horseshoe shape chiselled on the thighs of the Mantiklos statuette, which amounts to two four-colon verses:16

- - - uu-u u- u u - uu- x Ib 2b 3c 4a Mantiklos dedicated me to the far-shooter with the silver bow, u u u u -uuu u - u u - x Ib 2b 3a 4b as a tenth part. And so, Phoibos, grant me a pleasing reward.

-

Not only are these hexameters that behave like Homer's, within limits;17 their curious rendering in a two-layered U and boustrophedon (one layer reads in one direction and the other in the opposite direction) shows that the sound - not the writing - was the primary reality for both the engraver and whoever read the scratchings (aloud, presumably). This is a good lesson about early writing, which unlike our highly edited modern texts seeks to prompt rather than actually to be what it represents. A larger, more varied group of poems, the thirty-three Homeric Hymns that celebrate gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon, are also hexametrical and share poetic diction with the Iliad and Odyssey. But here we get a glimpse of what else can be shared among genetically related members of the same traditional ecosystem. The Hymn to Demeter, a 495-line paean to the goddess of fertility and sustenance, is in no way epic in genre. It follows the usual three-part hymnic structure - an introduction, a middle section that lists attributes or mythic material, and a conclusion involving a salutation, prayer, and reference to the poet's task - but all three parts are greatly expanded from those that typify the smaller and more common variety of hymn.18 As one of the four major poems in a group that appears to stem from different times and places, it goes beyond the supposed function of hymns as prologues to epic performance to become a free-standing encomium or extended prayer in its own right. It would be fair to say that all four

84 John Miles Foley

major hymns - to Demeter, Hermes, Aphrodite, and Apollo - are virtually a genre unto themselves. But they are still a hexametrical genre, and therein lies the key. Transferable phraseology is one result, and another is a narrative frame common to the Hymn to Demeter and the Odyssey: the story-pattern of Return.19 In this sequence, well known in a wide array of Indo-European poetic traditions, a protagonist is absent from his or her family for an extended period of time, during which there is widespread devastation. After many trials and negotiations, the protagonist manages to return, usually in disguise and telling lying tales in order to test people secretly and discover the reality of the situation he or she is covertly reentering. After further negotiation, often in the form of vengeance or an elicited bargain, the reunion takes place. Although the Hymn to Demeter is not an epic, it employs this Odyssean (and Indo-European) pattern to relate the story of Demeter and Persephone. Recognizing this pattern not only helps us explain the sequence of events; it also furnishes a frame for reception of the hymn. Because we know that Demeter and Persephone are following an idiomatic narrative path, we can better read their behaviour, their actions, and not least their longsought and climactic reunion. Other hexametrical genres could be mentioned, from the earliest Greek poetry through later Hellenistic reflexes, but perhaps these illustrations are sufficient to show that traditional genres leak both regularly and productively in ancient Greek. Shared rules for composing and transmitting phraseology are the precondition for exchange of diction and narrative patterns. Because these genres are related prosodically, traditional elements can move between them without any formal barrier to inhibit free-flowing exchange. The ecology of genres in ancient Greece fosters such exchange. Indeed, some of the presocratic philosophers, one of whose chief activities was to criticize Homer for his world-view, used the hexameter - Homer's medium, if you like as the vehicle for their attacks. Octosyllables versus Decasyllabics: South Slavic Oral Poetry The ecology of oral poetry in the Balkans is forbiddingly complex, the product of centuries of migrations, ethnic conflicts, and political oscillations. Almost any characterization of South Slavic oral genres - and by this label I mean to designate what was until recently covered by the term Serbo-Croatian - will necessarily fall short of reflecting reality.

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 85

For our purposes here, however, a small selection of the vast wealth of poetic forms in the general region of the former Yugoslavia will serve to illustrate how genres leak in that ecosystem, as well as allow a comparison with what we observed about ancient Greek oral poetry and will be considering below in relation to Anglo-Saxon verse. To begin, many of the oral poetic genres collected in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia follow a simple, two-part typology: those performed by females use the eight-syllable line, or osmerac, while those performed by males employ the ten-syllable verse, or deseterac. The phraseologies associated with women's and men's genres are thus interwoven with distinctly different prosodies, and mere syllable-count is not the only determinant. The octosyllable is a symmetrical, 4 + 4 meter with two equivalent halves; this balance makes for interchangeability and also for occasional 'triplet' lines of twelve syllables (4 + 4 + 4).20 The decasyllable, on the other hand, is asymmetrical, with an initial colon of four followed by a second colon of six syllables. The two parts of the deseterac are not interchangeable, and in fact they institutionally house different parts of speech, with the four-syllable increment devoted to conjunctions, pronouns, adverbs, and shorter verb forms and the sixsyllable section typically the site for noun-epithet phrases, longer verb forms, and the like.21 This discrepancy sets up the first criterion for interspecies exchange, providing an avenue for metrically homologous generic transfer and a barrier against leakage between 'gendered' kinds of oral poetry. Within this two-part typology there are other factors that assist in determining how traditional genres leak, factors that are especially noticeable in South Slavic oral poetry because we are dealing with viable, extant species in a living ecology. I am referring to the actual performance situations for each of these genres - when and where they are performed, under what conditions, and with what expectations. Such settings or contexts, which in this case we do not have to reconstruct theoretically but can directly observe and experience, are active in each genre's composition and reception, and they further individualize each expressive form and its distinctive poetics. In other words, performance settings limit and focus the leakage from one genre to another. A case in point is the women's genres, and here I highlight three of them: funeral laments, healing charms, and lyric poetry. Although all three depend on the octosyllable,22 their context and function in the overall poetic ecology is very much an individual matter. This individ-

86 John Miles Foley

uality in turn makes for more or less segregated phraseologies, with little leakage from one genre to another. That is, each is so focused a form, with particular, concrete expressive responsibilities in the society as a whole that go well beyond aesthetic value or entertainment, that they 'keep their language to themselves/ Phraseology and motifs tend not to be useful outside the given genre in what amounts to a very function-based poetics. Funeral laments, or tuzbalice in the emic terminology, are customarily composed and performed by the nearest female relative of the deceased.23 They usually take place in the graveyard not far from the gravesite itself, and are public events in which prepared food is dispensed to those who come to join the mourning ritual. Like other oral poetry, they are made and remade at intervals, in the case of this genre at regular intervals - more frequently during the first year but for many years after the original performance as well. Since every person's death is by definition a unique occurrence, the genre must allow for flexibility in the naming and biographical attributions that constitute it, as well as in its portrayal of the events that led to the death. In the example quoted below, a mother laments the fate of her son, who perished seven years before in a freak accident: he was running across an open field with a group of boys when he was struck by lightning and killed on the spot. Here is how she began her performance on the seven-year anniversary of Milorad's death: Dobro jutro, mladi momci, Oj, 'dje ste nam jutros rano? Jutro rano odjutrili? A mi smo se ponadali Da nijeste od'kle stigli, A mi smo se ponadili Da nam Mile zadocnio. Sredo divna, mi s' nadali. 'Dje ti majka kamen grli, Tuzan kamen, sedam Ijeta.

Good morning, young men, Oj, where are you this early morn? Early morn, where did you spend it? For we had so hoped 5 That you didn't reach here, And we had so hoped That our Mile was late [getting home]. Dear fortune, we all hoped. Where your mother embraces a stone, 10 A sad stone, [already] seven years.24

We glimpse features common to oral poetry in South Slavic genres and much more widely: syntactic patterns, formulaic verses (lines 4 and 6), a phraseology in symbiosis with its prosody, and so on. Yet we also see the generic focus: apart from the first few lines, where else outside of a lament would most of this diction be appropriate or useful? The

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 87

tuzbalice are metrically eligible to share features with other genres, but in fact they leak very little. Just so with the healing charms, or bajanje, that our fieldwork team collected in OraSac and other villages in central Serbia.25 Again the phraseology is interwoven with an octosyllabic meter, but the curative function of the poetry makes for a highly idiosyncratic way of speaking, or register. Here is an excerpt from a performance of the charm against the skin disease erysipelas, known emically as the 'red wind/ by Desanka Matijagevic. In this passage the conjurer or bajalica, the speaker of the charm, is summoning the horse and rider, a heroic apparition, to drive the incursive red wind back to its proper and original location in the 'other world': Otud ide crveni konj, Crveni covek, crvena usta, Crvene ruke, crvene noge, Crvena griva, crvene kopite.

Out of there comes the red horse, The red man, the red mouth, The red hands, the red legs, The red mane, the red hooves.26

Notice that all aspects of this phantasmagoric figure are red, calibrated to agree with the emic coding of the charm. As for prosodic concerns, the colour red has three syllables (crveni, etc.), unlike most of the other colours used in the repertoire of nine spells for the nine acknowledged skin diseases, which are disyllabic (e.g., zuti, yellow, or crni, black). The resulting instability in actual syllable-count was offset in performance by the conjurer's speaking five syllables in the temporal space normally occupied by four, so that in effect the overall octosyllabic prosody was maintained. Thus the phraseological grammar of the charm varies within limits as malady-specific adjustments are made. As with the funeral laments, however, this octosyllabic register is too dedicated to its particular social function to leak (or to admit leakage from other forms) to any significant degree. Although it follows a 4 + 4 schema, the charm language is narrowly focused on its role as a vehicle for medical intervention, a way to repair the cosmos by returning disease, now resident in the patient whom the bajalica is treating, to the other world. Any way of speaking dedicated to so specific a purpose is not usually vulnerable to migrations from other genres, nor is it in a position to migrate itself. A third example of women's oral poetry in South Slavic is lyric poems (lirske pesme; also called 'women's songs,' or zenske pesme, by some investigators). This amounts to a catch-all designation that incor-

88 John Miles Foley

porates poetry associated with particular ritual events, some of them calendrical, as well as situations that have no specific slot on the village ritual rota. Lyric poetry can be sung by individuals or by groups of women. It can even treat heroic stories more often told by men in the decasyllabic epic format. To illustrate this crossover phenomenon, I have chosen a brief passage from a lyric poem actually sung by a man, Meho Jaric, but decidedly in the osmerac, the women's generic meter, and collected by Milman Parry and Albert Lord on 21 September 1934. It speaks of the capture and eventual execution of two brothers, sons of the local pasha, who were responsible for financial and adulterous misdeeds: Ferman stize iz Stambola, Bujruntija iz Travnika, A jadija /'iz Saraj'va, Da podignu janjicare, Janjicare-i granicare, Da ufate dva Morica, Dva Morica, dva pasica.

A letter came from Istanbul, A decree from Travnik, An order from Sarajevo, To call out the Janissaries, Janissaries and men of the border, 5 To seize the two Mode's, The two Morics, the two sons of the pasha.27

Again we see the octosyllable in action,28 and again we encounter a phraseology that, while perhaps not as dedicated and narrow as those associated with funeral laments and healing charms, is still not likely to share much with diction supporting other forms. The (sub)genre in question here - a heroic tale told in the women's meter - is not likely to leak to any appreciable degree. This subgenre may in fact be closer to the men's genre of epic, although there is a definite barrier imposed by the metrical discrepancy. To be specific, it is in the second section of the line that the two heroic phraseologies must differ: the osmerac is a balanced 4 + 4, while the deseterac is an asymmetrical 4 + 6. Let me illustrate by 'translating' the lines just quoted into epic decasyllabics, using actual formulaic cola (six-syllable increments) and other compositional strategies drawn from Moslem epics collected by Parry and Lord:29 Ferman stize iz carskog Stambola, Bujruntija iz ravnog Travnika, A jadija /'iza Sarajeva, Da podignu ostre janjicare,

A letter came from the tsar's [city] Istanbul, A decree from level Travnik, An order from Sarajevo, To call out the bold Janissaries,

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 89 Janjicare, pa i granicare, Da ufate, brate, dva Morida, Dva Morica, dva pa§e sinova.

Janissaries and also the men of the border, To seize the two Morics, o [my] brothers, The two Morics, the two sons of the pasha.

While I do not guarantee that the translated decasyllabic version will pass muster artistically, it does show how generic leakage could take place even across the metrical boundary between species. What underlies that conversion, however, is more than meets the eye. In order to compose fluently in both genres (and some singers recorded by Parry and Lord could do just that), a person would need to have fluent command of both registers. He or she would have to be effectively bilingual.30 If that were the case, there is no reason why phraseology, motifs, and narrative patterns might not migrate between this particular kind of lyric song and the epic. Before leaving South Slavic oral poetry, let me add a few observations about the epic genre, by far the most thoroughly documented and studied of the species that inhabit this expressive ecology. For one thing, epic absorbs and idiomatically uses another decasyllabic form, the proverb, which also exists as a free-standing genre employed in everyday village conversation. Thus the following two-line aphorism Njema Ijeta bez Djurdjeva dana, Niti brata ne rodeci majka

There is no summer without St George's Day, Nor a brother without a mother giving birth

- which is recorded in the famous proverb anthology assembled by Vuk Karadzic in the nineteenth century but also appears prominently in an epic performance of The Captivity ofOgrascic Alija by the nonliterate Parry-Lord guslar Mujo Kukuruzovic.31 There is no possibility that the singer is citing from a text here: he could not read, and the Karadzic collection, drawn from the Christian epic tradition, would not have been widely available in the area supporting Kukuruzovic's Moslem tradition.32 As in many other such cases, the proverb engages an idiomatic field of reference in its own right, glossing the particularities of the specific narrative situation with its timeless applicability. This exchange clearly enriches the epic performance, illustrating how

90 John Miles Foley

traditional genres can leak productively, benefiting the 'target' genre aesthetically. Other decasyllabic genres, for instance the metrical genealogy, also interact with the epic, but I limit commentary to one further perspective. Whereas traffic between the Christian and Moslem subgenres of epic is minimal, there is much actual and implied interchange within each subgenre. That is, any given performance (of either type of extended narrative) assumes a substantial knowledge of other stories within its subgenre, and especially within the singer's geographical region. A character may be introduced merely by citing his or her formulaic name, while understanding the song requires knowledge of all or parts of that character's biography, or at least his or her behaviour in other relevant situations. If we are unaware that Prince Marko from the Christian tradition is an unwilling mercenary of the Turkish tsar who is spectacularly unsuccessful in forming any sort of relationship with women, or that Mustajbey of the Lika from the Moslem tradition is a conventionally untrustworthy leader of border warriors who can desert a comrade at a moment's notice, we may find their actions unmotivated and inexplicable. We will miss the implied cues, those that depend on experience with the poetic tradition. For this reason in South Slavic oral epic and in other oral epic traditions as well - I have grave doubts about the viability of the 'super-genre' called the epic cycle. To a degree any oral epic is always suspended in a network of other epics, and any single performance implies a whole that is never made explicit.33 In other words, individual epic performances leak not only from one genre to another, but also within their (sub)genre. In sum, South Slavic oral poetry also reveals leakage among the various genres that constitute its overall ecosystem. The rules that regulate the exchange are of two sorts. The primary differentiation among forms is by prosody, with women's genres taking the octosyllabic meter and men's genres the decasyllabic. But within this first approximation the functional setting and context of each individual genre comes into play. For that reason charms and funeral laments do not share formulaic diction, whereas proverbs flow freely into epic. Singers who are 'bilingual' can tell stories in either meter, thus qualifying as performers of lyric or epic songs. To emphasize the integrity of the two phraseologies, we remade an actual lyric performance into epic-style verses. As with the ancient Greek ecosystem of oral poetry, genres leak according to their structural and expressive rules.

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 91 Alliterative Licence: Old English Poetry In light of the analogues cited so far, let us begin with a general comment on the rules governing genre leakage in Old English poetry. From a metrical point of view, there is absolutely no barrier to interchange among forms. Put more positively, the same alliterative verse-form serves as the vehicle for all Anglo-Saxon poetic genres, bar none. Poets may use it with more or less dexterity and grace, they may depend occasionally on hypermetric lines (which also follow most of the same prosodic constraints), they may even speak or pen 'bad lines.' But alliterating half-lines, with characteristic stress-patterns and other internal structures, underlie all of the extant 30,000 lines of the poetry.34 Theoretically, then, we have a situation in which generic leakage might well be extremely common. Old English poetry could be more aggressively transgressive than ancient Greek, where hexametrical diction can migrate among a number of different contemporaneous forms, but not all of them. Or Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems might behave more like the South Slavic tradition, in which metrical avenues are often blocked by functional barriers, as considerations for the given genre's role in the larger ecology override prosodic homologies. Of course, we cannot observe and experience Old English poetry as a living phenomenon, and on that ground alone any remarks about functionality and genre must be tempered and cautious. But an interesting critical and interpretive problem does present itself: does AngloSaxon verse share phraseology, motifs, and larger narrative structures freely among genres, or are there specific constraints that inhibit or focus such exchange? In what follows I present a few examples that lead towards a tentative answer - that the Old English poetic tradition is the most interactive of the three examined; it follows rules, to be sure, but it clearly shows a free-flowing, aesthetically productive sharing of expressive strategies. We will read the poetry best when we are attuned to the implications of these shared generic signals. One of the most focused of genres in Old English poetry is the riddle. Far from a simple diversion or children's game, riddles probe and reflect the daily social life and identity of their makers and audiences. They seek to understand the rhythms and recurrent destructiveness of natural phenomena, the meaning of religious objects and ideas in a rapidly changing environment, and other problems that seem mysterious or difficult to explain fully. Pondering such subjects within this form allows the riddler to portray their unlikely or counterintuitive

92 John Miles Foley

behaviour or features, characteristically by offering seemingly opaque clues that fall snugly into place once the solution is guessed. Riddles are a genre for searching, wondering, and transmitting knowledge about important things and concepts. Among the tell-tale features of this curious poetic species is a challenge to the listener (or reader) to figure out the answer. This challenge is of course implied in the very fabric of the riddle as a speech act, but it also takes the form of a direct address of the riddler's audience that can occur at the opening of the poem or, more regularly, at its close. Here is the initiatory salvo in the first Exeter Book riddle: Hwylc is haeleba baes horse ond baes hygecraeftig baet baet maeg asecgan, hwa mec on sid wraece, bonne ic astige strong, stundum rebe ...35

This invitation to join the hermeneutical game is conventional and amounts to keying the listener's performance. If he or she is able to sort out these and subsequent clues and reach the conclusion that the poem has a double layer of solution - both Storm (in the person of the pagan Germanic storm-giant) and Apocalypse (in the person of Christ on Judgment Day) - then the process is complete.36 At the other end of the same poem lies a concluding challenge - so frequent among the ninety-three riddles of the Exeter Book that it becomes transparently idiomatic - that uses an imperative verb and asks the listener to 'Say what I am called.' Here is the coda to the Storm/Apocalypse riddle: Saga hwa me becce, obbe hu ic hatte be ba hlaest bere.37

Codas vary systemically from one poem to the next, attuned to some degree to the solutions they seek, but in general they follow the same pattern of directly eliciting an answer via some permutation of 'Say what I am called.' Riddling signals are not, however, confined to their 'home' genre. Poets composing other kinds of oral poetry in Anglo-Saxon draw freely from riddle-centred diction, with various aims. The phraseology can leak, and to decided aesthetic advantage. One of the more striking migrations occurs in the Advent Lyrics, a series of twelve poems bound together by their association with the Advent season and all that it reflects in Christian history, and also by the fact that many of them take

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 93

their inspiration and core ideas from the Greater O Antiphons of the Roman Breviary and other liturgical sources.38 Let me be as precise as possible: the majority of the lyrics, including the one to be examined just below, stem ultimately from a Latin source but are composed in the oral poetic register of Old English. No other example of this composite lyric genre survives in the extant Old English poetic corpus; indeed, given its singularity, there is no reason to suppose that another such poem ever existed. The lyric from which I will quote is the eighth in the series, and is based on the Antiphon of the Magnificat for Advent: O rex pacifice, tu ante saecula nate: per auream egredere portam, redemptos tuos visita, et eos illuc revoca unde ruerunt per culpam.39

The sixty-one lines of the lyric expatiate on this summons for Christ to re-enter the world, an action typologically correlated with his initial entry through the agency of God the father and his mother Mary. How that miracle was accomplished is one of the subjects here, and the reality that such miraculous events remain shrouded in mystery is one of the central motifs of the entire Advent Lyrics, found throughout its many-faceted meditation on Christ's birth as ryne [mystery]. In this eighth lyric, riddling language helps make that epistemological point. Listen to the poet pondering the mystery as it echoes against the background of language like that of the excerpt from 'Riddle V above: Nis asnig nu eorl under lyfte, secg searoj?oncol, to J>aes swide gleaw J?e J^aet asecgan maege sundbuendum, areccan mid ryhte, hu J?e rodera Weard aet frymde genom him to Freobearne.40

By echoing the phraseology associated with the riddle genre, the poet adds an implied layer to his contention that this is a ryne so great that no human being can ever hope to comprehend it. A few lines later the generically based overtones resound once more: For^on nis aenig £aes horse, ne J?aes hygecraeftig, J?e ]}in fromcyn maege fira bearnum sweotule geseJDan.41

94 John Miles Foley

The mystery of God's entry into the world is again construed as a riddle, portrayed as a puzzle beyond solving. When a few lines later the poet advocates turning to the question of Christ's mother's human heritage, the ryhtgeryno [truth-mystery], because direct knowledge of his father's participation is beyond human ken, he is essentially advocating riddle-solving. But just like Beowulf's disarming - the more powerful because it fulfils a traditional motif and yet reverses it at the same time42 - this is a riddle that will resist solution. The divine mystery will remain divine. Riddling language, glimpsed in the passages above, has unique idiomatic associations. By using these resources in what amounts to an entirely new generic context, the poet has deepened his representation of the Advent, both the original event and its ritual return as part of the annual cycle, and has done so in an inimitable way. Other signals also enrich the portrayal, such as the famous Beasts of Battle theme recalled in lines 256-8a, aligning Satan and the dark forces with the carrion animals that prowl the battlefield when the fighting is finished. As Francis Magoun, Adrien Bonjour, and others have shown,43 that theme conventionally portends a victory, and the poet is fluent enough in the traditional idiom to know and use that teleology: he calls for Christ to come again in order to save the flock driven asunder by the wolf, the carrion-beast. In this and many smaller ways, such as the formulaic phraseology that recalls the authority of tradition ('in geardagum' [in days of yore]; also at Beowulf Ib) and heroic action ('sigores Weard' [Guardian of victory]),44 the Advent Lyrics poet brings a broad crosssection of the generic ecosystem into play. Although creating a composite lyric apparently unparalleled in the Old English poetic tradition, he uses materials from well-established forms for the purpose. The resulting poem is evidence not only that traditional genres leak, and not only that they leak productively. The riddling language that drives aspects of the Advent Lyrics shows how this kind of 'borrowing' can work with economy and precision, telegraphically communicating a frame of reference unavailable in any other way. The same economy and precision also figure prominently in Solomon and Saturn I and //, two more Old English poems that have no generic counterpart in Anglo-Saxon poetry. Connected in some fashion with the Hebrew legends of King Solomon transmitted via Greek and then Latin recastings, the two poems are actually quite different one from the other. While both are basically dialogues between Solomon, representing Judeo-Christian wisdom, and Saturn, representing pagan wis-

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 95

dom, the first poem (I) mainly concerns the talismanic 'palm-twigged Pater Noster' and the potential of the prayer to dispel Satan.45 The second part (II) is more palpably antagonistic, with the two principals locked in contest over matters of cosmic import. The poems' chief editor describes their uniqueness as follows: 'Unfortunately no Latin texts resembling either dialogue in content have as yet been discovered ... One may hazard a guess that even if Latin sources should be found they would contain only a part of the material of the Old English dialogues. This is especially probable in the case of Poem II, in which many of the characteristic themes of Germanic poetry are interwoven with Oriental legends/46 Thus the Anglo-Saxon poems are not only unparalleled within their own corpus; they are sui generis against the extensive international background of Solomon and Saturn legends. But just what makes them unique? In relation to Poem II, on which we will concentrate here, I submit that it is most fundamentally their form and not their subject that separates the Old English dialogue from all potential analogues. Fully in accordance with traditional poetic patterns, the poet has crafted a verbal combat, a Germanic war of words, between two major culture heroes representing opposing world-views.47 We think perhaps of Beowulf's duel with Unferth over whose version of the Breca story is true, or of Byrhtnoth's rebuke of the Viking messenger in The Battle of Maldon. The poet says as much as Poem II opens: Hwaet, ic on flitan gefraegn on fyrndagum modgleawe men, middangeardes raeswan, gewesan ymbe hira wisdom.48

The code-phrase 'on flitan' [in contest] announces a verbal duel, just as the rest of this initiatory phraseology ('Hwaet, ic ... gefraegn on fyrndagum' [Lo, I... heard in olden days]) signals a heroic beginning.49 But where the issues to be contested are larger than Beowulf's individual reputation or even the collective honour of Byrhtnoth and his Saxon defenders, where the duel pits one massive religious and cultural reality against another, only the most focused and resonant hermeneutical signal will do. And that signal is riddling talk. For much of the remainder of the poem, as two world-views collide, Saturn poses riddles and Solomon solves them. Pagan wisdom throws down the gauntlet, and Judeo-Christian learning picks it up and ably discharges itself. The question-and-answer sequence treats dragons

96 John Miles Foley

and other monsters, but one of the most engaging riddles concerns another sort of beast. Saturn poses the riddle as follows: Ac hwaet is se dumba se de on sumre dene rested? Swyde snyttrad, hafad seofon tungan, hafad tungena gehwylc twentig orda, hafad orda gehwylc engles snytro, dara de wile anra hwylc uppe bringan, daet 5u daere gyldnan gesiehst Hierusalem weallas blican and hiera winrod lixan, sodfaestra segn. Saga hwaet ic maene!50

This brief passage has all the characteristics of the riddle genre: a seemingly impenetrable group of clues, a description that turns (like so many of the Exeter Book riddles) on an axis of animate versus inanimate, multifold contradictions (a voiceless beast with great wisdom, for example), and not least a version of the canonical closing formula that issues the challenge: 'Say what I mean!' Apparently this object/ creature possesses transfigurative religious force: it can turn a person towards Jerusalem and the redemptive cross of Christ. Saturn's words are full of mystery and demand a solution. And Solomon is up to the task, solving the conundrum with the very first word of his reply - 'books' - and adding detail as he proceeds: Bee sindon breme, bodiad geneahhe weotodne willan dam de wiht hyged, gestrangad hie and gestadeliad stadolfaestne gedoht, amyrgad modsefan manna gehwylces of dream'edlan disses lifes.51

Like the famous 'Moth' riddle, in which the wormy protagonist attacked a manuscript and 'consumed words but was none the wiser for it,' Saturn's challenge plays with the link between the written word and knowledge.52 But whereas the 'Moth' puzzle images the tenuousness of the written word, perhaps a reflection of a society in which its status was hardly absolute, this riddle celebrates the wisdom and even the redemptive power of books. Solomon's answer solves the animateinanimate dichotomy set up by Saturn and confirms the didactic power of what appears to be a sacred tome of some sort. It rests in a Valley' between board covers, it has (perhaps) the seven seals of Reve-

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 97 lation, each point encodes an angel's wisdom, and the object is an instrument of salvation. The two combatants, one representing pagan and the other Judeo-Christian wisdom, concur on at least one thing that books bolster faith and foster spiritual understanding. But why put this information into the form of a riddle? Why insert what amounts to Germanic rhetoric into a dialogue that most scholars would ascribe to a lost Latin stimulus, if not a lost Latin source? The answer is simple: because the riddle genre augments the agonistic texture of what is transpiring in the cosmic duel between these two semiallegorical figures. Genre leakage - from riddle to dialogue - sharpens the message, reframes the contest in archetypal Anglo-Saxon and more generally Germanic terms, and signals an idiomatic kind of reception.53 The composer of Poem II is fluent in the traditional poetic diction, and he uses that fluency to provide the listener (and reader) with a coded key to Saturn's exchange with Solomon. Their riddle-talk is no accident, no clumsy accommodation via a limited vernacular reprise; the rhetoric of puzzle and solution is a crucial dimension of the poet's art. Numerous further examples of generic leakage in Old English poetry could be adduced to illustrate how regularly and productively the diction and motifs associated with one genre migrate to another. We might examine the correlation between the proverb describing the inevitability of a dragon hoarding treasure and the ma iz carskog Stambola add disyllabic adjective from common formula line 2 iz Travnika > iz ravnog Travnika add disyllabic adjective from common formula-type line 3 iz Saraj'va > iza Sarajeva disyllabic form of preposition + de-elision > Sarajeva line 4 janjicare > oStre janjicare add disyllabic adjective from common formula-type line 5 granicare > pa i granicare common connective (pa) + upgrade i to full syllable line 6 dva Morica > brate, dva Morida common singer's interjection (metri causa but also idiomatic) line 7 dva paSida > dva paSe sinova alternate patronymic expression 30 Fieldwork has illustrated that oral poets can indeed be bilingual or 'illiterate in two languages/ and that such performers provide a channel for the spread of stories and other forms across the boundary between disparate languages. See esp. Kolsti, Bilingual Singer, and Skendi, Oral Epic Poetry, on South Slavic and Albanian. 31 For a full discussion of this and other examples, see Foley, 'Proverbs.' 32 On the differences between the Moslem and Christian traditions of South Slavic oral epic, see Foley, Immanent Art, 61-95 and 96-134. 33 On 'epic cycles' and the sustaining role of the poetic tradition, see Foley, 'Epic Cycles.' 34 On the symbiosis of metrical and phraseological patterns in Old English verse, see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 106-19, 201-39; from another perspective, Kendall, Metrical Grammar. 35 Williamson, Old English Riddles, 67, lines 1-3: Who among heroes is so wise and mind-skilled That he can explain who drives me on a journey, When I rise up strong, fierce at times ... 36 For an explanation of the pagan and Christian levels of this riddle, see Foley, '"Riddle I."' 37 Williamson, Old English Riddles, 67, lines 14b-15: Say who protects me, Or how I am called who bears this burden. 38 On the role of the Greater Antiphons in the Advent Lyrics, see Cook, Christ, xxxv-xliii, and more recently, Burlin, Old English Advent.

106 John Miles Foley 39 Cook, Christ, 100, note to lines 214-74: O peace-making king, born before our age: come forth through the golden gate, visit your redeemed ones, and call them back to the other world from where they have fallen down through error. 40 Burlin, Advent Lyrics, lines 219-23: There is no nobleman under the sky, no man so cunning of thought, so deeply wise, that he can explain to sea-dwellers, relate rightly how the Guardian of the skies took you at the beginning as his glorious Son. 41 Ibid., lines 241-3a: For this reason there is none so wise, nor so mind-skilled, that he can he can clearly declare your origin to the sons of men. 42 On this reversal of traditional expectation, see Foley, Immanent Art, 234. 43 For a summary of scholarship on the Beasts of Battle, see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 331. 44 In addition to Beowulf Ib, see the related instances discussed as part of the 'rhetoric of beginnings' in Foley, Immanent Art, 214-23. For phraseology that is formulaically similar to 'sigores Weard/ see, e.g., 'sigores agend' ([owner of victory] Christ and Satan 676b, Christ 420b, 513b) and 'sigores brytta' ([distributor of victory] Judgment Day II 279b); but note also that the morph sigor and combinant sige-, the latter often used as an alliterating stave in a compound, themselves carry a conventionally heroic connotation. On the phenomenon of 'indexed translation,' whereby a poet uses evocative phraseology to translate a passage or narrative into the poetic idiom and thereby stimulates a response associated specifically with that idiom, see Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance, 181-207, on Andreas. 45 Note O'Brien O'Keeffe's observations on orality, literacy, composition, and transmission in Solomon and Saturn I (Visible Song, 47-76). 46 Menner, Poetical Dialogues, 26. 47 On verbal combat in Old English and other Germanic poetries, see esp. Harris, The senna,' Clover, 'Germanic Context/ and Parks, Verbal Dueling. 48 Solomon and Saturn II, 170-2a: Lo, I heard wise-minded men in olden days, leaders of middle-earth, in contest over their wisdom.

How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse 107 Quotations of Solomon and Saturn II are drawn from Menner, Poetical Dialogues. 49 See note 44 above. 50 Solomon and Saturn II, 221-8: But what is the voiceless one that rests in the valley? It is very wise, it has seven tongues, each tongue has twenty points, each point has an angel's wisdom, each of [the points] will bring [you] up, so that you will see golden Jerusalem's walls shining and its joy-cross gleaming, the sign of those firm in the truth. Say what I mean! 51 Ibid., 229-33: Books are glorious, again and again they proclaim the appointed purpose for one who considers [them] at all, they strengthen and establish steadfast thought, they delight the spirit of each one of men concerning the misfortunes of this life. 52 Cp. 'Riddle 24' ('holy book') in the Exeter Book manuscript (Williamson, Old English Riddles, 82-3). 53 See note 47 above. 54 On the dragon and treasure-hoarding, see Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 'Maxims II,' lines 26b-7a: 'Draca sceal on hlaewe, / frod, fraetwum wlanc' [A dragon will be in his barrow, / old (and wise?), proud in his treasures], which precisely describes the dragon in Beowulf and does so proverbially. On the legends adverted to by the Deor poet via traditional implication, see Foley, Homer's Traditional Art, 263-70. On proverbs in Beowulf, see Burlin, 'Gnomic Indirection.' On heroic diction and The Dream of the Rood, see C. Wolf, 'Christ as Hero.' 55 For a summary of various critical perspectives and a proposal for a genre sui generis, see Foley, 'Genre(s) in the Making'; further background is available in Klinck, Old English Elegies, 223-51. Quotations of The Seafarer are drawn from Gordon's edition. 56 Seafarer, 8b-19a: Pressed by cold were my feet, bound by frost in cold fetters, where the cares sighed

108 John Miles Foley hot around [my] heart; hunger from within tore the spirit of the sea-weary one. No man knows, no one to whom things happen in the fairest way, how I, wretched and sorrowful, lived on the ice-cold sea for the space of a winter in the tracks of exile, deprived of friendly kinsmen, hung round with rime-icicles; hail flew in showers. I heard nothing there except the sea roaring, the ice-cold wave. 57 For a summary of scholarship on the exile theme, see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 331. 58 Seafarer 19b-22: At times the song of the swan I took as my joy, the gannet's cry and the curlew's music in place of men's laughter, the seagull singing in place of mead-drinking. 59 Beowulf, 1063-7: There was song and music both together before Healfdane's battle-leader, the joy-wood greeted, a tale often uttered, when Hrothgar's bard turned to telling hall-joy along the mead-bench,... 60 Beowulf, 1159b-62a: The lay was sung, the gleeman's tale. Joy rose up again, bench-music brightened, cupbearers distributed wine from wondrous vessels. 61 For more on 'Joy in the Hall/ see Foley, Immanent Art, 35-6,230-1.

A Reading of Brunanburh Donald Scragg

Ted Irving was fond of telling the story of being captivated by The Battle of Brunanburh early in his introduction to Old English poetry, and of being told by his teacher, John Pope: 'Just wait until you read The Battle ofMaldon.' Ted's thoughts on Maldon, when he came to study it, are in the public domain.1 Although there is no record of his early ideas on Brunanburh, the poem was in his mind again at the end of his life, when I invited him to write an essay on Tennyson's version of it, an essay which was published posthumously.2 For that reason, I choose to write on Brunanburh in his memory. Ted's special strength as a scholar lay in his sensitive close reading of texts. Because of its firm place in the Old English canon, Brunanburh has been closely read many times; thus, rather than adding to the published criticism of the poem in isolation, I intend in this essay to read the text in its manuscript context. The Battle of Brunanburh survives as the entry for 937 in four copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC), versions ABCD, and the differences between those manuscripts, given the fact that they were copied across a range of some hundred years, are relatively slight. In all four, after the very full entries for the latter part of Alfred's reign and almost equally full entries for much of Edward's, there are only occasional, usually quite brief, entries for the middle years of the tenth century, 925-75. In this section, in Janet Bately's words, 'Where they use the same material, MSS A, B/C and D show very little significant variation.'3 Of the four versions, that in B, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. vi, is a fair copy of the whole of the ASC up to 977, made soon after that date. C, Cotton Tiberius B. i, was written by a number of eleventh-century

110 Donald Scragg

scribes, and it is sometimes thought to be dependent for its material up to 977 either on B or on B's exemplar.4 The version in D, Cotton Tiberius B. iv, is the latest in that it was written in the middle of the eleventh century by the first of the many hands in that manuscript. Thus although we have four versions of the poem, three of them were copied relatively late. Only A, CCCC MS 173, gives us anything like a contemporary account of events from 892 onwards, its entries being made piecemeal by a series of scribes from the late Alfredian annals on. A then provides us with the best manuscript context for the poem, and it is this version that I will concentrate on, with citations from other manuscripts only where their divergencies are significant.5 The scribe who copied Brunanburh in A is of the mid-tenth century according to N.R. Ker (his hand 3).6 Bately suggests, because of 'the evenness of the script/7 that all the entries of this scribe, whose work is confined to annals 924-55 (apart from a brief interpolation in annal 710), were entered continuously rather than year by year. Certainly the annals are without the changes in appearance within the script of individual scribes which mark dislocation in the copying in earlier parts of A and in eleventh-century entries in C and D. Annals 924-55 in A are on two leaves which form the opening of a standard eight-leaf quire. That this quire was made independently of the one that precedes it is shown by the fact that two-thirds of the last leaf of the preceding quire was left blank at the end of the entry for 924. The entry under 710 by Scribe 3, however, shows that he had access to the earlier part of A and, since the addition that he made to 710 occurs in other manuscripts, that he had access to an ancestor (at whatever distance) of BC. His new quire in A, which has a different layout from that which precedes it, opens with what are now folios 26 and 27, and the scribe began his stint at the head of 26 recto with the death of Edward and accession of Athelstan, and ended at the foot of 27 verso with the annal number (and probably the entry, but see David N. Dumville8) for 955, which records the death of Eadred and the accession of Eadwig. Palaeographers from Ker to Dumville agree on dating the scribe at around 955. Ker describes the hand as handsome and fluent, probably that of Bald's Leechbook (London, British Library, MS Royal 12 D. xvii) and the copy of the Old English Bede in Cotton Otho B. xi, so we are presumably dealing with the product of a significant scriptorium, usually (but not always) thought to be in Winchester.9 Collectively the length of the three reigns of the sons of Edward amounts to little more than that of their father, or of their grandfather

A Reading of Brunanburh 111

Alfred the Great. But in view of the momentous political and military activities of the period, it is surprising that the ASC devotes so little space to them. Athelstan, after all, was a significant European figure, yet none of his influence on continental affairs receives mention from his chronicler. Eadred is a shadowy figure, ill for much of his reign, as witnessed by his apparent absence from court when the relatively few diplomas of the period were drawn up,10 and this may explain why a chronicler interested in promoting kings and kingship chose to ignore him. But by contrast to the preceding and succeeding reigns, the military activities of Edmund's appear to be relatively fully inscribed. When the reign is examined more closely, however, it becomes apparent that the ASC information is very selective. The only entries common to ABCD for the reign of Athelstan (92439) are the account of the king's northern expedition (entered in A under 933) and the poem on Brunanburh (annal 937). A's 933 entry (excluding the Winchester 'addition') reads Her for jEJ>elstan cyning in on Scotland, aegjjer ge mid landhere ge mid scyphere, and his micel oferhergade.11

The only common entry for the reign of Eadred (946-55) is the note that on his accession (annal 946) he took control of Northumbria, and the Scots paid him homage: Her Eadmund cyning fordferde on Sanctes Agustines maessedaege, and he haefde rice seofoj^e healf gear, and \>a feng Eadred seeding his bro|?or to rice and gerad eal Norbhymbra land him to gewealde, and Scottas him abas sealdan ba?t hie woldan eal Ipxt he wolde.12

There are thus only two entries for Athelstan's fourteen years, and none for Eadred's nine years. In contrast, the second half of Edmund's six-year reign (939-46) is relatively fully recorded. Immediately after Athelstan's death, Edmund, then eighteen, lost York to Olaf Guthfrithson, whom Athelstan had beaten at Brunanburh, and by the spring of the following year he was forced to allow Olaf control of north-eastern Mercia, the so-called kingdom of the five boroughs. The ASC is silent on all of this. Its first entry after Edmund's accession is for 942, and that entry consists of another poem, The Capture of the Five Boroughs, a brief account of Edmund's reconquest of the area which he himself had lost. This is followed by a sentence in prose:

112 Donald Scragg [Eadmund cyning] onfeng Anlafe cyninge aet fulluhte and }>y ylecan geare ymb tela micel faec he onfeng Raegenolde cyninge aet bisceopes handa.13

'Eadmund cyning' is omitted from this sentence by homeoteleuton, since it is the last verse of Five Boroughs. The text runs on from verse to prose on the same manuscript line. An empty annal number, 943, follows. BC similarly have this sentence in the 942 annal after the poem, but with a clear break between the two. The eyeskip is confined to A. C, like A, has an empty annal 943 but B does not. (D's material is fuller and therefore different.) The homeoteleuton and the fact that B has no 943 annal suggest confusion in an early common exemplar, and it may be that the prose sentence was originally the entry for 943.14 The poem and this sentence, then, record Edmund's expulsion from the five boroughs and the sponsorship at baptism of the two Dublin viking leaders who had by then succeeded Olaf Guthfrithson, and the ASC continues in successive years with his reconquering of Northumbria, and his defeat of Strathclyde and alliance with Malcolm, king of Scots: dccccxliiii Her Eadmund cyning geeode eal Norphymbra land him to gewealdan and aflymde ut twegen cyninges, Anlaf Syhtrices sunu and Raegenald Gudferbes sunu. dccccxlv Her Eadmund cyning oferhergode eal Cumbra land and hit let to eal Malculme Scotta cyninge on pxt gerad \>set he waere his midwyrhta aegber ge on sae ge on lande.15

By the end of his short reign, Edmund was back where his half-brother Athelstan had been after Brunanburh. The restitution of the southern king's control of all England is fully attested in the short poem and in the series of brief prose annals that follow it up. Clearly, someone felt that the victories of Edmund's reign were worth inscribing, alongside two important military successes in Athelstan's reign, the northern expedition and Brunanburh. These sporadic entries, I want to suggest, must be read together, as they were copied into the A version. That the prose entries for Edmund's reign, including that of his death and Eadred's accession, were composed together is suggested by the uniformity of their language. Compare 944 eal Norphymbra land him to gewealdan with

A Reading of Brunanburh 113 946 eal Norbhymbra land him to gewealde.16

I further hope to show that all of Scribe 3's entries, prose and verse, which are common to ABCD were composed by the same chroniclercum-poet, someone working necessarily after the end of Edmund's reign. The problem with Brunanburh criticism is that the poem is frequently seen out of context and judged on its merits as verse. This ignores evidence indicating that the line between verse and prose which is drawn by such editions as ASPR was then less secure.17 A simple example may be found in the homiletic tradition, notably in two of the items in the tenth-century Vercelli book: homily II, some of which is printed by Max Forster as verse,18 and the related homily XXI, which not only incorporates part of homily II, including the verse section, but a poem which survives independently as Exhortation to Christian Living. These are just two instances of texts that are for the most part prose but which adopt the metrical constraints of verse (or which include free-standing verse passages) for particular effects. We should assume a priori that the ASC compiler viewed the use of verse in the entries made for 937 and 942 as simply a heightening of style appropriate to the significance of the events described. However, this takes us no closer to answering the question of whether the poems were composed for inclusion in the ASC. On that point, commentators are divided. Dumville, for example, maintains firmly that the poem was 'specially composed' for its present position as 'is indicated by its opening word, Her, which is annalistic in style and which has no point of reference outside the annalistic context.'19 But why is he so sure that this opening word was not added by a scribe who wished to include a pre-existing poem in his chronicle? Dumville himself admits that Alistair Campbell had 'dismissed Her from his edited text as unnecessary/20 as indeed it is, because '^J^elstan cyning' satisfies all metrical 'rules' as we understand them without an additional syllable. Dumville supports his view by contending that Dobbie 'took issue with Campbell, which is surprising given that in the reference that Dumville himself cites, Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie says: 'The word Her is not necessary for the meter here.'22 Clearly, editors of the poem have concluded that there is no textual evidence in the opening of Brunanburh that it was written for inclusion in the ASC.23 For such evidence we must look elsewhere. I begin by comparing the poem with the next verse text in the ASC, Five Boroughs. Since this is less well known than Brunanburh, and relatively short, I quote it in its entirety:

114 Donald Scragg

5

10

Her Eadmund cyning, Engla beoden, maecgea24 mundbora, Myrce geeode, dyre daedfruma, swa Dor scadeb, Hwitanwyllesgeat and Humbra ea, brada brimstream. Burga fife, Ligoraceaster and Lincylene and Snotingaham, swylce Stanford eac and Deoraby. Daene waeran aeror under Nordmannum nyde gebegde on haebenra haefteclommum lange brage, ob hie alysde eft for his weorbscipe wiggendra hleo, afera Eadweardes, Eadmund cyning.25

This poem has attracted very little critical discussion. Those who do discuss it tend to focus on the technical correctness of the verse, something that commentators on Brunanburh have also frequently noted.26 Frank Stenton, however, calls Five Boroughs the first political poem in English, which is a more significant claim, although in my view, it overlooks clear signs of political consciousness in Brunanburh. There are a number of interesting parallels between the two poems. Each begins with the extra-metrical Her which has proved so troublesome to Dumville. Brunanburh follows this with '/Ebelstan cyning/ a standard Sievers Type A verse, Five Boroughs with 'Eadmund cyning/ These openings may be contrasted with the two other tenth-century ASC poems, on the coronation and the death of Edgar, 973 and 975, where the introductory Her is metrically integral to the first verse: Coronation: Her Eadgar waes, Engla waldend ...; Death: Her geendode eordan dreamas ...27

Brunanburh and Five Boroughs have other similarities. The latter poem is largely a catalogue: of its twenty-six verses, seven are simply placenames with an appropriate conjunction linking them into the sentence, and a further eight also include names. But the poem does employ a few traditional epithets, and two of them, 9b 'nyde gebegde' (BCD 'gebasded') and 13a 'afera Eadweardes/ echo verses in Brunanburh: 33b 'nede gebeded' (BCD 'gebaeded') and 7a 'afaran Eadweardes/ It must be admitted that the first is also found in other poems, and so must be considered a traditional verse, and the second is perhaps a natural

A Reading of Brunanburh 115

coincidence in a style of poetry that favours patronymic epithets. But coincidence becomes less likely when we examine other parallels. Five Boroughs 2a, 'maecgea mundbora/ contains the rare poetic word for man which is probably also found in Brunanburh 40a 'mecea gemanan' [in the companionship of men].28 Equally telling, in my view, is the form of Five Boroughs 7b, 'swylce Stanford eac,' which uses a frame found twice in Brunanburh: 19b 'swilce Scittisc eac/ and 30b 'swilce seofene eac/ and with an on-verse variant at Brunanburh 37a 'Swilce J?aer eac se froda' [Similarly there the aged one]. The frame of swilce plus eac with a single word between them, usually a name or a number, is found six times elsewhere in Old English, but this is not frequently enough for us to believe it to be commonplace.29 It has to be seen as a fairly distinctive usage. To find so many correspondences in these successive poems in the ASC, particularly when the second is so short, seems to me to be unambiguous evidence of a link between them.30 All of these parallels must be seen in the context of the repetitive style of Brunanburh, which has many stock syntactic patterns (e.g., 'geslogon aet saecce' 4a [won at battle], 'beslagen aet saecce' 42a [deprived at battle], 'hreman ne dorfte' 39b [no cause to exult], 'gelpan ne Sorfte' 44b [no cause to boast], 'hlehhan ne 6orfton' 47b [no cause to laugh], 'sweorda ecgum' 4b [by the edge of swords], 'hamora lafum' 6b [with the remains of hammers], 'haeleda nanum' 25b [with any of the men]) and repeated words and phrases (e.g., 'on [Sam] campstede' 29a, 49a [on the battlefield], on his 'cy^e nord' 38a [north to his native land], 'cy66e sohton' 58b [sought his native land], 'faege feollan' 12a [the doomed ones fell] 12a, 'faege to gefeohte' 28a [the doomed ones in the battle], 'cyningas geonge' 29b [young kings], 'geongne aet gude' 44a [the young one in the battle], 'heowon heaj^olinde' 6a [cut through the limewood battle shields], 'heowon hereflyman' 23a [cut through the fleeing army], 'on lides bosme' 27a [in the bosom of a ship], 'to lides stefne' 34a [at the prow of the ship]). Although it is possible to argue that there is artistic merit in such verbal echoes in some Old English poems (for example, in The Battle ofMaldon, they add to the cumulative effect of the carnage), it seems to me more likely that here they suggest a certain limitation on the poet's range and lexical variety. So far, I have identified linguistic parallels between the prose entries for 944-6, and more extensive ones between the two poems. It remains to find links between the poetry and the prose. I begin with some general observations on Brunanburh. It has frequently been observed that the poem exhibits that consciousness of numbers and of names of

116 Donald Scragg

people and places characteristic of the longer prose ASC entries of Alfred's and Edward's reigns, what Dolores Warwick Frese has called the 'who - what - when and where' of the poem's 'annalistic surface/31 Five Boroughs is even more prosaic in this respect, which is why it has been neglected in relation to the poetic canon. It has also long been recognized that Brunanburh nevertheless utilizes many of the rhetorical tricks of heroic verse, proof perhaps not that the poet 'had meticulously studied earlier Old English verse,' to quote Campbell,32 but a sign of a poet doing something different: signalling that although the context in which the text occurs is prose, this particular annal is in verse. For example, the poem opens with a shorthand reference to the comitatus motif in 2a, ^corna beahgifa' [ring-giver to men], with Athelstan as the generous lord and his men, by implication, followers loyal unto death. The opening of Five Boroughs, which uses words like peoden, mxcga, and mundbora in the first two lines, similarly alerts the audience to the poetic form, even though the rest of the piece is largely factual in content and lacking in poetic resonance.33 Brunanburh is often described as a simple praise poem for Athelstan, but it seems to me to be part of a wider strategy, appropriation of the battle in line with the legitimization of the royal house of Wessex. Nowhere in the poem does Athelstan appear without Edmund by his side. Athelstan is the hero of Brunanburh, but he is not the only hero. In structural terms, Athelstan and Edmund provide a neat parallel to the named enemies Constantine and Olaf. But beyond the structural device is a clear attempt to stress the importance of lineage. Athelstan and Edmund are not only physically the sons of Edward (mentioned twice, at lines 7 and 52) and brothers (lines 2 and 57-8), they are successful because of their noble ancestry (lines 7-8). Dangerous as such speculation may be, it is worth considering what the poet does not say as well as what he says. William of Malmesbury tells us that two other grandsons of King Alfred died in the battle.35 Is it possible that they are not mentioned in the poem because their death could not be assimilated to the poet's project, which is celebration of the royal house to which they belonged? There is a further factor to consider in relation to the emphasis on Edmund in the poem. Whatever his actual military contribution, in 937 he was only sixteen, and could have had no significant reputation. If the poem was composed after 939, when Edmund had succeeded to the throne, mention of his involvement might be much more readily understood. Edmund's role in the poem may be an aspect of its political dimension, as is the emphasis on the fact that the Mercians and the

A Reading of Brunanburh 117

West-Saxons had an equal hand in the victory (lines 20-8). This is despite the fact that the poem appears to have been composed from the standpoint of Wessex, for it is to that cypp [native land] that the brothers return victorious after the battle (lines 57-9). For these reasons I maintain that Brunanburh, like Five Boroughs, is a political poem. Not only should we see the two poems as having a common authorship, we should also view them as part of a larger design that extends into the prose entries. They are paeans of praise to Athelstan and Edmund, sons of Edward the Elder as the poems themselves stress, and they collectively emphasize the expansion of the new order established by Edward: unity of the English and Danes under one rule, completing the design begun by King Alfred. The descendants of Alfred are, as their coins and charters stress, kings of all the English and rulers of Britain.36 Further evidence for this view is offered by the prose entries themselves. First, we should consider Athelstan's obit, which sits between the two poems, with its self-consciously dynastic introduction of a parallel between Athelstan's death and the death of Alfred in that there was forty years but for one night between the two:37 dccccxl Her A^elstan cyning forj?ferde on vi kalendas Nouembris ymbe xl wintra butan anre niht |>aes pe Alfred cyning for^ferde.38 The chronicler here shows a significant interest in history; he not only writes with a consciousness of the importance of his record for subsequent generations, but is aware as well of the significance of the past on the present. I would further maintain that this same concept of history informs the conclusion of Brunanburh, when the poet writes: Ne weard wasl mare on {>is eiglande aefre gieta folces gefylled beforan f>issum sweordes ecgum, Jjaes J?e us secgad bee, ealde udwitan, sij^an eastan hider Engle and Seaxe up becoman, ofer brad brimu Brytene sohtan, wlance wigsmijsas, Wealas ofercoman, eorlas arhwate card begeatan39

- a passage that is immediately followed by the reporting of the death of Athelstan.

118 Donald Scragg

In Five Boroughs, the content of the prose entries that follow is similarly consequent on the events related in the poem. Five Boroughs relates how Edmund subjugated the north-eastern Danelaw to English rule. In annals 944 to 946 it is reported that he extended his power into Northumbria, Strathclyde, and Scotland in succession, and that after his death Eadred maintained similar control of northern areas. This process of expansion and consolidation echoes the entries for Athelstan's reign: A 933 reports the king's subjugation of Scotland, and the combined strength of the northern powers is defeated even more decisively at Brunanburh. In terms of what is said, then, there is total consistency in the ASC material common to ABCD and entered in A by Scribe 3: it reinforces the unification of the English under an English dynasty. The literary allusion of the concluding passage of Brunanburh, with its self-conscious reference to books, must lead us to seek for the source of the information the poet claims knowledge of. The books were written, we are told, by 'ealde u3witan.' T. Northcote Toller glossed the noun as 'historians/ but this is simply an assumption based on the context. Bately has recently shown that here and elsewhere 'ealde udwitan' should be read as 'wise men, scholars/ Who were these scholars and what were the books which detailed the history of the English right back to the fifth century? The answer cannot be Bede, if we accept that the phrase is more than a thoughtless reproduction of a traditional verse,40 for Bately shows that Bede is normally described as a bocere. The most obvious alternative answer is that we have here a self-referential passage by a poet composing for the ASC itself. This is one more strand of evidence to place composition of the poem (and the one that follows it) firmly in the ASC tradition. There are few linguistic usages in Brunanburh which might be thought to link the poems with the brief prose entries of A Scribe 3. Old English poetry generally, and Brunanburh in particular, is too formulaic to support strong claims for authorship, even if there was a greater body of prose evidence available for comparison. But we might tease out a few items of interest. Of the many words in the poem which are found nowhere else in the poetic corpus, two are worthy of comment: 'scipflotan' (11) [vikings] is a nonce-word and may have been coined by the poet. If so, he may well have been influenced by the frequent use of 'flota' in the ASC. The second is herelafum (47) [remnants of an army], not found elsewhere in verse but commonplace in prose, especially in the ASC. There is also the word udwita [scholars] itself, which is rare in recorded Old English poetry, but a word favoured by

A Reading of Brunanburh 119

King Alfred and perhaps one current in Winchester or court circles in the tenth century. Of seven verse examples outside Brunanburh, three are found in the Meters of Boethius.41 While it would be rash to suggest a close association of the Meters with King Alfred himself, such an association cannot be ruled out. One more example of udivita occurs in the unhappily named Menologium. The sole copy of this poem is in Cotton Tiberius B. i, where it follows a copy of the Old English Orosius and precedes the C version of the ASC. Neither prove a link either with Alfredian texts or with the ASC tradition, but again such a link cannot be ruled out. The other examples of udwita, one each in Andreas, Elene, and Precepts, are less helpful.42 In the prose entries the only lexical choice of note is 'midwyrhta/ which occurs in the annal for 945. It is otherwise found only twice in the Old English corpus, both times in King Alfred's writings (one example in the Pastoral Care, the other, spelt myd-, in the Soliloquies).43 It is difficult to make any definitive statement about such a restricted usage, but it might point to the word being a Winchester or court word. What can we conclude from all of this? That Brunanburh and Five Boroughs are the product of one writer is strongly indicated by the linguistic patterns, and this means that they were composed for their present context. That they are linked to the prose entries of Athelstan's and Edmund's reigns seems very likely, given their common subject matter and the exclusivity of interest in the influence of the three sons of Edward on the north. Whoever decided to inscribe the events of Athelstan's and Edmund's reigns, and the succession of Eadred, used the opportunity to enforce the construction of the successors to Edward as kings of all the English and effective rulers of Britain. Why then the shift from prose to verse and back again? Perhaps it was felt that the most important events of the period were so significant that a different literary strategy was needed. The heightening of tone may have been intended to signify that the deeds of latter-day kings were like those of the Germanic heroes of old. But that the decision was made by a chronicler seems to me to be beyond doubt. The Battle of Brunanburh is a chronicle poem in every sense.44 Notes 1 Irving, 'Heroic Style.' 2 Irving, 'Charge of the Saxon Brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh.'

120 Donald Scragg 3 Bately, MS A, xci. 4 See Ker, Catalogue, 252. S. Taylor considers the evidence at length in MS B, but see my review in Anglia 104 (1986): 471^4. For C see now O'Brien O'Keeffe, MS C. The relationship of B and C is not relevant here and the matter will not be pursued further. The important point is that B and C are textually close. 5 I cite the text in Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 16-20, as the most easily accessible, but the definitive edition is Campbell, Battle of Brunanburh. Citing the A version is textually problematic because occasionally the scribe or a predecessor seems either deliberately or accidentally to have altered the copy. 6 Ker, Catalogue, 58. 7 Bately, MS A, xxxv. 8 Ker, Catalogue, 58: 's. x med.'; Dumville, Wessex and England, 62. 9 Bately, MS A, xiii-xiv, discusses the provenance. For her reference to Dumville, see particularly Wessex and England, 124-34. 10 See Keynes, Diplomas, 46-8. 11 In this year King Athelstan invaded Scotland with both an army and a navy, and caused extensive damage to much of it. 12 In this year King Edmund passed away on St Augustine's day, and he ruled for six and a half years, and then Prince Eadred his brother succeeded to the throne and brought all the land of the Northumbrians under his control, and the Scots gave him pledges that they accepted all that he wanted of them. 13 King Edmund stood sponsor to King Olaf at baptism and that same year after a considerable interval he stood sponsor to King Ragnald at his confirmation. 14 So Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles, vol. 2,143. 15 944. In this year King Edmund brought all the land of the Northumbrians under his control, and drove out two kings, Olaf son of Sihtric and Ragnald son of Guthfrith. 945. In this year Kind Edmund invaded the whole of Strathclyde and granted it all to Malcolm king of the Scots on condition that he would cooperate with him both by sea and on land. 16 Note too the use of oferhergade (-ode) in A 933 and 945. The word is not exclusive to these two annals but is not widely used elsewhere. 17 There is a wealth of literature on the subject. See, for example, Mclntosh, 'Wulfstan's Prose,' and more recently Stanley, '"Judgement of the Damned."' 18 Forster, Vercelli-Homilien.

A Reading of Brunanburh 121 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29

30

Dumville, Wessex and England, 142, note 8. Ibid. Ibid. Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 146. Szarmach, '^delflsed of Mercia/ 105, writes of the poem as 'intercalated' in the ASC. mxcgea B, mecga C, maga A. In this year King Edmund, lord of the English, guardian of men, traversed Mercia, the beloved performer of bold deeds, as far as where Dore forms the boundary together with the Whitwell Gap and the river Humber, that broad tidal stream. [He won] five boroughs, Leicester and Lincoln and Nottingham, likewise Stamford and Derby. Formerly the Danes had been subjected by force to the Vikings, to the bondage of the heathens for a long time, until the protector of warriors, Edward's son, King Edmund, afterwards released them with valour. E.g., Campbell, Brunanburh, 16: 'As is well known, the poem is remarkably "correct" in metre.' Coronation: In this year was Edgar ruler of the English ... Death: In this year ended the joys on earth ... Technically 'geendode' might form a complete half-line but of a rare type, but in view of the opening of Coronation it seems more likely that we are to regard her as integral to the verse. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. The readings are A 'maecan,' B 'mecea,' C 'meca,' D 'mecga.' I accept Campbell's argument (Brunanburh, 100-11) that the a? and eg spellings are difficult to account for if the word is to be read as 'mece' [sword] since all versions spell the word conventionally in line 24. Others disagree, cf. Sisam, Studies in the History of Old English Literature, 127, note 1. Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 148, assumes that the word is 'sword' because Campbell's argument is based on D mecga, whereas for Dobbie 'D clearly has in ecga.' But the latest and most authoritative text, Cubbin, MS D, prints mecga. The editors of ASPR made little attempt to consult manuscripts first-hand. Instances are: Andreas 584, Fates 50, Dream 92, Elene 3, Christ 145, Psl02.7.3.1 have ignored thirteen instances of the two words without another between, seven instances where they occur in different verses in the same line, and two of 'eac' before 'swylce.' Presumably little can be made of Brunanburh 33 'Norpmanna,' 53 'Norpmen,' and Five Boroughs 9 'Nordmannum'; or Brunanburh 24 'Myrce/ and Five Boroughs 2 'Myrce,' although the instances are worth noting. The first sentence of each is very similar in construction.

122 Donald Scragg 31 Frese, 'Poetic Prowess/ 84. 32 Campbell, Brunanburh, 38. 33 It is worth pointing out that the poem is not entirely without artifice, e.g., the neat tailoring of the concluding phrase, 'Eadmund cyning/ echoing the opening one. 34 Where, one should ask, is Owen (Eugenius) of Strathclyde? Perhaps he was omitted because of the need for two pairs of antagonists. 35 Mynors, et al., Gesta regum Anglorum, vol. 1,151-2. The two sons of King Alfred's youngest son ^thelweard, ^Ifwine and ^thelwine, who, according to William, died in the battle, were buried in Malmesbury, an abbey lavishly patronized by Athelstan. One might speculate that their remains went there by Athelstan's intervention. It is even possible that the poet intended his contemporary audience to draw a contrast with Constantine who left his son dead on the battlefield (lines 42-4). 36 On the coins, see Blunt, 'Coinage of Athelstan'; on charters, see P.M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 352-3, and Keynes, 'Charters of King Athelstan.' 37 The entry may be wrong, but that does not invalidate the point that the writer was making. For a discussion of the dates, see Harrison, 'Beginning of the Year,' 68. 38 940. In this year King Athelstan passed away on 27 October, forty years but for one day after King Alfred passed away. 39 Lines 65b-73: In this island there was never hitherto, before this, greater slaughter of an army produced by the edge of the sword, as books tell us, old scholars, since the Angles and Saxons came here from the east, sought Britain across the wide seas, the proud craftsmen at war, the brave warriors, overcame the Britons, obtained a land. 40 For the instances, see below, 119. 41 Four of the eight instances are in collocation with (e)ald-. 42 It is perhaps worth noting that of four examples of xwiscmod- in Old English verse, one occurs in Precepts and one in Brunanburh. 43 Sweet, Gregory's Pastoral Care, vol. 1, 278-9, line 25; Carnicelli, St. Augustine's 'Soliloquies,' 69, line 2. 44 Bredehoft, Textual Histories, which contains some ideas similar to those put forward above, came to hand after my essay was completed.

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse Sarah Larratt Keefer

Poetry is thought of today as a personal articulation, invariably an individual act of composition, since its form is as crucial as its content, and everyone's concept of form is unique. This idea, however, may not necessarily apply to a cultural understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. Yet a voice cries T within many poems in Old English: the narrator in Beowulf interjects a first-person singular pronoun ('ne hyrde ic cymlicor ceol gegyrwan/ hildewaepnum' 38-9a [never have I heard of a comelier keel fitted out / with battle weapons]), riddlic creatures challenge the intellect with their 'Saga hwaet ic hatte/1 the gnomic voice in Maxims I states 'Nelle ic J?e min dyrne gesecgan' (2b) [I do not wish to tell you my secrets], and the opening lines of both The Seafarer ('Maeg ic be me sylfum sodgied wrecan' [I can make a true report about myself]) and The Wife's Lament ('Ic Ipis giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre' [I make this poem about myself all sorrowing]) promise a song of individual experience. Are we correct when we assume - as we so often do - a single recollective voice implicit in a literary construct that is in verse? More to the point, were these Old English expressions of T generated as truly private articulations and thus 'self-contained' in the modern sense, or are they relics of bardic performance and thus formulaic, adopted and preserved for traditional purpose? When the subject matter of a poem is by its nature communal, and that poem is thus the articulation of something culturally understood as a corporate action, we find a further confusion, even a tension, between our understanding of the speaker's voice - be it formulaic or genuinely private presented in the singular pronoun of poetic form and the somewhat

124 Sarah Larratt Keefer

antithetical concept of public poetic content. Who is 'ic' and who 'we' within the vernacular liturgical verse canon? Can we consider one individual, the result of private devotion, and the other public and communal, deriving from synactic or corporate worship? We are thus faced with a conundrum: are these poems based upon synaxis, impersonal and communal, a product of the conventual 'we' that monastic life would suggest, or are they - like the prose body of private devotions that they mirror - the result of a single voice composing, as the Church had understood the first-person singular psalmist to do, for both the discrete soul of the composer and a greater congregational whole? Many of the phrases that construct these vernacular liturgical poems appear in verse that is purely narrative or in prose pieces of homily or saint's life and, as such, indicate a field of comparison that is far too vast for the scope of this study. The 'ic' and 'we' question in Old English verse as a whole awaits further investigation. I confine my efforts here to an exploration of the nuances behind the speaker's voice solely within eleventh-century Old English verse composed with the liturgy as its inspiration. I will begin by exploring the idea of 'self and the personal, and its application to Anglo-Saxon poetry. When Charles Taylor examines the notion of 'self/ he utilizes the concept of moral 'frameworks' by which people choose this over that: identity is thus defined in part by the values an individual espouses or eschews. Taylor sees at least a medieval concept of 'self as mediated through Augustine, for whom 'created things receive their form through God, through their participation in his Ideas. Everything has being only insofar as it participates in God.'2 For this reason we can tread carefully but confidently in considering meditative liturgical poems as 'personal' or even 'self-conscious' in the truest sense of the word, since it is in the realm of private prayer and meditation that the soul as a creature of God is in dialogue with or contemplation of her Creator. Here, first and foremost, the soul of each human is most truly herself/her 'self because she is gazing upon That which most completely valorizes her: "by going inward, [she] is drawn upward.'3 Creatures have voices with which to praise the Creator, and different voices can be discerned in the vernacular liturgical poems of the eleventh century: by examining their sources and comparing the pieces that use 'ic/ those that use 'we/ and those that use both, we will see that the private does indeed stand within the public at the heart of Old English liturgical verse composition. Indeed, I would suggest that con-

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 125

temporary thought, at least within 'monastic academe/ was intrigued by this contrast between private and public and the function of the one in terms of the other. Perhaps this interest is driven by Augustine's understanding of memoria, important when considering synactic forms that were committed to the memory both through intention and constant repetition: 'But what is at the basis of this memory itself? At its root, constituting this implicit understanding, is the Master within, the source of light which lights every man coming into the world, God. And so at the end of its search for itself, if it goes to the very end, the soul finds God ... [W]hat grace does is to open the inward man to God, which makes us able to see that the eye's vaunted power is really God's.'4 To this end, I will argue that the Old English liturgical poems of the eleventh century most closely based on their synactic originals, which purport to be communal, are instead carefully crafted spiritual exercises constructed with the originals as their point of departure. Clad in the guise of synaxis, or public worship, they are nonetheless a deliberate exploration of 'selfhood' as it was perhaps understood through Augustine, the private soul within her temporal community and in communion with her eternal Lord; they are thus both an articulation and an examination of the creature in response to the Creator. There are many different kinds of liturgical expression, and Dom Gregory Dix would employ an umbrella definition for synactic practice: 'the act of taking part in the solemn corporate worship of God ... officially organised by the Church.'5 All synactic performance, which includes the eucharistic liturgy, is thus by its nature inherently public. However, we must also remember the development of private prayer standing just on the borders of synaxis, originally deriving from the pre-Nicene period and evolving elaborately as a result of the monastic expansions and their focus on meditation within the Western Church. Synaxis and private devotions developed together from the fourth century in such a way that in many places the communal and the individual flowed together. By the eleventh century, they were almost impossible to perceive as discrete. For example, is the Pater Noster a public or a private prayer? Provision is made by the fourth century6 for its use both in the communal practice of the Mass (as we find in the sacramentaries7 of both Anglo-Saxon and contemporary continental practice, where its petition for 'daily bread' was held to represent the sacrament of Holy Communion)8 and in the private devotions preserved in books like London, British Library MS Cotton Titus D. xxvi9 or Cotton Galba A. xiv,10 which draw their inspiration from Ambrose's,

126 Sarah Larratt Keefer

Origen's, or Augustine's injunctions.11 Dix marks a distinction between public and private as it pertains to the liturgy proper only at the very end of the Middle Ages: The old corporate worship of the eucharist [was] declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind. And it is the latter which is beginning to seem to him more important than the corporate act.'12 However, we may safely regard private prayer as an individual undertaking of significant value considerably earlier than Dix would have it, developing out of synaxis, as we have seen, with the kind of meditation practised within monasticism. Mary Carruthers tells us that the medieval monk's life 'was "perfected," "made complete" by acquiring a civic being and identity' through 'an orthopractice for the invention of meditation and the composition of prayers.'13 Nevertheless, a discrete voice within that 'civic being' may be discernible through the poetry that grew out of the prescriptions for Benedictine meditational exercises. The Regula Sancti Benedict! itself is an interesting document when approached with a focus on communal or personal: with the stabilitas of the community foremost, the Rule states clearly that no one is to live in any way other than communally, nor to own anything corporeal as an individual ('ne quis praesumat... aliquid habere proprium'), for even one's body is not one's own ('nee corpora sua nee uoluntates licet habere in propria uoluntate').14 Yet acts of devotion seem in some ways to be exempt from this: 'In quibus diebus quadragesimae accipiant omnes singulas codices de bibliotheca ... Hoc ipsud tamen quod unusquisque offerit abbati suo suggerat.'15 Meditation remains the voice of the soul until it is brought forth in words to share with the community. If Old English liturgical verse as a subgenre can represent meditative acts of cogitation,16 those acts were probably undertaken by monks and nuns, and perhaps even emulated by laymen for devotional and spiritual purposes, thus deriving their inspiration from the words of corporate synaxis but generated from within, shaped and framed according to individual experience and belief. Given their synactic impulse, I cannot agree with Carruthers's view that the literary creative act within monastic experience must of necessity spring from a visual prompt, or include a visual dimension: The monastic practice of meditation notably involved making mental images of cognitive 'pictures' for thinking and composing ... The emphasis upon the need for human beings to 'see' their thoughts in their minds

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 127 as organised schemata of images or 'pictures/ and then to use these for further thinking, is a striking and continuous feature of medieval monastic rhetoric, with significant interest even for our own contemporary understanding of the role of images in thinking. And the monks' 'mixed' use of verbal and visual media, their often synaesthetic literature and architecture, is a quality of medieval aesthetic practice that was also given a major impetus by the tools of monastic memory work.17

I consider Jean Leclercq to be far closer to the mark when he speaks of the effect that hearing - as one hears the words of public synactic performance - had on the imagination: 'The verbal echoes so excite the memory that a mere allusion will spontaneously evoke whole quotations ... Each word is like a hook[;] ... it catches hold of one or several others which become linked together and make up the fabric of the expose ... [so that] what results is a muscular memory of the words pronounced and an aural memory of the words heard. The meditatio ... inscribes ... [t]he sacred text in the body and on the soul.'18 As these acts of meditation were formed into words, it seems likely that those words were in the vernacular, and not in Latin. The psalmic injunction, 'et erunt ut conplaceant eloquia oris mei et meditatio cordis mei in conspectu tuo semper, Domine, adiutor meus et redemptor meus/19 encapsulates this tension between public and private that may, in fact, be no tension at all: words of the mouth suggest recitation that may be corporate, while thoughts of the heart when cast into word-shape are private. For the Anglo-Saxon monk or nun thus engaged in meditation, the mouth articulates common (Latin) words with the community, while the heart preserves individual (English) thoughts from the soul. The process of meditation thus enables the flowers and fruit of hymns or poetry to spring from the communal root-stocks of liturgical, scriptural, and patristic inspiration. Latin gives rise to vernacular, so that we sing a new song unto the Lord in our own mother tongue. Virtually all of the liturgical verse from Anglo-Saxon England is preserved in manuscripts that date from around or after 960,20 and it is not inconceivable that the reinvigorated monastic and educational practices of Dunstan's period and the tenth-century Reform proper provided the necessary impetus to writings of this kind. The canon of its historical witnesses falls well past the time by which the private devotions and public practices of Western liturgy had become inextricably intertwined. My efforts here are to attempt a distinction of sorts, to cast light upon the ways - inherently public or inherently private - in which dis-

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crete prayers or canticles may have been approached by those members of the Anglo-Saxon Church who sought to turn them into poetry. This requires consideration of the voice and the speaker associated with it in examples of Old English liturgical poems left to us today. There seem to be three specific kinds of voice that we can identify: that which derives its impulse directly from the liturgy; that which is devotional within the context of the liturgy; and that which uses liturgy as inspiration by which to create the kind of vernacular meditation referred to above. All have their origins within the words of synactic forms, since we can hear the lexicon of those forms as the sources, with or without structural phrasing, within the poetry even after we have crossed the language boundary between Latin and Old English. Thus the Latin register of semantics, and the Latin syntax and grammar constructing the liturgy, serve as an invisible presence within the lineage of these pieces, and are probably never far from the consciousness of those who composed them. But all are presented in the vernacular, framed within a verse-line that is culturally Germanic and shaped in Old English grammar and syntax, and their import is contained in a register of words that transfer semantic meaning from the Latin liturgical experience - gloria, pater, rex, credo - to the AngloSaxon rearticulation of that experience - wuldor, fxder, cyning, gelyfe. Carruthers's work on meditation seems to focus inherently on the structuring of thought into Latin: 'though the main influence of this essentially monastic model of invention [i.e., the Latin prayer-models of such as Cassian] lies in meditative practice itself, it found expression also ... in the newly defined (or refined) concept of compositional ductus, the "route" in which one moves through a composition.'21 Yet she has not apparently allowed for any sense of a vernacular voice in this process, nor has she followed meditation or prayer into the private, where language boundaries are more frequently crossed, and the resultant composition is framed in the vernacular words of the heart.22 For the sake of order I will begin with the last type mentioned, the most typical poetic voice, and identify it as 'Meditative'; this I consider to be a genuine expression of the individual experience, with the T of the speaker truly meaning the discrete and specific person attempting to articulate the meditations of the heart. While the finest example of a poem of this sort is The Dream of the Rood, I do not include it here. It is too early for my purposes, and only a fraction of it, lines 101-9, has any evident Latin liturgical presence shadowing its generation. For the

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 129

most part, The Dream of the Rood contains no clear material by which to test the voice of its internal and characterized narrator. However, there is another poem within the Old English liturgical verse canon, long overlooked but of considerable interest, which modern editors have simply called Prayer.23 Its earliest witness is incomplete and stands in the Lambeth Psalter24 in a hand of the later eleventh century, while its complete version is in an Anglo-Norman hand of the twelfth century.25 Prayer provides a good example of T as meaning 'individual voice' rather than 'voice speaking as part of a community': ^Ela, drihten leof! JE\a, dema god! Geara me, ece waldend. Ic wat mine saule synnum forwundod; Ic be andette, aelmihtig god, baet ic gelyfe on be ,..26 he poem clearly draws on its poet's experience of participation in litny, confession, glorification, and creed, but while in places it echoes me-honoured synactic or homiletic formulae, I will attempt to show that it does so primarily from a sense of 'ic' as a creature of God, because its articulation comes from the meditation of the heart upon original Latin synactic forms. The second type I call the 'Devotional' voice. It is more difficult to ascertain. It uses 'ic,' but in a fashion different from the Meditative voice, and we must return to its source to look for the conceptual motivation underlying the pronoun use. Although the Devotional voice employs a singular pronoun which might seem to indicate individual expression, this use derives from synactic Latin originals in which that singular pronoun is also the norm. Thus, while the Latin piece behind the poem might have been recited communally or silently by the eleventh century, at its inception it is demonstrably an expression of synactic communal thought: it says T but means 'we.' The purest example of the Devotional voice in the Old English liturgical verse canon is the Creed poem:27 'ic on sunu binne so6ne gelyfe / haelendne cyning/28 whose Latin, 'Et in lesum Christum filium eius unicum, dominum nostrum'29 is governed by the first-person singular present verb credo. The final, and perhaps most interesting, type I call 'Liturgical/ because it purports to speak from within a synactically driven mode. Its source is always part of a public liturgical celebration and, transpar-

130 Sarah Larratt Keefer ent to its Latin original, it uses the plural 'we/ framing individually shaped poetic expressions of faith as if they were communal. This in and of itself is intriguing and points to some degree of self-conscious manipulation of form, since even in Anglo-Saxon England poetry by its very nature most frequently suggests a single narrator. Poems belonging to this class of voice include Lord's Prayer II and 777, and the piece based on the Gloria Patri.30 Such verse is deceptively straightforward in its tone, suggesting a natural transfer of expression and lexicon from liturgical Latin to Old English verse, despite the generic expectations of poetry proper to the contrary. While these poems may have been initiated at the direction of a teacher or a spiritual guide, we should be able safely to assume that a single mind undertook the 'first original' of each. Communal efforts at literary creativity are not well attested to in the Anglo-Saxon period, and from the references within liturgy made to hymn material and the writers of the hymns,31 it seems likely that a single author, even if unknown, was presumed when a literary construct was indicated. For our liturgical poems, secondary input may have followed their original drafting, but certainly the compositional stage in each case must have consisted of a discrete undertaking by a single person. Yet we have no idea whose verses these might be, or whether they are monastic or lay. Humphrey Wanley and Emil Feiler believe Wulfstan to be the author of the 'Old English Benedictine Office' poems, while James Ure sees him as the compiler rather than the composer.32 All we can do is examine the poems in terms of their liturgical points of departure, in order to learn something more about the cultural aesthetic by which each one was undertaken. The voice of Meditation presents the most typical poetic register within this subgenre of verse, and considering the nature of the synactic source material, it provides a fascinating insight into the co-opting of public language for private interpretation. The poet makes no effort to adopt the voice either of a community at prayer in liturgical worship or of the soul rededicating herself to the faith of the Church in words that are inherently synactic. Here we find the soul 'speaking' first from silence, by carrying out Leclercq's 'word-hooking' of remembered phrases and allusions, and then creating a new song from within, which breaks forth in the vernacular of meditation. In poetry written in this voice, we may discern the texts of corporate worship as source, but those texts are transfigured into the personal as we move away from synaxis and into the realm of private prayer.

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 131

I have discussed Prayer more fully elsewhere,33 and in this study I shall focus entirely on the implications of the structure created by the poem's voice. The poet writes himself as 'ic' and 'me' facing 'Ipu' and 'j^e' for God throughout, summing up the relationship between Creator and creature in words that belong to a great tradition of Christian mystics, 'thou so great and I so small': Ic J?e andette, aelmihtig god, £>aet ic gelyfe on J>e, leofa haelend, J?aet ]DU eart se miccla and se maegenstranga and ic com se litla for Ipe

and se lydra man.34

He moves easily among synactic forms, privileging no one over another. Within the series of interjective addresses ('^la, drihten leof! &\a, dema god!' 1 [Ah, dear Lord! Ah, God [our] judge!], '&\a, frea beorhta, folkes scippend!' 8 [Ah, bright ruler, creator of peoples], 'JEla, leohtes leoht! &la, lyfes wynn!' 21 [Ah, light of light! Ah, joy of life!]) and divine epithets to sustain his direct appeal to God throughout the rest of the poem, we hear the structure of litanic phrasing35 but alongside it we find language from the Nicene Creed ('leohtes leoht' 21a [Light of Light] and 'sod meotod' 27b [true Lord]). Hard on the heels of a substantial reference to the Confiteor, swa ic ne sceolde, hwile mid weorce, hwile mid worde, hwile mid ge^ohte, J^earle scyldi, inwitnidas oft and gelome,36

we hear lexical echoes both from vernacular confessional forms or adjurations ('ic Ipe halsige nu' 67a [I adjure thee now])37 and the doxological formula that invokes the Trinity ('Gloria Patri et Filii et Spiritui Sancto' represented here as 'heofena drihten' 67b [Lord of heaven], 'bearna selost' 68b [the best of sons], 'se halga gast' 70b [the Holy Ghost]). The poem contains what might appear to be specific resonances of Wulfstan ('oft and gelome' 66b [ever and anon] and 'J?ysum laenan lyfe' 73 [this transitory life]) but Dorothy Bethurum describes such structure as 'a very common homiletic phrase, rather old-fashioned

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in [Wulfstan's] time'38 which nevertheless antedates the earliest fragmentary witness for this poem by almost half a century. Prayer may therefore be an example of Leclercq's monastic writer whose verse is 'triumphant devotion brimming with enthusiasm, animated with intense joy and with the confidence of the children of God.'39 In direct contrast to Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder's presentation of a speaker 'rather tearfully and melodramatically beatfing] his breast/40 I would argue that the Prayer poet articulates his personal relationship with God through the lens of sacramental penance, beginning with glorification and supplication, moving to confession proper, and ending with intercession and gratitude. Referring to both 'ancient monasticism' and Cistercian writers of the twelfth century, Leclercq remarks: The confession [early authors] are discussing is that same means given by God to man on earth for doing penance in the fullest sense of the term by admitting he is a sinner and professing his faith in the power given by God to the Church to pardon, to purify the conscience and to prepare it to appear without spot at the Last Judgement... Ecclesiology and eschatology unite, consequently, as the two dominating themes of a literature born in the atmosphere of the cult.41

Thus the poet echoes the forms of synactic worship but speaks invariably as the soul in private prayer. 'Ic' here means 'I myself/ with no attempt at any other dimensionalizing in the process. As is true of the private prayer that results from it, meditation is an individual act; articulating it into vernacular verse means giving it a voice rather than leaving it silent in the heart. This may be because of an inherent sense of the performative nature of liturgy. Meditation is reflective, emanating from and returning to the soul in silence. To actualize into alliterative long-line verse-form from meditation is to conceptualize something whose shape is based on the auditory and is thus to be performed, implying an audience - or a congregation. The irresistible pull of the synactic original provides the impulse to enact, embody, and incorporate the private into the public, even though that private must speak ultimately from individual reflection. This suggests a point of generation between two distinct axes, marking both a birthplace of the creative and a gateway between the private imagination and the communal experience. Within spiritual meditation, the soul at prayer thinks in her own vernacular, here Old English, but within

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 133

synactic worship we speak in the ritual language of the service, here Latin. Does Old English liturgical verse composition effect a transition from one to the other? Was this the medium for a deliberate monastic spiritual exercise to explore the parameters of 'ic' and 'we/ the individual within the communal? If we consider the landscape of synaxis from which the impulse to write such poetry comes, we may be able to answer these questions. The Pater Noster and the Apostles' Creed stand as the two liturgical elements to be known by 'aelc cristene man' [every Christian person]; to these Wulfstan adds the Gloria Patri as well.42 These three prayers form the subject matter of most of the verse in which the other two kinds of voice are to be found. The Gloria Patri is the doxological avatar, used to close psalms or any synactic prayers in general by offering eternal praise to the Trinity.43 It evolved in response to the Arian heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries: thus, while versions of doxological formulae ultimately came to be used within private prayer as well, its origin lies within the synactic forum and its role in refuting heretical doctrines. The Gloria Patri poem, found in both CCCC 201 and Junius 121, is divided into six sections by its intercalated Latin. The scribe of this manuscript thus presented the poem to reflect resonance between the Latin original and the related vernacular re-articulation. But the first division is marked by the word 'Gloria' alone, with 'Patri et filio et spiritui sancto' marking the second section. This division represents a rethinking of the implications presented by the customary incipit, 'Gloria Patri.' So, too, the import of each Old English section moves well beyond the semantic scope of its Latin. The lines on Gloria alone amplify the meaning of the single-word prompt by celebrating God's rule of all creation, 'eall eor6an maegen and uplyfte / wind and wolcna,'44 which gives back glory to its creator, in echo of the Song of the Three Children.45 In the second section, the first two Persons of the Trinity are magnified while the Holy Spirit is only named, again indicating the interpretive rather than translational impulse behind this composition. When the Old English comments on the phrase 'Sicut erat in principio' [As it was in the beginning], the poet returns to the theme of creation once again, setting aside ten lines (20-30) on the sanctity of Sunday that is nowhere attested to in the Latin doxology proper. The next articles (introduced by 'et nunc et semper' [now and forever] and 'et in secula seculorum' [world without end]) are more careful pre-

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sentations, the former focusing 'nu and symble' (31) [now and forever] on God's power within the transitory realm of mortal life, the latter again translating its Latin literally, 'And on worulda world' (41) [world without end], and refocusing God's power within the eternal realms as well. But 'Amen' makes no effort to translate the closure marker directly and instead restates ('we baet sodlice secgad ealle' 51 [verily we all say that]) the import of the poem in seven more lines of verse. As it began with a subjunctive, 'Sy be wuldor and lof' (la) [glory and praise be to thee], it ends with a confident indicative, 'Swylc is Cristes miht!' (57b) [Thus is the might of Christ!]. The whole is a carefully presented construction, sensitive in its use of pronouns for speaker and the creator he addresses. Appropriately, for a piece whose source is a glorification of God, only the second-person pronoun singular appears from line la up until line 38b. 'We' is introduced ('we men') as a communal voice once God's rule within the present life ('et nunc et semper' [31b ff.]) is established, yet it is only used twice, once in line 38b, and once more in the restatement of the 'Amen' in line 51 a, while direct address to God in the second-person singular continues through to the very last line. The overwhelming number of second-person singular pronominal forms (twenty-five in a fifty-seven line poem) locates the piece firmly in an act of selfless glorification, directing our attention unwaveringly onto God and away from the individual interpretations at work in the verse. The poet, in the guise of a communal voice whose authority derives from public synaxis, remains almost invisible unless we consider the individualized reworkings of each section's Latin text. The Pater Noster was understood as given by Christ in response to the request 'Domine, doce nos orare.'46 It is the 'summary of all prayer, containing in its seven petitions the substance of all that man can ask of God.'47 The Pater Noster was used daily within the Mass, and it was to be learned by heart by the catechumens: this would have been an act of strict memorization intended to give rise to meditation on the piece. From earliest times, the 'newly-baptized neophyte, turning to the east, repeated the prayer himself; this was the closing ceremony of the administration of Baptism,'48 and provision for adult baptism remained alongside that for infant baptism throughout the AngloSaxon period.49 In chapter 13 of the Regula Sancti Benedicti we are told that Vespers and Lauds were always to be concluded with the Pater Noster, 'plane agenda matutina uel uespertina non transeat aliquando, nisi in ultimo per ordinem oratio dominica, omnibus audientibus, dicatur a priore.'50 The Prior alone repeats it; the community listen

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 135

while he recites it on their behalf. It was the prayer of the faithful, performed publicly only by baptized Christians: 'St Ambrose, St John Chrysostom, St Augustine, and many others, exhort the faithful to say it often in their private devotions.'51 Thus, the Pater Noster was public first, becoming private in response to patristic injunction, and was said at times by one voice as a representative of the community. The eleventh-century Pater Noster verses, the older of which shares its witness with the Corpus Gloria Patri in CCCC 201, are also shaped by the linking of public synactic recitation with vernacular verse-form. In the case of the Corpus Lord's Prayer, we find the speaker's pronoun as 'we,' the first-person plural, used here more frequently than in the Corpus Gloria piece, and dramatically offset when balanced half-line by half-line against the second-person singular by which 'ure faeder' is addressed. As with the Gloria poem, we find the Latin text of the prayer intercalated into the Old English verse, though separately spatialized and rubricated. It is not set out in the seven traditional petitions of canonical writing but is instead divided into fourteen sections, beginning with Tater noster' alone and ending with 'amen/ The language of praise within the Corpus Lord's Prayer is remarkable in its departure from the original Latin text. God is addressed as 'engla god' [god of angels] four times (7a, 21a, 34a, and 123a) and 'heofonengla cyningc' [king of archangels] once (13b), for which there is no precedent in the Pater Noster proper. But while its layout suggests that it draws its import to some degree transparently from its synactic original, the Corpus Lord's Prayer shares much with those other liturgical poems whose voices are apparently more complex in their authority. Like Prayer (22b and 75b), which belongs more rightly to the Meditative voice, it uses the epithet 'tyreadig cyningc' (56b and 82b) [glorious king] and even alliterates with the same verb, '[ge]ty5an/ used by Prayer in lines 22a and 75a, in one of its own a-lines, 'bonne bu him tidast' (56a) [when thou bestowed upon him]. We hear the admittedly common phrase 'daeges and nihtes' (107b) [day and night] in the Corpus Lord's Prayer but also in Prayer at lines 12a, 17a, and 63a, although here the other half-line alliterators are unique to each poem and thus distinct from one another. The Corpus Lord's Prayer shares with Prayer a preoccupation with strata of creation: Prayer sets out the Church Militant, the Church Triumphant, and the Heavenly Host as witnesses to God's glory in lines 30-3b,52 while the Corpus poem presents the dwellers of heaven, earth, and hell as witnesses at the end of time and the judgment of souls: 'heofonwaru and eordwaru, helwaru bridde'

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(95) [heaven-dwellers and earth-dwellers, hell-dwellers the third]. Prayer gives us the alternatives of the wretched man in the devil's power 'canning be on eordan her / ... deofle campaS / and hys willan wyrcd/53 or the blessed man who serves God, 'eadig ... be on eordan her ... drihtne hyraed / and a hys willan wyrcS,'54 while the Corpus Lord's Prayer tells us that we will merit one of two possibilities, glory with God or suffering with Satan, 'bar man us tyhhad on daeg twegen eardas, / drihtenes are o36e deofles beowet.'55 These are not the only examples of remarkably similar lexical structures in the two poems: compare Corpus Lord's Prayer line 17 - 'Wei bid 5am be wyrcd willan binne' [it is well for him who works thy will] - with Prayer line 18 'and a hys willan wyrcS; wel hym baes geweorkes' [and ever works his will; that [kind of] work shall be well for him]. The Corpus poem shares the phrase 'her on life' (99b) [for (the) life here (on earth)] with the later eleventh-century Creed poem (51b, 53b), which is nevertheless matched in Junius 121, with a different vernacular verse Lord's Prayer as part of the so-called Old English Benedictine Office. More interestingly, the Corpus Lord's Prayer and the Junius Creed also contain an unusual echo: we may take it as an 'antiphrasis' for the Virgin Mother whereby she is both 'mater et filia' [mother and daughter of her Son], but this is a topos that is more familiar after the twelfth century.56 But if we are to examine the echo another way, it more alarmingly begins to resemble one of the Modalistic Monarchianist heresies; Sabellianism would have the Triune God manifest to the human mind as one Being with different attributes, rather than as three Persons.57 The Corpus Lord's Prayer addresses God 't»u eart sunu and faeder, / ana aegber,'58 which could be construed innocuously as doctrinally inexact but acceptable because it is poetic, but the Junius Creed goes much further, and may cast question on the Corpus poem's address: heo bast aerende onfeng freolice, and 3e faeder sylfne under breostcofan beam acende.59

While Clayton optimistically assumes scribal error and tries to read 'faeder sylfne' together with '3e' as a dative,60 I would argue that the masculine accusative singular ending of 'sylfne' can be read as making complete grammatical sense, but must be read, together with '6e faeder/ as accusative masculine singular as well, thus the direct object

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of 'acende/ in apposition with 'beam.' Clayton sees this section of the Creed poem as 'expand[ing] the brief reference to Mary in the Creed with surprising ardour. This is very much in keeping with the emphasis on Mary at the time of the Benedictine reform.'61 We may thus be seeing here a very early example of the 'mater et filia' antiphrasis, heralding the later Marian devotional worship. I set out these unusual elements in the Corpus Lord's Prayer and the Junius Creed in order to challenge the claim of communal speaker for either the Liturgical or Devotional voices in this kind of poetry, despite the plural pronoun use and the synactic tradition behind each piece. For this reason I used 'deceptively straightforward' to describe the verse some pages back. Although they are based - and indeed laid out to echo - the public liturgical sources from which their inspiration derives, these poems reflect one another by frequently presenting individual reinterpretations that have nothing to do with liturgical tradition. I would argue that at least the Corpus Lord's Prayer and Gloria are the product of a deliberate and self-conscious undertaking, for while the voice purports to be communal, 'ure faeder/ the pieces share significant features with poetry that is less straightforward in its narrative articulation and, as we have seen, in places suggestive of idiosyncratic ideology. It is not therefore a simple case of suggesting even a shared lexicon or school for what purport to be communal speakers in this genre of poetry. It is more likely that the sources - in this case the Gloria Patri and the Pater Nosier - influenced the form adopted for the voice which nevertheless remains a constructed pose, since the pieces draw common inspiration from the same wells as those other poems that use 'ic' in varying degrees of intellectual honesty. What can we deduce, in light of this, about the Junius Creed, and how are we to define it in terms of its own speaker? The Apostles' Creed is synactically de facto the self speaking for itself but with the community as witness of that speech act. Like the Pater Noster, it was essential to the sacrament of baptism, recited by the catechumen if an adult or by the sponsors if a child, as we read in articles of faith set forth by Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen. Because there was 'no necessity ... to make a profession of faith during Mass/62 it never formed part of the liturgical synaxis proper; when a creed was later introduced into the liturgy of the Mass, the Nicene and not the Apostles' Creed was used. We may approach it then, within its context of baptism, where in that portion of the service called the 'Redditio symboli/ the catechumen had to recite the Creed by heart in the presence of rela-

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tives, sponsors, and godparents.63 It is thus a personal statement of faith while at the same time a learned formula, and its very performative enactment unites the individual with the 'civic being' of the community of Christian believers. A valuable model from the early Church may have served to influence the communal sense that we find surrounding baptismal synaxes, even in the Anglo-Saxon period where 'baptism had become primarily the responsibility of the priest':64 in a fourth-century order of service for Baptism on Holy Saturday Eve, we read 'retro in absida post altarium ponitur cathedra episcopo, et ibi unus et unus vadet, viri cum patre suo, aut mulier cum matre sua, et reddet simbolum episcopo.'65 Here we find enacted the mystery of the individual become communal, the single file procession of souls gradually incorporated, in the truest sense of the term, into the body of believers through the recitation, by each individual speaker, of the formula of faith. There is no reason to believe that Anglo-Saxon England had abandoned this basic understanding it had inherited from Rome. The Creed poem from Bodleian Junius 121 uses 'ic' and not 'we/ It thus seems at first more personal than the Liturgical voice and I have classified it as 'Devotional' for that reason, although at base it derives from almost the same impulse. It is the liturgical originals that determine the difference: the Pater Noster is public articulation: 'noster' or 'ure' point to the communal body at prayer, while the Apostles' Creed represents the soul approaching baptism as an individual but watched by that community to which she joins herself in the act of 'redditio symboli.' The verb 'credo' implies a singular first person subject: the soul professes her faith, and by repeating that profession in the form of a verse, rehearses once again the act of single self becoming 'civic self/ and the contemplation of that union becomes an act of devotion. The Junius Creed is an antiphonal piece: this in and of itself suggests a fair degree of sophistication concerning form and performance. Only the first half of each tenet of faith is intercalated in Latin: the missing half 'answers' each Latin 'prompt' as a short meditation in Old English verse. So, for example, the Latin 'Credo in deum patrem omnipotentem' [I believe in God the Father almighty] finds its second half in lines 1-8, ^Imihtig faeder up on rodore, Ipe da sciran gesceaft sceope and worhtest and eordan wang ealne gesettest, ic J?e ecne god aenne gecenne,

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 139 lustum gelyfe. Pu eart lifes frea, engla ordfruma, eordan wealdend, and 5u garsecges grundas geworhtest, and J?u da menegu canst maerra tungla,66

whose import is 'creatorem caeli et terrae' [creator of heaven and earth]. The bilingual nature of the poem is conceptualized as in some way performative rather than recitative, based on the way that antiphonal liturgy was conducted; voice as a synactic phenomenon plays a substantial part in the shaping of the Junius Creed. Here we see that the pronoun 'ic/ in line 4a reflects the grammatical inflection of the Latin verb form credo before we reach its first vernacular lexical counterpart, 'gelyfe' (5a); the same first-person verb 'gelyfe' occurs again in line 9a after 'Et in lesum Christum/ which is also governed by the first 'credo/ and we find another in line 41a with 'beluce' after 'Credo in spiritum sanctum/ and in lines 49a, 52a, and 55b with 'gelyfe' or 'getreowe/ to affirm the tenets that 'Credo [in spiritum sanctum]' governs. Thus the reiterated 'ic' with these additional verbs serves to personalize the voice of the poem but justifies doing so through the synactic Latin form it derives from and includes in those partial intercalations within its structure. Hence we must again consider the conundrum laid out earlier: is the poet voicing baptismal orthodoxy of the one becoming part of the many because the synactic formula 'ic' points towards the communal 'we/ or is the poet voicing individual ideology because in vernacular verse the formula 'ic' from its most basic narrative origins generally means T? We have already seen that the Liturgical voice, purporting to speak for a community with the authority of its synactic source, can adopt a distinctive view or explore creative augmentation for which no provision has been made in the synactic original; and we have noticed this same tendency on the part of the Junius Creed poet, who embarks on singular descriptive phrasing with those lines that hint at either Sabellianism or an early example of the 'mater et filia' antiphrasis.67 In similar fashion, he amplifies the poem's vernacular antiphonal section corresponding to 'descendit ad infernas' with a description of the Harrowing of Hell, which is only implicit in the Latin text of the Apostles' Creed: and he of helle hude gefette of J?am suslhofe, sawla manega, het Ipa uplicne e6el secan.68

140 Sarah Larratt Keefer

Thus the Devotional voice, like the Liturgical voice, pretends to an authority it does not in fact merit; it speaks as 'ic' on the premise that 'ic' can mean 'we' within its synactic original, but 'ic' must instead be perceived as inherently individual when the vernacular is compared with its Latin. But some of these liturgical pieces are not always so readily classifiable. The poem called Lord's Prayer III from Junius 121 says 'ic be bidde' [I pray thee] in line Ib, but then 'urum' in line 5a, 'us' in line 7a, and it uses only the plural pronoun thereafter. How do we account for that 'ic' in Ib? Should we consider this poem an example of Devotional or Liturgical voice? It is possible that here we have the impulse to be communal in form but personal in content caught visible between pronouns. The Junius Lord's Prayer is more traditional in design than its Corpus counterpart, including its Latin petitions in their standard division of seven, flanked by the correct interjection, 'Pater noster qui es in caelis' [Our Father who art in heaven], and the correct closure marker, 'amen,' at its beginning and end. Although they are separated in Junius 121 by only an Old English verse version of Ps. 118:175-6, the Junius Lord's Prayer is unlike the Junius Creed in that its verses are not antiphonal but instead recast each Latin petition into simple translations of import. It shares some features of vocabulary with the Corpus Lord's Prayer and with the Kentish Hymn from the late tenth century: compare 'beoden engla' (33a) [lord of angels] with Corpus Lord's Prayer's 'engla god' (34a) [god of angels]; 'hiofena heahcyninc' (KH, 42a) [high-king of the heavens] with the same phrase 'heofena heahcyning' (Lord's Prayer III, 15a); and 'Crist nergende' (KH, 39b) [redeeming Christ] with the same 'Crist nerigende' (Lord's Prayer III, 28b). For the most part, however, it is a different kind of poem from the mainstream of liturgical vernacular pieces: where the Corpus Lord's Prayer provides a seven-line restatement of the import of the entire Pater Noster prayer to represent 'amen,' the Junius Lord's Prayer simply ends with 'WeorSe baet/ a literal translation of the closure marker proper. Far less sophisticated or broad-ranging in his approach and at best homiletic in his ornamentations, the Junius Lord's Prayer poet may have written 'ic be bidde' in line Ib without considering the voice that needed to be adopted from the outset of the piece. Thus, while he espouses the orthodox position and never deviates from his Latin original in content, the writer of this poem 'errs' in his use of 'ic.' In so doing, he may be reflecting the older vernacular cultural tradition of narrative performance that regards the speaker of a poem as singular, despite authority or rationale for its pronoun.

'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse 141

Thus this articulation of meditation upon prayer within the structured medium of Old English verse appears to mediate a transition whereby the personal becomes communal, the private public. It locates individual experience within a social and intellectual community as a reinvestigation of the phenomenon of monasticism, or perhaps a revitalization of it, and prefers the cenobitic to the anchoritic impulse. Rather than being a translation exercise for young monks, liturgical poetry based specifically on a single discrete synactic source may have framed a crossover point where the 'words of our mouth' and the 'meditations of our hearts' were made public into written text, suggesting a performative re-enactment of synactic worship, but within the medium of private thoughts, the vernacular. If this is so, then the verse we have looked at presents an interesting witness for Anglo-Saxon aesthetic sensibilities: these poems become a verse-form 'type/ a creation that deliberately seeks to intercalate not only the Latin into the Old English on the page, but vernacular personal responses to the Latin synactic originals into the act of worship within the verse-form itself. The Junius Lord's Prayer is a beginner's attempt at the exercise, carefully following only the content of the source, slipping once because of the inherently individual voice of the genre it is working within, but ultimately orthodox in what it says and how it says it. The Junius Creed, the Corpus Gloria, and the Corpus Lord's Prayer are the products of a sophisticated mind with more experience; here we have the individual immanent within the semblance of the communal, just as each soul, reciting within synactic performance, is still reciting for herself and from her own space within creation. At times the speaker of the Liturgical or Devotional voice steps wide enough of the bounds of authority to be visible, even in the guise of 'we' or communal 'ic.' Both are different from the voice of Meditation, which remains truly personal, and whose 'ic' is untrammelled by a conventional pose or a structural injunction to follow the form of the original. It is itself an original, a spontaneous recreation of personal prayer, unlike the other pieces which are self-conscious literary constructions as well as spiritual exercises. Notes 1 Say what I am called. (See for example, the last half-line of the Exeter Book's 'Bow' Riddle, beginning 'Agof is min noma' [so edited in Muir, Exeter Anthology, 304-5].)

142 Sarah Larratt Keefer 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20

C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 127. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 135,139. Dix, Shape of the Liturgy, I. Ibid., 140. See, e.g., Richter and Schonfelder, Sacramentarium, 4, item 19. Cabrol, Mass of the Western Rite, 80, states that 'the words Panem nostrum quotidianum may well apply to the Bread Superstantial, as ... was the custom ... at Rome and in other churches. But in the Greek churches this was not so; and the Pater formed part of the prayers of the Canon [although]... among the Greeks the Pater is recited at Mass by all the people, while at Rome the celebrant alone says it.' Giinzel, &lfwine's Prayerbook, 143. sing ... pater noster Criste to lofe. Muir, Pre-Conquest English Prayer-Book, 133 and 147 (fols. 102V and 114V of Cotton Galba A. xiv). Cabrol, Liturgical Prayer, 89, n. 1. Dix, Shape of the Liturgy, 599. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 2. De Vogue and Neufville, Regie de Saint Benoit, 562; Crotty, Rule ofSt Benedict, 45: 'no one is to presume ... to keep anything at all as his own ... since they are not even permitted to have their bodies or their wishes subject to their own will.' De Vogue and Neufville, Regie de Saint Benoit, 602,606; Crotty, Rule ofSt Benedict, 60, 62: 'in these days of Lent, they shall all receive individual books from the library ... however let each one suggest to his abbot that which he would individually offer.' Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 64. Ibid., 3. Leclercq, Love of Learn ing, 78-9. Psalm 18:14: May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be found acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. The canon of Old English liturgical poetry, collected as a subgenre and currently being prepared for editorial presentation and commentary, is as follows: 1. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D. vi, s. xmed: 'Dauid was haten diormod haeleaet rice heahj^ungenum menn, Harolde sylfum, aej^elum eorle, se in ealle tid hyrde holdlice haerran sinum wordum and daedum, wihte ne agaelde Ipses J?e {>earfe waes Ipses f>e J^eodkyninges.47

A favourable opinion of Harold is found in the Vita /Edwardi Regis, as well. Book I of this text, which seems to have been written at the request of Harold's sister Edith, the wife of Edward the Confessor, concentrates on the Godwin family and was probably composed in 1065-6.48 The anonymous author of the Vita JEdwardi stresses Harold's kind treatment of the people and his zeal in maintaining peace and suppressing theft: Virtute enim corporis et animi in populo prestabat ut alter ludas Machabeus, amicusque gentis sue et patrie uices celebrat patris intentius, et eiusdem gressibus incedit, patientia scilicet et misericordia, et affabilitate cum beniuolentibus. Porro inquietatis, furibus siue predonibus leonino terrore et uultu minabatur gladiator Justus.49

Given that Harold escapes the opprobrium attached to other members of his family, and that he served his country well for the nine

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 203

months that he was king, Harold seems an unlikely candidate for the wolf.50 William, on the other hand, fits the portrait of the wolf remarkably well. The Chronicles note again and again the contrast between his promises and his actions. The problems begin with his coronation in 1066: Da on midwintres daeg hine halgode to kynge Ealdred arcebiscop on Westmynstre, 7 he sealde him on hand mid Christes bee 7 eac swor, der ban be he wolde pa corona him on heafode settan, p&t he wolde pisne peodscype swa wel haldan swa xnig kyngc xtforan him betst dyde, gif hi him holde beon woldon. Swapeah leide gyld on mannum swide stid, 7 for pa on pam lengtene ofer sae to Normandige, 7 nam mid him ... manege ... gode men of Englalande, 7 Oda biscop 7 Wyllelm eorl belifen her aefter 7 worhton castelas wide geond pas beode, 7 earm folc swencte 7 a syddan hit yflade swide.51

Again, s.a. 1067, the D Chronicle tells us that William 'heom wel behet, and yfele gelaeste.'52 The chronicler of E, writing of a time shortly before William's death, similarly notes the gap between justice promised and justice dealt: Se cyng and pa heafod men lufedon swide and oferswide gitsunge. on golde. and on seolfre. and ne rohtan hu synlice hit waere begytan buton hit come to heom. Se cyng sealde his land swa deore to male, swa heo deorost mihte. Donne com sum o6er and bead mare bonne be oder aeer sealde. and se cyng hit lett bam menn pe him mare bead. Donne com se bridde. And bead geat mare, and se cyng hit let bam men to handa be him eallra meast bead, and ne rohte na hu swide synlice ba gerefan hit begeatan of earme mannon. ne hu manige unlaga hi dydon. Ac swa man sun/dor spxc embe rihte lage. swa mann dyde mare unlaga.53

William, like the wolf, is made to swear that he will govern well before being crowned. And like the wolf, he governs ill, having little capacity for true justice although sensitive to its trappings. While the wolf literally devours his subjects, William, devoted to rapacity, consumes their gold, land, and goods.54 While the plot of 'The Wolf Reigning' focuses on the actions of the wolf, the epimythium contemplates the fate of the monkey, caught between royal desire and complicit counsellors:

204 Gail Ivy Berlin Grandia sic multi patiuntur dampna ministri, Vt fari timeant ne post grauiora, loquendo, tSuscipiant, dominis durum iam teche [sic] ferendo,t Vexantur penis nimiis [ms. penas animis] labroque tacendo.55

Although the language here is contorted, the point is essentially the same as that found in Phaedrus: Tacere tormentum, poenast loqui/56 The situation of the monkey is reminiscent of Harold's situation upon being asked to take the oath. The oath in fact functions as a double bind for Harold. If he keeps silent and refuses to swear, at the very least he insults a powerful host to whom he is indebted for having saved him from captivity with Count Guy and to whom he has already rendered service in Brittany. But he also risks being himself prevented from returning to England, as the Tapestry perhaps suggests by placing the oath scene and the departure to England next to each other, unlike Norman sources, which suggest that the oath was made upon Harold's arrival.57 If he speaks, he must swear to help another against his own best interests, and he may have been aware, even before he swore, that he had no intention of keeping his word, thus risking the damning epithet of 'oath breaker/ Harold is trapped between the equal dangers of speech and silence. His dilemma is summed up by Eadmer: 'Sensit Haroldus in his periculum undique; nee intellexit qua evaderet, nisi in omnibus istis voluntati Willelmi adquievit itaque. 58 In brief, this fable provides windows onto two very different historical events. If viewers of the Bayeux Tapestry were to remember the plot of the fable, they might then recall the gnawing abuses of William's reign: the heavy taxes, the snatching of land, the displacement of the nobility. If, on the other hand, the epimythium came to mind, a viewer might recall Harold's dilemma as he prepared to swear the problematic oath, a moment during which silence and speech were alike damning. Thus the fable suggests at once the moment of Harold's incipient downfall and the later effect of this downfall on the AngloSaxon people, subject to the burdens of William's rule. 'The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite' The sixth fable, 'The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite,' is difficult to discern in the Tapestry. It appears directly below the oars of the third ship. In it, a bird of prey, whose tail feathers pierce the line of the border, holds a creature in its claws. Below this creature, another appears, helplessly

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 205

spreadeagled. While neither of these figures appears clearly, the upper has been identified as the mouse, the lower as the frog. The tale, as it appears in Rawlinson G. Ill, involves a mouse who desires help in crossing a body of water. A deceitful frog offers its assistance. Tying the mouse's neck and foot to itself, the frog begins to swim, intending to drown the mouse. While the mouse struggles to keep from being submerged, a kite swoops down and seizes it with its claws. The frog, being firmly attached to the mouse, is consequently and deservedly doomed as well.59 The moral: 'Est equum cunctis semperque nocentibus esse.'60 At the time of the defeat at Hastings, at least two authors in AngloSaxon England expressed the view that the fate of invasion and subjection to a foreign ruler had befallen the nation as a sign that their sins had gravely displeased God. As Chronicle D points out in its account of the Battle of Hastings, 'Pa Frencyscan ahton waelstowe geweald, eallswa heom God u6e for folces synnon.'61 Similarly, the second book of the Vita ^Edwardi Regis, written c. 1067, gives report of Edward's deathbed vision. In this vision, he was 'instructed infallibly about those things which we for our sins bear at the present time'62 by two monks who bring him a message from God: 'Quoniam/ inquiunt, 'hi qui in hoc regno Anglico in culmine prelationis conscenderunt, duces, episcopi, et abbates, et quique sacrorum graduum ordines adepti, non sunt quod uidentur esse, sed econtra ministri diaboli, tradidit deus post obitus tui diem anno uno et die una omne hoc regnum a se maledictum in manu inimici, peruagabunturque diaboli totam hanc terram igne, ferro, et depredatione hostili.'63

The fable of The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite' aptly reflects the theme of divine retribution for sin. In this scenario, the frog would represent the sinful Anglo-Saxons, doomed by their own iniquities; the mouse would serve as a sign of their sinful acts; and the kite swooping down from heaven, the sign of God's displeasure with the sinful. The last two fables in the sequence, The Goat and the Wolf and The Lion's Share,' do not appear in our manuscript but deserve brief comment in order to round out the discussion. 'The Goat and the Wolf A sense of the plot for The Goat and the Wolf may be drawn from fable 94 in Marie. A goat is confronted by a wolf in the woods. Rather

206 Gail Ivy Berlin

than fleeing, the goat asks permission to recite the masses on a hilltop, so as to be closer to heaven. Once on the hilltop, the goat cries out. The wolf assumes that it is reciting a mass, but the goat actually alerts all who can hear it of its distress. Dogs and peasants armed with clubs give chase to the wolf and hunt it down.64 This fable, as it appears in the Tapestry, begins beneath the fourth and frontmost ship, which has just dropped anchor upon the shore, and extends beneath the following scene in which Guido apprehends Harold. The fable is presented in three stages. In the first, a wolf faces a goat. The second scene consists of an image of a goat whose head is lifted and whose mouth is open as it sings its 'mass.' Next come two men with clubs, one of whom looks back at the goat, the other of whom looks forward. They follow four dogs who chase the wolf, now fleeing. It is interesting to note that the wolf is placed directly below Harold. In order to achieve this placement, the designer has had to leave extra unfilled space next to the image of "The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite' - a rarity within the borders, for the fables are usually separated by double bars which frame them snugly. In addition to this blank space, the designer then provides two stylized trees, taking up yet more space. It is possible that the wolf and Harold are meant to be identified, for the designer has had to go out of his way to achieve this juxtaposition. If so, this fable becomes a handy emblem for a common Old English narrative motif, the reversal of expectations. The wolf fully expected to be the hunter; however, he became the hunted instead. Likewise, Harold desired to rule, but like the wolf, he has fallen prey to his expectations. The clever and deceitful goat singing masses would thus be likened to William, who sought and received papal support for the invasion.66 'The Lion's Share' 'The Lion's Share/ the last fable in the series, appears beneath knights who are helping Guy to capture Harold. The fable is represented by a lion, a cow, possibly a sheep, and a goat who pursue a stag. Frequently anthologized, it usually features various animals (in most instances some combination of a cow, a goat, and a sheep) who accompany a lion on a hunting expedition. The lion kills a stag, divides it into four parts, and then discusses why each part should belong to it alone. Although the precise reasons given vary from text to text, the result is always the

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 207

same. The lion keeps all of the prey for itself. J. Bard McNulty, who interprets the fables from a Norman point of view, sees in 'The Lion's Share' an image of royal prerogative. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view, however, the fable can easily be taken as an expression of royal greed, particularly given William's reputation in the C, D, and E Chronicles. Are the fables that accompany Harold's sea-journey and landing in Brittany organized in any way? Assuming that my interpretations fall within the range of the possible, the following rough pattern can be sketched. First, the master designer uses the initial three fables to anticipate the end: 'The Fox and Crow' suggests the loss of kingdom; The Wolf and Lamb' anticipates Harold's death; and in 'The Pregnant Bitch' the loss of homeland is explicit. After these anticipations, the fables shift to providing evaluative commentary on events. 'The Wolf and the Crane' pegs Harold as a noble fool; 'The Wolf Reigning' underscores the corruptions of William's rule; 'The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite' hints at the culpability of the Anglo-Saxons whom God now justly punishes through the Norman invasion; and 'The Lion's Share' alludes to William's rapacity. Harold's thwarted intention to hold England as king is implied by 'The Goat and the Wolf.' Although criticism may be aimed at either William or Harold, the point of view is consistently Anglo-Saxon. Other Appearances of Fables Fables occur in three other locations within the Bayeux Tapestry. A second appearance of 'The Fox and Crow,' in which the fox now has the cheese firmly in his jaws, appears at the beginning of William's campaign in Brittany, just as William's forces approach Mount St Michel and the river Couesnon, where Harold will save the Norman soldiers from quicksand. The fable marks this episode as one that contributes directly to Harold's difficulties and eventual loss of the kingdom. Upon Harold's return to England, and just over the words announcing his return, 'Reversus est ad anglicam terram/67 appear two more fables, the second appearance of 'The Wolf and the Crane,' and the final appearance of "The Fox and the Crow.' These fables serve to bracket the episode in Brittany, marking it as a single narrative unit, much as repeated lines or phrases bracket episodes in Old English verse.68 The way in which these two fables are depicted suggests that

208 Gail Ivy Berlin

disaster has been temporarily averted. The crane still extends its neck and places its head into the wolf's mouth, but now has a bar interposed between itself and the wolf, as if to protect it. The fox and crow are now separated by two bars tilted in towards each other, and the crow once more has its cheese.69 England is under its rightful ruler still - but not for long. These fables function much as does the word o66xi [until] in Old English poetry; they signify a reversal of fortune. 'Harold will be safe in England/ they imply, 'until the Conqueror comes.'70 The fate implied by the fables has been deferred, but cannot be cancelled. The last set of fables appears while William exhorts his troops before the Battle of Hastings. The pregnant bitch is depicted below the advancing horses, a reminder of the upcoming loss of the kingdom to a foreign invader. The wolf and the goat face each other one last time above a row of horsemen charging behind a contingent of archers. The wolf stands above the word 'prelium' [battle].71 This fable serves as a final reminder of Harold's hopes of conquering, hopes which will shortly prove to be in vain. Taken together, these fables represent the final anticipation of the end which, as in various Anglo-Saxon poems, is made just before the events themselves are played out.72 Conclusion The fables in the Bayeux Tapestry are suggestive, allusive, richly multivalent, and politically charged. They strongly imply that the fable's potential for covert political commentary was not lost upon the AngloSaxons. Indeed, the designer takes advantage of the parallel circumstances provided by historical happenstance to camouflage potentially inflammatory comments. After all, Edward twice promises the kingdom, once to William and once to Harold. Both Harold and William do eventually reign as king. Both men swear solemn oaths on conspicuous formal occasions, Harold when he receives arms from William in Normandy, and William just before he is crowned king of England. Neither man feels himself firmly bound by the oath he has sworn. Thus any allusion to promises, oaths, or kings by the fables must necessarily be ambiguous. The ambiguity is complicated by the fact that any given fable may convey a number of values. In such a circumstance, certitude may be impossible, but interpretation is assuredly invited. The very fact of placing one narrative next to another - in this case fables adjacent to historical record - elicits a desire to construct a correlation between the one and the other, an impulse as natural in the

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 209

age of exemplum and typology as it is today. The presence of fables complicates the narrative structure of the Bayeux Tapestry, preventing us from viewing the history there recorded in a monolithic fashion and summoning us to pursue alternate points of view in the margins. Notes 1 For a general introduction to the use of the fable in ancient and medieval times, see Perry's introduction in Babrius and Phaedrus. Concerning the use of the fable in England from the sixteenth century onward, see Patterson, Fables of Power. 2 Wormald, 'Style and Design/ 27, states that the fables are 'purely decorative.' Others who find no relationship between the fables and the main narrative of the Tapestry are Herrmann, 'Apologues et Anecdotes,' 380; Abraham and Letienne, 'Bordures/ 497; Yapp, 'Animals/ 33; and most recently Grape, who reiterates Wormald's views in Bayeux Tapestry, 42. Critics disagree as well concerning the point of view embodied within the Tapestry. Bernstein, Bayeux Tapestry, 132, finds that the Tapestry evinces a 'studied ambiguity/ sometimes revealing an Anglo-Saxon, sometimes a Norman point of view. Dodwell, 'Bayeux Tapestry/ 559, also regards the fables as meaningful, but does not discuss them individually since he believes that they all inscribe the same moral, the theme of 'treachery and betrayal.' McNulty, Narrative Art, 27, perceives in the fables a 'carefully attuned commentary on the main story' and argues for a consistently Norman point of view. Most recently, Lewis, Rhetoric of Power, 73, notes in the fables a steady shift from a possible Anglo-Saxon to a definite AngloNorman point of view, representing a 'gradual process of cultural and political transformation.' 3 Digby, 'Technique/ 43-4. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 As Owen-Crocker points out, 'Telling a Tale/ 55, n. 2, the 'tapestry' is actually an embroidery. 6 Digby, 'Technique/ 43. 7 Gameson, 'Origin/ 162. 8 A good review of the arguments for Odo as patron can be found in McNulty, Narrative Art, 62-3. 9 For a discussion of the correspondences between the Bayeux Tapestry and the Norman sources, see Brooks and Walker, 'Authority and Interpretation/ 5. In Van Houts's edition of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of

210 Gail Ivy Berlin Jumieges, events contributing to the Norman invasion are recounted in II. vii. 13 (31). Pertinent passages in the Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers may be found in Davis and Chibnall's edition in i. 41-6 and ii. 1. 10 The authenticity of the D has on occasion been questioned. Brooks and Walker, 'Authority and Interpretation/ 10, suggest that the authority of the D still needs to be established. Their concerns are addressed by D. Wilson, Bayeux Tapestry, 203-4, who notes that conservators examining the Tapestry in 1983 found no evidence that the cross bar is a later addition. Most recently Grape, Bayeux Tapestry, 60, concerned to prove a Norman origin of the Bayeux Tapestry, suggests that even if the D were authentic, this would simply indicate that an Anglo-Saxon may have been consulted, but has no bearing on the nationality of the designer; however, Grape provides no evidence to counter that of D. Wilson. For a critique of Grape, see Gameson, 'Origin,' 162-74. Lasko, 'Bayeux Tapestry,' finds further support for an English origin of the Tapestry in its handling of 'diminution' to represent three-dimensional space. 11 The fact that more than one needlewoman was involved is indicated by differences in the quality of the stitching. On the gender of the embroiderers, see Bernstein, Bayeux Tapestry, 15 and 199 n. 5. 12 Abraham and Letienne, 'Bordures,' 501-2. 13 For identification of the eight strips which comprise the Tapestry, see Bertrand, La tapisserie de Bayeux, 23-6. The fables occur in strips one, two, and six. 14 Concerning the likelihood of a single master designer working perhaps with helpers, see Wormald, 'Style and Design,' 34; Bernstein, Bayeux Tapestry, 15; and Grape, Bayeux Tapestry, 24-5. 15 Concerning William's treatment of rebels, see Bernstein, 'Blinding,' 57, and notes 48-9. 16 Lewis, Rhetoric, 59-62 and 67, examines how the ambiguity of the fables 'implicate[s] the viewer in the creation of discursive meaning' (59). 17 See Davis and Chibnall, Gesta Guillelmi, 1.41, p. 69; Van Houts, Gesta Normannorum, VII.13 (31), p. 159; and Rule, Eadmeri Historia, 1.7, p. 6. 18 Lewis, Rhetoric, 36. 19 The idea of partisan viewers derives from Lewis, ibid., Rhetoric, 34. 20 Within the Tapestry, William is juxtaposed with a fable only once, above the second of three occurrences of the fable of the fox and crow in which the cheese, representing the coveted kingdom of the English, appears firmly in the jaws of the fox. 21 Concerning juxtaposition of cause and effect, see Owen-Crocker, Telling a Tale,' 46 and Berlin, 'Old English Narrative,' 85-114.

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 211 22 Bernstein, 'Blinding/ 49 and n. 23, cites Harold's perjury as the theme of the Tapestry. 23 Among those studies identifying the fables of the Tapestry, Chefneux's Tables' remains the most useful. See also Abraham and Letienne, 'Bordures'; Bertrand, 'Etude sur les Bordures'; Herrmann, Les Fables Antiques; and Parisse, La Tapisserie. Agreement on the identity of the fables is not universal. In addition to the eight fables accompanying Harold's voyage, Chefneux also includes The Swallow and the Linseed,' while McNulty suggests The Lion and the Stag.' Herrmann identifies forty-two fables, but few scholars have found his identifications convincing. 24 The decision to use Marie as the source for the fables undoubtedly derives from Chefneux, 'Fables,' which examines the principal manuscript collections of fables extant before the thirteenth century and determines that only the Fables of Marie de France and one other MS, designated LBG, contain all the fables also present in the Tapestry. Both, however, are too late to be the direct source. 25 The text of Rawlinson G. Ill may be found in Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, 653-713. Hervieux, vol. 1,805, dates Rawlinson G. Ill as no later than the beginning of the twelfth century. Chefneux, 'Fables/ 26, dates it to the end of the eleventh century. The Bodleian catalogue simply cites the eleventh century as the date. 26 Both Hervieux and Chefneux refer to this manuscript as 'Le Derive Metrique/ since it is derived from the Romulus of Nilant. Oddly, no students of the Bayeux Tapestry make use of this manuscript. For a discussion of fable collections in Anglo-Saxon England, see Wissolick, Bayeux Tapestry. 27 Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, Fable XII, 665: Thus if a person loses whatever he loves through injurious deceit, and if grieving, he regrets it, still it profits him nothing in these circumstances. Translations throughout are my own unless otherwise indicated. My thanks go to Devra L. Kunin and George Miltz for their assistance in translating the Latin of Rawlinson G. 111. Any errors are, of course, my own. 28 Krapp, Junius Manuscript, lines 353b-5a: Pride boiled within his heart; it was hot for him without, a dreadful punishment. 29 Perry, Babrius, Book I, Fable 1,192: Haec propter illos scripta est homines fabula qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt. Hervieux, Fabulistes, VoL II, Fable III, 132: Qui fictis causis innocentes opprimunt. 30 Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, Fable II, 655: Thus the vicious speak evilly to others with false words so that they can seize prey and life. The sense of

212 Gail Ivy Berlin

31

32 33

34 35 36

37

38 39

'luce redacta' in the last phrase in this passage is not entirely clear, and is best left untranslated. Patterson, Fables of Power, 15, similarly observes that in this fable 'language itself seems to be helpless' since 'right wins the argument but might wins the day.' Rule, Eadmeri Historia, 1.10, p. 7. Ibid., 8. Bosanquet, Eadmer's History, 8, translates: 'My sister, whom according to our pact you ask for, is dead. If the Duke wishes to have her body, such as it now is, I will send it, that I may not be held to have violated my oath. As for the stronghold at Dover and the well of water in it, I have completed that according to our agreement although for whose use I cannot say. As for the Kingdom, which then was not yet mine, by what right could I give or promise it? If it is about his daughter that he is concerned, whom I ought, as he asserts, to take to be my wife, he must know I have no right to set any foreign woman upon the throne of England without having first consulted the princes. Indeed, I could not do so without committing a great wrong.' Vygotsky, Psychology of Art, 121. Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, Fable VIII, 660: Neither your shelter nor your life shall you have any longer, unless you are stronger than me with my young offspring. Following Marie's epimythium, McNulty, Narrative Art, 30, suggests that the fable 'shows how a good man can be driven out of his lawful inheritance, and provides a warning against being kind to treacherous men.' He equates Harold with the pregnant bitch who unjustly steals the cave, and William with the dog who has been robbed of her home. Bernstein, Bayeux Tapestry, 131, similarly finds the fable to be 'anti-Harold,' seeing in it a 'metaphor for Harold's ingratitude' to William. Both Anglo-Saxon and Norman accounts mention the promise to William. William of Poitiers stresses this promise as one of the means by which the Conqueror claimed right to England. Eadmer also refers to Edward's bequest, supposedly made while the exiled Edward was lodged with William in Normandy. The D-version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions a visit of William to Edward in 1052, a time when Edward's promise could have been given, but does not comment on the purpose of this visit. Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, Fable VII, 659: While you may bestow good things upon a criminal, nevertheless he will harm you and everyone. Ibid., Vol. II, Fable VII, 659: [This] may befall an innocent person offering excellent gifts [even] now to the vulgar crowds on account of a gentle

The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective 213

40 41 42

43 44 45

46 47

48

49

50

heart. Compare ibid., Fable IX, 518, the epimythium of this fable in Digby 172, which contains a prose version of Romulus of Nilant: 'Hec parabola illis pertinet qui bene faciunt insipientibus' [This fable pertains to those who do good to the foolish]. Ibid., Vol. II, Fable VII, 659: A vast folly certainly held me, mild [as I am]... Alas! now these evils have arisen from my virtues! Bernstein, Bayeux Tapestry, 132, likewise suggests the Couesnon episode as a possible referent for this fable. There has been some debate concerning whether this animal is a wolf or a lion. Chefneux, 'Fables/ 9, identifies it as a wolf, noting that unlike the other lions of the Bayeux Tapestry, this one has no mane. However, Yapp, 'Animals/ 38, prefers to see in this quadruped a lion, since it possesses the distinctive Bayeux lion's tail, which curls beneath the animal's body and up along the side. Hervieux, Fabulistes, Vol. II, Fable XXXIV, 700: Venom like a spear creeps through his innards. Ibid., 700: It is granted that you may do whatever you desire in your heart. Chefneux, 'Fables/ 30, posits that Rawl. G. Ill was the first to make this switch from lion to wolf. The shift from lion to wolf is found as well in Marie and in LBG. In Phaedrus, the plot involves the lion only. See O'Brien O'Keeffe, MS C, s.a. 1036,1046, and 1052. Ibid., s.a. 1065: And nevertheless the wise one [Edward] entrusted the kingdom to a man of high rank, Harold himself, a noble earl, who on every occasion obeyed his lord loyally in words and deeds, neglected not at all whatever was needful to the people's king. Barlow, Life of King Edward, xxxi. Barlow, ibid., xxxii, dates Book II to 1067 and also defends the historical value of the Vita, claiming, Ixi, that it is 'not simply "Godwinist."' Ibid., Book 1,48-9: 'In the strength of his body and mind Harold stood forth among the people like a second Judas Maccabeus: a true friend of his race and country, he wielded his father's powers even more actively, and walked in his ways, that is, in patience and mercy, and with kindness to men of good will. But disturbers of the peace, thieves, and robbers this champion of the law threatened with the terrible face of a lion.' I cite Barlow's translation of the Vita ALdwardi throughout. McNulty, Narrative Art, 32, observing that the wolf swears on relics and then finds reason to break his oath, deems the wolf to be Harold. Lewis,

214 Gail Ivy Berlin Rhetoric, 72, also identifies Harold with the wolf, pointing out the king's election by royal councillors, among other elements. 51 Cubbin, MS D, s.a. 1066, p. 81. Then on Christmas day archbishop Ealdred consecrated him as king in Westminster and made William promise on Christ's book and also swear an oath before he would set the crown on his head that he would rule this people as well as the best of any kings before him, if they would be loyal to him. Nevertheless, he laid very heavy taxes upon the people and then travelled in the springtime overseas to Normandy and took with him ... many ... good men from England. Bishop Odo and Earl William he left here, and they built castles widely throughout the land, oppressing the wretched folk, and ever it grew worse and worse [my translation; emphasis added]. 52 Ibid., s.a. 1067, p. 82: William made [the citizens] fair promises which he ill kept. 53 Plummer, Saxon Chronicles, Chronicle E, s.a. 1086 (1087), p. 218: The king and the leading men indulged greatly and over-greatly in their desire for gold and silver and did not care how sinfully it were acquired so long as it came to them. The king sold his land on the harshest terms and as dearly as could be. If another man came and offered more than the first gave before, the king gave the land to the man who offered him more. If a third came and offered yet more, the king gave it into the hands of the one who offered most of all and cared nothing how very sinfully the reeves obtained it from wretched men nor how unlawfully they proceeded. But the more talk there was about preserving justice, the more injustice was done (my translation; emphasis added). 54 The writer of Chronicle E produces a more balanced picture of William when writing of him upon the occasion of his death. His account is of particular interest since, as he says, ibid., at 219, 'Donne wille we be him awritan swa swa we hine ageaton. aet he aer facen dyde / manna cynne.'34 We are less certain about our second example, a translation of PPs 134:14, where we read that the Lord judges his people 'fairly': 'ForJ^on his folc demeS faegere drihten.' Although we.have placed this citation under the sense 'justly, in equity, fairly' (DOE s.v.fasgere sense 6), we cannot wholly dismiss another possibility: the adverb may have been chosen simply for alliteration, as is especially frequently the case in the Paris Psalter, and may have been used without any necessarily restricted sense. We should perhaps translate it more generally as 'well, with happy result' (faegere sense 8). It is worth noticing that certain members of a word family, such as the adverb here, may attest at times to senses which are wholly lacking in the main member of the family. The single occurrence of the meaning 'fair-complexioned' and the complete absence of the meaning 'unbiased' in the Old English adjective 'fair/ senses so familiar today, suggest that Old English practice is very different from contemporary usage. In Old English 'fair' usually means 'beautiful/ the primary sense of the adjective, and the translation term I will now use. About 85 per cent of the Old English examples fall within this category.35 When Moritz Scheinert in 1905 published his detailed study of the adjectives in Beowulf, he treated 'fair' together with other words for 'beautiful' in a group of adjectives which appeal to the senses.36 Among the beautiful ladies who appeal to the eye in the Corpus of the Dictionary of Old English are some familiar names. Eve, a most beautiful woman ['freo faegroste'] who appears in the Old English poem GenB at line 457a, is a suitable companion to the perfect Adam before the Fall; other

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Old Testament beauties include Sarah,37 Esther,38 and Judith, the last especially renowned for both her beauty and her wisdom.39 Mary, typologically a second Eve, is 'faegerust maegda, / wifa wuldor.'40 The female saint to whom the adjective 'fair' is applied most frequently in Old English is St Margaret41 whose beauty is the cause of all her woe, for she is subject to the lustful desires of a man who tortures and imprisons her when she refuses his advances. Moreover, beauty may not only be a source of danger to its possessor, but also to those who are attracted by it, as we learn in GenA when the sons of Seth seek brides among the beautiful women of the race of Cain.42 In fact, one of the proverbs (11:22) from the Book of Proverbs, with its abbreviated Old English gloss, pungently warns: 'Like a golden ring in a swine's snout is a beautiful woman with a rebellious disposition.'43 Beautiful but strong-minded men do not seem to be treated quite so unsympathetically. Old Testament Joseph (Gen. 39.6) and Moses (Exod. 2.2) are described as beautiful, as is Christ when he appears on Judgment Day to the good (ChristC 912a).44 This quality is attributed to unnamed men, as well, including a leper cured in the life of St Basil, the retinue of soldiers St Helena leads on expedition to find the true Cross, and the English slave boys in the Roman marketplace, portrayed in one of the most memorable passages in Bede's Ecclesiastical History - all are beautiful.45 Souls and angels, especially Lucifer before the Fall, are beautiful, and ^Ifric locates in Lucifer's very beauty the source of his pride.46 For their transgressions Lucifer and his company of angels are changed to loathly devils 'of dam faegeran hiwe' [from that fair form/ appearance].47 'Fair' in the sense of 'beautiful' modifies a large group of referents in addition to these intelligent beings: animals, places, things, abstractions, words, and place-names, such as 'Fairoak.'48 'Fair' functions almost as an epithet for the mythological Phoenix. This is at times induced by the demands of alliteration in both the poem, The Phoenix, and the two late homiletic versions of the Phoenix story written in a kind of alliterative prose, but semantic appropriateness may also be a factor.49 Buildings, towns, cities, countries, and heaven, too, are beautiful. Heorot, the beautiful earthly residence ('faeger foldbold' [Beo 773]) of Hrothgar is so beautiful that its construction is seen as an imitation of the divine act of creation.50 Nor is it left to poets to mark the beauty of places. Unexpectedly, in one of our legal records, the land settled by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the land which Edward now rules, is named 'the beautiful island of Britain.'51 In the natural world, the sun,

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moon, the morning star, and light itself are beautiful; ice, springs, and brooks are beautiful; fields, meadows, blossoms, and fruits are beautiful; so too are hills, mountains, and forests. In a world of artifice, gems, treasures, lanterns, and vessels are beautiful (and Corinthian vessels are 'fairer' and 'dearer' than any others).52 Not surprisingly, the period of life which is celebrated as the most beautiful is youth, and it is 'fairest,' we are told by the homilists, because with youth there is no old age.53 As we all know, beauty is not always a curse and it can provide distinct advantages in life. The Anglo-Saxons were not insensitive to the benefits of a beautiful appearance. In the Prognostics, the person who is beautiful frequently meets with other good fortune. In one prognostic we are told that if we dream that our countenance is beautiful, that is good, and honour will be in our future; conversely, if we dream that we are ugly, that is bad. The dreadful consequence is left unstated.54 In another we are told that if we see our countenance as beautiful, it signifies bliss.55 In yet another we discover that someone born on Sunday will live without anxiety and will be beautiful.56 We attribute the living without anxiety as much, though mistakenly, to being beautiful as to being born on Sunday. We can compose a list of features described as 'fair' in its primary sense of 'beautiful to the eye' in the Dictionary Corpus: bodies, eyes, hands, and fingers (thin and long) are beautiful; so too are legs, but they are wasted on a lame man according to an Old English gloss based on Proverbs 26:7.57 Cheeks and heads are beautiful, and especially the hair of the head, for curly locks are worthy of notice58 as well as hair in luxuriant growth.59 But the face is the most frequently described part of the body which is named as beautiful: f&ger on andwlitan I fxger on ansyne [fair of countenance] are the usual Old English expressions,60 and they are paralleled in late Middle English by the alliterative formula 'fair of face.'61 However, our material does not anywhere describe a standard of beauty, a kind of Platonic ideal towards which all aspired or which all admired in that society. Conceptions of beauty are not universal or changeless from age to age, and Naomi Wolf has recently reminded us just how variable these stereotypes can be among various peoples, from the Maori to the Padung to the Nigerian Wodaabes.62 However, in Old English there is no generic vision of beauty, no stylized catalogue of features such as is found in Chaucer's depiction of the Black Knight's 'goode faire White,' Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, John of Gaunt's first wife in The Book of the Duchess.63

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Chaucer details the natural beauty of the Black Knight's beloved: the hair on her head is not red, nor yellow, nor brown, but most like gold (855-8); her eyes are of good size, but not too wide (861); her complexion is white, ruddy, fresh, and lively-hued (905); her speech is soft, friendly, and reasonable (919-22); her neck is white, smooth, straight, and flat (942) where no bone mis-sat (941); her throat is a round tower of ivory, showing perfect measure: 'Of good gretnesse, and noght to gret' (947). This catalogue occupies nearly a hundred leisurely lines. And then, almost as if the Black Knight is worried that time is running out, he gives us within six lines a staccato account of the rest of her physiognomy: fair shoulders, a long body, plump, fleshy arms (but which are not large, nonetheless), white hands, red nails, round breasts, wide hips, and a straight flat back (952-7). This is a portrait of beauty which will reach its apotheosis in Spenser's Epithalamion: Tell me ye merchants daughters did ye see So fayre a creature in your towne before, So sweet, so louely, and so mild as she Adornd with beautyes grace and vertues store, Her goodly eyes lyke Saphyres shining bright, Her forehead yuory white, Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte, Her brest like to a bowle of creame vncrudded, Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre, And all her body like a pallace fayre, Ascending vppe with many a stately stayre, To honors seat and chastities sweet bowre.64

In Old English the closest we come to such a model of beauty is a brief catalogue of four items in an anonymous homily for Easter Sunday in CCCC MS 162, where a striking figure, the Son of Man of the Apocalypse (1:14-16) is described in this way: 'His loccas waeron swa hwite swa swicte hwit wull, 7 his ansyn wses swa faeger swa sunne, 7 his eagan waeron swilce se reada lig Jsaes fyres, 7 his stemn waes swilce manegra waetera gejmnn.'651 am not even sure we can call this a figure of beauty; there is something awe-inspiring in the depiction of the fiery eyes and the almost deafening voice that recalls to us Judgment Day scenes. And yet we seem to have nothing fuller than this to set beside

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the later English models, for the Anglo-Saxons usually made only the plain statement of fact, that X or Y was beautiful. At the level of individual words, we are finding evidence which confirms what Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis, among others, have discovered through their investigation of larger units of Latin source material - that AngloSaxon writers were reluctant to treat attractiveness, especially sexual attractiveness, as a literary topos.66 The adjective 'fair' appeals not only to the sense of sight but also to hearing and smell. Here the usual translation terms would be 'agreeable (to the senses), pleasant, delightful,' and so forth. Our examples are mainly of sound, rarely of odor: the trumpets of victory sing out in 'fair' or 'delightful' harmony ['on faegerne sweg' (Ex 567a)]; the music of the bagpipe is 'pleasant' ['faeger hleoj)or' (Rid 3117)]; the singing of birds is 'lovely' ['faeger fugla reord' (GuthA 743)]; from heaven one hears 'sweet' melody ['JDonon 6u gehyrdest done faegeran dream'].67 In a rare appeal to the olfactory sense, the plain which the Phoenix inhabits is filled 'mid Jsam faegrestum ... stencum' (Phoen 7) [with the most fragrant smells] of the earth. But, as the Old English translation of Boethius reminds us, there are limits to what individual senses can tell us: the sense of touch may identify a body, but touch cannot determine whether that body is black or white, beautiful or ugly ['J?e blaec Ipe hwit, de faeger 6e unfaager'].68 When 'fair' modifies something that is measureable, it conveys the sense that the referent is 'large, ample, considerable.' All of the occurrences in Old Engish depict the 'handsome' rewards in store for those who do God's will.69 'Fair' can also convey the sense of an inner moral beauty, an unblemished state. When applied to qualities within people, we might translate 'fair' by an exalted term like 'noble': Mary is known for her 'noble' humility. When the referent is conduct or behaviour, 'fair' conveys the sense of 'free from impropriety, proper, appropriate, fit.' In Old English, observances should be 'appropriate'; behaviour, 'proper'; hospitality, 'suitable, fit'; examples should be 'noble/ or perhaps on a more modest scale, 'fit, appropriate.' And with concrete objects such as water and rain, 'fair' is perhaps used to suggest how 'clean, pure, and clear' they are. The second largest sense division for 'fair' after 'beautiful' carries the notion of 'favourable or benign influence.' This is principally exemplified by 'favourable' weather (i.e., fair and clear) and 'favorable' seas (i.e., not stormy).70 'Fair' in this sense can also refer to a way of life, a state or condition that is 'free from trouble, pleasant': in BIHomlO we

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read that the life of rich men 'seems free from trouble' and in PPs 54.23 that the bloodthirsty man filled with deceit 'does not find a pleasant life anywhere.'71 The adjective can be taken in the more general sense of 'splendid or excellent' when describing enterprises, learning, the times. The number of translation terms I have used in this brief summary suggests the semantic freight 'fair' had to bear in Old English. Obviously, it was too much for one word to carry on its own. So far I have painted a monochrome picture of this adjective. What is depicted as 'fair' is actually 'fair.' There is a mapping of reality with the word used to describe it. However, what is 'fair' on the outside may not be 'fair' on the inside, the external appearance and the internal reality divided and conflicting. The contrast is clearly and strikingly articulated by the placement of the adjective 'fair' and its opposite 'foul' in close proximity. Our first example is drawn from the King . Alfred's English prose version of the Paris Psalter, where godless men are likened to (whitened) sepulchres which the Old English, but not the Vulgate, says are 'beautiful' on the exterior but 'foul' within ['utan faeger and innan ful' (13.5)] 72 Another example, from the Old English gloss to Book 3 of Boethius, teaches us how to read the person of Alcibiades, the handsome but treacherous Athenian general, whose outward appearance is 'the fairest' but whose entrails are 'the foulest,' an indication of his deceptive nature.73 In both of these examples we are dealing with a surface beauty which is real (the whitened sepulchre / handsome Alcibiades) but which masks ugliness at the core. This treatment of spurious beauty in Old English is not restricted to the physical appearance of people or things, but is even more evident in language, in the show of words. Although there are a number of examples of 'eloquent' language (such as Christ's comforting his apostles before his Ascension 'with his fair words'; Gregory the Great's acquiring the epithet 'Golden Mouth' for his natural eloquence; ^Ethelberht of Kent's request that Augustine of Canterbury reveal to him 'the fair words and promise' of the new Christian religion),74 in at least several instances language is specious. The paradigm for this, of course, is the serpent's 'faegir word' (GenA 899) [fair words] in the Garden of Eden, on account of which Eve exonerates herself for her disobedience to God. This notion of the spurious 'beauty' of words, which, significantly, the producer knows to be spurious, becomes a literary tradition in English, epitomized by the proverbial saying To speak fair before and false behind.'75 We find the first instance of this tradition in a poem from the Vercelli Book known by the catchy title 'Homiletic

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Fragment I.'76 Based on Psalm 27:3 in the Vulgate,77 the poem loosely amplifies the following passage: Draw me not away together with the wicked; and with the workers of iniquity destroy me not; Who speak peace with their neighbour, but evils are in their hearts.

In the Old English poem we read of a man who 'taeleS behindan, / spreced faegere beforan, ond beet facen swa Ipeah / hafad in his heortan/78 The poet later reiterates this theme when he describes the man who is 'gefylled mid facne, beah he faeger word / utan aetywe.'79 For a third time and in the fullest manner, the poet elaborates his point, portraying false men as 'ba 6e mid tungan treowa gehatab / faegerum wordum, facenlice J?encab';80 they have in their promises 'hunigsmaeccas, / smedne sybcwide' (28b-9a) [tastes of honey, smooth words of peace], but in their minds 'dyrne wunde' (30b) [a secret wound]. Tom Hill, in an engagingly titled article, 'The Hypocritical Bee/ identified a parallel for this proverbial statement in Gregory's ninth homily on Ezechiel.81 The bee, which brings honey in its mouth but has a sting behind, as an emblem of deceitfulness is replaced in the later Middle Ages by the figure of a scorpion, with its tail secretly wounding from behind.82 In our poem, as in both those figures, an attempt is made to capture the essence of a duplicitous nature. Except for these few passages depicting hollow language, the adjective 'fair' has wholly positive connotations in Old English. What is said to be 'fair' is almost always 'fair/ and overwhelmingly, 'fair' means 'beautiful.'83 In the Old English period 'fair' is applied with equal frequency to men and women, and we have written a usage note to this effect at the start of our entry for faeger adj., thus foregrounding a new fact added to the story of English. Old English practice forms a contrast with the later history of the word. Already in Middle English the adjective, though frequently used of men, more often describes women (MED fair adj. sense l.a). In early Modern English the adjective is 'almost exclusively used of women' (OED2fair a. and sb.2 sense I.l.a). The history of 'fair' in the sense of 'beautiful/ therefore, shows a gradual gendering of the adjective, as the word ceases to be applied evenhandedly to men and women and is almost universally restricted to women. In fact, the adjective acquires such exclusivity that women in general are characterized by this quality of 'fairness' or 'beauty': we are familiar with such phrases as 'the fairer sex/ a comparative expression

Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 265

which arose in the seventeeth century, and its eighteenth-century positive development, 'the fair sex/ corresponding to French 'le beau sexe.'84 Both phrases now have the musty whiff of the drawing-room, and yet they capture evocatively and poignantly how circumscribed the adjective has become. What led to the restricted use of 'fair' in the sense of 'beautiful' to women? Is it, true as George Crabb suggests in his English Synonymes, that: 'Beauty is peculiarly a female perfection; in the male sex it is rather a defect: a beautiful man will not be respected, because he cannot be respectable. The possession of beauty deprives him of his manly characteristicks; boldness and energy of mind; strength and robustness of limb.'85 Not many of us would agree with the logic of Crabb's distinction. Perhaps it is simply a linguistic fact that descriptive adjectives of this type originally have a wide application and then narrow their focus to one sex. It may be relevant to point out that the adjective 'handsome,' in its prevailing current sense of 'good-looking,' that is, 'having a fine form or figure/ a sense which arose at the time of Spenser (OED2 handsome a. sense 6), is in contemporary English largely restricted to men when applied to people. In this respect its application is the opposite of 'fair/ but not quite as narrow. If we speak of a 'handsome' woman, there has to be something full-sized or stately about her, in addition to beauty, something that partakes of the grand scale. 'Handsome' will attach itself only to women of a certain type. Once the feature which these women have in common with men is identified and isolated - that of dignified size, solid proportion, imposing mass, I suggest - then the adjective can be applied. It seems unlikely that we would use 'handsome' today of a small woman, no matter how striking she is. The conceptual universe of 'handsome' seems not to be able to accommodate anything less than liberal size. Within this frame we might be able to call Lady Philosophy 'handsome'; as Roberta Frank has recently reminded us, she is described by Boethius as waxing and waning 'on a vertical axis, sometimes of average height, at other times piercing the skies.'86 The adjective might also be applied to Philology, spouse of Mercury, who varied in the other direction, in breadth. But here we need to be careful. Philology, with her 'pinched' waistline of the early Middle Ages, could not have been called 'handsome' - only after she attained an expansive, Rubensian girth in the twelfth century would the adjective become her.87 As is evident by the translation term I have used throughout this essay, I can no longer say 'fair' today when I mean 'beautiful.' 'Fair' in

266 Antonette diPaolo Healey

the sense 'beautiful, fair (to the eye); of pleasing appearance or form' is no longer used in spoken English. OED labelled it a century ago as 'slightly archaic or rhetorical' and states that it is 'very common in literature' (OED2 fair a. and sb.2 sense I.I). 'Fair' was replaced by a foreign loan, but a loan domesticated in a characteristically English fashion, by taking the Anglo-Norman noun beute, Old French biaute88 and adding the Old English suffix -full, which forms adjectives when appended to nouns, so that the new Anglo-French hybrid, literally meaning 'full of beauty/ is born. At the time it was coined 'beautiful' was probably a more fashionable word than 'fair/ and it was certainly less ambiguous. The gradual weakening in force of the senses of 'fair' from 'beautiful' to 'blonde/ from 'morally spotless' to 'equitable, just/ from Very large, very good' to 'tolerably large, just so-so/ belongs to the later history of English. But in Old English 'fair' is a noble word, a word of great amplitude, with nothing mean or small about it, with no foreign splendour or sparkle, capable of describing both external beauty and internal worth, and with only a hint of speciousness. Unfortunately, its rich polysemy doomed to death its primary sense in Old English - that of capturing all that is beautiful to Anglo-Saxon eyes.89 Notes 1 I.i.3. 2 Ibid., I.i.11-12 3 The locus classicus for the sentiment is Vergil, Eclogue, 111.93; see Mynors, Opera, 9: 'frigidus, o pueri (fugite nine!), latet anguis in herba.' 4 Hutcheon, Irony's Edge. 5 Auerbach, Mimesis, esp. 77-95, 'Sicharius and Chramnesindus.' 6 Ong, 'From Mimesis/ esp. 22-6; for an interesting analysis of the complex logic of mimesis as applied to French texts from the 'age of realism/ see Prendergast, Order of Mimesis. 7 See Irving, ed., Old English Exodus; Irving, 'New Notes'; and 'Exodus Retraced.' 8 Irving, Reading of Beowulf; Rereading Beowulf. 9 O'Brien O'Keeffe makes the same point in the context of textual editing; see her 'Editing and the Material Text/ 148-9; for a comparison of the linguistic sensitivity of the Anglo-Saxons with that of later users of English, see Stanley, 'Linguistic Self-Awareness.'

Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 267 10 For an eloquent statement of this 'mysterious difference/ now see Frank, 'Unbearable Lightness,' esp. 495-500; for the conventional signal by which lexicographers admit failure in their search for meaning, note the formulaic phrase 'of uncertain meaning and etymology.' 11 The writing of the letter F has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, an independent federal agency; the British Academy, London; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, New York; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York; the McLean Foundation, Toronto; the Salamander Foundation, Toronto; the Provost's Office, University of Toronto; and the various contributors to the Dictionary of Old English Fundraising Campaign organized by Profs. Patrick Conner, West Virginia University, Joyce Hill, University of Leeds, Nicholas Howe, Ohio State University, and Jane Toswell, University of Western Ontario. 12 Throughout my treatment I am indebted to my colleague Joan Holland who wrote the entries for the 'fair' word-family in the DOE; I am especially grateful to her for our many productive discussions about the complexities of 'fair.' 13 Rudskoger, Fair. 14 Onions, English Etymology, s.v.fair; Klein, Etymological Dictionary, s.v.fair adj.; Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. pek-, pek-, pdk-. 15 Rudskoger, Fair, 23, who quotes Wyld, Universal Dictionary, s.v.fair (II) adj. 16 Kluge, Nominale Stammbildungslehre, § 194, Anm. 17 Holthausen, Worterbuch, s.v.fxger. 18 Streitberg, Gotische Bibel, 141, Luke 14:35; for the negative adjective in Gothic, see 113, Luke 6:35, where unfagram glosses axaplo-ro^; see also Lehmann, Etymological Dictionary, s.v. *fagrs. 19 Roberts and Kay, Thesaurus, 1.424,07.10; the others in this category are: gebleod, cyme, cymlic, hiwbeorht, hiwlic, hleortorht, sciene, wlitebeorht, wliteful, wlitescme, wlitig. 20 If our interpretation is correct, this is a rare instance of for- modifying a positive adjective (cf.formicel); in most other instances, it modifies either negative or neutral adjectives and adverbs, e.g.,/ordys/zc 'very foolish,' foroft 'very often, all too often/ forpearle 'very much, much too much,' etc. Another possibility is to take for- as the/ore-prefix in the sense 'pre-eminent,' the compound having the sense 'most beautiful.' 21 The Latin words which fxger glosses are: amoenus, formosus (3x with speciosus), pulcher, sudus (with purus), venustus (2x with egregius, 3x with speciosus). 22 H. Bradley, ed., New English Dictionary.

268 Antonette diPaolo Healey 23 Ibid., vii-viii. 24 For a recent analysis of the 'culture of light/ of the representation of whiteness in Western visual (principally photographic) culture, see Dyer, White. 25 Millward, Biography, 131. 26 Pfeifer, Etymologisches Wbrterbuch, s.v.fair; Kluge, Etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v.fair. 27 Ullmann, Semantics, 170. 28 Rudskoger, Fair, 476, quoted by Ullmann, Semantics, 170. 29 Holthausen, Worterbuch, s.v. ge-wyrde sense 2; Holthausen notes parallel formations with the adjectives beald and bitter. Here too the second element is needed to clarify the ways in which 'bold' and 'bitter' are to be taken. 30 Ong, 'From Mimesis,' 24. 31 Ullmann, Semantics, 160. 32 LS 5 (InventCrossNap) 280: Then the two young men became of just as fair a complexion as their fathers and the mothers were as dark as they had been before; cf. 16.27: 'ba weard all heorae swartnysse on hwitnesse iwaend' [then was all their darkness turned to whiteness]; cf. Invent.sanct. cruc [Ca] 46.29 'facti sunt ualde albi et spetiosi, qui paulo ante fuerunt nigri et horridi' [they became very white and beautiful who a little before had been black and horrid]. Unless otherwise noted, editions and abbreviations are those in Healey and Venezky, List of Texts. 33 JELS (Cecilia) 112: whose blood is red in likeness to a rose, / and whose body is white with a lily's fairness (Skeat's edition). The Latin source does not provide help here because there is no corresponding word for 'fairness'; cf. Pass. Cecil. 1.334.22, 'cuius in ipsis rosis sanguis florescit et liliis cuius corpus albescit' [whose blood grows red like the roses themselves and whose body grows white like the lilies]. 34 Lines 55b-7a: the criminal must hang and pay fairly [his] recompense because he previously committed a crime against mankind. 35 Approximately 60 out of 400 examples are distributed throughout the other senses. 36 Scheinert, 'Die Adjectiva im Beowulfepos,' 386, §105. 37 GenA 1852b-5: baet faegerro lyt for aedelinge idesa sunnon, ac hie Sarran swiSor micle, wynsumne wlite wordum heredon [that few women did they consider more beautiful before the king, but they praised Sarah's beautiful countenance much more].

Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 269 38 Assmann, Angelsachsische Homilien, 97.178-9: 'seo cwen ... swiSe faegeres hiwes' [the queen... of very beautiful appearance]. 39 Ibid., 110.263-5: 'And his pegenas saedon, baet swylc wimman naere on ealre eordan swa faegeres wlites and swa wis on spraece' [And his thanes said that there was not such a woman in all the earth so beautiful of countenance and so wise in speech]. 40 Men, 148: the most beautiful of women and the glory of women. 41 Clayton and Magennis, Lives ofSt Margaret, §§ 5.5,5.10,6.13, 7.6, 7.14, 9.3, 9.4,17.10. 42 GenA 1250b-2: 'and him baer wif curon / ofer metodes est monna eaforan, / scyldfulra maegd scyne and faegere' [and despite God's will, there the sons of men chose for themselves wives, lovely and beautiful women from among those guilty people]. 43 Zupitza, 'Glossen,' 224.373: pulcra fege[r] (with ge over erasure). 44 Crawford, Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Gen 39.6: 'loseph waes faeger 7 wlitig on ansine' [Joseph was beautiful and comely of countenance]; Exod 2.2: '7 ba heo geseah paet he [Moses] faeger waes pa hydde heo hine pry monpas' [And when she saw that he [Moses] was beautiful, she then hid him for three months]; ChristC 910-12: 'he bid bam godum ... on gefean faeger' [to the good he will be ... beautiful in his joy]. 45 JELS (Basil), 488-9: 'gelaedde hine on mergen ford swide faegres hiwes buton aelcum womme' [in the morning he led him forth with a very beautiful appearance and without any blemish]; El 240b-2: 'Ne hyrde ic sid ne aer / on egstreame idese laedan, / ... maegen faegerre' [I have never heard before or since of a woman leading a handsomer troop on the oceanstream]; Miller, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 1.96.18-20: 'paet is sarlic, paette swa faeger feorh 7 swa leohtes ondwlitan men scyle agan 7 besittan beostra aldor' [it is sad that such beautiful creatures and men of such bright faces should be owned and possessed by the prince of darkness]. 46 Clemoes, Mfric's Catholic Homilies, 1,179.29-31: 'pa waes paes teodan weredes ealdor swiSe faeger 7 wlitig gesceapen. swa paet he waes gehaten leohtberend. ba began he to modigeanne for daere faegernysse. be he haefde' [then the leader of the tenth host was created very beautiful and comely so that he was called 'light-bearer.' He then began to become proud for the beauty which he had]. 47 Ibid., 1,180.1. 48 Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, vol. 2., no. 776A:feger ok (Sawyer 481). 49 See, for example, Phoen 85-6, 'wundrum faeger fugol' [the wondrously beautiful bird]; Kluge, 'Dichtungen,' 477.35, 'se faegera fugol' [the beautiful

270 Antonette diPaolo Healey

50

51

52 53 54

55

56

57

58 59

60 61

bird]; 475.34, 'sebe is faegere Fenix gehaten' [he who is called the 'fair Phoenix']. Rudskoger, Fair, 171, in a rare mention of Old English, suggests that here there may be a trace of the root sense 'well put together, suitable' because the poet explicitly directs our attention to how Heorot was 'skillfully fastened inside and out by bands of iron' (Beo 774-5). Robertson, Charters, no. 104, p. 194.7-8: 'swa he nu dagum Breotanrices faegran iglandes Eadwearde cyncge sealde 7 geupe' [so now in these days he has given and granted the beautiful island of Britain to King Edward]. Bately, Old English Orosius, 5.2,114.10-11: 'hie sint faegran 7 dierran bonne aenegu opru.' Forster, 'Apocalypse of Thomas/ 18.5: 'paer bid sio faegruste geogud butan aelcere ilde' [there Youth will be most beautiful without any Age]. Forster, 'Volkskunde II,' 302.1: 'Gif him maete, paet his onsyne faeger si, god paet bid, and him bid wurdmynt toweard; and gif him bince unfaeger, yfel baet bid' [If someone dreams that his countenance is beautiful, that is good, and honour will be in his future; and if it seems not beautiful to him, that is bad]. Forster, 'Volkskunde IV,' 68.274: 'Si uideris faciem tuam pulchram, gaudium significat gif bu gesihst ansine bine faegere blisse getacnab' [if you see your face beautiful, it signifies bliss]. Forster, 'Volkskunde VII,' 297.1 (Version B): 'Swahwilc man swa on sunnandaeg odde on niht acenned bid, orsorglice leofaed he, 7 bid faegger' [Whoever is born on Sunday or Sunday evening will live without anxiety and will be beautiful]. Getty, 'Liber Scintillarum,' 24.22: 'Quomodofrustra habet daudus pulchras tibias, sic indecens est in ore stulti parabola hu on idel haefd faegere scancan swa ungerysenlic ys on mube dysiges bigspell' [as a lame man has beautiful legs in vain, so a parable is unseemly in the mouth of a fool]. Miller, Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 5.2, 390.17: '7 haefde crispe loccas faegre' [and he had beautiful curly locks]. Napier, Wulfstan, 148.4-5: 'and baet feax afealled, be aer waes faeger on hiwe and on fulre waestme' [and that hair falls out which before had been beautiful in appearance and in luxuriant growth]. As Prof. Rolf Bremmer has reminded me, the synonomous phrase 'wlitig on ansyne' also occurs; it appears four times in the Dictionary Corpus. This formula appears in the MED (s.v.face, sense 3.a) as a variant to Cursor 4263: 'loseph was farli fair in face' [vr. 'of face']. OED2 does not cite the formula (s.vv.face sb.,fair a. and sb.2) although the compound 'fair-faced' is

Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 271 given a full entry; Craigie, Dictionary, Vol. II, s.v.fair a. sense l.b, cites the expression from the Legends of Saints, xvii.7, dated [a.1400]: 'Scho was far of fax and face.' The absence of 'fair of face' as a citation in OED2 is surprising since the expression is found in Gawain lines 1259-60: 'Scho made hym so gret chere, / Pat watz so fayr of face'; other occurrences are given by Oakden, Alliterative Poetry, 280, under the phrase fayr of face. 62 N. Wolf, Beauty Myth, 12-13. 63 Line 948. References to and citations of The Book of the Duchess' are from Benson, Riverside Chaucer. For a succinct account of the type of female beauty depicted by Chaucer, see Brewer, 'Ideal of Feminine Beauty,' esp. 263-9; at 258, Brewer attributes to Matthew of Vendome in the twelfth century the first 'full organization of the ideal of feminine beauty in formal description,' noting laconically that 'the description of the beautiful woman does not seem to have been of great importance in literature' before that. 64 Lines 167-80. 65 HomS 27 49: His locks were as white as very white wool and his countenance was as fair as the sun and his eyes were like the red flame of the fire and his voice was like the loud noise of many waters. Schaefer, 'Five Old English Homilies,' 251.49-52 (MS CCCC 162, p. 385,11. 7-10). 66 Clayton, 'Ailfric's Judith,' esp. 224-5; Magennis, '"No Sex Please.'" 67 Godden, JElfric's Catholic Homilies, 21 202.91. 68 Sedgefield, Boethius, 41.145.24. 69 See, e.g., ibid., 37.113.12: 'ac gemun du syle miclan 7 baes faegran edleanes' [but always remember the great and handsome reward]; Men 151b-3a: 'haefde nergend ba / faegere fostorlean faemnan forrgolden / ece to ealdre' [the Savior then had given to the woman for all eternity a handsome remuneration for fostering]. 70 See, e.g., Phoen 182-3: 'Donne wind liged, weder bid faeger, / hluttor heofones gim halig seined' [When the wind lies low, the weather is fair, the holy gem of heaven shines clear]; Treharne, Life ofSt Nicholas, 93.340-1: 'baet scipferde ... haefde swide god weder 7 faegre sae on to faerenne' [the fleet... had very good weather and a calm sea for sailing on]. 71 BIHom, 107.29: '7 puhte faeger & wlitig heora lif & wynsumlic'; PPs, 54:23: ' faeger lif... gemeted ahwaer.' 72 Bright and Ramsay, Liber Psalmorum, 25,13:5. 73 Hale, 'CCCC MS 214,' 307.39^1: 'hu ne... on ansyne faegerusta lichama fullicust waer geduht?' [whether... the fairest body in appearance was thought to be most foul]; cf. Bieler, Boethius, 3, pr. 8.10 : 'nonne introspectis uisceribus illud Alcibiades superficie pulcherrimum corpus turpissimum uidere-

272 Antonette diPaolo Healey

74

75

76

77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

tur?' [would not one judge that body of Alcibiades superficially very beautiful to be extremely base once his entrails were looked upon]. Pope, Homilies ofALlfric, 10.131: 'mid his faegerum wordum'; Hecht, Bischof Wxrferths von Worcester Ubersetzung, Preface to Book 3,179.3: 'for paera faegran worda gyfe'; Godden, /Elfric's Catholic Homilies, 9 78.199: 'faegere word and behat.' Whiting and Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, F44 To be False and speak fair'; F50 To feign Falsehood under fair words'; S580 To Speak fair before but not behind.' One of the Admonitions of JElfric also reflects this tradition; see Norman, Hexameron ofSt Basil, 46,5.13: 'ne lufa bu pinne brodor mid gehiwodre heortan bast bu hine kysse and kepe him hearmes forpam be se fakenfulla faegere word sprecd oft and on his modes digolnysse macad syrwunga' [do not love your brother with a hypocritical heart so that you kiss him and be intent on harming him, for the deceitful man often speaks fair words and in the secrecy of his mind contrives plots]. Krapp, Vercelli Book, xxxix, identifies Ps 28:3 KJV as the ultimate source of the fragment. Ibid., 'Homiletic Fragment I,' 4b-6a: slanders from behind, speaks fair before and yet has deceit in his heart. Ibid., 17-18a: filled with deceit, although he may show fair words without. Ibid., 25-6: those who with their tongue promise truth with fair words, but think deceitfully. Hill, 'Hypocritical Bee,' 123. See MED s.v. scorpioun sense 2.(a): The scorpion as a symbol or type of Judas, woman, treachery, backbiting, lechery, love of the world, etc.; and sense 2.(b): a treacherous person. P. Taylor, 'Poetic Vocabulary of Beauty,' 213,217, treats fxger under the 'Beauty as Brightness' category. Rudskoger, Fair, 50, also mentions the parallel expressions 'the gentle sex, the weaker sex and the softer sex.' Crabb, English Synonymes, 313; my reference is to the 1841 edition; cited by Rudskoger, Pair, 173, from a different edition. Frank, 'Unbearable Lightness,' 488. 'Pinched' is Frank's term; details of weight gain or loss in Philology's figure are indebted to Frank, 'Unbearable Lightness,' 488-9. Stone and Rothwell, Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. belte; Tobler and Lommatzsch, Altfranzosisches Worterbuch, s.v. biaute. I am grateful to the students and faculty in Medieval Studies at Brown, Harvard, and Yale Universities, who heard earlier versions of this paper,

Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul 273 and to the medievalists at the 36th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, who heard an abbreviated version of this paper, for their stimulating questions and comments. I am especially grateful to my colleagues at the Dictionary of Old English, David McDougall and Ian McDougall, and to Eric Stanley, for help on particular points.

Bravery and the Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle ofMaldon Janet Bately

'Nu maeg cunnian hwa cene sy/ cries the young Ailfwine, as he urges on his comrades after the death of Byrhtnoth and the flight of the cowardly sons of Odda,1 a memorable and often quoted statement, about which the only controversy seems to have been whether it should be translated as 'now (one) is able to test who is brave/ or 'now whoever is brave is able to prove (it)/2 But what role does bravery play in the Battle ofMaldon? How accurate a rendering of cene is ModE 'brave/ a term which, like the abstracts 'bravery' and 'courage/ did not enter the English language till many centuries after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and which now has to compete there in a lexical field which includes both native terms such as 'bold' and loanwords such as 'valiant/ 'courageous/ 'intrepid/ not to mention 'heroic'? In 1967, in a painstaking trawl of Old English dictionaries, Robert S. Rudolph found no fewer than ninety-five words taken by their editors to be synonymous with the adjective 'brave'; more recently, using the same database but extending its brief, the Thesaurus of Old English (TOE) has presented us with an impressive eighty-one adjectives, twenty-three nouns, and eighteen adverbs which may, on the strength of dictionary definitions, be assigned to the lexical fields Courage, Boldness, Fearlessness, Daring, and Presumption, and (in a few instances) Will, determination, resolution, Strength, fortitude, and War.3 However, as Rudolph, examining the contexts in which his words occurred, soon discovered, a number of terms in the dictionaries with 'brave' among their secondary meanings are simply Vague poetic words used favorably of warriors/ perhaps merely identifying the characters as heroes.4 Sometimes, he observes, it

The Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle ofMaldon 275

is impossible to distinguish between 'brave' and other meanings, such as 'mighty/ 'outstanding/ 'renowned/ and 'resolute.' Indeed, in the case of some of the terms that he cites, such as strung and til,5 any association with bravery is very much a matter of local - contextual - interpretation by modern scholars, who in any case are attempting to superimpose their own system on the now only imperfectly understood and recorded Anglo-Saxon one.6 Even where the Old English appears to be a direct translation of a Latin term there are problems. So, for instance, the Latin adjective fort is and noun fortitude refer primarily to manifestations of strength, and although ModE 'brave/ 'bravery' are included in lists of synonyms relating to mental strength provided by standard Latin dictionaries such as that of Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, they, along with 'courage' and 'courageous/ compete there with '(mentally) strong, powerful, vigorous, firm, steadfast, stout, manly etc.' and 'firmness, manliness (shown in enduring or undertaking hardship), fortitude, resolution, intrepidity' respectively. As for virtus, although under Lewis and Short subsection C we find the definition 'military talents, courage, valor, bravery, gallantry, fortitude (syn. fortitudo),' and the terms bravery' and 'courage' also feature in subsection A, this word too has many other potential meanings, from 'manliness, manhood (i.e. the sum of all the corporeal or mental excellences of man), strength, vigor; aptness, capacity; worth, excellence, virtue, etc.' (I A), to 'moral perfection' (IIB), and 'obstinacy' (IID). In this paper, I propose to examine in detail the items from TOE's entries that are found in the 325 lines of the Battle ofMaldon, comparing the poet's selection and their application there with that in the 3182 lines of Beowulf. In my assessment of the items' claims for consideration as 'bravery' words I shall be guided by the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions: Bold l.a. Of persons: Stout-hearted, courageous, daring, fearless; the opposite of 'timid' or 'fearful.' Often, with admiration emphasized = brave. Boldness l.a. Courage, daring, fearlessness. Brave l.a. Of persons and their attributes: Courageous, daring, intrepid, stout-hearted (as a good quality). Bravery 2. Daring, courage, valour, fortitude (as a good quality).

It is the 'plus' or admiration factor - boldness and so forth 'as a good quality' - that will be looked for in the contenders for a place in the Old English 'bravery' list.

276 Janet Bately

But before discussing the vocabulary of Beowulf and the Battle of Maidon fragment, it is necessary to examine the poets' handling of the theme of bravery in the two poems. Both deal with deeds of what we today might consider great courage ('bravery'?), set off and heightened by instances of the converse, the actions of cowards. So, for instance, in the former poem Wiglaf goes to the aid of the wounded Beowulf as he falters in his fight against the dragon, while his comrades faintheartedly retreat to the woods.7 In the latter, ^Ifwine and Offa and other named combatants continue in their fight against the Vikings, after the cutting down of their lord, Byrhtnoth, while the sons of Odda take to flight, followed by manna ma Jjonne hit aenig maed waere, gyf hi J>a geearnunga ealle gemundon pe he him to dugu|?e gedon haefde.8

In both poems there is a central figure9 who engages in combat, acknowledging that God alone knows/will decide the outcome10 though perhaps with greater confidence that this will be favourable on the part of Beowulf (before his first fight)11 than on that of Byrhtnoth. In both poems warriors express their determination not to retreat one step - '(ofer)fleon fotes trem'12 - and engage without regard for their own lives. So in Maldon Dunnere reminds his comrades that if they wish to avenge their dead lord they must not 'for feore murnan' [be anxious about life] while the poet of Beowulf tells us that the hero, preparing to plunge into Grendel's mere to seek vengeance for the killing of Hrothgar's retainer Aischere, 'nalles for ealdre mearn' [was not at all anxious about life].13 However, in a number of ways the approach of the poets of these two 'heroic' poems is strikingly different. In Maldon, for instance, Byrhtnoth is reacting to a fait accompli - the presence of a Viking force on an island, threatening the town of Maldon - and the behaviour of the English is generally depicted as defensive and negative. So right at the beginning of what has come down to us of the poem we find the statements that Byrhtnoth - who, incidentally, describes himself negatively as 'wnforcud' (51) [unstained in reputation] - was not prepared to tolerate cowardice ('nolde yrhdo gej^olian' [6]) and that the young kinsman of Offa in his turn was not prepared to weaken in the battle ('nolde / wacian aet J?am wige' [9-10]). Byrhtnoth's men are firmly instructed by means of two negatives that they should not be afraid

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('ne forhtedon na' [21]). To let the Vikings go without a fight ('unbefohtene' [57]) is described as too shameful (55-7), and tribute must not be obtained without a struggle (59). Once battle has commenced, the first encounter described is between what seems to be the entire Viking force and just three individuals on the Anglo-Saxon side, and these are portrayed as not afraid ('tmforhte' [79]) and not prepared to flee ('noldon ... fleam gewyrcan' [81]).14 Later we hear of the cowards who did not care for battle (192), and did not wish to be there (185), and we are told that many had previously spoken boldly who would not hold out later in time of need (200-1), that those who remained were not cowardly ('wnearge' [206]), would not retreat (246, 275, 317), would not falter (258-9, 268), would not have a care for their lives (259, 260), indeed would not lay themselves open to reproach by leaving the battlefield alive (220, 249-50). And this repeated use of negatives which stress what we would call bravery by reminding the audience of its converse continues to the final line of the now incomplete poem, where we are told that Godric, son of ^thelgar, was definitely not that Godric who had fled, a negative statement highlighting the courage of the small band of resisters to the death by means of contrast with the cowardice of many of their comrades: 'Naes J?aet na se Godric J>e 6a gude forbeah .../15 From the moment they advance to the river bank to confront the enemy across the water, the Anglo-Saxons' strategy is depicted by the poet as essentially defensive, meeting and responding to the aggression of the Vikings. In reply to the challenge from the Viking spokesman, Byrhtnoth describes his role as that of a protector 'J>e wile gealgean ej?el J?ysne' (52) [who intends to defend this homeland] and the orders he issues to his men are to stand firm, to hold the positions that they have been given (19,102-3).16 The three warriors assigned the negative task of holding the bridge, that is, of preventing the Vikings from crossing the causeway, are not only not prepared to flee (apparently an option), but continue to defend themselves stoutly until they are finally cut down (83). (One wonders what the rest of Byrhtnoth's army was doing at the time.) This emphasis on defence rather than attack continues right up to the point where the transcript breaks off, with descriptions of warriors standing fast (301) and defending themselves valiantly (283). The adverbs fxste, fxstlice occur no fewer than six times and the related compound adjective stedefxst twice. After the death of Byrhtnoth there is certainly a number of references to individual Anglo-Saxons advancing and attacking.17 However, these acts too

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are reactive: their inspiration is loyalty,18 obligation to their lord, their avowed motive is vengeance not victory, and bravery here is the demonstration of unflinching courage in the face of what appear to be overwhelming odds, leading to certain death. In the three central fights in Beowulf, in contrast, the deeds of the eponymous hero are essentially active not reactive, and negatives relating to his actions19 are the exception, not the rule.20 So it is Beowulf's own choice to come to Denmark to destroy the monster Grendel and to spend the night in Hrothgar's hall in the hope that the monster will visit it. It is his decision to allow one of his men to be eaten by Grendel, so that he can better plan his own attack.21 When Grendel's mother seizes and carries off one of the Danes in her turn and Hrothgar challenges Beowulf to respond to her act of vengeance if he dare (1379), Beowulf does not wait for her to re-emerge from the mere22 but takes the initiative, plunging alone into the unknown and monster-ridden depths - an action which, outside myth and legend, might be considered not so much brave as ridiculously foolhardy. Even in the case of the fight with the dragon, when the aged but still exceptionally strong king can be said to be acting purely reactively in defence of his people, Beowulf takes the fight to the dragon's lair, determined once again on single combat, and he adopts the role of challenger. Although this time he arms himself with sword, armour, and a specially constructed iron shield, he states that were it not for the dragon's fire he would have fought unarmed: Nolde ic sweord beran, waepen to wyrme, gif ic wiste hu wi6 dam aglaecean elles meahte gylpe widgripan, swa ic gio wid Grendle dyde.23

That Beowulf is able to behave in this way with confidence against monstrous foes is of course thanks to his own superhuman qualities.24 From his first appearance in the poem he is depicted as having special qualifications for the deeds he is about to perform, not available to ordinary human beings. He has exceptional strength, being ... moneynnes maegenes strangest on paem daege J?ysses lifes, aej^ele ond eacen.25 He is also - not unlike Grendel - of exceptional size (247-51) and

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stands out among his companions (369-70). What is more, these special qualities are God-given (1270-1), and when he comes to Denmark to destroy Grendel, he, is perceived by the Danes as having been sent by God (381-4).26 Even before his encounter with Grendel, Beowulf's prowess has already been demonstrated by dangerous exploits undertaken in his youth (408-9, 419-20, 532-81), at least one of these initially embarked on as the result of a youthful wager - interpreted by Unferth as an act of foolhardiness - and revealing both strength and endurance and his willingness to risk life and limb for the sake of glory. His intent to attempt further deeds of valour even if death may be the result is forcefully expressed in his first speech to Hrothgar (426-55), when he requests permission to fight Grendel in words that suggest that far from conferring one, he is asking the king for a special favour.27 Indeed it early becomes clear that in that part of his life which the poet reveals to us, Beowulf's prime aim is to not so much to show himself to be courageous (though as he observes, 'wyrd oft nered / unfaegne eorl, J?onne his ellen deah' [572b-3] [Fate often protects an undoomed man, when his courage avails]), as through deeds of exceptional daring to win glory and enduring fame.28 To accomplish these goals he relies on his strength, as a man must do who thinks to win glory (1533-6).29 His philosophy is that since every one must die, wyrce se be mote domes aer deabe; bset bi3 drihtguman unlifgendum aefter selest.30

The key word is dom, a term which is found in a sense that corresponds roughly to modern 'glory'31 no fewer than eleven times in the poem, along with mxrdo 'fame, glory, glorious deed' (twelve times), lof(-) 'praise, glory' (three times), and blxd(-) 'power, vigour of life, glory' (six times).32 It is by the achieving of dom in his fight with Grendel that Beowulf is seen as comparable with the great Germanic hero Sigemund, who had similarly won lasting renown as a result of killing a dragon ('Sigemunde gesprong / aefter deaddaege dom unlytel' [884b-5] [To Sigemund accrued no little glory after his death]), and also as outdoing the unfortunate Unferth, who loses face because he did not have Beowulf's special advantages and so was not prepared to plunge into the depths of Grendel's mere ('baer he dome forleas, / ellenmaerSum' [1470b-la] [there he lost glory and renown for courage]), while in the

280 Janet Bately dragon episode Wiglaf desperately urges his injured lord to remember his earlier vow: Leofa Biowulf, laest eall tela, swa 3u on geogu3feore geara gecwaede, baet du ne alsete be 5e lifigendum dom gedreosan.33 It may be that this is the vow made by Beowulf before leaping into the mere: 'ic me mid Hruntinge / dom gewyrce, oj?5e mec deaS nimeS!' (1490b-l) [I will achieve glory with Hrunting, or death will carry me off]. As for mxrpu, translatable by 'glory/ 'glorious deed/ this, along with the compound ellenmxrpu, is again a term that is regularly associated with the hero in terms of both expectation and performance. So for instance when Beowulf arrives at Hrothgar's court almost his first words are that he has 'maerda fela / ongunnen on geogoj>e' (408b-9a) [undertaken many glorious deeds in his youth]. When Hrothgar entrusts Heorot to Beowulf's charge, he urges him to set his mind on glory: 'gemyne maer^o, maegenellen cy6' (659) [be mindful of glory, show your mighty valour]; when Beowulf grapples with Grendel's mother we are told that he is 'maerda gemyndig' (1530a) [mindful of glorious accomplishments]; when the 'gubcyning' is injured by the dragon, he nevertheless 'm(aer5a) gemunde' (2678a) [was mindful of glorious deeds]. We may compare the passage in the OE Orosius, where we are told that Alexander wished that his 'maerda waeren maran ]?onne Ercoles' (72.10-11) [wished that his glorious deeds were greater than Hercules'].34 However, it is neither dom nor maerpu but lof that Beowulf's epitaph describes him as most eager for: cwaedon baet he waere wyruldcyning[a] manna mildust ond mon(3w)aerust/ leodum lidost ond lofgeornost.35 Commenting on the term lofgeornost, Klaeber suggests that 'the reference is either to deeds of valor... or to the king's liberality toward his men.'36 In support of the former, he cites lines 1387ff., though lines 1534b-6a, 'Swa sceal man don, / b.onne he aet gude gegan fenced / longsumne lof

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[So a man must do, when he thinks to obtain long-lasting fame in battle], might have been even more appropriate here, and in this particular context, perhaps also the Seafarer, lines 72-80, with their reference to 'lof lifgendra' (73a) [praise from the living] as the best of epitaphs for a man and the desirability that hine aelda beam sefter hergen, and his lof sibban lifge mid englum awa to ealdre, ecan lifes blaed.37

The poet, then, in his depiction of Beowulf's exploits, concentrates on their offensive and positive aspects. The image that he builds up is that of a larger-than-life hero who performs superhuman feats and is dedicated to the acquisition of a glorious reputation. In this context boldness is a necessary prerequisite, taken for granted in a hero; the normal dividing line between courage/'bra very' and foolhardiness is an irrelevance,38 and contests, as in the case of the encounter with Grendel39 can be totally one-sided. The achievement is all.40 What emphasis there is on bravery relates to the fight against the dragon the first time that Beowulf has to take on a non-human adversary without Providence having ordained him the victory. Once again, we are told, the hero is relying on his own strength alone and 'ne bid swylc earges sid!' (2541b) [such an undertaking is not that of a coward]. Indeed, Beowulf is, in Edward B. Irving, Jr's words, 'the incarnation of the heroic spirit.'41 He fights as ever without concern for his life and the poet as usual concentrates on his concern for glory. However, in the event credit for victory is shared between Beowulf and his retainer and relative, Wiglaf,42 and it is Wiglaf who demonstrates true bravery, when, his companions having fled, he rushes unprotected by special defensive armour to aid his stricken lord. What then of the vocabulary of 'bravery' as used in the two poems? How many of the words listed in the relevant sections of the Thesaurus of Old English are to be found in Beowulf and Maldon, and what is their distribution in those poems? In the TOE-based lists that follow,43 words recorded in Beowulf are given in italics, words in Maldon in bold, words in both texts in bold italics. Words found in neither of these two texts are placed in final position, in square brackets. TOE's helpful flagging of words as found in poetry only (p), in glosses (g), as hapax legomena (°), or as questionable (q) is retained, but its use of length marks is not.

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TOE 6. Mental Faculties 06.02.07.06 COURAGE, BOLDNESS, VALOUR: anmedla, eorlscipep, hygejyrymmop, modsefap, modpracup, ellen, hyge, mod, [bealdnes0, (ge)bield(o), hwaetscipe, snellscipe0, {?egnscipe] .WARLIKE VALOUR: gu]jmodop, wig, [guj?cystop] .MIGHTY VALOUR: rmegenellen0? .PROWESS, VALOUR: herew3esmop, hildecystop, [hildej)rymmop, hildef>ryj>op] .BRAVE, BOLD, VALOROUS: deor, ellenrof,ferh]jfrec,fram, hrorp, modiglic, rofp, cene, god, modig, wlanc, caf, [dohtig, ellenheardp, ellenlic, modrof°P, J>raecfulq, ^rist(e)] ..OF HIGH COURAGE: modiglic, [modwlancp] ..VERY BRAVE: bregorofop, cynebealdq,felahror°p, [hwaeteadigop, leodhwaetop] ..BRAVE IN FIGHT: d3edceneop,fyrdhw3etp, guprofp, heapudeorp, heafiurofp, hildedeorp, nipheardp, wigheardop, [aescroff, beaducafop, daedhwaetp, guj)hwa3top, hildfromop, J?raecheardop, {?raecrofop] ..EAGER TO ADVANCE: forj>geornop .COURAGEOUSLY: ellenlice, modiglice, {jegnlice, [bealde, cenlice, ranclice, stranglice, unheanlice] .TO TAKE COURAGE: [gecollenferhtan08, heafdu up ahebban, mod niman] ..TO BEAR ONESELF BRAVELY: [bealdianop] .A BRAVE ACT: deed, ellendaedp, ellenweorcp, ellen ..(OF DEED) BRAVE, RENOWNED: deorlicop 06.02.07.06.02 Boldness: cenpuop .BOLD, CONFIDENT: collenferhpp, stearcheortp, heard, [beald, framlic, heardlic, hwaetmodp, ranc, stercedferhj?p, J)ristlic] ..KEEN, BOLD, ACTIVE: hwxt, snelHc, snell ..VERY BOLv:felamodigp, [ellenj^rist, searoceneop] ..BOLD IN FIGHT: garcenfp [gu{5heard, hildeheardop, orlegfromop, wig{?ristop] ..BOLD IN JOURNEYING: sipfromp .BOLDLY: on elne, caflice, [framlice, heardlice, frecne] ..BOLDLY, CONFIDENTLY: bealdlice 6.02.07.06.02.01 FEARLESSNESS: [egeleasnes0, forhtleasnes] .FEARLESS: unearg, unforht, [ungeblyged, unearhlic0, unfortigende0, unforhtmod, unforwandodlic] .FEARLESSLY: unforhte, [butan gewande, egeleaslice0, unforhtlice, unforwandigendlice, unforwandodlice] 06.02.07.06.02.02 Boldness, daring: [nej?ing, noj?p]

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.HIGH SPIRITS, BRAVADO: wlenc(u) .DARING, BOLD:frecne [arod, gedyrstig, free, garbristop, horse, bristiglic] .BOLDLY, DARINGLY: [dyrstiglice, briste, bristlice] .BOLDLY, VIGOROUSLY: [geheortlice0, horsclice] .BOLDLY, RASHLY: [bristiglice] 06.02.07.06.02.03 PRESUMPTION: .PRESUMPTUOUS, RASH, BOLD: (ge)dyrstig, [dol, foredyrstig, briste, bristful°8] To which may be added the following entries from sections 06.02.07 Will, determination, resolution, and 6.02.07.01 Strength, fortitude, and 13.02 War: 06.02.07 .BOLD-MINDED, OF STRONG PURPOSE: swiphycgendep, pristhydigp, [bristhycgendep] 06.02.07.01 .STEADFAST, BRAVE: anhydigp', heardhicgendep, hygerofp, hygepih-

tigop, swipferhpp, [anmod, deormodp, heardmod, geheort, hygestrangop, modhwaetp] 13.02 ..BOLD IN WAR: beadurofp In the study that follows, not only will the 'plus' factor - boldness as a good quality - be looked for in the contenders for a place in the Old English 'bravery' list, but distinction will be made between those words found in general contexts and those in situations where brave behaviour might be expected. However, first it is necessary to eliminate certain words for which renderings relating to either boldness or bravery are not appropriate in the two poems under discussion,44 or which are at best, as Rudolph puts it, 'vague poetic words used favorably of warriors,' perhaps merely identifying the characters as heroes - always bearing in mind the demands of versification.45 Modern renderings are exemplary only and are taken from the dictionaries of Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (BT), J.R. Clark Hall (CH), the Toronto Dictionary of Old English (DOE),46 the glossaries to Friederich Klaeber's and Donald G. Scragg's editions of Beowulf (K) and the Battle ofMaldon (S) respectively, and S.A.J. Bradley's translations of these texts (Br). A. Beowulf

A. I Eliminations A. I.I Nouns Nouns in this category, glossed 'courage/ 'valour/ or 'bravado' by CH,

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but for which such a rendering is not appropriate to their use in Beowulf, are anmedla (BT, DOE, K 'pride, arrogance, presumption, pomp' etc.), hyge (BT, K 'mind, heart, soul'), hygeprymm (BT 'strength of heart or mind'; K 'greatness of heart'),47 wlencu (BT, K 'pride, high spirit, daring'). To these may be added dxd (CH, BT, DOE, K 'deed, action' etc.) and modsefa (CH, BT, K 'mind, heart, spirit, character').4 Relating to the behaviour expected of warriors or heroes, but with core meanings other than 'bravery' and again to be eliminated from this study as not used in Beowulf in actual 'bravery' situations, are eorlscipe (DOE 2 'act of heroism, noble achievement'),49 herewxsm (BT 'warlike fruits of martial deeds,' K 'warlike stature, martial vigor'),50 hildecyst ('battle-excellence'), modpracu ('mind-force'),51 wig (lit. 'war, battle').52 Lastly, gupmod may be eliminated, since it is used not of a person but a boar image on a helmet,53 while the adjective and adverb frecne bear connotations of terribleness, audacity, and danger and though used of the dragon and the giants are never applied to humans in this poem.54 A. 1.2 Adjectives Forms in this category are dyrstig, god, (nip)heard, (fela)hror, snell, snellic, stearcheort, wlanc, and finally, a handful of compounds in ferhp and hy(c)g-. (a) Hror, felahror, snell, and snellic are adjectives denoting primarily nimbleness, agility, and briskness and never occur in Beowulf in contexts involving actual bold or brave behaviour,55 while for wlanc - used indiscriminately of Beowulf himself, Hrothgar's spokesman, Hygelac, Grendel's dam, and the dragon - its primary sense 'proud' is perfectly appropriate.56 Stearcheort has a first element meaning 'stiff, rigid, unyielding, stern' and so forth, and is used of both Beowulf and the dragon.57 It is translated 'truculent at (of) heart' by Bradley. God, with the primary sense 'good,' may refer to a whole range of virtues other than, or as well as, bravery and is, incidentally, not included in Rudolph's list. As for heard, alone and in the compound nipheard, there is no good cause to reject its core meaning of hardness (surely a heroic quality): when Beowulf and Sigemund, among others, are described by this adjective, it is their toughness that is being referred to.59 (b) Anhydig, pristhydig, heardhicgende, swiphycgende, hygepihtig, collenferhp, swipferhp, ferhpfrec. The words anhydig, heardhicgende, swiphycgende, thanks to their first elements, relate to single-mindedness and strength or powerfulness of thought respectively,60 while swipferhp m be translated 'strong-minded.' It is found four times in Beowulf,61 no

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of these in situations where bold or brave behaviour is actually involved, being used of the Danes as they wonder what to do about Grendel, of Beowulf's Geats as they go to sit down and feast; of Heremod, after his degeneration has been described, and of Beowulf himself, in a non-specific context, after Grendel's death, and in a combination, snotor ond swydferhd, which reminds the reader of the association in Beowulf of wisdom and strength, sapientia etfortitudo. We may compare the word stipmod, which is used in the context of Beowulf's fight against the dragon, but which has a first element carrying the core meaning of 'stiff, firm, strong/ and so forth and which is rightly listed by TOE under the sub-heading 'stubborn, obstinate.'62 Hygepihtig too relates to strength of mind, in this case determination or resolution.63 Collenferp, rendered by DOE l>rave, bold spirited; proud; audacious,' is more problematic, since its first element is not found outside this compound and the related verb gecollenferhtan, and for Rudolph its meaning is 'always unclear to some extent.'64 In Beowulf it is applied to the hero as he gets ready to return home and to Wiglaf as he returns laden with treasure to his dying lord, on both occasions picking up the alliteration of the second half-line.65 It thus clearly falls into the category of words used in a vague sense to designate a warrior. Lastly ferhpfrec, 'spirit-greedy,' applied to Finn at the time of his death, is a hapax legomenon surely constructed to meet the demands of alliteration. Its second element, free, is excluded altogether by Rudolph from his list.66 A. II The remaining words in my lists fall into two groups, according to whether they carry some aspect of 'boldness' as their primary meaning or whether 'boldness' is merely one of a variety of possible secondary senses assigned to them by the dictionary makers on contextual grounds. In the latter category are a number of terms indicating some quality of mind, viz. mod and compounds in mod, also two further elements with core meanings relating to briskness, strenuousness, activeness, viz. hwxt and fram, alone and in compounds. A. II.l Words with 'boldness' merely as possible secondary sense A. ILl.i Mod, (fela)modig, modiglic Mod, and compounds in mod, are, like hyge and its compounds,67 wholly dependent on the contexts in which they are used for their interpretation in any positive sense, and in Beowulf these contexts are mainly of the kind described by Rudolph as 'general,' not specific with

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respect to 'bravery, courage/ Modiglic (CH 'high-souled, lofty, proud: brave, bold: splendid, magnificent') is the adjective used by Hrothgar's spokesman to describe Beowulf and his companions on their arrival at Heorot.68 Modig (CH 'spirited, daring, bold, brave, high-souled, magnanimous/ and in a bad sense, 'impetuous, headstrong, arrogant, proud') occurs no fewer than thirteen times in the poem, all in 'good' contexts, with felamodig twice. Simplex and compound are used of a number of characters, individually and collectively, from Beowulf and Wiglaf to the young men as they ride home after tracking the dying Grendel to the mere and the band of Geats as they return to their boat. In most instances the word is located in the first half-line, conveniently alliterating both with the first stressed syllable of the second half-line and its partner in the first, and once again Rudolph's reference to 'vague poetic words used favorably of warriors' comes to mind.69 In some instances Klaeber's 'high spirited' may seem the most appropriate rendering. However, very occasionally the context is one where the quality of mind expected is indeed courage. Such an occasion is that where Wiglaf joins his wounded lord in attacking the dragon and burns his hand (2698). (A second instance, where Beowulf is referred to as modig in the account of the fight with Grendel, is perhaps weakened by its immediate context, which foregrounds his relationship to Hygelac rather than his bravery against the monster.)70 As for the simplex mod itself, although this is found in Beowulf twenty-three times, only twice does Klaeber assign to it the meaning 'high spirit, courage' once with reference to Beowulf and once to Unferth. These last are line 1057 (where Beowulf's mod is said to have combined with God to foil Grendel's murderous plans) and line 1167 (where mod micel is used as a variant to ferhp in a reference to the Danish court's perception of Unferth's qualities). In neither of these instances does the context actually demand identification with 'bravery' rather than the less specific 'spirit' or 'determination.' A. II. 1. ii hw3et,fram, rof

Also in this category of words 'used in a vague sense to designate a warrior' are the adjectives hw3et,framf and rof. Hwxt is defined by the dictionaries as 'quick, active; bold, brave/ also 'sharp, brisk' (CH) and Vigorous, stout' (BT).71 (In the Old English Orosius it corresponds to the Latin terms fortis and [noun] virtus.) It is used five times of groups of warriors in bravery-neutral contexts,72 twice as an epithet applied to individuals (Wiglaf's messenger, as he announces Beowulf's death

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[3028], and Heoroweard, in a passage in which we are told that Heorogar was not prepared to give him his sword [2161ff.]), and twice in the compoundfyrdhwdet, 'active in war, warlike' (of Beowulf's men, as they carry Grendel's head back from the mere [1641], and as a general description of Ongentheow's sons [2476]),73 on both occasions in collocation with/ram. Although from (from), as used of persons,74 is glossed by Klaeber 'bold, brave,' and the older dictionaries75 also include the word 'bold' in their definitions, it is clear that the alternatives which they provide - 'strenuous,' 'active,' and 'strong' - are at once better representative of its meaning and fully appropriate to the contexts of Beowulf's two instances of from used, as we have seen, in collocation wiihfyrdhwxt, while for the third BT suggests the translation 'firm.'76 As for the compound sipfrom (1813), this is actually glossed 'eager to depart' by Klaeber and translated 'keyed up for journeying' by Bradley, and is found in the bravery-neutral context of readiness by the Geats for a return home from Denmark. Last in this group is rof, a word of frequent occurrence in Beowulf, being found there six times as a simplex and twelve times as the second element of compounds. The simplex is rendered 'vigorous, strong, brave, noble, renowned' by CH, Valiant, stout, strong' by BT, hence its inclusion among 'bravery' words in TOE. Rudolph, however, conceding that it 'may be translated "strong, mighty, or brave"' but favouring the translation 'renowned/ finds it 'difficult to infer its meaning from the contexts in which it appears.'77 The word is certainly braveryneutral in Beowulf, being used here not only of the hero but also of Grendel. Interestingly, it is applied to these two major figures alone. Grendel is referred to by Beowulf as 'rof... nibgeweorca' (682b-3a) [renowned for his malice] and as 'maegnes rof (2084a) [notorious for his strength]. Beowulf is described by the poet as 'rofne randwigan' (1793a) [renowned shield-warrior] as he goes peacefully to bed after his killing of Grendel's dam, as 'rof oretta, / heard under helme' (2538b-9a) [the renowned warrior, hard beneath his helmet] as he goes alone into the dragon's lair; and again as 'Sone rofan' (2690a), as the dragon charges him for the third time. No less significantly he is addressed as 'daedum rof (2666b) [renowned for deeds] by Wiglaf (by way of encouragement?/gentle reminder?) as the latter urges the flagging hero on to even greater efforts.78 As for the compounds in rof, three of these have first elements meaning simply 'battle, war' and are translated in the dictionaries by a range of terms relating to renown as well as boldness and bravery in battle. So, for instance, beadurof is ren-

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dered 'war-renowned, bold in war' by BT, 'strong in battle, renowned in war' by CH, and 'brave and renowned in battle' by DOE. Guproffor BT is 'famous in war' (CH 'brave in battle'); and heapurof 'famed fo excellence in battle' (CH 'famed in war, brave'). None of the contexts in which they are found in Beowulf is of fighting or warfare, nor is brave behaviour being specifically referred to, the words, with one exception, being selected merely as epithets appropriate to a king or warrior. So guprof is applied to Hrothgar in the context of the arrival of Beowul (608a); beadurof79 to Beowulf in the context of the raising of a monu ment to the dead hero (3160a), heapurof to the retainers riding backm from the mere after Grendel's defeat (864a), and to Hygelac as he gives presents to Beowulf (2191a). The one exception is the description by Hrothgar of the newly arrived Beowulf as heapurof, with the strength of thirty men in his grip (381). So too with the other compounds in -rof, the unique form bregorof (Rudolph, 'of royal renown')80 is used of Hygelac as he sits in his hall at the return of Beowulf (1925b). Ellenrof(DOE 'Strong. 1. Of people,... brave, strong/ but also 'used loosely in a context where a term of commendation is not expected') is applied to Beowulf as he addresses Hrothgar's spokesman on his arrival at Heorot and to Hrothgar's spokesman on that same occasion (340a and 358a), to warriors feasting after the death of Grendel's dam (1787b), and to a warrior 'Everyman' as death approaches (3063a).81 Higerof, applied to Beowulf before he leaves home for Denmark (204a), is an emendation, while sigerof, used of Hrothgar (619b), is not taken by either dictionary makers or editors to be a boldness/bra very word at all.82 As Rudolph comments, the position of rof in a list of bra very-words is less than secure.83 A. II. l.iii Dyrstig, *prist Dyrstig (DOE 'bold, daring, presumptuous, audacious, rash' etc.) is etymologically related to the verb 'to dare' and is often found as a translation of Latin ausus. In Beowulf it is used in a comment (2838b) on the fact that few Geats, m&genagendra, had prospered in an encounter with the dragon, no matter how daring in deeds they might be. Prist (CH 'daring, rash, bold; audacious, shameless') also occurs only once in Beowulf, in the compound pristhydig (CH 'bold, valorous/ K 'bold-minded, brave/ Br 'intrepid'). It is used in an unthreatening context,84 to describe Beowulf as, on the point of death but victorious over the dragon, he hands over his helmet, ring, and corslet to Wiglaf (2810a).

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A. II.2 This leaves us with a group of words with 'boldness' apparently as their primary sense: viz. the adjectives *beald, cene, dear, and the nouns cenpu, and ellen and related compounds.85 A. 11.2.1 Beald Interestingly, it is the ancestor of modern English 'bold'86 that is of the least frequent occurrence in Beowulf, appearing only in the compound cyningbald (DOE 'bold as a king, very bold'). Once again it occurs in an 'unthreatening' context, being an epithet applied to the group of Geats, as they carry Grendel's head triumphantly back from the mere (1634b). Dear (DOE 'fierce, formidable, bold') is another 'boldness' adjective found in Beowulf which is bravery-neutral, being applicable equally to the eponymous hero and to Grendel. It appears both as simplex (two times), with adjective-suffix -lie, and in combination with the battlewords heapu- (two times) and hilde- (eight times). And again the bulk of instances is found in contexts where physical bravery or boldness is not involved: so dear (1933b) occurs in a negative context - of Modthryth's retainers, afraid of their mistress; heapudeor (688a) is used of Beowulf as he lies down to sleep; hildedeor three times of Beowulf, as he places Grendel's arm above the hall door (834a); as he returns triumphant from the mere (1646a); as he goes to bid farewell to Hrothgar (1816a), and once each of the Danish coastguard as he directs Beowulf to Heorot (312a); of Hrothgar as he plays the harp (2107a), and of Wiglaf and Geatish retainers in the context of Beowulf's funeral (3111a and 3169b). Only very occasionally is deor or its compounds used in contexts where actual behaviour of a brave or bold nature might be expected or a reference to a general ability to be bold, fierce, or brave be appropriate. These are line 772 where heapudeor is used to describe Beowulf and Grendel as they fight in Heorot, line 2090 where Beowulf tells Hygelac how Grendel, 'dior daedfruma' [ferocious doer of deeds] purposed to carry him off in his glof, and perhaps also line 2183 where the poet reports how Beowulf, ... mancynnes maeste craefte ginfaestan gife, be him God sealde, heold hildedeor.87

As for deorlic (DOE 'brave, bold') this is used with the non-personal noun dxd, in a negative context (585a).

290 Janet Bately

A. II.2.ii Cene and cenpu Cene (DOE 'bold, brave, daring, etc.') and its compounds dsedcene and garcene, in contrast, are never used in this poem to refer to monsters or villains,88 though on one occasion cene describes, with intentional or unintentional irony, the Danes, as they listen from a place of safety to the sounds of the fight between Beowulf and Grendel (768b), while dxdcene (DOE 'bold in deeds, daring') and garcene (CH 'bold in fight') serve merely as appropriate epithets to describe kings or heroes - garcene (1958b) in a general description of Offa and dxdcene (1645a) of Beowulf, returning from the mere, in a passage of twenty-four lines in which the hero is also described as swipmod, hror, modig, and hildedeor, and his band of companions as pryplic, cyningbald, felamodig, from, andfyrdhw&t. The sole instance of cene in a genuinely 'positive' context is in line 206, where boldness/bra very is the criterion for selection to accompany Beowulf on his way to Denmark. As for the noun cenpu (DOE 'boldness, courage'), this is - somewhat surprisingly - a hapax legomenon.89 It is used in an unequivocably positive sense, along with ellen, to refer to Wiglaf's behaviour in helping Beowulf against the dragon: Da ic aet J?earfe [gefraegn] J?eodcyninges andlongne eorl ellen cyQan, craeft ond cendu, swa him gecynde waes.90

A. II.2. iii Ellen Ellen (DOE I 'Courage, strength'; Ib 'specifically: courageous deed, act of strength')91 is clearly a heroic virtue.92 In Beowulf the simplex occurs no less than twenty times, sometimes semi-adverbially or in adverbial phrases, beside a single instance of adverb ellenlice.93 In nominal compounds it is found not only in ellendaed two times,94 ellenweorc six times,95 and rmegenellen one time,96 but also in ellenmaerpu two times97 and ellengaest98 once. As adjectives we have ellenrofand ellenseoc." Since ellen is something that a warrior/hero is expected to show (see Maxims II 'Ellen sceal on eorle' [16a] [courage belongs in a warrior]) and is a contributory factor to his survival (in Beowulf's own words 'Wyrd oft nered / unfsegne eorl, J^onne his ellen deah' [572b-3] [Fate often protects an undoomed man when his courage avails]), it is only to be expected that forms of this word should be found applied to Sigemund (ellen [893b], ellendsed [876a, 900a]), Finn (1097a), Heremod (902a), Dasghrefn of the Hugas (2506a), the Hetware as they defeat Hygelac (2917a), the princes of the Danes in times gone by (3b), and Beowulf's ancestors, the Waegmundings (2816a), and that it should be

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mentioned as something expected of, promised, or generally shown/ displayed/performed by Beowulf (602a, 637a, 2535b, 2876b, and, in compounds ellenweorc [661a, 2643a, 3173b] and rnxgenellen [659b]).100 Ellenmxrpu (DOE 'fame for courage, renown for strength') is something which Beowulf rejoices in, after his fight with Grendel (828a), and which Unferth loses, when he hands over Hrunting (1471a). However, ellen is also used of the dragon (2349a),101 elleng&st of Grendel (86a), and ellenweorc of the conflicts that Beowulf had survived up to the last fight against the dragon (2399a), while ellenlice is the adverb applied by Beowulf to the behaviour of his adversary, Grendel's dam (2122a). In a negative context it is the quality 'lost' by Beowulf' companions other than Wiglaf when they failed to join in the fight against the dragon (2861b). Finally it is used of both Beowulf and Wiglaf in danger-specific contexts: of Beowulf as he leaps into the mere, and as he realizes that his sword is useless against Grendel's dam (1493a, 1529b), of Beowulf and Wiglaf together, as they kill the dragon (2706b);103 and of Wiglaf alone as he joins in the fight against the dragon (2676a, and - coupled with cenpu - 2695b). A.II.2.iv Unforht In contrast, the negative construction unforht (CH 'fearless, bold') is used only of the Danish coastguard - speaking after he knows that Beowulf and his Geats are friends not foes (287a) - while the adverb unforhte [fearlessly] is applied by Beowulf to Grendel's expectation that he will consume Geats in the hall that night (444a).104 B. The Battle ofMaldon Most of the potential 'boldness' and 'bravery' words in Maldon105 either occur also in Beowulf or are compounds with elements found in that poem, and their primary meanings have thus already been discussed. The only completely new terms are caf, caflice, forpgeorn, and pegnlice, and as we shall see, there are good grounds for discarding all of these from our lists. Concentration therefore in this section will be essentially on types of context. Once again, however, it is necessary to begin with eliminations. B. I Eliminations B. I.I Words found also in Beowulf: god, heard, and wlanc As we have seen, the primary meanings of god, heard, and wlanc are 'good,' 'hard/ and 'proud' respectively, and in Maldon as in Beowulf

292 Janet Bately they never occur in contexts requiring the translation 'bold' or 'brave.' Of six occurrences of god, two are found at the very beginning of the fragment and appear in collocation with the nouns hige and gepanc and refer essentially to the morale, real or hoped for, of the English troop.106 Heard (S 'hard, bitter, resolute, brave, fierce'), wigheard (S 'hard in war, fierce') and adverb heardlice (S 'fiercely') are all used indiscriminately of English and Vikings,107 as is wlanc (S 'proud, splendid').108 B. 1.2 Words not in Beowulf: caf,forpgeorn, pegnlice Caf and adverb caflice are now defined by DOE as 'nimble, active, quick; ready, willing, responsive/ also 'able to perform well, effective,' and 'quickly, swiftly, readily, willingly,' respectively. Forpgeorn (Maldon 281a) has the basic meaning 'eager to go forth' and so could equally well be used of cowards as of bold or brave men. Pegnlice simply means 'in a thegnly manner,' 'as a thegn should'109 and is found in glosses to Latin viriliter. B.II.l Words for which a rendering 'courage' is a possible contextual meaning B. Il.l.i Nouns: hyge, mod The core meaning of both hyge and mod is, as we have seen, 'heart,' 'mind,' but with an important secondary signification that is defined by BT as 'a special quality of the soul ... in a good sense ... [and] in a bad sense' (s.v. mod II [a] and [b]). In the case of Maldon, it is not possible for the modern reader to determine which of a range of possible meanings was in the author's mind, or indeed whether any degree of specificity was actually intended. Our modern uncertainty is reflected in translations of the poem. So in line 4, where the young warriors are urged to advance, 'hicgan to handum 7 to hige godum/ Scragg's 1991 rendering of hige godum is 'bold thoughts' (note: 'great courage'), and Bradley's 'a doughty disposition.'110 For the old retainer's rallying cry, lines 312-13, 'Hige sceal be heardra, heorte be cenre, / mod sceal be mare be ure maegen lytlacV Scragg suggests 'The spirit must be the firmer, the heart the bolder, / courage must be the greater as our strength diminishes,'111 Bradley has 'Resolution must be the tougher, hearts the keener, courage must be the more as our strength grows less/ Roberta Frank translates 'Will must be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater, as our strength lessens/112 and Bruce Mitchell

The Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle ofMaldon 29

and Fred C. Robinson move from the general to the specific: 'Our resolve must be so much the firmer, our hearts so much the bolder, our courage so much the greater, by so much as our (physical) strength diminishes.' B. II l.ii Adjectives: modig, cene, snell One word eliminated from the Beowulf lists actually occurs in Maldon in a context where a boldness/bravery word might well be expected. Snell is used by a Viking of the Vikings, clearly in a complimentary sense, and might have been selected by the poet in the knowledge that ON snjall had the meaning 'valiant, brave.' In OE it is, as we have seen, normally used in the senses 'quick, active, swift/ Modig appears twice, once of /Elfere and Maccus, holders of the 'bridge,' and once of Byrhtnoth. Although on both occasions the contexts are ones in which demonstrations of bravery are expected, on both occasions the choice of epithet seems determined by requirements of alliteration (to match the proper name Maccus [80] and the synonym for God, Metod [147]). That leaves us with cene, used no fewer than three times - in line 215, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this paper, in line 283, in a reference to the quality of the Anglo-Saxons' defensive fighting,113 and in line 312, in conjunction with hige and mod, when Byrhtwold urges on his comrades the greater strength/courage of mind as their physical might diminishes. In this last context it is translated variously 'bold' and 'keen.'114 B.II.l.iii Adjectives: unearh, unforht Here unearh, in line with Maldon's fondness for negatives, is used of Byrhtnoth's retainers, advancing after their lord's death (206), while 'wigan unforhte' [fearless warriors] is used of ^Ifere and Maccus, defenders of the 'bridge' (79).115 B. Il.l.iv Adverbs and adverbial phrases: baldlice, on ellen, modelice Baldlice (DOE 'boldly, courageously, confidently; rashly' etc.) occurs twice in Maldon.116 The first instance is used to describe a Viking's action in attempting to cross the causeway (78), and does not carry the 'plus'-element. The second refers to the manner of speech of one of the English warriors (311), as do the single instances of on ellen (211) and modelice (200). As the context of this last shows - 'baer modelice manega spraecon / be eft aet baer[f]e bolian noldon' [many there spoke bravely / who would not hold out later at time of need] - speaking

294 Janet Bately

bravely or boldly does not necessarily go hand in hand with brave behaviour. Indeed in Maldon, what bravery words there are in that part of the poem that has come down to us are linked to the hope/expectation/ intention of brave behaviour (or braveness of mind), rather than to specific actions of boldness or bravery. Not what people are, but what they need to be. Certainly the Vikings are categorized by their spokesman as snell, and the poet describes the English in general as defending themselves keenly (cene, in alliteration with dufon and cellod, in a passage focusing on defensive shield and corslet). However, the only individuals particularized in this way are the three men defending the Imdge' and Byrhtnoth himself, and on both occasions the adjective used - modig - is little more than a vague term of commendation, selected to meet the demands of alliteration. In Beowulf too potential 'boldness/bravery' adjectives and nouns to a very great extent fall into Rudolph's category of 'words of approval which could be used of warriors' and may have been selected to provide a heroic backcloth. Very few of them actually occur in bravery- or boldness-requiring contexts. And even here the immediate contexts often suggest that they are being used as no more than poetically suitable epithets. So modig is certainly used of Beowulf in the passage describing his fight with Grendel, but, as we have seen, as part of the larger description 'se modega maeg Hygelaces' (813). (We may compare his designation as 'se goda maeg Higelaces' [758] [the good kinsman of Hygelac] earlier in the same episode.) He is also described along with Grendel - as heapodeor [formidable in battle]. Otherwise the poet concentrates on the hero's strength and fierceness (repe, gram). In the fight with Grendel's dam, we learn once more of his strength, fierceness, anger, resoluteness, care for glory, the only potential bravery words being attached to negatives. So at one point he was powerless against the monster - 'no he J?aes modig wass' (1508) [no matter how brave he was] - while we are subsequently told that he was not slow/sluggish in respect of courage ('nalas elnes last' [1529b]). And in the actual fight against the dragon the poet/narrator does not use any potential bravery/boldness words at all of Beowulf,117 leaving it to Wiglaf to describe his lord as 'daadum rof' (2666b). What we today call bravery is in this poem the hallmark not of the hero, but of his loyal retainer, fighting, like the men in Maldon after the death of Byrhtnoth, against seemingly hopeless odds, but willing/prepared to die with his

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lord. And, as it were in response to the challenge in Maldon as to who would turn out to be cene - unanswered, of course in that incomplete poem - it is of Wiglaf, as we have seen, that the poet says that he displayed 'ellen ... / craeft ond cen6u.' Notes 1 Line 215. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Maldon are from Scragg's 1981 edition and translations are from Scragg, Maldon AD 991. 2 See Scragg, Maldon, 81. 3 See Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ and Roberts and Kay, Thesaurus. 4 Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 4. See also ibid., 203, 'some seemed merely words of approval which could be used of warriors and by extension of saints, Biblical heroes and heroines, and others.' 5 Ibid., 23 and 120-2. 6 For examples of the lack of agreement between major dictionaries see Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 3. 7 Beowulf, 2596-2610. Cited here and throughout from Klaeber. Unless otherwise stated translations are my own and as literal as possible - always bearing in mind the fact that 'it is often not possible to assign an occurrence to one sense in ModE without arbitrariness and the attendant loss of semantic richness' (DOE s.v. craef 8 Maldon, 195-7: more men than was at all fitting, if they had all called to mind the favours that [Byrhtnoth] had done for their benefit. 9 Conventionally described today by the fourteenth-century loanword hero though Byrhtferth - shown in the fragment as doing nothing more spectacular than his loyal retainers - perhaps deserves only a neutral title, such as 'leader.' See further the extensive literature on the treatment of hero and heroism in Old English poetry. 10 Beowulf, 685-7 and Maldon, 94-5. See also Beowulf, 440-1,603-6. 11 There is no hint in the account of the fight with Grendel that Beowulf expects an unfavourable outcome, as there is in the case of his encounters with Grendel's mother and the dragon. See also his statement to the coastguard (277-9) and Hrothgar's words (381-2). 12 Beowulf, 2524-5; Maldon, 246-7. Beowulf is of course merely stating his intentions in advance of the fight; Leofsunu is in the thick of battle. 13 Maldon, 259; Beowulf, 1442; cf. Maldon, 260 'feores hi ne rohton' [they did not care about life]. 14 Cf. Irving, 'Heroic Style/ 464: 'the intense consciousness of the possibility

296 Janet Bately of flight in the minds of the combatants has been suggested all through the poem by the unusual way of defining courage as "not fleeing/" and Phillpotts, 'Danish Affinities/ 174-7, who sees the epic formulas 'he did not flee in the fray, but fought while he had weapons' or 'might wield his weapons' as 'perhaps peculiarly Danish.' 15 Line 325: It was not at all that same Godric who fled that battle. For negatives in other contexts see, e.g. lines 64-5 and 70-1, and the reference to Godric's flight, 'on bam geraedum be hit riht ne waes' (190) [on to the trappings, which was highly improper]. 16 See also Maldon, 100 and 127. 17 See Maldon, 205,225,229,253,260,297,323. 18 For loyalty as the theme of Maldon, see, e.g., Frank, 'Heroic Literature/ 204-6. 19 For a different use of negatives - to define the ideal hero by mentioning what a hero is not - see Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 2 and chap. 1, esp. 9 n. 7. 20 Often they relate to positive and aggressive intentions, as, for instance, Beowulf's heroic renunciation of weapons (Beowulf, 683-5) and his decision not to let Grendel live (Beowulf, 792). For his determination not to withdraw one step in the dragon fight see above, 276 and n. 12. 21 There has been a variety of attempts to justify this action (or rather inaction). 22 Having avenged her son and recovered his arm, she might of course never have returned to Heorot: see Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 23 Beowulf, 2518b-21:1 would not wish to carry a sword, a weapon against the reptile if I knew how I might otherwise gloriously [?] wrestle with the monster, as I once did with Grendel. 24 He also has at his disposal exceptional armour and weapons; a helmet that could not be bitten into by weapons (1453-4), a loaned sword that had never before failed its wielder (1460-1), an enormous iron shield (2337-9). Ironically, Beowulf's own sword fails against the dragon because of his excessive strength. 25 Beowulf, 196-8a: the strongest of mankind at that time in this mortal existence, nobly born and mighty [DOE 'endowed with excellent qualities']. See also, e.g., Beowulf, 750-3,788-90, and (for the fact that he had the strength of thirty men in his hand) 379-81. 26 See further Beowulf, 939-42,1056-7. 27 Cf. also Beowulf, 632-8. 28 See, e.g., Beowulf, 2177-9. 29 Cf., e.g., Tolkien, 'Monsters and the Critics/ 80: 'Beowulf... who used his great gift of mxgen to earn dom and /o/among men and posterity.'

The Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle ofMaldon 297 30 Beowulf, 1387b-9: let him who can achieve glory before death - that is afterwards the best for a man no longer living. 31 Another loanword which is not recorded before the end of the Middle English period. 32 Modern English equivalents from Klaeber. Of these words only dom is found in Maldon, where it occurs with the meaning 'glory' only once and then in the mouth of Byrhtnoth, who somewhat ironically is portrayed as urging his young retainers to concentrate on the fight, if they wished 'on Denon ... dom gefeohtan' (129) [to win glory from the Danes]. 33 Beowulf, 2663-6a: Dear Beowulf, perform everything well, as you declared long ago in the days of your youth, that while you lived you would not let your glory decline. 34 Rendering Latin 'aemulatione permotus, ut Herculis acta superaret.' I cite the Orosius from my edition. 35 Beowulf, 3180-2: They said that among the kings of this world he had been the mildest [most compassionate?] of men, and kindest, the most gracious to his people and the most eager for glory. 36 Beowulf, p. 230. 37 Lines 77-9: the children of men will praise him afterwards and his glory will live then among the angels for ever, [in the] blessedness of eternal life. I cite text and translation of the Seafarer from Gordon's edition. For Tolkien's interpretation of to/in Beowulf see 'Monsters and the Critics,' 91-4. 38 Cf. Wiglaf's comment that Beowulf 'manna maest msrda gefremede, / daeda dollicra' (2645-6a) [of all men has performed the greatest deeds of glory and audacious acts], and see, e.g., Schiicking, 'Ideal of Kingship,' 47, quoting Heusler: '[The] first virtue [of the Germanic heroes] is bravery, but this may also be blind courage, for heroic poetry loves bravado, over-activity, contempt of caution.' 39 In this 'contest' we are told that Beowulf suddenly seizes the unsuspecting Grendel's arm and Grendel can do no more than struggle to get free. There is no mention of any injury at all to Beowulf. The only damage (apart from that to Grendel himself) is done to the hall, as Grendel threshes desperately about, trying to get free from Beowulf's superhuman grip. 40 Beowulf's rebuttal of Unferth's accusations hinges on the fact that although he and Breca had - being young - made a foolish boast, they in the event fulfilled it. 41 Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 246. See also ibid, 121, 'that special blend of wild daring, restless strength, alert intelligence, luck, and divine favor that makes a hero,' and 161, 'We must be able to tell true heroes from ordinary men: the difference lies in the strength and dedication of their respective wills.'

298 Janet Bately 42 See Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 162, 'the honor of the victory is obviously divided evenly.' 43 I have omitted a handful of entries, including 'A Hero' and 'Presumption.' 44 That is not to say that ideas of boldness or bravery might not be subsumed in them as in modern terminology. So a good or resolute fighter may well be a brave one. 45 Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 4. For reasons of space it has not been possible to consider Rudolph's findings in detail here, nor to refer to more than a handful of the numerous articles and books dealing with individual Old English words. For publications to 1980, see Cameron, Kingsmill, and Amos, Word Studies. 46 The DOE is currently available only for words beginning with the letters A-E. 47 Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 58, 'greatness of spirit.' 48 Cf. Br 'courageous temperament/spirit' for modsefa (Beowulf 349 and 1853). However, although the context here might suggest an element of commendation, in neither case is a bravery word the appropriate rendering. 49 Cf. Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 245, 'heroism.' See also Sutherland, 'Meaning of eorlscipe/ 1136, 'eorlscipe, as used in Beowulf, never has any connotation of "heroic deeds" but refers to formal, ceremonial, or official conduct,' and cf. drihtscipe (Beowulf 1470, K 'valor, bravery') entered in TOE under 12.01.01 Authority: Lordship, rule, authority), DOE 1. 'Lordship, rulership, power'; 2. 'Valor, courage (in collocation with ellen).' 50 Applied equally to Beowulf and Grendel, 677. 51 The second element here, -pracu, is bravery-neutral, since it can be used in both good and bad senses (cf. BT s.v. I 'not in a bad sense, power, force'; II 'in a bad sense violence'). 52 K 'fighting force, valor/ but found in Beowulf in contexts where it might no less appropriately be interpreted as 'ability' or 'prowess in war.' 53 Gupmod is taken as a noun by TOE, following a suggestion in BT, Addenda. 54 See Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 112, Though frecne evidently means "daring" or "bold," it never does so when applied to human beings.' 55 Hror is used of Beowulf as he emerges from the mere (I629),felahror of Scyld (27) at the time of his death, while snell and snellic are applied to a warrior powerless to hit back at Ongentheow, and to Beowulf's retainers as they go to bed - and to sleep - on the eve of Grendel's attack (2971 and 690). 56 Indeed the word is not included in his lists by Rudolph. 57 Lines 2288 and 2552. 58 S.A.J. Bradley never translates the word as 'bold' or 'brave.' 59 See, e.g., lines 376 and 886. Of heard Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 58-9, writes,

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299

The sense "brave" is limited to poetic usage and must have had an archaic quality even to the Anglo-Saxons ... Ordinarily it is impossible to distinguish between meanings "brave" and "resolute" on the basis of inferences from the context.' 60 Cf. DOE anhygdig 'single-minded, resolute, steadfast; stubborn'; for swfyhicgende Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 162, suggests 'of strong purpose' or 'stout hearted.' 61 Lines 173,493,826,908. 62 TOE 06.02.07.04 Obstinacy; cf. Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 93, 'resolute, undaunted, brave, stern,' etc. 63 Line 746, K 'strong-hearted, determined', Br 'unflinching.' Cf. Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 153, 'the line between "resolute" ... and "brave, courageous" is too elusive to be drawn with any assurance on the basis of the evidence still extant/ 64 Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 138. 65 Lines 1806 and 2785; Br 'with spirit roused' and 'bold-hearted' respectively. 66 Line 1146. See Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 209-10. 67 See above, 284. 68 Line 337. In TOE it is entered also under 06.02.07.04 Obstinacy, 08.01.03.09.11 Hardheartedness, cruelty, severity and 16.01.01.01 Attributes of God. 69 See Rudolph's comment, 'Synonyms,' 95, that it 'evidently means brave or bold' but at BeowM//312-14 is merely a 'vague but complimentary epithet.' 70 'Se modega maeg Hygelaces' (813) [the courageous kinsman of Hygelac]. 71 K 'brisk, vigorous, valiant.' 72 With the collocations hwate Scyldingas [vigorous (?) Scyldings] and hwate helmberend [vigorous (?) helmet-bearers] each two times. The former (1601a and 2052b) is used by the poet of Hrothgar's men, as they abandon the watch for Beowulf at the mere, and - tauntingly? - by a Heathobard in the context of the Danish-Heathobard conflict, the latter (2517a, 2642a) of the men chosen to accompany Beowulf to the dragon's lair. A third instance (3005b) of hwate Scyldingas applied, apparently in error, to the Geats is emended by editors to scildwigan. 73 Br 'soldierly bold' and 'full of martial zeal.' 74 Cf. the non-personal use, 21a, qualifyingfeohgiftum. 75 Cf. DOE dxdfram 'active, vigorous, strong in deeds.' 76 See lines 2527b-8 where Beowulf, about to fight the dragon, cries 'Ic com on mode from, / baet ic wi6 bone gudflogan gylp ofersitte.' Br. translates (controversially): T am confident in my heart that I shall be left possessing the renown against the winged adversary'; however, gylp ofersittan is better

300 Janet Bately translated 'refrain from boasting.' See also line 2188a, unfrom 'inactive, feeble.' 77 Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 73ff. See also ibid., 132,135,136. 78 Cf. DOE dxdrof 'noble in deeds, valiant.' 79 Rudolph, 'Synonyms,' 135, 'renowned for his striving.' 80 'Synonyms/ 136. DOE 'brave as a ruler or lord; very brave.' 81 Irving, Reading of Beowulf, 59, 'famous for his daring.' For Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 9, 'in many contexts ellenrof appears to be nothing more than a vague epithet suggesting approval or commendation.' 82 Proposed translations include 'victorious/ 'triumphant/ and 'illustrious.' TOE locates it under the general headings 13.02.05.01 Victory and 16.01.01.01.01.01 Mightiness. 83 See Rudolph, 'Synonyms/ 132. 84 Cf. Andreas line 1139a, where prist is used of the behaviour of a leodhata. I cite Andreas from Krapp's edition of the Vercelli Manuscript. 85 Beald and prist occur only in compounds in Beowulf. 86 DOE beald 1 'bold, courageous, confident'; 2 'bold, overconfident, presumptuous; shameless.' 87 Lines 2181-3: Ferocious in battle he possessed the greatest might of all mankind, the ample gift which God had bestowed on him. 88 Elsewhere it is used of evil emperors and as a rendering of Latin belliger andfortis may also carry the meaning 'warlike.' 89 The adverb cenlice 'boldly' is recorded only eight times, all in the works of ^Ifric. 90 Lines 2694-6: Then I have heard that in the monarch's time of need the man at his side displayed courage, might and daring, as was innate in him. (For other renderings of andlang, see the entry in the DOE.) 91 Cf. Clemoes, Interactions, 68ff., ellen 'fighting spirit.' 92 See also Alfred's Boethius, where it is linked with wisdom. 93 DOE 'courageously, bravely.' The only other instance of this adverb, in a manuscript of Alcuin, De virtutibus et vitiis (Ale. 217), glosses fortiter. 94 DOE 'act of strength, vigor; deed of courage.' 95 DOE 'courageous deed, act of valor.' 96 CH 'mighty valour.' 97 DOE 'fame for courage, renown for strength.' 98 DOE 'powerful spirit, bold spirit' (but possibly an error for ellorgxst). TOE lists the word under 16.01.03.02 A demonic apparition. 99 DOE 'feeble in strength/ K 'deprived of strength.' See TOE 02.02.03.01 In process of dying: mortally wounded.

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100 See also line 958 (we), and cf. line 1464, where ellenweorc is something performed by the sword Hrunting. Ellen is also used with reference to Beowulf and his men's return to the Geatish court in line 1967, a context that does not demand boldness, courage, or strength. 101 In collocation with eafob. 102 The admiration implicit in DOE's rendering 'courageously, bravely' (K 'valiantly, boldly') was not necessarily shared by Beowulf or intended by the poet. 103 But interestingly put impersonally: Teond gefyldan - ferh ellen wraec' [they had felled the foe - courage had driven out life]. 104 See also the denial of cowardice ('ne bid swylc earges si5!' [2541]) and the poet's use of hildlata (2846), 'one sluggish in battle, coward,' and tydre (2847), 'weak, craven,' in a description of the emergence of Wiglaf's companions from their place of safety after the dragon-slaying. 105 The biggest cluster is to be found in the account of the holding of the 'bridge,' lines 74-83, with wigheardne, cafne, unforhte, modige, and adverbs baldlicost andfxstlice. 106 Cf. OED Good 3 c 'of state of mind, courage, spirits. Not depressed or dejected.' 107 Cf. lines 75,130,261, 266, 312. 108 Cf. lines 139 and 205. 109 So Scragg, Motion AD 991, line 294; cf. CH pegnlic 'noble, brave, loyal.' 110 Scragg, Moldon AD 991,19; S.A.J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 520. 111 Scragg, Maldon AD 991. 112 S.A.J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 527; Frank, 'Heroic Literature,' 203. 113 'Cene hi weredon.' Cene here is taken as an adverb by Mitchell and Robinson and by Scragg, Maldon AD 991, and as an adjective used substantively by S.A.J. Bradley ('fierce men') and Scragg, Maldon. 114 See above, 292. 115 For the converse, cowardice, see lines 192, 'gube ne gymdon' [they did not care for the battle], 238 'earh Oddan beam' [the cowardly son of Odda], and 6 yrhdo [cowardice]. 116 Cf. byldan 'to encourage, embolden,' lines 169,209, 234,320. 117 In the build-up to the fight Beowulf, as we have seen, is described as 'rof oretta' (2538) [renowned warrior].

Sex in the Dictionary of Old English Roberta Frank

It has become customary for publishers and reviewers of new dictionaries to celebrate the 'four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms' featured within. Dirty words win friends. When the F-word was admitted to the first volume of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, its editor twice drew attention to this event in print.1 The new New Oxford Dictionary of English goes so far as to make 'fuck' and 'fucker' running heads, resplendent in bold type.2 On any given day, 'fuck' is by far the most looked-up item in the online Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (www.m-w.com/home.htm); 'love' took second place during the first six months of 1998, reflecting not a springtime turn to romance but a euphemistic search for obscenities.3 Alas, four-letter Anglo-Saxon words are not likely to perk up advertisements for the new Dictionary of Old English (DOE).4 The closest the Toronto lexicographers will get to obscenity is probably a Scandinavian loanword: OE serd < ON serda [to penetrate, screw].5 The Old English form appears once and in an unlikely context: Aldred's interlinear gloss (c. 950-70) to Matthew in the Lindisfarne Gospels. There, 'non moechaberis' (Mt 5.27) [do not commit adultery] is Englished as 'ne gesynnge 6u vel ne serd 6u odres mones wif' [do not sin with or 'have sex with' another man's wife].6 Perhaps what is referred to was so rare among the English that Aldred had to adopt a dirty word from his Danish neighbours to describe it. ('No Sex Please, We're AngloSaxons' is the title of one of several recent essays describing the restraint of the early English in matters erotic.)7 But there is no certainty that the verb serda was taboo in the better pubs and byres of

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viking Northumbria. And even if it were, what is unspeakably obscene in one tongue can be inoffensive or light bawdy in another.8 The C-word, glossed by Randle Cotgrave in 1611 as 'a womans &c/ only narrowly escaped the grasp of the Toronto lexicographers.9 Had personal names not been largely excluded from the Dictionary of Old English, one Godwinus Clawecunt 'claw cunt/ emerging for the first time in the Winton Domesday, might have singlehandedly boosted sales of fascicle C.10 Instead, as fate would have it, the basic obscenities are missing from the corpus on which the DOE is based. In the 1808 edition of DM Chevalier quifist les cons parler, published under the title Le Chevalier quifaisoit parler les *** et les ***, the word *** occurs some twenty-nine times, replacing all the cons and a few conjugated forms of foutre.11 Similar asterisks in nineteenth-century editions and translations of Old English works merely signal a gap in the text.12 Nevertheless (reviewers take note), the six published fascicles of the Dictionary of Old English are brimming with words for sexual intercourse, related body parts, and willing partners. (It is hard, as the nineteenth century discovered, to write about chastity without describing its opposite.)13 Earlier Old English dictionaries translated many of these lexical items into Latin, making it easier to locate the juicy bits. The Clark Hall/Meritt Dictionary (3rd ed. 1931) still gives as definitions testiculi, membrum virile, veretrum, mentula, tergosus, egestio, cacare, pedatio, and the evocative fesiculatio.u ('My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language/ assures Edward Gibbon,15 discriminating - as Ross Arthur has so well put it - between those readers who know Latin and those who need an extra reason to learn it.)16 For current speakers of English, Latin terms such as pudendum or Latin derivatives such as 'testicles' pose no threat, give no offence (unlike their vernacular counterparts). J.R. Clark Hall translates the Old English nouns for faeces (e.g., droge, scytel, tord) and urine (e.g., hland, micga, migoda) into Latinate Modern English, reserving Latin itself for the acts of breaking wind (feorting, fisting) and defecating (dritan, driting). His many sexual euphemisms ('cohabitation/ 'the private member') for equally mealy-mouthed Old English compounds (haemedping [(extra)marital-encounter], scamlim [shame-limb]) may strike our less modest age as comic as well as obscure - like Lewis and Short's famous definition of Latin sellarius [male prostitute] as 'one that practises lewdness upon a settle'17 - but had he called a spade a spade, he would have failed to convey the polite vagueness of the Anglo-Saxon author. The art of narrating

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steamy scenes decorously was taught to all readers of the Aeneid, including those in early England.18 The turnover rate of circumlocutions is dizzying, faster than a human lifespan; they are born to die.19 The Toronto Dictionary has now dispatched its predecessors' flock of woolly 'cohabitations' and 'bedfellowships' (see gebedscipe, bedgemana). But how long will '(carnal) intercourse/ the current euphemism, be able to hold the field? The rust of 'conjugal felicity/ 'marital relations/ and 'carnal knowledge' is already eating away at its aging bones. Our blunt 'to have sex' (first OED citation 1929, D.H. Lawrence, Pansies) and 'to make love' (first OED citation, sense 7 g, 1950, Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast, uttered by Fuchsia) are not much older than we are; both will probably seem as quaint in a hundred years as Benjamin Thorpe's 1832 rendition of OE hseman [to have sex with] as 'to have to do with' does now.20 The shelflife of euphemisms is brutally short. The Toronto lexicographers have the almost impossible task of balancing the Anglo-Saxon writer's delicate sense of propriety and register with the modern reader's conviction that pussyfooted euphemisms are themselves obscene. Successfully avoiding evasiveness, the Dictionary of Old English defines ende, sense A.S.b.i, as 'penis/ a sense derived from a provision in the Scriftboc or Confessionale Pseudo-Egberti: Conf. 1.1 (Spindler) 63 nyten gyf hit sy mannes ende besmyten, slea man, sylle hundum, gyf him tweonige, laete libban. [If an animal be defiled by a person's ende, let it be killed and given to dogs; if there is uncertainty, allow it to live.] cf. Poen. Theod. 2.11.9 animalia coitu hominum pulluta [occidantur], carnesque canibus proiciantur. [Let animals polluted by the sexual intercourse of men be killed and their flesh thrown to dogs.]

T.N. Toller's Supplement translated ende (3a) in this citation with a query: 'part of the human body (?)' This is too coy perhaps for a readership accustomed to flagrant displays of sexuality, for a world in which a Barbara Walters delicately asks Richard Gere about his alleged sexual use of gerbils (note the paronomasia), and a Larry Flynt confesses that he murdered his first sex partner, his grandmother's chicken. But the definition 'penis' (< Lat. 'tail') is perhaps anatomically overspecific, overdetermined. If the Anglo-Saxon writer had wished to specify the male organ of copulation, he had a pride of vernacular

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medical terms to choose from.21 But he picked ende 'bottom, extremity, tail-end/ discreetly suggesting the intended sexual part by naming the larger area of the body (groin, abdomen, buttocks) within which it is located. Lexicographers do what poets and scribes have always done: interpret material touching on gender and power in a way that conforms to audience expectations. Like most scholars, the compilers of the Scriftboc probably regarded interspecies hanky-panky as a male activity. Nevertheless, unlike subsequent commentators and translators, the Anglo-Saxons' terminology does not exclude the possibility of female agency or, indeed, of a man taking the passive role.22 Each of the first five fascicles of the Toronto Dictionary contains one or more verbs that, in a suitably suggestive context, can mean 'to have sex with': for example, agan (I.A.lO.b), ahrinan/dethrinan, brucan (2.a.i), cunnan (II.N), and dyrnlicgan. (£ is relatively chaste, but the next fascicle, F, the first in the new millennium, will not disappoint; it includes frige, freond, freondr&den, freondscipe, freogan, flaesccostnung, and forliger. Old English is probably as rich as modern English in euphemisms for 'making out' and 'getting together': 'join/ 'play/ 'have/ 'see/ 'be or lie with/ 'kiss/ 'embrace/ 'touch/ 'use/ 'enjoy/ 'take/ 'possess/ 'knead/ and 'sleep with.' But for some reason, the association of sex and knowledge, that is, 'to know' in its familiar biblical (i.e., sexual) sense, gave Anglo-Saxon writers pause, so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary and its descendants assign the first use of 'to know (carnally)' to the early thirteenth century. In the Old Testament, only fifteen of the 948 occurrences of the Hebrew verb yada' 'to know' refer to sexual knowledge;23 almost half of these are in Genesis. Sometimes a man is the subject (Gen 4.1,17, 25; 24.16; 38.26; Judg 19.25; 1 Sam 1.19; 1 K 1.4); sometimes a woman (Gen 19.8, Num 31.17,18, 35; Judg 11.39); men can be both subject and object (Gen 19.5). The sexual euphemism 'to know' was fully at home in Latin and Greek before it appeared in biblical translations;24 but even so, rabbinic and patristic exegetes pondered what else it might mean.25 The first complete translation of the Bible into English (c. 1390) turned the Hebraism into Middle English without any sign of distress: 'Adam forsothe knewe Eve his wijf (Gen 4.1). But in the only full-scale attempt before the Wycliffite Bible to render the Old Testament into English prose, /Elfric consistently avoids 'to know/ writing instead 'to enjoy, use' (Lat./rwor, utor): 'Adam ... breac his wiues' (Gen 4.1); 'Cain breac his wiues' (4.17); 'Adam sodlice briac his wiues' (4.25).26 The non^Ifrician version of Genesis 4 in London, BL, Cotton Claudius B.iv

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also shuns 'to know (carnally)': 'Adam gestrynde Cain be Euan'; 'Cain nam wif be J?aere he gestrynde Enoch'; 'Eft Adam gestrynde sunu.'27 The poem Genesis A is similarly reluctant to make a man the subject of biblical 'to know' (cf. 965-9, 1053-4, 1104-5). In two key verses in the New Testament, we read that Joseph did not 'know' Mary (Mt 1.25) and that Mary responded to the angel: 'How can this be, when I know no man' (Lk 1.34). With one exception, Anglo-Saxon writers supply Joseph with another verb. Aldred attempts to convey the biblical euphemism in his interlinear gloss to Matthew, but not without a struggle: MtGl (Li) 1.25: el non cognoscebat earn donee peperit filium suum primogenitum & ne cude vel ne cunnade hea vel da ilco wid vel da huile gecende sunu hire frumcende.

The glossator offers both cunnan 'to know' and the very different cunnian 'to test, have experience of/ Other translators chose different euphemisms. Farmon's independent gloss (c. 970) to the same verse in the Rushworth (MacRegol) Gospels rendered cognoscebat with a form of gretan 'to approach (sexually),' as do all four complete eleventhcentury manuscripts and the two twelfth-century copies of the socalled West-Saxon Gospels.28 Aldred's gloss to Luke 1.34 follows Mary's query word-for-word: LkGl (Li) 1.34: dixit autem maria ad angelum: quomodo fiet istud quoniam uirum non cognosce cuoed uutedlice to daem engel huu wordes Sis fordon wer ne conn ic.

Owun, unperturbed, copied the same gloss into the Rushworth Luke: 'huu wor6es 6is for6on wer ne con ic' [how can this be, for I know no man] (LkGl [Ru] 1.34). The Blickling Annunciation uses another verb of knowing: 'for{?on f>e ic naenigne wer ne ongeat' (HomU 18 [BIHom 1] 72); the Old English translation of the Gospels supplies a third: 'fordain ic wer (var. were) ne oncnawe' (Lk [WSCp] 1.34). Although the Latin Gospels use cognosco for both Joseph and Mary, Anglo-Saxon translators seem to distinguish verbally between male and female agents: a man can 'use/ 'have/ 'enjoy/ 'approach/ 'embrace/ or 'touch' a woman, but he cannot 'know' her. The remaining examples of cunnan 'to know (carnally)' refer to a woman's not 'knowing' a man. All four poetic occurrences domesticate

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the Hebraism by inserting a euphemistic non-animate noun as object (e.g., 'she knew not a man's embrace'): ChristA 74: arece us Jsaet geryne J?aet Ipe of roderum cwom, hu j?u eacnunge aefre onfenge bearnes J>urh gebyrde, ond pone gebedscipe aefter monwisan mod ne cudes. ChristA 197: sod ic secge j^urh sunu meotudes, gaesta geocend, J?aet ic gen ne conn ]?urh gemaecscipe monnes ower, aanges on eordan. ChristA 416: J^aat is wraeclic wrixl in wera life, baette moncynnes milde scyppend onfeng set faemnan flaesc unwemme, ond sio weres friga ne cuj>e. GenA 2468: ne can £>ara idesa owder gieta J^urh gebedscipe beorna neawest.

Christ A, echoing Luke 1.34, announces that Mary conceived without knowing gebedscipe (74) [sexual intercourse]; she confirms her ignorance of any man's gemxcscipe (197) [sexual intercourse], any man's friga (416) [sexual love]. In Genesis A, neither of Lot's daughters 'knows the society of men' through gebedscipe (2468) [sexual intercourse], an elaborate variation on 'to know' in Gen 19.8: 'habeo duas filias, quae necdum cognoverunt virum.' The final two occurrences of cunnan 'to know (carnally)' are in a twelfth-century Old English prose translation of a Latin sermon by Ralph d'Escures, bishop of Rochester (1108-14) and archbishop of Canterbury (1114-22).29 Mary is again the subject and, as in Christ A, knows no man's company: LS 22 (InFestisSMarie) 36: da J?a se aengel hire cydde, J>aet heo caennen scolde Codes Sune, heo andswerede & acsode, hwu sceal J^iss gewurden, for ic ne cann naht of weres gemane? LS 22 (InFestisSMarie) 43: for J?eh heo Josepe gehandfaest waere, |?ehhweSere he haefde anraedlice on hire gemynte, J>aet heo naefre weres gemaennysse nolde cunnen.

Something in the vernacular did not like intrusions on its privacy, refused to import loanwords or exotic euphemisms ('to know') for

308 Roberta Frank

ordinary (or even extraordinary) sexual behaviour. Unlike Modern English, none of the dozen or so Old English terms for male genitalia comes, like 'male genitalia,' from Greek or Latin. 'Daet Englisc [haefd] his agene wisan' (^EGenPref 100) [English has its own style, its own way], observed ^Ifric in his Preface to Genesis. Not even he was a slave to the Latin text of the Bible. The closest -#ilfric gets to the biblical 'to know' is the isolated and early 'ne oncneow heo weres gemanan' (^CHom 1,2 196.197) [she did not know a man's congress]. Elsewhere he uses, with formulaic consistency, the verb brucan 'to use, enjoy (carnally)': 'hu ma3g J?is gewurSan: for dan J?e ic ne bruce nanes weres?' (/ECHom 1,13 283.56; 285.126) [how can this come to pass, for I 'enjoy' no man?]. Old English brucan, unlike cunnan, seems completely gender-neutral; expressions such as 'weres brucan' [to have sex with a man] and 'wifes brucan' [to have sex with a woman] course through >Elfric's prose, from the Sermones Catholici to his Old Testament translations and pastoral letters.30 Wulfstan, with his own strong sense of stylistic etiquette, prefers the verb agan 'to have (sexual) relations (with someone gen.)': '[Mary] J>e naafre nahte weres gemanan' (WHom 7a 24; WHom 6.141; HomU 27 [Nap 30] 237; HomS 41 32) [who never had congress with a man]. Agan with a male subject is used formulaically throughout his legal writings: 'nagon ... J?urh haamedj^ing wifes gemanan' (WPol 2.1.2 92; WPol 2.1.1 197; LawVAtr 9; LawICn 6.2; HomU 40 [Nap 50] 110; HomU 47 [Nap 58] 176) [they have ... no congress with a woman through sexual intercourse]. The delicate sense of appropriateness, of the distinction between synonyms, that led ^Elfric to choose brucan and Wulfstan agan ... gemanan escapes me. But when we find 'wifes brucan' in a homily 'by' Wulfstan (e.g., HomU 44 [Nap 55] 100), we can be confident that ^Elfric has been here. (This particular homily combines Wulfstan's outline of history with ^Ifric's sermon for the first Sunday in Lent.) 'Wifes/weres brucan/ like 'agan weres/wifes gemanan/ is as good as a signature. There are a few practical benefits to looking at sexual vocabulary in the Dictionary of Old English. Antedating the OED is one. The sexual meaning of words such as 'stones' (OE stanas [testicles]), 'purse' (OE burse [scrotum]), and 'to have' (OE habban [to possess sexually]) were alive and well long before Shakespeare.31 Sometimes light is shed on the meaning of a particular word. The compound wifcyppe occurs just once, in the famous Chronicle entry of 755 telling of the death of King Cynewulf of Wessex: 'Ond J)a geascode he J>one cyning lytle werode on wifcyppe on Merantune' (ChronA [Plummer] 755.10) [and then he found out that the king

Sex in the Dictionary of Old English 309

with a small retinue was in the company of a woman in Merton].32 The second element, cypp [knowledge (of something)], [familiarity (with a person)], is not elsewhere compounded with a noun. Bosworth-Toller (1898) glosses the compound as 'a visit to a woman/ 'familiarity with a woman/ The word is queried by Clark Hall (1931): 'company of a woman? intercourse with a woman?' The first he took from Sweet's Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1896); the second (apparently) from y^thelweard's late tenth-century Latin translation of the Chronicle, where 'on wifcybbe' is rendered as 'cum quadam meretrice morando' [tarrying with a certain courtesan]:33 the king was visiting his concubine or mistress, ^ithelweard's directness has seemed appealing to recent commentators. Burchfield translates 'then he discovered the king having intercourse with a woman at Merton/34 The new Thesaurus of Old English (1,25) follows suit, listing the compound under the heading 'sexual intercourse/ The later the lexicographer, it would seem, the more lurid the king's behavior. The Chronicle entry as a whole makes it clear that Cynewulf was closeted with a woman friend at Merton. But given the reluctance of the vernacular to allow Adam, Cain, and Joseph to 'know' their wives, there is some reason to be suspicious of readings that take wifcyppe not as 'female companionship' but as 'carnal knowledge of a woman.' Henry of Huntingdon, whose mother was English, knew what he was doing when he paraphrased the 755 annal: 'He sought out the king at Meretun, where he had gone privately to visit a certain woman/35 The twelfth-century chronicler, like his Anglo-Saxon predecessor, only hints, decorously and indirectly, at what ^thelweard and modern translators so explicitly affirm. In the privacy of the Old English vernacular, the half-said thing alone worked wonders. The scholar to whose memory this piece is dedicated was, like the Anglo-Saxon poets he wrote about, a lover of words. He was a vital and encouraging presence at the conference that established the Toronto Dictionary of Old English (21-2 March 1969).36 And he had a gift for friendship. One of his last essays talks about a manuscript reading that he first defended more than forty years ago:37 Wop waes wide, worulddreama lyt, waeron hleahtorsmidum handa belocene, alyfed ladsiQ leode gretan, folc ferende; freond waes bereafod.

[Exodus 42-5]

310 Roberta Frank Weeping was widespread, little joy in the world, the hands of the laughter-makers were locked, a hated journey was permitted to greet the people, the nation travelling; the lover was bereaved. Editors usually emend freond to feond 'enemy': 'The feond is Pharaoh, who is, allegorically, the devil .../38 Typically, Ted heard not doctrine but emotion in this passage, the 'massing of formulas of loss and grief: weeping, loss of joy and laughter, a hated journey to death ... and a bereaved lover ... That the lover was Egyptian is less important than that he was heartbroken.'39 For the generosity of spirit so evident in his scholarship, and for so much more, the community of Anglo-Saxonists is in his debt. Notes 1 See Burchfield, 'Four-letter Words' and 'Some Aspects of Historical Treatment.' When the fourth volume of the Supplement appeared, readers were again alerted to the presence of sexual vocabulary: '[we] have not held back when presenting illustrative examples of such words' ('End of the Alphabet' [19]). 2 J. Pearsall, New Oxford Dictionary, 739-40; noted by Stanley, 'A New "New" English Dictionary/ N&Q ns 46.1 (1999): 79. The first American dictionary to record the F-word was Morris, ed., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (except for the Texan edition). For etymology, see Liberman, 'English F-Word.' 3 Toronto Globe and Mail, Saturday, 9 January 1999, D 11. 4 Dictionary of Old English: A; /£; B; Beon; C; D; £, edited by Antonette diPaolo Healey et al. (Toronto), 1986 (D), 1988 (C), 1991 (B), 1992 (£, Beon), 1994 (A), 1996 (£). The editors are now poised to proceed straight through the rest of the alphabet. 5 I am indebted to Ian McDougall, who would have preferred to remain anonymous, for drawing my attention to OE *seorpan. On ON serda, see S0rensen, Norr0nt Nid, 19-22,32 (trans. Turville-Petre, Unmanly Man, 16-18,27). Also Jochens, 'Old Norse Sexuality,' 378,382. The ON word occurs in a midtwelfth-century runic inscription in the British Isles: 'fcorny sar5, Helgi reist' [I>orny fucked, Helgi carved]. See M. Barnes, Runic Inscriptions, 38,104-5. 6 Unless otherwise noted, editions and abbreviations are those in Healey and Venezky, eds., List of Texts. I am grateful to Toni Healey for her wise counsels and for not pressing me too much on the subject of gerbils.

Sex in the Dictionary of Old English 311 7 Magennis, '"No Sex Please."' 8 Cf. OHG serten, MLG serden, MHG serten, English sard 'violate, ravish/ and the histories of con /'cunt' in French and English. A tenth-century OHG phrasebook for Latin-speaking travellers to German lands includes, alongside 'Where are you from?' and 'Give me my horse/ the impudent 'Guanna sarden ger?' ('quot vices fotisti?') [How many times did you fuck?] (Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch, 9-10). Con in its anatomical sense did not appear in the Petit Larousse until 1970: see Feldman, Sexualite. 9 Cotgrave, Dictionarie. 10 Feilitzen, 'Personal Names/ 210. Cunte may occur in a topographical sense in the boundary marker 'to/of cuntan heale' Ch 360 (Birch 596) 48,49; Ch 683 (Birch 1054) 6. 11 Cited by Arthur, 'Editing/ 27. 12 See, e.g., Thorpe, Cxdmon's Metrical Paraphrase, 117,126. 13 Cf. Lecky, European Morals, 1,51-2: 'It will be necessary for me in the course of the present work to dwell at greater length than I should desire upon questions connected with this virtue ... I am sorry to bring such subjects before the reader, but it is impossible to write a history of morals without doing so.' 14 Mentula, a basic obscenity in Latin, defines tears and wsepnedlic Urn in the first printed OE dictionary (Somner 1659). Other early Old English dictionaries consulted include Lye and Manning; Bosworth as revised by Toller; Toller (Supplement); Campbell; and Clark Hall. 15 Sheffield, ed., Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, 212. 16 'Editing/29. 17 Lewis and Short, Dictionary, s.v. 18 See Ziolkowski, 'Obscenity.' Virgil's delicacy in describing the coupling of Venus and Vulcan (Aeneid 8.406) was praised by Isidore of Seville, among others: see Etymologies, 1.37.15. 19 See Burchfield, 'History of Euphemisms'; Coleman, 'Sexual Euphemism' and 'Sexual Vocabulary.' 20 Metrical Paraphrase, 148; see OED s.v. do, 4.d. Thorpe here follows the definitions of Somner and Lye s.v. hseman, originally 'to marry' but more commonly 'to have sex with': see Fischer, Engagement, 63-75. The Sodomites' earthiness in Genesis A 2460 is closer to Old Latin versions of Genesis 19.5 than to the Vulgate's 'educ illos hue ut cognoscamus eos/ Cf. V.L. 'ut coitum faciamus cum eis' (Lyons, Bibliotheque de la Ville, 403 [329]) and 'ut concumbamus cum eis': Fischer, ed., Vetus Latina. (Curiously, only for this passage does the Septuagint render Hebrew yada' 'to know/ with synginosko, 'to meet, converse with' and not with ginosko, 'to know.') On the

312 Roberta Frank

21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Anglo-Saxons' understanding of the Sodomites' request, see Frantzen, Before the Closet, 184-228, and Godden, Trouble with Sodom.' See Roberts and Kay, Thesaurus, 02.04.06.04.01 Male genitalia. ON accusations of bestiality sometimes depict an animal taking the active role: e.g., Sneglu-Halla Mttr, chap. 10,294-5. See also Minkov, 'SnegluHalli/ 285-6. These statistics come from Botterweck and Ringgren, Dictionary, s.v. yada'. On 'to know (carnally)' in Catullus, Caesar, Ovid, Menander, etc., see Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, 190. See, e.g., Kugel, Bible, 86: '"And the man knew his wife Eve." What did he know? That she was already pregnant [by someone else]' - Pirqei deR. Eliezer 21 (perhaps eighth- or ninth-century C.E.). Cambridge, University Library, Ii.1.33 (= MS C) in Crav/ford, Heptateuch. Ibid. See now Liuzza, ed., Gospels and Lenker, Evangelienversion. The homily occurs in BL, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, which contains fiftythree articles in Old English. See Handley, 'Cotton Vespasian D. xiv' and Richards, 'Date and Provenance.' E.g., /ECHom 1,11 273.203; /ECHom 1,32 452.54; /ECHom 11,1 5.82; /ECHom 11,6 57.150; /ECHom 11,40 343.263; /ELS (Agnes) 49; /ELS (Ash Wed) 48; /ELS (Eugenia) 160; /ELS (^Ethelthryth) 18; /ELet 2 (Wulfstan 1) 16,179; /ELet 5 (Sigefyrth) 157; /EHomM 8 (Ass 3) 192; /EAdmon 33. For 'stones,' see ChronE (Plummer 1125.1, 8); 'purse,' DOE, s.v. burse; 'have (sexual intercourse with),' Pope, Homilies, glossary s.v. habban, I.h (homily xv.96); for two non-^lfrician uses of habban 'to have sex with,' see Stanley, Review, N&Q 34/2 (1987), 249. See now Bately, MS A. For a new reading and a bibliography of selected recent articles on this narrative, see Scragg, 'Wifcyppe.' Campbell, Chronicon, 23. 'History of Euphemisms,' 22. The phrase 'with a small retinue' is tactfully omitted. Historia Anglorum, iv.24,252. 'Ipse autem impeciit regem apud Meretune, ubi priuate perrexerat ad quandam mulierem.' For a record of the proceedings, see Cameron, Frank, and Leyerle, Computers. Irving, 'Editing/ 19-20. Lucas, Exodus, 81. Irving, 'Editing/ 19-20.

A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Edward B. Irving Jr

Books Rereading Beowulf. 1989. Repr., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope. Edited by Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving Jr, and Marie Borroff. 1974. Repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Introduction to Beowulf. 1969. Repr., Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973. A Reading of Beowulf. 1968. Rev. ed.7 Provo: Chaucer Studio, 1999. The Old English Exodus. YSE 122.1953. Repr., Hamden: Archon Books, 1970. Articles The Charge of the Saxon Brigade: Tennyson's Battle of Brunanburh.' In Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, 174-93. CSASE 29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 'Editing Old English Verse: The Ideal.' In New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, 11-20. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. 'Christian and Pagan Elements.' In A Beowulf Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Miles, 175-92. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. The Advent of Poetry: Christ I.' ASE 25 (1996): 123-34. 'Heroic Worlds: The Knight's Tale and Beowulf.' In Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philosophical Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel, ed. Rich-

314 A Select Bibliography of the Writings of Edward B. Irving Jr ard G. Newhauser and John A. Alford, 43-59. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. 'Heroic Experience in the Old English Riddles.' In Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, ed. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, 199-212. New York: Garland, 1994. 'Heroic Role-Models: Beowulf and Others.' In Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr, ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle, 347-72. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993. 'Beowulf.' ANQ ns 3 (1990): 65-9. 'What To Do with Old Kings.' In Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman Parry, ed. John Miles Foley, 259-68. Columbus: Slavica Publishers, 1987. 'Alliterative Literature.' In Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Miriam Youngerman Miller and Jane Chance, 188-90. New York: Modern Language Association, 1986. 'Cruxifixion Witnesses; Or, Dramatic Interaction in The Dream of the Rood.' In Modes of Interpretation: Essays in Honour of Stanley B. Greenfield, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, and Fred C. Robinson, 101-13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. The Nature of Christianity in Beowulf.' ASE 13 (1984): 7-21. 'A Reading of Andreas: The Poem as Poem.' ASE 12 (1983): 215-37. 'Beowulf Comes Home: Close Reading in Epic Context.' In Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts, 700-1600. Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Lterature in Honor ofE. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, 129-43. Norman: Pilgrim, 1982. 'Exodus Retraced.' In Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving, Jr, and Marie Borroff, 203-23.1974. Repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. 'New Notes on the Old English Exodus.' Anglia 90 (1972): 289-324. 'Image and Meaning in the Elegies.' In Old English Poetry: Fifteen Essays, ed. Robert P. Creed, 153-66. Providence: Brown University Press, 1967. 'Ealuscerwen: Wild Party at Heorot.' TSL 11 (1966): 161-8. The Heroic Style in The Battle ofMaldon.' SP 58 (1961): 457-67. 'On the Dating of the OE Poems Genesis and Exodus.' Anglia 77 (1959): 1-11. 'Latin Prose Sources for OE Verse.' JEGP 56 (1957): 588-95. Audio Recordings Favorite Passages from Beowulf. Prove: Chaucer Studio, 1997. Selected Readings in Old English: The Dream of the Road, The Wanderer, Deor, and The Seafarer. Provo: Chaucer Studio, 1996.

Bibliography

Primary Sources, Editions, and Reference Works Assmann, Bruno, ed. Angelsachsische Homilien und Heiligenleben. Bibliothek der angelsachsischen Prosa 3.1889. Repr. with a supplementary introduction by Peter Clemoes, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964. Baker, Peter S., ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 8: MS F. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Baker, Peter S., and Michael Lapidge, eds. Eyrhtferth's Enchiridion. EETS ss 15. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Barlow, Frank, ed. and trans. The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Bartok, Bela, and Albert B. Lord, eds. and trans. Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Bately, Janet M., ed. The Old English Orosius. EETS ss 6. London: Oxford University Press, 1980. - ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 3: MS A. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986. Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Bethurum, Dorothy, ed. The Homilies ofWulfstan. 1957. Repr., Oxford: Clar don Press, 1971. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina antiqux et medise setatis. 2 vols. Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes, 1899-1901. Novum Supplementum by Henryk Pros. Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes, 1986. Bieler, Ludwig, ed. Anicii Manlii Severini Boethii Opera, Pars I: Philosophiae

316 Bibliography Consolatio. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 94. Turnholt: Brepols, 1984. Birch, Walter de Gray, ed. Cartularium Saxonicum: A Collection of Charters Relating to Anglo-Saxon History. 3 vols. 1885-99. Repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1964. Bischoff, Bernhard, and Josef Hofmann. Libri Sancti Kyliani. Die Wurzburger Schreibschule und die Dombibliothek im VIII. und IX. Jahrhundert. Wiirzburg: F. Schoningh, 1952. Bischoff, Bernhard, Josef Hofmann, and Michael Lapidge, eds. Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian. CSASE 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bishop, T.A.M., and Pierre Chaplais, eds. Facsimiles of English Royal Writs to A. D. 1100 Presented to Vivian Hunter Galbraith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957. Blake, Norman R, ed. The Phoenix. 1964. Rev. ed., Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1990. - Acta Sanctorum. 1902. Repr., Brussels: Societe des Bollandistes, 1970. Bond, Edward A., ed. Facsimiles of Ancient Charters in the British Museum. 4 vols. London: British Museum, 1873-8. Bosanquet, Geoffrey, trans. Eadmer's History of Recent Events in England [Historia Novorum in Anglia]. Philadelphia: Dufour, 1965. Botterweck, G. Johannes, and Helmer Ringgren, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. 1974. Rev. ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997. Bradley, Henry, ed. A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Vol. 4, F and G. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901. Bradley, S.A.J., trans, and ed. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Dent, 1982. Bright, James Wilson, and Robert Lee Ramsay, eds. Liber Psalmorum: The West Saxon Psalms Being the Prose Portion or the 'First Fifty' of the So-Called Paris Psalter. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1907. Brooks, Kenneth R., ed. Andreas and The Fates of the Apostles. 1961. Repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Burlin, Robert B., ed. and trans. The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary. YSE 168. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. Caenegem, R.C. van, ed. English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I. 2 vols. Selden Society, nos. 106-7. London: Selden Society, 1990-1. Calder, Daniel G., and Michael J.B. Allen, eds. Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1976. Cameron, Angus, Roberta Frank, and John Leyerle, eds. Computers and Old English Concordances. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Cameron, Angus, Allison Kingsmill, and Ashley Crandell Amos. Old English

Bibliography 317 Word Studies: A Preliminary Author and 'Word Index. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Campbell, Alistair, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary based on the Manuscript Collections of Joseph Bosworth: Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda to the Supplement by T. Northcote Toller. 1921. Repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. - ed. The Battle of Brunanburh. London: W. Heinemann, 1938. - ed. Chronicon JEthelweardi. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962. Carnicelli, T.A., ed. King Alfred's Version of St. Augustine's 'Soliloquies.' Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Clark Hall, J.R. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894. 2nd ed. (1916); 3rd ed. (1931); 4th ed. with a supplement by H.D. Meritt (1960). Clayton, Mary, and Hugh Magennis, eds. The Old English Lives ofSt Margaret. CSASE 9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Clemoes, Peter, ed. JElfric's Catholic Homilies: The First Series. Text. EETS ss 17. London: Oxford University Press, 1997. Clemoes, Peter, and Norman Eliason, eds. JElfric's First Series of Catholic Homilies, British Museum Royal 7. C. Xllfols. 4-218. EEMF 13. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1966. Colgrave, Bertram, and R.A.B. Mynors, eds. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Cook, Albert S., ed. The Christ ofCynewulf. 1900. Repr., Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. - ed. The Old English Elene, Phoenix and Physiologus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919. Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. 1611. Repr., Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. Crabb, George, ed. and enl. English Synonymes, with Copious Illustrations and Explanations, Drawn from the Best Writers. 1841. Rev. 1916. Repr., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961. Craigie, Sir William A., ed. A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue: From the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth. Vol. 2, D-G. 1931. Repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Crawford, S.J., ed. The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, JElfric's Treatise on the Old and New Testament and his Preface to Genesis. EETS os 160.1922 [for 1921]. Repr. with the text of two additional manuscripts, London: Oxford University Press, 1997. Crotty, Richard, ed. and trans. The Rule ofSt Benedict: with a translation by Richard (John) Crotty. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1963.

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344 Bibliography English Homily and Its Backgrounds, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppe, 241-67. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978. - 'Sulpicius.' In Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture: A Trial Version, ed. Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas D. Hill, and Paul E. Szarmach, with the assistance of Karen Hammond, 158-60. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 74. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1990. - '^delflced of Mercia: mise en page.' In Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson. Ed. Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, 105-26. Toronto Old English Series 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. - 'Abbot ^Ifric and His Rhythmical Prose in the Computer Age.' In New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, 329-40. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. Tarkka, Lotte. Transformations of Epic Time and Space: Creating the World's Creation in Kalevala-metric Poetry.' OT11 (1996): 50-84. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Taylor, Paul Beekman. The Old English Poetic Vocabulary of Beauty.' In New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, 211-21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Toldberg, Helge. 'Grundtvig og de engelske Antikvarer.' Orbis Litterarum 5 (1947): 258-311. Tolkien, J.R.R. 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.' PBA 22 (1936): 245-95. Repr. in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson, 51-103. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963. Ullmann, Stephen. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Vessey, Mark. The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study.' Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 495-513. Vygotsky Lem Semenovich. The Psychology of Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Wallenberg, J.K. Kentish Place-Names: A Topographical and Etymological Study of the Place-Name Material in Kentish Charters Dated before the Conquest. Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift, Filosofi, Sprakvetenskap och historiska Vetenskaper. Vol. 2. Uppsala: Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1931. - The Place-Names of Kent. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeriaktiebolag, 1934. Webber, Teresa. Scribes and Scholars at Salisbury Cathedral, c. 1075-c. 1125. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

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Contributors

Mark C. Amodio is Professor of English at Vassar College where he teaches courses in Old and Middle English language and literature. He has recently completed a book-length study of medieval English oral poetics and is currently writing the The Blackwell Guide to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Formerly holder of the established chair of English Language and Medieval Literature and subsequently Gollancz Research Professor at King's College London, Janet Bately is now Professor Emeritus of the same institution. Gail Berlin is Professor of Old and Middle English language and literature at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Robert E. Bjork is Professor of English, Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and Director and General Editor of Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies at Arizona State University. His book publications include The Old English Verse Saints' Lives, Cynewulf: Basic Readings, and (with John D. Niles) A Beowulf Handbook. He is currently working on the Scandinavian involvement in Anglo-Saxon studies and is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. A.N. Doane is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is director of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche

348 Contributors

Facsimile, has edited Genesis A: A New Edition and The Saxon Genesis, and has written numerous articles on the interconnection of orality and writing. John Miles Foley is Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and Byler Chair in the Humanities at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he also directs the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. Among his recent publications are The Singer of Tales in Performance, Homer's Traditional Art, and How to Read an Oral Poem. Roberta Frank, Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University, writes on and teaches Old English and Old Norse literature. She is former Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Timothy Graham is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico. He has published numerous articles on the use of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts by scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he has a special interest in the recovery of damaged Old English texts with the help of ultra-violet light. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Antonette diPaolo Healey is the Editor of the Dictionary of Old English and the Angus Cameron Professor of Old English Studies at the University of Toronto. She teaches in the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English. Nicholas Howe is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of The Old English Catalogue Poems, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England and Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin. He is currently at work on two books: Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England and The Yale Guide to Old English Literature. Sarah Larratt Keefer is Professor of English at Trent University, where she teaches History of the English Language and Old English language and literature. Her research focuses on the the liturgy of the AngloSaxon Church and its impact on the culture of Anglo-Saxon England. A Fellow of the British Academy, Michael Lapidge is Notre Dame Pro-

Contributors 349

fessor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He has edited and/ or translated the Latin and/or Old English writings of various Insular authors, including Archbishop Theodore, Aldhelm, Bede, King Alfred, Wulfstan of Winchester and Byrhtferth of Ramsey, as well as a substantial corpus of anonymous writings. He is General Editor of AngloSaxon England and of the series Oxford Medieval Texts. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe is Notre Dame Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Her work focuses on the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England, with particular emphasis on the textual evidence for early medieval subjectivity and on cultural transmission. She has most recently edited the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the joint project, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Jane Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature, King's College, University of London. She has written widely on Old and Middle English literature and she is one of the editors of the Thesaurus of Old English (with Christian Kay). Donald Scragg is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies and Director of the Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies at the University of Manchester. His principal publications include A History of English Spelling, editions of The Battle of Maldon and The Vercelli Homilies, as well as many collections of essays. He is director for Old English of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and is currently directing a large-scale project on eleventh-century spelling. Paul E. Szarmach is Director of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University and Professor of English and Medieval Studies. Formerly Editor and now Publisher of the Old English Newsletter, he has edited collections on Old English prose and has written articles on Old English prose with special attention to its Latin backgrounds. He is a general editor of Medieval England: An Encyclopedia and, most recently, of Old English Prose. His current projects include a book on ^Ifric, editions of two of Alcuin's minor works, and a website on Edmund of East Anglia.

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Index

Abbo of Fleury, 45 Achaia, 169n40 Acta Lanfranci, 174 Ademar of Chabannes. See fable jElfheah, St, 179 /Elfric, 5-6,33,38-55, 259,300n89, 305,308; and audience, 43-4,50-1, 55; and authorship, 38-44,51-5; Cotton-Corpus collection of works, 43^1,60n42; and modern editorial practice, 38-9,41,44, 56n5,57nlO; and rhyme, 51; and rhythmical prose, 43-51, 54-5, 68; and sources, 43,45,55; and style, 38-9,43-5,48, 51,53-5; works: Catholic Homilies, 6, 38-40,42-6, 308; 'Excusatio dictantis,' 40; 'Letter for Wulfsige,' 39; 'Life of Eadmund,' 45; 'Life of Martin' [Catholic Homilies], 6,38-40,42, 44-51,53-5; —, Main Hand, 40-1; 'Life of Martin' [Lives of Saints], 6, 38-9,41-2,44-51,53-5; Lives of Saints, 6, 38,41-3; 'Passion of Thomas,' 40; Preface to Genesis, 308. See also Martin, St /Elfstan, abbot, 175

Aeneid, 304 Aesop. See fable /Ethelberht [of Kent], king, 247, 263 /Ethel wine, 122n35 /Ethelwold, 54 /ESelmaer, 42, 50 /Eaelweard, 42,50,55,122n35, 309; Chronicle of, 55, 309 Alain of Farfa, Homiliary of, 42 Alcibiades, 263 Alcuin, 43-4,150,170n57; works: De laude Dei, 150,170n57; Laudationes, 43-4 Aldhelm, 54-5,168n22; De virginitate, 168n22 Aldred, 302, 306 Alfred, king, 4,53,109, 111, 116-17, 119,122n35; translations: Augustine's Soliloquies, 119; Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, 4,119,262; Pastoral Care, 119; translations associated with: Orosius, 119,280, 286. See also Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Alfred [the /Etheling], 202 Ambrose, 125 Amiens, 46

352 Index Andrew, St, 151,153-4,170n61,242 Angles, 259 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 7-8,17,109, 111-12,118-19,202-3,308-9; and authorship, 180; orthographical variants in, 180; phraseology in, 180; prosody of, 113-15; individual manuscripts: MS A, 8-9, 65,11013,118,172,174-5,177-82,184, 190nn35,37; —, scribes of, 110,118, 174,179-81; MS B, 109-14,118; MS C, 109-14,118-19,179,202,207; MS D, 109-14,118,179,202-3,205, 207,212n37; MS E, 179,203,207, 214n54; MS F, 9,172,174-5,17781,183-4,188-9n23,190nn35,37; —, scribe of, 174,177,180-1; individual poems: Battle ofBrunanburh, 7,17,109-19,121n30; —, scribe of, 110; Capture of the Five Boroughs, 111-19,121n30; Coronation of Edgar, 114; Death of Edgar, 114; Death of Edward, 202. See also manuscripts Anglo-Saxons, 12,24,194-5,198,202, 207, 260,262 anhaga, 5,14-15,29 Anselm, archbishop, 174 Anthimus, St, 147-8 Apostles' Creed, 133,137-9 Aquileia, 148 Athelstan, king, 110-12,116-19, 122n35 Auerbach, Erich, 30,253 Augustine, St, of Canterbury, 148-9, 167nl4,263 Augustine, St, of Hippo, 52,124-6; works: De doctrina Christinana, 52 author-function, 6,53,55, 61n60 authorship, 5. See also Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; JElfric

Auxerre, 167nl4 Babylon, 14-16,18,26-9,216n72 Babylonian Captivity, 16,26, 33 Babylonians, 15-16 Bacchylides, 82 Barthes, Roland, 61n58 Basil, St, 259 Battle ofMaldon, 7,11,17,48, 95,109, 115,274-6,281,283,291-5,297n32; and audience, 194-5,197,204; 'bravery' in, see lexicography; figures in: Ailfere, 293; ^Ifwine, 122n35,274, 276; Bryhtwold, 48; Byrhtnoth, 95, 274, 276-7,293-4, 297n32; Dunnere, 276; Godric, son of ^thelgar, 277; Godric the coward, 277; Leofsunu, 295nl2; Maccus, 293; Odda, sons of, 274, 276; Offa, 276 Bayeux Tapestry, 9,191-209,210n20, 216n71; and audience, 194-5,197, 204; and medieval production of tapestries, 192; and Old English narrative style, 194,196, 206-8, 216n72; spelling in, 193. See also fable Beauvais, 151 Bede, 44,118,149,168n23, 243, 247; works: Ecclesiastical History, 259; Martyrologium, 149-50 Benedictine Reform, 127,137 Beowulf, 3,18,54,240; aglxca in, see lexicography; battle of Ravenswood in, 247; 'bravery' in, see lexicography; editions of, 217-18,225; 'fair' in, see lexicography; Finnsburg episode in, 100; and genre, 91, 94-5,97, 99-100; and Old English narrative style, 196, 216n72; and voice,

Index 353 123. See also Beowulf Manuscript Beowulf Manuscript, 6,62-72; and audience, 69-72; fitt divisions in, 67; layout of, 64-6, 74nl7; and modern editorial practice, 10,64-6, 68-71,74-5n24; and orality, 6, 66-7,71-2,74nl5, 75n26; Scribe A, 64-9,71-2,73nlO, 74n22; Scribe B, 64-8,71-2, 73nlO, 74nnl7,22; word spacing in, 65-7, 69, 72; individual works: Judith, 65, 67; Marvels of the East, 64. See also Beowulf Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, 260 Blickling Homilies, 60n42; individual works: Annunciation, 306; Homily 10,262; Vercelli Martin, 60n42 Boethius, 265. See also Alfred Brittany, 195,199-200,204, 207 Brunanburh, battle of, 111-12 Byrhtferth, 243, 295n9 Campania, 148 Canaan, 16,22, 25 Canterbury, 9,174,179; and Bayeux Tapestry, 193 Caedmon, 53, 218 Chaldeans, 27, 29,33 'Charm for Unfruitful Land,' 6 Chaucer, 260-1; works: Book of the Duchess, 260 Christ Church, Canterbury, 8-9,179; and BNF lat. 10861,151; cartulary of, 187nll, 190n35; and MS A, 172; and MS F, 172; and port of Sandwich, 8-9,172,174-5,178-9; and St Augustine's, 9,177. See also St Augustine's Abbey

Christians, 26,33,46,48,147 Claudian, 220 Cnut, king, 8,172,174-5,177-9; conquest of Denmark by, 179 Confiteor, 131,144-5n41 Conrad II, emperor, 179 Constantine, 116,122n35 Cotton Library fire, 4,40 Cotton, Sir Robert, 177 Couesnon, river, 200,207 Cuma, 148-9 Cynewulf, 8,53,147,150-6,169nn40, 45,46,48,170nn57,59,61,64; works: Fates of the Apostles, 121n29, 153-4,170n61; Juliana, 8,99,147, 150,152,154,156,169n43 Cynewulf, king of Wessex, 308-9 Danelaw, 118 Denmark, 278-9,287-8,290; modern, 217-18,222, 224-6,228-9,232, 234nl3 Dover, 198 Dunstan, St, 127; Life of, 192 Durham, 6,17 Eadmer, 194,197-8, 204, 212n37, 214n54 Eadred, king, 110-12,118-19 Eadsige, archbishop, 175 Eadwig, king, 110 Ebbsfleet, 175 Eden, 16-17,19, 21, 33 Edith, queen, 202 Edmund, king, 111-13,116-19 Edward [the Confessor], king, 193-5, 198-9, 202,205,208, 212n37 Edward [the Elder], king, 7,109-10, 116-17,119 Egypt, 25-6,33 Egyptians: and Exodus, 16, 24-5,33;

354 Index and phoenix myth, 221; and St Julian, 149 Emperor, 49 Engla lond, 17,34 England, 208; Anglo-Saxon, 4-5,138 English, 225,294 Epistola Tertia ad Bassulam, 60n42 Erasmus, St, 148 Exeter Book, 17,29,150-1,156, 170nn59,64,218-19,225; scribe of, 152; individual poems: Christ I [Advent Lyrics], 92-3,102,121n29, 307; Dear, 29, 97; Husband's Message, 97; Juliana, see Cynewulf; Maxims 1,123; Order of the World, 4; Phoenix, 217-19,222, 226,228, 234nl3,259; Precepts, 119; 'Riddle 1,' 92-3; riddles, 96; Seafarer, 15, 97-9,101,104n20,123, 281; Vainglory, 4; Wanderer, 15,34nl, 97; Widsith, 3,15,99; Wife's Lament, 15, 97,123; Wulfand Eadwacer, 15 Exhortation to Christian Living, 113 exile, 5,14-22,26,28-33, 99,102; and covenant, 16,26,28,32; and desert, 16,18,23,25 exodus, 16-18,24,26-7 Exodus, Book of, 23,25-6,31 fable, 9; Ademar of Chabannes', 196-7,199; Aesop's, 9,191,195-6; in the Bayeux Tapestry, 191-209; in England, 195; Marie de France's, 195-7,199,205,215n59; Phaedrus's, 195-7,199,202, 204; individual fables: The Fox and the Crow,' 196-7,207; The Goat and the Wolf,' 205-7; The Lion's Share,' 205-7; The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite/ 204-7,215n59;

The Pregnant Bitch,' 198-9,207; The Wolf and the Crane,' 199-200, 207; The Wolf and the Lamb,' 1978,207; The Wolf Reigning,' 200-4, 207. See also Bayeux Tapestry Farmon, 306 Fortunatus, bishop of Naples, 148 Foucault, Michel, 6, 51-4,61n58, 61n60 Fulda, 151 Fuscus, 148 Galerius, emperor, 147 Genesis, Book of, 17, 23,305 genre, 5-7, 76-102; and alliteration, 6,91,102,106n44; and audience, 6, 92,97-9; ecology of, 78-102; and generic exchange, 79, 82,84-7, 89-92, 94,97-8,100-2; and phraseology, 6, 81-95,98,100; and prosody, 6,80-6,90-1,101-2; types of: charm, 6, 90,102; dialogue, 94-5, 97; elegy, 6, 97-9; epic, 6, 80-4, 88-90,102; hagiography, 6; heroic poetry, 5,11-12; lyric poetry, 6,82, 93^, 97,102,104n22; proverb, 89-90, 97; riddle, 91-7. See also Greek poetry; liturgical verse; prosody; South Slavic poetry Germanic tribes, 18,24 Germany, 59n30 Gloria Patri, 130,133,137 Godwin family, 202 Greek poetry, 5, 7, 79-85,91,102; genres of, 80-3; meter of, 81-2; phraseology of, 81-2. See also genre Gregory of Tours, 43; Historia Francorum, 43 Gregory the Great, pope, 148, 167-8n21,263-4

Index 355 Gretsch, Mechthild, 54-5 Grundtvig, N.F.S., 9-10,66,217-32, 234nnl3,17,236-7n40; and figurative language, 220-1; works: Bibliotecha Anglo-Saxonica, 219; PhenixFulgen, 9, 217-32; —, dedicatory poem in, 219,222-6; —, fitt numbers in, 219,234nl7; —, translation in, 219,226-8; Prospectus, 218, 225; translation of Beowulf, 232, 236-7n40 Guido. See Guy Guthlac, St, 17 Guy, count of Penthieu, 194,204,206 Hadrian, abbot, 149,167nnl4, 20, 167-8n21 Harley Psalter, 15 Harold [Godwinson], king, 9,193200, 202^, 206-8 Harold [Harefoot], king, 175 Hastings, battle of, 208 Helena, St, 259 Henry I, king, 188nl8 Henry of Huntingdon, 4,309 Herodotus, 220 Hesiod, 82-3,102, 220; works: Theogony, 82; Works and Days, 82,104nl5 Holy Land, 30,33 homeland, 3,14-16,19,21-5, 27, 29, 31-2 Homer, 80,82-4,101-2; works: Hymn to Demeter, 83-4; Iliad, 80-3; Odyssey, 80-4 Hutcheon, Linda, 253 Irenaeus, 137 Irving, Edward B, Jr, 5,12,17, 76-7, 109,219,240,242,245-7,249,253, 281, 310

Israelites, 15-16,18, 21,23-8,31-3, 220 Jerome, 52,148; works: Commentary on Philemon, 52; De uiris illustribus, 52 Jerusalem, 14,18,26-9,216n72 John of Gaunt, 260 John of Worcester, 4 Julian, St, 149 Juliana, St, 147-50,166-7n8,167n20, 167-8n21,168n22; commemoration in Anglo-Saxon England, 148-9,167-8n21 Junius Manuscript, 5,17-18,22-4, 26-33; and audience, 18-19,23,28, 30,33; and Cotton metra, 4; figural interpretation in, 16-17,25-6,30, 32-3; individual poems: Christ and Satan, 5,17,30-2, 35nl9; Daniel, 5, 17-18,26-31,216n72; Exodus, 5,15, 17,23-6,30,32,253; Genesis, 5,17, 19,21-4,28,30,35nl9,99,196,218, 258-9,306-7. See also exile; homeland Junius, Franciscus, 4,189n25 Klaeber, Friedrich, 10, 65,70,745n24,280,283, 286-7 Lactantius: De Ave Phoenice, 219-20, 226-7 Lambeth Psalter, 129 Lasamon, 4,218; Brut, 218 Leclercq, Jean, 127,130,132 lexicography, 5,10-12; of aglxca, 10, 66,242-6; and audience, 11-12, 254; of 'bravery/ 11,274-95; and euphemisms, 303-5,307; of 'fair,' 252-66: fxger, 255,257, 260, 263-4;

356 Index for-, 267n20;/w/, 255; sweart, 257; unfxger, 255; wlitig, 255,270n60; of 'sex/ 302-10: brucan, 308; cunnan, 306-8; cunnian, 306; ercde, 304; gebedscipe, 307; sen?, 302; wifcypbe, 308-9

Lindisfarne Gospels, 302 liturgical verse, Old English, 123141; alliteration in, 132,135; and audience, 132; and Latin, 127-8; individual works: Corpus Lord's Prayer, 130,135-7,140-1,1423n20; Creed, 129,136-41, 142-3n20; Exeter Lord's Prayer, 142-3n20; Gloria 1,135,137,141, 142-3n20; Gloria II, 142-3n20; Junius Lord's Prayer, 130,136, 140-1,142-3n20; Kentish Hymn, 140,142-3n20; Kentish Psalm 50, 142-3n20; Old English Benedictine Office, 130,136; Prayer, 129,131-2, 135-6,142-3n20,144-5n41 Magdalene, St: tapestry depicting life, 192 Malcolm, king of Scots, 112 manuscripts: - Cambridge: Corpus Christi College 9 [Martinellus], 41; 162, 261; 173 [Parker Chronicle], 8-9,65,110,172,173 fig. 1,177,178 fig 3,182; 198 [^Elfric, CH Martin], 39, 56-7n9; 201,133,135,142-3n20; 270, 188-9n23 University Library, Gg.3.28 [^Elfric, CH Martin], 39 - Canterbury, Cathedral Archives and Library, Chart. Ant. S 259, 187-8nl3; S 260,175; S 261,175

- Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, 142-3n20. See also Exeter Book - London: British Library: Cotton Augustus II. 90,175; Cotton Caligula A. xiv [^Elfric, LS Martin], 41, 58nl9; Cotton Claudius B. iv, 305; Cotton Domitian A. viii [MS F], 172,174,176 fig. 2,1778,180 fig. 4,183; Cotton Galba A. xiv, 125,145n41; Cotton Julius A. ii, 142-3n20; Cotton Julius E. vii [^Elfric, LS Martin], 41,45; Cotton Otho A. vi [Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy], 4; Cotton Otho B. xi [OE Bede], 110; Cotton Tiberius A. vi [MS B], 109; Cotton Tiberius B. i [MS C], 109,179; Cotton Tiberius B. iv [MS D], 109,179; Cotton Titus D. xxvi, 125; Cotton Titus D. xxvii, 142-3n20; Cotton Vespasian C. vi, 142-3n20; Cotton Vitellius A. xv [Beowulf], 17, 64; Cotton Vitellius D. xvii [^Elfric, CH Martin], 39-40; Royal 7 C. xii [^Elfric, Catholic Homilies], 38-9,42; Royal 12 D. xvii [Bald's Leechbook], 110; Stowe Charter 39, 187-8nl3 Lambeth Palace Library, 427, 142-3n20,144-5n41 - Oxford: Bodleian Library: Bodley 340 / 342,40; Bodley 343 [^Ifric, LS Martin], 41,51; Digby 172, 212-13n39; Eng. hist. a. 2,1878nl3; Junius 10,189n25; Junius 11, see Junius Manuscript; Junius 12 [SC 5124] [Boethius,

Index 357 Consolation of Philosophy], 4; Junius 86 [Blickling Homilies], 60n42; Junius 121,133,136,138, 140,142-3n20; Laud Misc. 108, 250n23; Laud Misc. 482,1445n41; Laud Misc. 636 [MS E], 179; Rawlinson G. Ill, 195-7, 199,201, 205,215n59 - Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale de France: Lat. 10837,149; Lat. 10861 [Passio S. lulianae], 8,147, 151-3,155; —, scribe of, 152,156, 171n83; Lat. 12052,144n31 Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare, CXVII, see Vercelli Book Wiirzburg, Universitatsbibliothek M. p. th. q. 28b, 151 culture of, 8-9; and modern editorial practice, 64; as performance, 63-^4,69, 71. See also scribes; use of reagent on, 176 fig. 2,177, 188-9n23 Margaret, St, 259 Marie de France. See fable Martin, St, 40-1,43,45-50,57nlO, 59n30; feast of, 42; and Hilary of Poitiers, 50; and Julian, 47-9 Martinellus, 41,43,59n30, 60n42. See also Sulpicius Severus Martyrologium Hieronymianum, 148-9,167-8n21; recensions of: Bern, 149; Echternach, 148-9; Wolfenbuttel, 149 material textuality, 5,8-10 Maximian, emperor, 147; and Great Persecution, 147-8 maxims. See proverbs Maxims II, 258,290 Maximus, St, 148

Memoires ofSt Urban ofTroyes, 192 Menologium, 17,119 Mercia, 111 Mercians, 116 Mermedonians, 242 Meters ofBoethius, 119 Misael, 28 Modalistic Monarchianism, 136 Moses, 17-18,23,26, 31-2,259 motifs: 'Beasts of Battle,' 6,94; Christ in the Wilderness, 16; comitatus, 116; Harrowing of Hell, 16,31,139; 'Hero on the Beach/ 6; 'Joy in the Hall,' 100-2 Mount St Michel, 207 Naples, 148-9; Bay of, 148-9 Nicene Creed, 131,137 Nicomedia, 147-9 Nisida, 149 Norman Conquest, 199,207 Northumbria, 111-12,118 Norway, 178-9 Odo of Bayeux, 175,192 Olaf Guthfrithson, 111-12,116 Olaf Haraldsson, king of Norway, 178-9 Old English Martyrology, 168n22 Old English verse tradition: and audience, 132; and exile, 14, 29; and form, 7,55,91,116,118,132, 135,140-1; and genre, 7,48, 91-5, 97-102; and orality, 76-7,79-80; and oral performance, 77, 79-80, 82-3, 85-7,89-90,102; and scribal practice, 53,62-3,71-2,74nl5; and self, 124 Ong, Walter, 253,257 oral poetic tradition, 5-6,76-79, 80,

358 Index 101-2,103n7; and audience, 79, 97 Origen, 126,137 Osbern, 179 Ovid, 220 Owen of Strathclyde, king, 122n34 Owun, 306 Palermo, 148 Paris Psalter, 258,263 Passio S. Mianae, 8,147,149-51,153, 155,166-7n8,167-8n21; recensions of: 'Corbie,' 150; 'St Gallen,' 150; 'Wiirzburg/ 150-1 Pater Noster, 125,133-5,137-8,140 Patras, 151,153,169n40 Paul, St, 153 Paul the Deacon, Homiliary of, 42-3 Peter, St, 153 Phaedrus. See fable Pilate, 153 Pindar, 82 Pliny, 220 Prognostics, 260 proverbs, 6,97. See also genre Proverbs, Book of, 259 prosody: meter, 64, 81-2, 87-91; morphology, 77; phraseology, 84-95, 98,100. See also genre Prudentius, 62 Psalm 136, 5,14-16,25, 29; illustrations of, 15-16; Old English version of, 14,16 Ralph d'Escures, 307 'Ratoldus' Sacramentary, 144n31 Regula Sancti Benedicti, 126,134 Regularis Concordia, 144n31 Roman Breviary, 93

Rushworth (MacRegol) Gospels, 306 Sabellianism, 136,139,146n57 St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury: conflict with Christ Church, 9,175, 177. See also Christ Church St Paul's Cathedral, 179 Sandwich, port of. See Christ Church, Canterbury Sappho, 82 Saxo Grammaticus: Gesta Danorum, 222 scribes, 40-1,44,53, 62-^4; and audience, 63,67,69-72; and authors, 63,68; and corrections, 65-6,68-9, 71-2; and hands, 65; and intervention, 6,38,40,42,51,62,68,71; and orality, 62-3, 66-8,71-2; and tradition, 53-5. See also Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; JElfric; Beowulf Manuscript Scyld Scefing, 223 Scyldings, 70,222 self, concept of, 7,124-5,137-8 Severinus, St, 148 Shakespeare, 252; works: Macbeth, 252,254 Sicily, 148 Sigeric, archbishop, 42 Sion, 15-16 Solomon and Saturn I and //, 94 Song of the Three Children, 133 South Slavic poetry, 5,7,79-80,84-7, 89-91,102,104n22,104-5n29; and audience, 85,90; charms, 85,87-8, 102; lyric poetry, 85,87-90,102; types of: funeral laments, 85-8,90, 102. See also genre Stour river, 174 Strathclyde, 112,118

Index 359 Sulpicius Severus, 41,44,47,50, 59n30; works: Dialogues, 41,43-4; Epistulae, 43; Vita Martini, 43,47-8, 50 Swein [Godwinson], 202 Symeon Metaphrastes, 166-7n8 synaxis, 124-6,130,133-4; forms from, 125,128-9,131,137,139^1; performance of, 125,127,135,137, 141; and private prayer, 124-6, 130,132; and worship, 124,132-3, 141. See also liturgical verse Syracuse, 148

13nl, 106n44,119,121n29; 242; Dream of the Rood, 97,121n29,1289; Elene, 6,119,121n29; Homiletic Fragment I, 263-4; Homily II, 48, 113; Homily XXI, 113 Vercelli Translator, 60n42 Vita /Edwardi Regis, 202,205 voice, poetic, 5,7,123-4,126,128, 133,135,140; communal, 134,137; Devotional, 7,129,137-8,140-1; individual, 129,141; Liturgical, 7, 129-30,137-8,140-1; Meditative, 7,128-30,135,141

Tacitus, 220 Taylor, Charles, 124 Tennyson, Alfred, 109 Tertullian, 137 Theodore, archbishop, 149,167nl4 Thorpe, Benjamin, 39,67,188-9n23, 218,225 Tower of Babel, 21 Tremulous Hand of Worcester, 4, 39-40,56-7n9, 57-8nl3

Wessex, House of, 116-17 West-Saxon Gospels, 306 William of Jumieges, 192 William of Malmesbury, 116,122n35 William of Poitiers, 192,212n37 William, [the Conqueror], king, 175, 192-5,197-200,202-4,206-8, 210n20,212n37,214n54, 216n71 Willibrord, St, 148; 'Calendar of/ 149 Winchester, 54,110-11,119 Worcester, 40 Wulfstan the Homilist, 53,130-1, 133, 308; works: Homilies, 308; Institutes of Polity, 308; Laws of /Ethelred, 308; Laws ofCnut, 308

Usuard, 168n23 Utrecht Psalter, 15 Venantius Fortunatus, 144n31; works: Pange lingua, 144n31 Vercelli Book, 17,263; prosody of, 113; individual works: Andreas,

York, 111