Textual Reception and Cultural Debate in Medieval English Studies [1 ed.] 1527506525, 9781527506527

Citation preview

Textual Reception and Cultural Debate in Medieval English Studies

Textual Reception and Cultural Debate in Medieval English Studies Edited by

María José Esteve Ramos and José Ramón Prado-Pérez

Textual Reception and Cultural Debate in Medieval English Studies Edited by María José Esteve Ramos and José Ramón Prado-Pérez This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by María José Esteve Ramos, José Ramón Prado-Pérez and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0652-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0652-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 (Re)Searching the Medieval: A Vision of Recent Perspectives María José Esteve Ramos Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England: The Bilingual Copies of the Regula Sancti Bendicti Francisco José Álvarez López Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh: Sentence Organization, Content, Form and Hierarchy in Translation Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 51 Mapping the Language of Glasgow University Library Manuscript Ferguson 147 Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 79 Astrological Medicine in Middle English: The Case Þe Booke of Ypocras Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas and Irene Diego Rodríguez Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 101 The Horns of a Dilemma: Finding the Viking Influence on Medieval English Vocabulary Richard Dance Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 129 Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxon Hero’s Journey through the Labyrinth Miguel A. Gomes Gargamala

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 155 Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs Nils-Lennart Johannesson Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 177 A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England Haruko Momma

INTRODUCTION (RE)SEARCHING THE MEDIEVAL: A VISION OF RECENT PERSPECTIVES MARÍA JOSÉ ESTEVE RAMOS UNIVERSITAT JAUME I

El hombre medieval vivía efectivamente en un mundo poblado de significados, remisiones, sobresentidos, manifestaciones de Dios en las cosas, en una naturaleza que hablaba sin cesar un lenguaje heráldico, en la que un león no era solo un león, una nuez no era solo una nuez, un hipogrifo era tan real como un león porque al igual que este era signo, existencialmente prescindible, de una verdad superior. (Eco, Umberto)

After many years of being a scholar in the field, it is still sometimes difficult to express the impact that the study of the Medieval times has on us. It becomes so appealing and interesting, so thrilling that hundreds of years passed by, we still feel a real fascination for all things connected to that period. Different disciplines in academia contribute to the knowledge and fascination of the Medieval era, and philologists and linguists play a fundamental role in this achievement. In the case of the current publication, this collection of essays are the work of well-known scholars in the field. By using different approaches and encompassing many and varied topics, the book will provide the readers with a well-selected sample of current research in the field of Medieval English studies. The Medieval linguistic and cultural commonplaces offer many insights into the multiple perspectives of this period of time, its language or languages, and of course, the relationships of culture with its multilingual context and text production. In recent decades, new approaches have emerged, but the necessity to go back to the manuscript sources has been a recurrent issue. In the iconic article by Nichols, published in the Journal Speculum in 1990, the idea of the discipline as

2

Introduction

connected with archaic notions of methodological enterprises was challenged, and Nichols coined the term “New Philology” to stand for the necessity of embracing a discipline which had been fundamental in the history of the humanities: What is “new” in our enterprise might better be called “renewal”, renovatio in the twelfth-century sense. On the other hand, it is a desire to return to the medieval origins of philology, to its roots in a manuscript culture where, as Bernard Cerquiligni remarks “medieval writing does not produce variants; it is a variance” (Nichols, 1990: 1).

In his article, he continued emphasizing the fact that there should be a more narrow connection between the philological approach in medieval studies and other contemporary movements such as linguistics or cultural studies. In this sense, this introduction aims at gathering a few of the different approaches regarding this term. In 1996, Jeremy Smith, in his introduction to An Historical Study on English, highlights the value of a more philological approach to texts: It is therefore important not to draw linguistic conclusions from textual data without first subjecting the texts to careful examination. “Every text has its own history” could be taken as the key axiom which underlies –or should underlie- philological practice. To refer simply to diatopic (“through-space”, i.e. geographical) and diachronic (“through-time”, i.e. historical) variation of texts is not enough; texts need to be contextualised, so that the true status of the information they contain may be ascertained. (1996:15).

In line with this tendency, the term pragmaphilology also emerged in the past decades. We can find a definition of this approach by Jucker (1995:11) claiming that “Pragmaphilology goes one step further and describes the contextual aspects of historical texts, including the addressers and the addressees, their social and personal relationship, the physical and social setting of text production, and the goal(s) of the text.” Whether it is, or it’s not, a useful framework in our present times, is a question that arises in the article “The Future of Philology” by Bajohr, Dorvel, Hessling and Weitz, who write that “The question, then, is whether it still makes sense to speak institutionally and epistemologically of “philology”. In the same article, published in 2014, they refer to the idea that there may not be one philology, but a multitude of schools and approaches that differ from each other by period, textual type, editorial tradition and their current theoretical trends. Current use of technology has also provided a new value for the discipline, and we may now find the

(Re)Searching the Medieval: A Vision of Recent Perspectives

3

label e-philology or the more global term digital humanities. In the end, the presence of the discipline seems to be still prominent, and the authors conclude that “philology seems to have converted its continuing crises into an ongoing success, and has thus earned the honorific philologia perennis or “everlasting philology” –an expression coined by the classical Rudolf Pfeiffer.” (2014:18). All considered, it seems quite clear that a text, its context and its reception are all important when we are dealing with the understanding of the language, literature and culture of the time, and this is what the following works attempt to do in the subsequent chapters. The present book comprises eight chapters covering topics such as translation, manuscript studies, language contact, vocabulary and Anglo-Saxon and Early Medieval Literature. In chapter One, Fran Álvarez investigates the use of the vernacular and Latin in the religious context of the Benedictine Reform. The idea of a multilingual England is widely accepted and attested. This chapter deals with the different status of two of the most important: English and Latin, and specially with the idea that English may have a subordinate role in reference to Latin –specially in religious contexts, in which Latin would still stand as lingua franca. Old English had won a prominent role thanks to the politics of King Alfred, whose actions in favour of translating important works from Latin to English positioned the vernacular in a more equalitarian position with Latin. However, the Benedictine Reform, despite using English “[…] became more distinctly that ever before an instrument, a pedagogical tool for the sake of effectiveness, in sharp contrast with the simulatenous movement of a hermeneutic form of Latin, decidedly intended as a prestige dialect of the monastic movement.” In this context, then, the author considers the Old English version of the Regula Sancti Benedicti, translated by Ethelwold. The didactic purpose of this work may have been connected with the lack of competence in Latin, specially by the novices, and would have been oriented to “deprive uneducated monolingual speakers of English (þa ungelæredan inlendisce) of their excuses for not obeying the precepts of the RSB on account of their deficient knowledge of Latin.” Seven copies, full or partial, have arrived to our days, mostly produced in the eleventh century. The majority presented a bilingual format -Latin first- followed by the Old English translation. This layout is considered to be the choice of the scribe, which would come to reflect a well-known tradition of bilingual texts produced and transmitted following that arrangement. Álvarez considers the paleographical analysis fundamental as “it is crucial to examine the ways in which the scribes responded to the challenges presented by a context

4

Introduction

which required each language to be written in a separate set of letterforms.” Apart from letterform, text size also reveals differences, showing that Latin letters were bigger that the vernacular ones. As Álvarez concludes, Latin was the language of the church and the language of God, and these visual differences in the manuscripts made it clear that, in the observance of the rules and the precepts of the community, Latin would be considered as the best option. In the next chapter, Bueno deals with the interesting and difficult question of literary translation in Old English. As an expert in the field, Bueno analyses the Old English poem the Battle of Brunanburgh, and focuses on different elements commonly used by the heroic poetry with the aim of discussing how renderings have tried to face and solve the challenge of being translated to contemporary English. In the chapter, Bueno considers the analysed translations to be classified in three groups. First, translations that would consider the poem in isolation. Second, those who would consider it within the context of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And third, those who would use the poem for poetic inspiration. The author of the chapter focuses on the first group, and more specifically, on the beast-of-battle topos present in lines 57-56a. He continues by comparing the translation into Spanish and Asturian and a very interesting question arises; what makes the difference, once the lexical meanings have been successfully rendered? Bueno answers that those who “have been able to incorporate that meaning into a given rhythmic structure, those which have taken into account the overall poetic layout of the verse” may have the answer, and continues: “that is to say: they saw the trees of the units to be translated but also seeing he woods of their syntactic organisation.” The chapter continues by analysing more examples of the renderings, and insists on the idea that the degree of adequacy of each translation will depend on the philosophy and conception of the work, including elements such as the layout or the structural organisation of the poem. Finally, Bueno concludes by emphasising the importance of these type of translations, as they stand as the only source form many contemporary readers and alludes to the function of poetic translators, whose fundamental function would be: “trying to see the present moment in yester texts, to bring the past into sympathy with the present” De la Cruz studies the language and the linguistic provenance in MS Ferguson 147, a collection of medical recipes housed at the Glasgow University Library (GUL). The Ferguson collection, acquired by the University, in 1921, contains a big part of the personal library of John Ferguson, a chemistry professor at Glasgow University in the 19th century. The manuscript under consideration is dated around the beginning of the

(Re)Searching the Medieval: A Vision of Recent Perspectives

5

fifteenth century. This miscellany contains recipes for different illnesses, as well as prognostic texts and also charms. The text contains, according to the author, 13.000 words approximately. Out of these, once Latin and other material excluded, the final number of words considered for analysis will result in approximately 11.300. The methodology used relied on the author’s transcription and the use of a concordance programme (AntConc). With this software, frequency of words was obtained. The author continues the chapter by describing the editorial practice of the scribe and again, by discussing the use of concordance programmes for linguistic analysis in historical texts such as the material under consideration. She makes very interesting reflections on this issue and introduces the use of LALME (Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English), which is used for the localisation of the results at stake. Results of the medieval recipes are compared to previous studies on the Antidotarium, also contained in MS Ferguson 147, as indicated above. Linguistic features and dot maps provided by LALME offer the results to be considered, and again the author offers a very interesting discussion on the advantadges and limitations when using LALME. She concluded, thus, despite some limitations, that LALME continues to be a valid and useful source when mapping the language in a manuscript. Results on this particular case have shown that language in MS Ferguson 147 does not coincide fully with the Linguistic Profile of LALME. However, some features may reveal compatibility with some of them, and although some forms are highly standardised, the author’s main conclusion would be that Profiles that show a higher correspondence belong to the county of Hereforshire, with influences from Shropshire, Monmouth and Warwickshire. Other questions that should be considered, including the fact that the scribe may have used different sources for the text, or even the interference of his own dialect, would also need to be taken into account. Next chapter deals with astrological medicine. This work, written by Isabel de la Cruz and Irene Diego explores the language of these texts. This type of medicine deals with the effect of planets on the health of the people, and it constitutes an unexplored and fascinating topic of research. The article starts referring to the well-known article by Robbins (1970) in order to establish three groups according to the type of text, based on three types. The first would be prognosis, the second, diagnosis, and the third would be “treatment or medications by means of herbs, bloodletting ad empirical remedies”. However, this classification was not considered to be sufficiently accurate and Voigts (1984) proposes medical writings to be classified into academic treatises, surgical treatises and remedybooks or materia medica, of which astrological treatises would be part of. Astrological

6

Introduction

treatises could be further classified into lapidaries, electionaries, lunaries, destinaries and questionaries. In this case, the treatise under consideration in the chapter is a lunary, more specifically a zodiacal lunary. As the authors indicate, most of these lunaries seem to have been translated into English during the first half of the fifteenth century period, and the audience to which they were addressed would be varied, from the high classes to the clergy. This would explain the large number of surviving copies. The texts analysed in the chapter are considered to be translations of a Hippocratical Treatise. In the Middle Ages, however, many of the treatises attributed to the Hippocratic Corpus were not in fact treatises by Hippocrates, but as the authors point out, they would be “ “fabrications of the Middle Ages” and have been usually referred to as the “medieval Hippocratic collection””. After explaining several issues concerning the so called “Hippocratic question”, the sections that follow focus on the transmission of the Latin texts and its transmission through the renderings in English. The identification of parallel copies follows, by including a list of the identified copies of the treatise under consideration and the location of the material. Finally, the authors present their findings and conclusions, emphasizing the importance of Astrology, and more specifically of Zodiacal Lunaries, as a fundamental part of medieval medicine. Chapter Five discusses the Viking legacy in Medieval English vocabulary, a task that proves to be –in some cases- almost impossible to achieve, defeating the linguist in the battle for uncovering the origin of the word. In this chapter, Dance presents us with a fascinating insight into the origin of English words. This subject has been the object of concern for many scholars, and still today, stands as one of the most problematic questions that concerns English etymology. To identify a word as having Old Norse origin or a different one is one of the central issues dealt with in this chapter. This work considers the etymological evidence from a particular group of words, and focuses on examples present in the Middle English text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as these examples are claimed to be Norse loans. The author reminds us that measuring the impact of Old Norse words would range from the 1500 items presented in the Oxford English Dictionary, to “the 600-900 given by Nielsen in Contemporary English”. Dance makes an exhaustive revision of the methods used to establish methodological grounds, especially focusing on the comparative phonological evidence. He then focuses on the case of Norse-related words in Sir Gawain, explaining that a total of 140 words in this work would unarguably present Norse origin. However, other examples could be included in the same category, according to different considerations. If

(Re)Searching the Medieval: A Vision of Recent Perspectives

7

we add these words, the total of Old Norse lexical stock in Sir Gawain would turn nearly 400. The question, then, according to Dance, would be what should be done with the “difficult” words. In order to attempt to answer this question, he proposes four types of prototypical categories which show the structural evidence under which Norse-derived words could be filed. The Chapter continues deepening into each of the four categories, bringing up difficult and fascinating examples of the etymological possibility or non-possibility of the origins of words present in Sir Gawain such as ME grome or ME rass. The author concludes, after detailed analysis and discussion, that each case need individual focus and study. As he states, in many of the examples the etymological evidence resists a single interpretation, nor a simple one. Thus, interpretation and the process of surfing into the complexities of the problem are as important as the conclusions themselves, and deserve to be at the center of the debate as much as results do. In the following chapter, Gomes uses the idea of labyrinth as a symbolic landscape to explain the structure of the poem Beowulf. The poem presents, as it is the case in Old English poetry, an intricate design in which elements such as alliterative patterns, repetitions, variations, recurrent themes and other additions form a maze resembling the journey that the hero himself will have to go through. To a certain extent, this structure would resemble the contemporary decorative art of the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells, containing curvilinear and rectilinear patterns. Gomes continues by stating that may be the labyrinth, conceived as a metaphor, a physical and a mental representation, would well be a more comprehensive alternative to previous proposals for the analysis of the poem. The chapter continues by analysing different passages that connect with this idea of labyrinth, creating a clear tension between linearity and circularity that contributes to the greatness of the poem. Gomes concludes the chapter reminding us that may be the final purpose of a labyrinth is precisely not having a purpose. The joy, mistery and greatness of the journey itself –as for Beowulf- should be the main attraction. Chapter seven is written by Professor Nils-Lennart Johannesson. This interesting work exposes and relates the correspondences of two passages in two texts: the first found in the Orrmulum and the second in the Testaments of the Twelve Partriarchs. This comparison is grounded in the claim that a previous Greek source would have been available to Orrm before the latter translation of the same into Latin by Grosseteste in 1242. The evidence found for this claim would be sustained by some passages in Middle English present in the well-known Middle English homily

8

Introduction

collection Orrmulum, which would reflect the content of the Greek text, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The chapter is divided into six different sections. In the Introduction, the author explains the state of the art and exposes the necessity to consider the revision of the transmission routes of the text under consideration. Following this introduction, he continues with the description and contextualisation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and of the Orrmulum in sections two and three. After this revision, Johanesson presents the correspondences between the list of Orrms’ vices and virtues and their parallel version in the Testaments. As the author indicates, the entries are presented with the same layout. After presenting these correspondences, Johannes arises the question of whether Orrm would have been able to ascribe these vices and virtues to the patriarchs without having access to one version of the Testaments. How this could have happened is the object of the next section. In this section, he discusses a possible route of transmission, where he established links between Orm and the palace school of Laon in Picardy, where a translated copy of the Testaments may have been available. The precise route in which the Testaments reached Orrm is not yet to be known, but according to the evidence when comparing the list of the vices and virtues of the Patriarchs, it seems clear that the Latin copy of the Testaments entered Western Europe prior to twelfth century, and left no other print than Orrm’s list. Last chapter of the volume is written by Haruko Momma. This work purports to demonstrate how the Early Middle English literary tradition used previous material to construct the emerging literary tradition of the emerging period. Momma uses very interesting concepts, such as “bricolage” -coined by Lévi-Strauss- and relates it to the way materials have been re-used in order to give way to this new tradition stemming from the previous one. She focuses on the use of “the trope of ravenous worms” as connected to the theme of soul and body. In her chapter, the image of the ravenous worms is the base to conduct a survey in the AngloSaxon tradition that help to link these previous sources with the new literary tradition in the Early Medieval tradition in England. In order to do so, she focuses on a vernacular homily found in composite manuscript named Hatton 115, which is related to the ninth homily in the Vercelli Book. The theme of the homily is related to the topic of the body and soul. Post-Conquest vernacular writers “make do with” whatever is at hand” and “renew or enrich the stock […] to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destruction.” The idea of worms associated to the dead flesh goes back to a Pre-Christian era. The expression “food for worms” and its different variations are found in Old English texts, such as the Soul

(Re)Searching the Medieval: A Vision of Recent Perspectives

9

and Body poems of the Vercelli Book and the Exeter Book. This tradition, according to Momma, may have reached the Post-Conquest period; early Middle English poems such as The Grave and the Soul’s Address to the Body from the Worcester Fragments. Next section in the chapter is about the so called “Hatton Worm Homily”. This homily, found together with other texts, is part of the manuscript known as Hatton 115, and shows the image of the trope of ravenous worms very effectively. The text in Hatton shares a common origin with the ninth homily in the Vercelli Book, but its version in the Hatton adds material (not found in the Vercelli) as Momma shows thoroughly. The author finds this material in another homily, a version of which is found in Vercelli II. Thus, she concludes that Old English Homilies will still be used after the Conquest, and that Post-Conquest tradition would assemble materials to produce texts that could accommodate the audience of the time. In this particular case, it is proven that Hatton mss would be a composite homiletic text, composed by assembling existing materials of Anglo-Saxon origin that endured and remained part of a renewal and innovative tradition. In conclusion, the contents of the volume above described remain particularly interesting for those interested in the different perspectives of current research in the field. The chapters included in this volume cover a wide range of topics, exhorting the potential reader to consider the relationship of the medieval textual heritage and language with both, its contemporary medieval audience and the readers of the 21st century. We hope that this book will inspire further research and interest. I would like to conclude this introduction by emphasizing, once more, the importance of this field of research. We must search and (re)search to continue the quest for the poetic verses and their metaphors, the origin of words, the impossible spellings and translations, the lost manuscripts, and the endless labyrinths so that we can continue studying and writing about the fascination we feel for the Medieval English Studies.

Works cited Eco, Umberto. 2012. Arte y Belleza en la Estética Medieval, (Elena Lozano, trad), Barcelona. ed Debolsillo. Driscoll, M.J. 2010. “The words on the Page: Thoughts on Philology, Old and New” in Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge (eds) Creating the medieval Saga: Versions, variability and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature. (Odense: Syddansk Universitetforlag) pags 85-12.

10

Introduction

Hannes Bajohr, Benjamin Dorvel, Vincent Hessling and Tabea Weitz (eds). 2014. The Future of Philology: Proceedings of the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Juker, Andreas H. 1995. Historical Pragmatics. Pragmatic developments in the history of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lerer, Seth. 2000. Book review: In praise of the variant: a critical history of philology by Bernard Cerquiligni and Betsy Wing. Compararative Literature, vol 52, n.4 (autumn 2000, pp 369-372) Nichols, Stephen G. 1990. “The New Philology. Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture.” Speculum, 65, nº1 pags 1-10 Smith, Jeremy J. 1996. An Historical Study on English. London: Routledge.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank the authorities of the town of Morella (Castelló, Spain) for granting permission for the use of the image of the cover: “les Dances de la Mort”. Also, we would like to thank the Research Group GREMI (Grup de Recerca d’Estudis Medievals Interdisciplinars), and especially to Professor Tomàs Martínez Romero, for their constant support. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors for their patience, enthusiasm, and commitment with this project.

CHAPTER ONE BILINGUAL MANUSCRIPTS IN LATE ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND: THE BILINGUAL COPIES OF THE REGULA SANCTI BENDICTI FRANCISCO JOSÉ ÁLVAREZ LÓPEZ UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

In his well-known Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede describes the linguistic landscape of Britain in the following terms: At the present time, there are five languages in Britain, just as the divine law is written in five books, all devoted to seeking out and setting forth one and the same kind of wisdom, … These are the English (Anglorum), British (Brettonum), Irish (Scottorum), Pictish (Pictorum), as well as the Latin languages; through the study of the scriptures, Latin is in general use among them all. (1994, 10)

This is the description of a multilingual society, that is to say, one in which the different communities and their languages coexisted in apparent harmony, as here exemplified by the simile with the five books of the Pentateuch. However, the final sentence leaves little doubt that the vernacular languages held a subordinate status to Latin in accordance to its position as religious lingua franca. As was the case throughout Western Europe at the time, Latin was the main instrument for the production of written records in Anglo-Saxon England. However, unlike other contemporary European societies, the Anglo-Saxons resorted to their written vernacular from a very early date. Even though Old English began to be written in the seventh century in the form of glosses and native personal and place-names, it is not uncommon to find Old English bounder

12

Chapter One

descriptions in charters from the early eighth century and even from the seventh. One such example is to be found in S23 (Whitelock 1955).1 By the third quarter of the ninth century the situation had been turned on its head by the Viking raids, as dramatically described by King Alfred of Wessex: There were very few (individuals) this side of the Humber who were able to understand their services in English, or translate even a single document from Latin into English, and I reckon that there were not many the other side of the Humber; there were so few that I cannot think of a single one south of the Thames when I first came to the throne. (Keynes and Lapidge 1983, 126)2

The apocalyptic landscape that Alfred outlines is subsequently seized upon to justify the need for his very own educational programme in which an innovative approach is laid out: learning to read Old English would be the priority, although “Latin would (also) be taught to those that seemed most apt or were intended for holy orders” (Orchard 2003, 214). However, it is Alfred’s reference to the translation of texts from Latin to English that is relevant here. One of Alfred’s cultural achievements was the setting up of a translation programme that would bring into the vernacular those texts which he considered “most necessary for all men to know”.3 The impact of this endeavour on Anglo-Saxon prose was outstanding in part due to the fact that the presentation of the texts translated in Alfred’s circle was mainly in Old English. As pointed out by Nicole Discenza, even though Alfred’s court was multilingual (as it included Frankish and Welsh assistants and often hosted Irish and Scandinavian guests) “the works of Alfred and his contemporaries carry little trace of these tongues. They wrote monolingual texts” (2011, 55). In the history of interaction between Latin and Old English, Alfred’s translations probably stand as the second most significant step towards the more fluid interplay which we find in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The presence of glosses in some of the most outstanding manuscripts from the early Anglo-Saxon era has been described as “the 1

London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Augustus II 91. A grant of land to Dunn, priest and abbot, and the church of Lyminge by Æthelberht II, King of Kent, date AD 732 (Whitelock 1955, no. 65). See also Crick (2012, 177); and Tite, (2003, 102-3). 2 Orchard (2003, 213). 3 In recent times the role of Alfred in the translation programme has been questioned. See Godden (2007); and the reply by Bately (2009). The latest views on this can be found in Discenza and Szarmach (2014).

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

13

foundations of English translation” (Stanton 2002, 1). In the tension between the two languages the need was felt for the vernacular to become an essential instrument in the interaction with Latin texts. And “it was precisely in its need to regard, contemplate and process Latin texts that Old English acquired its own status as a written vernacular” (1). In Stanton’s words, [g]losses are our earliest evidence of interpretative activity among the Anglo-Saxons, and they graphically dramatize the externalization of understanding, where the interpretation of a text becomes visibly separable from the words of the text and, paradoxically, by being marginalized becomes a more central object of investigation and further manipulation. (6)

Alfred’s output shows more likeness with the use of glosses than it may seem initially apparent. As with the glosses, the vernacular renditions that came out of Alfred’s circle have an intended didactic character, and therefore they betray a strong determination to elucidate and educate. It is tempting to agree with Stanton’s view whereby “[t]he king is playing the role of the schoolmaster (as he seems to play with) the idea of the eloquent ruler, a figure with roots both in the Old Testament and in classical antiquity”, and later revisited in the Carolingian court (6-7). His translations set the foundations for a culture of vernacular translation and perhaps institutionalised the concept of bilingual culture. His work and that of his circle seem to counterbalance the implicit lack of “authoritative weight” of English in the shadow of Latin. However, Alfred’s “unwavering belief in the ability of English to express the same content as Latin texts” was seemingly not shared by the generations of Benedictine reformers that came to dominate the AngloSaxon religious landscape from the mid-tenth century (Stephenson 2011, 130). Two of its most prolific voices seem to have had a rather different view on the value of the vernacular. Both Byrhtferth of Ramsey and Ælfric of Eynsham produced a remarkable corpus of vernacular texts, and yet it is only too apparent that for them English was but “a shabby substitute for those who have not mastered Latin” (130).4 Byrhtferth is particularly adamant of this as he fervently “protests that he is forced to resort to English due to the laziness of his clerical audience whose Latinity is deplorable” (131). On the other hand, Ælfric seems resigned to accepting much more willingly his role as mere translator given that he writes for a lay audience (his patrons Æthelweard and Æthelwær). In the context of the 4

On Alfred´s contrasting view see Discenza (2005, 5).

14

Chapter One

language politics of the Benedictine Reform, English became more distinctly than ever before an instrument, a pedagogical tool for the sake of effectiveness, in sharp contrast with the simultaneous development of a hermeneutic form of Latin decidedly intended as a prestige dialect of the monastic movement.5

1. The Translation of RSB It is within this context of vernacular translations and compositions which aimed to achieve a didactic goal that the production of the Old English Regula Sancti Benedicti must be considered. Æthelwold’s translation became the core workbook among the newly founded or reformed Benedictine communities. An entry in the Liber Eliensis claims that King Edgar and his queen assigned the Bishop of Winchester to produce an Old English rendering (Blake 1962).6 The ascription of authorship provided by this twelfth-century entry has been widely accepted among scholars although the translator’s ultimate purpose is a recurrent topic of debate.7 However, a historical record surviving on an early twelfth-century manuscript (Cotton MSS, Faustina A X) but commonly accepted as contemporary with the Benedictine Reform and known as King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries (EEM) claims that “hæbben forþi þa ungelæreden inlendisce þæs halgan regules cyþþe þurh agenes gereordes anwrigenesse, þæt hy þe geornlicor Gode þeowien and nane tale næbben þæt hy þurh nytennesse misfon þurfen” (Whitelock et al. 1981, 142-54).8 Therefore, according to this historical source which is arguably a product of Æthelwold himself, the translation was intended to “deprive uneducated monolingual speakers of English (“þa ungelæredan inlendisce”) of their excuses for not obeying the precepts of the RSB on account of their deficient knowledge of Latin” so that they might “the more zealously serve God and have no excuse that they were driven by ignorance to err”

5

On hermeneutic Latin see Lapidge (1975). Recently translated in Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, trans. Janet Fairweather (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 134-5. 7 For differing views on this, see Grestch (1974, 125; 1992, 131; 1999, 226-33); Jayatilaka, (2003, 147); Schröer (1885-88, xiii-xiv); Whitelock (1970, 125); Wulfstan of Winchester (1991, liv-lv). 8 Also printed in Thomas O. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, 3 vols., Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, no. 35 (London: Longman, 1864-66, repr. 1965), iii, 432-44. 6

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

15

(Gretsch 1999, 237, no 32).9 Hence, the available evidence presents us with a purposeful translation, created (and presumably circulated) under royal sponsorship, that was intended to bridge the existing gap between the accession of new recruits to monastic orders and their lack of appropriate Latin comprehension skills. In an instance not too dissimilar from the aforementioned translation programme set out by King Alfred, the aim was an utterly practical one. Novices needed to understand and abide by the monastic principles from the moment they entered the community, but this was not possible given their defective knowledge of Latin. Hence, it was most necessary that these regulations were made available in their native language.

2. Format Seven full or partial copies of Æthelwold’s text have survived to the present day.10 Even though they range in date from the late tenth century to the early thirteenth, most of them were produced in the eleventh century. Moreover, the majority of these items share a common, bilingual format whereby the Old English text follows the Latin chapter by chapter.11 On the other hand, the remaining two manuscripts offer monolingual renderings of the vernacular RSB as evidence that the vernacular text may have circulated to some extent on its own, perhaps as a late, eleventh-century development.12 The most problematic of these is the Durham manuscript, because it contains a copy physically independent from the Latin text and there is only tentative evidence to suggest that both versions were originally intended to go together. Moreover, it seems that the vernacular was produced at a different scriptorium and was later 9

See also Pratt (2012). Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 197 (s. x2); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 178, Part B (s. xi1); London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Titus A IV (s. xi med.); Wells, Cathedral Library, MS 7 [chs. 49-65] (s. xi med.); Durham, Cathedral Library, MS B. IV. 24 (s. xi2); London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Faustina A X, Part B (s. xii1); London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Claudius D III (s. xiii1). Two further manuscripts are often included in this group (London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Tiberius A III and Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 35). However, they contain only chapter 4 of the RSB, which seems to have had its own independent circulation. See Hallinger (1969, 211-32); and Jayatilaka (1996, 245-9). 11 This is the case in OCCC197, CCCC178, Cotton MSS, Titus A IV, Wells 7 and Cotton MSS, Claudius D III. 12 They are B.IV, 24 and Cotton MSS, Faustina A X, Part B. 10

16

Chapter One

attached to the composite manuscript in order to supplement the Latin version (Álvarez López 2007a; Dumville 1993, 12-13). Similarly, the Faustina manuscript presents us with a very interesting instance in which a twelfth-century copy of the vernacular RSB is followed by a contemporary copy of the aforementioned EEM, in a manuscript with plenty of evidence of mid-twelfth century use in the form of numerous marginal annotations (Álvarez López 2012; Gameson 1999, no. 384; Gretsch 1974, 126-37; Ker 1957, no. 154B; Treharne 1999, 232-4).13 When considered as a group, the surviving copies suggest that the bilingual format may have been the original layout chosen by the translator himself or a copyist very shortly afterwards, even though none of the extant copies is contemporary with the translation. Far from being innovative, such choice would come to reflect a tradition, well-known at the time, of bilingual texts produced and transmitted in that arrangement (Dumville 1993, 12). The production of bilingual texts in which the two languages are presented side by side or immediately following each other was particularly common during the eleventh century and even a quick exploration allows us to find a number of examples in which a variety of slightly different formats were used in order to accommodate multilingual works on a manuscript page. One such instance is found in the so-called Paris Psalter (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8824). This is a codex of uncertain origin (although St. Augustine’s, Canterbury has been plausibly argued for) from the middle of the eleventh century which contains both a prose translation of Psalms I-L associated with King Alfred’s circle and a vernacular verse rendering from the mid-tenth century of Psalms LI-CL parallel with the Latin original (Bately 1982; Gneuss 2001, no. 891; Gretsch 1999, 21; Ker 1957, no. 367; O’Neill 2001).14 Here the narrow pages show two columns of text with the Latin original on the left-hand side and the Old English translation on the right column. This format, which is seldom found amongst other bilingual texts of the time, allows for a close relationship between the two languages and, as it happens, reveals the need for extra space when copying the vernacular. To compensate, ink drawings were entered in most of the gaps left at the end of the Latin chapters. A fragmentary copy of the Homiliarium of Angers survives in Taunton, Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DAD C/1193/77 (Gneuss 2003,

13

For a detailed palaeographical study of Part B, see Álvarez López (2010, ch. 6). For an edition of the prose translation, see Bright and Ramsay (1907). For the “Metrical Psalter” see Krapp (1932). A facsimile of the entire manuscript can be found in Colgrave (1958). 14

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

17

303).15 This item, commonly known as the ‘Taunton fragment’ since Helmut Gneuss brought it to the attention of the academic world following Simon Keynes’ discovery in 2002, consists of two original bifolia (now four separate leaves) containing part of an exposition of biblical texts (pericopes) for the fifth to eighth Sundays after Pentecost. Here, the Latin original alternates with the vernacular translation at brief intervals. Although its place of origin remains unknown, evidence ranging from the quality of the hand to peculiar linguistic features points to a minor AngloSaxon centre. The leaves were written in the middle of the eleventh century or shortly after and provide an instance of a bilingual text aimed at catering for the pastoral needs “outside of the intellectual traditions of the Benedictine reform and its practitioners”, as Aidan Conti puts it (2009, 33). Thus, this small window into the production of manuscripts in rural England during the Anglo-Saxon period shows, not only that bilingual texts were known, produced and circulated outside the intellectual circles of the time, but that a practical layout had been selected to ease the duties of the preachers using them. In this particular case, the rapid alternation of languages allows the speaker to engage their monolingual audience in very fluid manner. Durham, Cathedral Library, B.iii.32 is a composite book containing a hymnal from the second quarter of the eleventh century (fos 1-55) and an early or mid-eleventh-century copy of Ælfric’s Grammar (fos 56-127) (Gameson 2010, nos. 8-9; Gneuss 1968, 85-90; Hartzel 2006, no. 91; Ker 1957, no.107A; Scragg 2012, nos. 318-24). Overall, the manuscript has a distinctive bilingual feel given that the hymns and canticles in part A were almost fully glossed in Old English and the Grammar in part B is also partly bilingual. However, it is fos 43v-45v that draw our attention. Within those five pages, which had originally been left blank, we find a collection of proverbs in a hand from the middle of the eleventh century.16 In this instance, each Latin sentence is followed by its Old English translation, with the hand alternating between Caroline and insular minuscule accordingly. Even though both languages were copied in the same ink, the separation is highlighted by the use of initials in the Latin only. A final, albeit more relevant instance is provided by the Exeter bilingual copy of the Rule of Chrodegang, now in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 191 (Gneuss 2001. no. 60; Ker 1957, no. 46). This manuscript from the third quarter of the eleventh century presents both renderings of the regulations for canonical life in a single column of text 15 16

See also Conti (2009); Gneuss (2005); Gretsch (2004); Rudolf (2010). For an edition of the proverbs see Arngart (1981).

18

Chapter One

with the Latin followed by the vernacular chapter by chapter. This arrangement, which is favoured in the surviving copies of the RSB, was also used for texts as diverse as the Marvels of the East, extant in London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Tiberius B V, fos 78v-86v (s. xi 2/4). Nevertheless, this format seems to have been particularly convenient for customaries that were used in daily chapter meetings (Ker 1957, no. 193).17 This selection of items offers evidence of a tradition of bilingual texts being copied and circulated by the middle of the eleventh century (and probably from as early as the middle of the tenth century) whose layout may range from the parallel columns of the Psalter to the chapterby-chapter presentation of the Rule of Chrodegang and even the line by line variation seen in the Durham Proverbs.18 The primacy of the Latin language is not only maintained but even reinforced by its foregoing position. However, the role of the vernacular should not be underestimated given that the format chosen for copying these bilingual texts seems to respond to the practical aim of gaining a better and easier access to the Latin text through the vernacular (Wieland 2009, 139). This is something that can be seen, for instance, in the Taunton fragment whose Old English text “would have well served priests with limited abilities in Latin” (Conti 2009, 32). However, the common format used for the RSB and the Rule of Chrodegang was probably more fitting for texts intended to be read out and explained at the daily chapter meetings, precisely chapter by chapter.

3. Script The use of this layout during the late tenth and eleventh centuries in England had significant implications for the nature and appearance of the scripts in which these manuscripts were written and for the scribes who wrote them. Although for most of the Anglo-Saxon period scribes used their own insular script when writing both Latin and Old English, the introduction of the continental Caroline minuscule in the middle of the tenth century destabilised the status quo of the native, vernacular script and brought about a definite separation between the two languages (Stokes 2014, 11). The foreign script was soon adopted, if not imposed, as a set of 17

An earlier copy of the Rule of Chrodegang with same layout from Canterbury can be found in Canterbury, Cathedral Library, Add. MS 20 (s. xi2). See Ker (1957, no. 97). A further instance of the same layout is found in the F-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, in this case the Latin follows the vernacular, which takes pre-eminence. See Ker (1957, no. 367). 18 Other bilingual texts from this period are discussed in Stokes (2014, 19-21).

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

19

letterforms whose marked clarity and roundness symbolised the religious perfection that the Benedictine élite strived to implement across the Anglo-Saxon monastic landscape, even if this varied between the scriptoria connected with Æthelwold and those connected with the other two leading reformers, Dunstan and Oswald (Crick 2012, 63).19 Moreover, as the visual separation became increasingly blurred towards the middle of the eleventh century, the native Anglo-Saxon script was somehow relegated in a kind of ideological script hierarchy.20 Thus, in bilingual manuscripts from the second half of the tenth century and from the eleventh century the Latin text tends to be visually less cluttered (a sense only enhanced by the absence of certain ascenders and descenders) and present a more elaborate punctuation system. On the other hand, the insular text tends to appear untidy, using a rather simple punctuation system (punctus simplex is normally the only mark found) and at times even smaller in size.21 From a palaeographical point of view, it is crucial to examine the ways in which the scribes responded to the challenge presented by a context which required each language to be written in a separate set of letterforms. A detailed study of each hand both in the vernacular and the Latin reveals informative details about the dynamics under which individual scribes performed, as well as regarding the evolution of script in the broader context of the English scriptoria. However, one must begin by establishing a fine chronological line at about the year 1100 when the separation between Caroline minuscule (or, rather, its English developments) and the insular Anglo-Saxon minuscule effectively becomes so blurred that it is no longer possible to establish clear differences between them, except for those letterforms which remain unique to Old English (æ, ऍ, ϩ, þ, ð).22 As a result, in the two latest copies of the Old English RSB (Cotton 19 On the arrival of Caroline minuscule in England and the English Benedictine Reform, see Bishop (1971, xvii); Dumville (1993, 143); Rushforth (2012, 198). 20 This form of minuscule is also described as English Vernacular minuscule. See Crick (2012a) and Stokes (2014). On the ideological undertone behind the introduction of Caroline minuscule, see Bishop (1971, xi-xii and xvii-xxiii); Crick (2011, 6); and Dumville (1993, 7-78). 21 The difference in size is particularly obvious in some bilingual charters, where property boundaries are given in Old English. See, for example, S801, a charter from Edgar to Æthelwold from 975: London, British Library, Harley Charter 43 C. 6. On the visual separation between Anglo-Saxon minuscule and Caroline minuscule see Crick (2012a, 179); Stokes, (2011, 23-47); Treharne (2012, 265-87). 22 This is effectively the beginning of a transitional period characterised by a transitional script: Protogothic minuscule. See Brown (1990, 72-3), and Roberts (2005, 104-7).

20

Chapter One

MSS, Faustina A X, s. xii1, and Cotton MSS, Claudius D III, s. xiii1) the scribes do not show significant differences between Latin and Old English beyond the aforementioned special letterforms.23 On the other hand, the earliest surviving manuscripts do confirm the existence of a strict binary system of scripts. None of these codices is contemporary with the reforming process which allegedly established this new state of affairs, but, as pointed out by Bishop (1971, xxi-xxiii) and Dumville (1993, 3548), the earliest surviving copy (OCCC197) shows the work of a scribe with an excellent skill in both scripts at a time when maintaining that difference seemed to be a matter of great ideological importance.24 After the first generation of reformers, the degree of purity of the continental script seems to have deteriorated progressively and a certain degree of insularity reveals itself throughout the Latin letterforms. Arguably, this “purity” was never properly achieved in the scriptoria under the direct influence of both Dunstan of Canterbury and Oswald of Worcester, the two leading reformers working alongside Æthelwold. CCCC178 has often been highlighted as an example of the unique development that the Anglo-Caroline script, the generic variety of Caroline minuscule developed in England, underwent at Worcester in the last quarter of the tenth century. Dumville (1993, 69-75) labelled this variety of insular Caroline as “Style III” and it argued that it was characterised by the abundance of mannerisms and its vernacular proportions.25 Most copies from the eleventh century reveal a parallel tendency whereby the vernacular script becomes more angular and the continental more anglicised. Overall, the scribes of these earlier bilingual texts were able to maintain this separation of scripts with a high degree of success, even though the exercise must have required a good deal of concentration. As noted elsewhere, it is not uncommon to find a script occasionally used in the wrong language (Álvarez López 2007b). Slips of concentration were fairly regular when copying short chapters and therefore alternating from script to script in quick succession. The two earliest manuscripts show a few interesting instances. Thus, whereas the scribe of OCCC197 writes whole sections of the Latin text in a neat form 23

In the case of the former manuscript, which contains a monolingual copy of the vernacular text, Latin words and quotations are still occasionally found. See, for example, fos 106r or 118v, where musical notation was also entered. 24 On OCCC197; see also Dumville (1993, 19-35); Jayatilaka (2003, 151-4, 1826); Ker (1957, no. 353); Scragg (2012, nos. 950-8). 25 See Bishop (1971, 20, no. 22). Dumville actually argued that Worcester initially produced a style of Caroline minuscule much closer to Æthelwold’s Winchester (Style I) before the development of Style III at the turn of the century.

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

21

of Anglo-Saxon Square minuscule,26 CCCC178 exposes how individual letterforms influence each other in both scripts.27 Nevertheless, most scribes coped fairly well with the frequent appearance of Latin words or phrases within the vernacular text. The abundant influences found are mostly related to either visible features of letters common to both alphabets28 or forms with slightly different shapes but significantly close to each other as to allow common features to be visible.29 Finally, it seems that this impact is more frequently present in Latin, where letterforms are occasionally evocative of insular shapes. It consequently follows that these scribes had probably been trained first in the insular script before moving on to the continental alphabet,30 once considered “the most difficult of scripts” (Bishop 1971, xxiii).31 The difference between the two languages is not simply reduced to individual letterforms. In some instances, a detailed examination of the text size exposes the fact that the Latin letters may be noticeably bigger than their vernacular counterparts. Whereas this difference is not so markedly noticeable in other early copies, Wells 7 shows a consistent dissimilarity in appearance whereby the Latin text is visually clearer and more solemn.32 Besides, the difference in minim height is of 2 mm.33 Similarly, it has already been discussed how the birth of translation in Anglo-Saxon England is often deemed to lie with glosses (Stanton 2002, 1-7). The best examples of glossed manuscripts are provided by some of the most remarkable early medieval psalters. In several of them the 26

See fos 74v17-23, 82r10-14, 83r17-83v1, 86v18-87r15 (full Chapter 59). Namely, the descender of Caroline g and high s. 28 For instance, c, e, i, l, m, n, o, p, q, t, or u look substantially similar in both scripts as well as the descender of g and ऍ. 29 For example, a, the second component of æ, round-shaped d as well as ascenders and descenders. 30 For further commentary on the initial training of scribes see Bishop (1971, xxiii) and Dumville (1993, 26). 31 See also Crick (2012a, 179-83) and Stokes (2014, 192-8). 32 Similar instances are found in the late copy in Claudius D III as well as in the bilingual copy of Chapter 4 preserved in Tiberius A III, fos 103r24-105r10. This mid-eleventh century text is sometimes studied alongside the full copies of the Old English RSB. However, the vernacular, interlinear gloss found in the copy of the Latin RSB in the same manuscript has been shown not to relate to Æthelwold’s translation and is therefore not studied alongside it. See D’Aronco (1983, 121-8); Gretsch (1999, 226-8); Jayatilaka (1996, ch. 5). 33 Minims are consistently 5 mm high in the Latin, whereas they reach only 3mm in the Old English. With regard to ascenders, they are 8 mm and 7 mm respectively. 27

22

Chapter One

glossing process was planned from their very conception and the lines were ruled and written by the main scribe of the Latin text. In most of these cases, the vernacular gloss is significantly smaller than the Latin original. However, one exception stands out. The pages of the mideleventh-century Cambridge Psalter, also known as the Winchcombe Psalter (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 1. 23), were ruled in a single column for 32 long lines in which the continuous Old English gloss (in red ink) was entered immediately above the Latin original (in black ink). Despite the chromatic variation, the mise-en-page and the overall appearance prompted N. R. Ker to argue that this “is not properly an interlinear gloss” (1957, no. 13).34 Indeed, the ruling of the page shows great consistency in terms of space between the lines regardless of whether they are intended for the main text or the gloss. Moreover, minim height is only slightly higher in the Latin, which is about 1mm higher than its translation. Nevertheless, a number of features are present as a reminder of the status of the Latin. These include the choice of ink colours (where the gloss is given the same ink colour as the opening initials and which is very uncommon for the copying of main texts), the thinner nib used for the vernacular and the lack of initials in the Old English text. In the words of Jane Roberts, “the greater importance of the Latin is signalled by the setting of the initial capital for each verse out into the marginal space” (2011, 63).

4. Conclusions The manuscripts containing the bilingual copies of the Old English RSB provide us with a remarkable set of items which, beyond their unquestionable individualism and the unique features each of them contains, allows for a wider exploration of the solid Anglo-Saxon tradition of negotiating multilingual works. They reflect and are a direct result of a long tradition which emerges from the need felt by individuals such as King Alfred to bring the most significant Latin texts closer to potential readers whose abilities on the foreign language were limited. The need to bridge that gap by enhancing the didactic character of the texts and their physical representations seems to be commonplace during key moments across the Anglo-Saxon period. However, the starting viewpoint was not always the same. Thus, whereas Alfred played the role of schoolmaster of his realm and conceived English as a valid vehicle for teaching and learning, the generations of Benedictine reformers that came from the mid34

See also Robinson (1988, I, no. 29).

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

23

tenth to the eleventh centuries, were much less enthusiastic about the didactic value of the vernacular. In their eyes, resorting to Old English was a minor irritation that was only accepted as a medium to access Latin and thus reaching the true means for divine teaching and learning. The frequent references to recipients of vernacular texts as “those who have not mastered Latin” or the “uneducated monolingual speakers of English” only serve to emphasise the authoritative weight of Latin which may also be reflected in the parchment. As a consequence of the proliferation of bilingual texts, scribes were faced with the dilemma of how best to present them on the page. It has been shown that a variety of options were adopted mostly according to the nature of the work in question. Thus, a mise-en-page made of two columns was adopted for the Paris Psalter as both languages were kept physically separate, whereas the periscopes in the Taunton fragment alternate languages at short intervals within a single column of long lines in a much more fluid setting. Finally, the Durham proverbs show a format much closer to that used for customaries such as the Rule of Chrodegang or the RSB where the prominent Latin text is followed by the Old English after each section (be this a proverb or a chapter). The introduction of Caroline minuscule in Anglo-Saxon scriptoria from the middle of the tenth century turned the copying of bilingual texts into a challenge for scribes who were now required to use two scripts. What is more, they often had to switch between languages within very short intervals. As expected, this alteration had a real impact on the performance by English scribes and, even more importantly, it deeply marked the history of both scripts in England. Thus, whereas the vernacular script was from this point effectively limited to the copying of Old English and saw the rounding of the Square minuscule, the Caroline minuscule underwent a similar process of hybridisation at different points in different centres of production.35 Overall, evidence from the manuscripts discussed above shows how in the eleventh century both scripts evolved in an ever-closer fashion to the point when differentiation became problematic and ultimately non-existent. The epitome of this process is provided by the early twelfth-century copy of the Old English RSB in Faustina A X, where the Protogothic script is used both for the vernacular text and for the occasional Latin sections found within it. Beyond the upheaval caused by the adoption of a new script, and despite the availability of different formats for the production of bilingual texts, there seems to be little doubt that the scribes, or those that 35

For a recent study on this, see Curran (2017).

24

Chapter One

commissioned their works (in this case the bilingual RSB), aimed at sharing the translation of the Benedictine text while carefully maintaining the status of Latin on the page. It is arguable whether one could blame the new continental script with its round and occasionally large dimensions, but instances such as Wells 7, where the Latin text is significantly bigger than the vernacular, show a determined effort to focus the reader’s attention on the former while at the same time somehow belittling the Old English text. Thus, the latter becomes a mere tool required simply to overcome the lack of sufficient linguistic skills among the younger members of the community. To conclude, Latin was in the medieval period the language of the Church and, by implication, the language of God. It may to an extent seem striking that, within the context of the Latinising Benedictine Reform, English ecclesiastics produced such a large body of vernacular writings (reluctant as they may sometimes have been), and even more so that sacred texts such as the Psalter and RSB were translated and repeatedly copied in Old English. However, one should not lose sight of the fact that this resulted often out of the necessity to communicate to those with little or no Latin at all (Liuzza 1998, 7). In addition, the underlying linguistic hierarchy seems to be strictly maintained with regards to the visual appearance which the texts had on the page, especially after the Benedictine Reform and the establishment of the Caroline minuscule. There is little doubt that scribes were fully aware of the visual difference between the two scripts they were working with (Crick 2012a, 19-20). Thus, besides the fact that the version in the divine language takes precedence by leading the vernacular translation, its occasionally bigger size provided a symbolic reminder of what language a member of the monastic community (or, for that matter, any reader) should strive to dominate if they were to observe fully the precepts of a saintly life.

References Álvarez López, F. J. 2007a. “DCL, B IV, 24: A Palaeographical and Codicological Study of Durham’s Cantor’s Book”. In Bells Chiming from the Past. Cultural and Linguistic Studies in Early English, edited by I. Moskowich-Spiegel and B. Crespo García, 209-26. Costerus New Series 174. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. —. 2007b. “Changing Scripts: a Case Study of the Use of Different Scripts in the Bilingual Text of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 178, Part B”. Quaestio Insularis 8: 19-35.

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

25

—. 2010. “A Comparative Analysis of the Palaeography of the Manuscripts Containing the Æthelwoldian Translation of Regula Sancti Benedicti Written in England”. Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Manchester. —. 2012. “Marginal Evidence for Twelfth-Century Monastic Scholarship: Annotation, Provenance and Use in London, British Library Cotton MS. Faustina A. X, Part B”. Electronic British Library Journal. Arngart, O. 1981. “The Durham Proverbs”. Speculum 56(2): 288-300. Bately, Janet. 1982. “Lexical Evidence for the Authorship of the Prose Psalms in the Paris Psalter”. Anglo-Saxon England 10: 69-95. —. 2009. “Did King Alfred Actually Translate Anything? The Integrity of the Alfredian Canon Revisited”. Medium Aevum 78: 189–215. Bede. 1994. The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited and translated by J. McLure and R. Collins. Oxford: OUP. Bishop, Terence A. M. 1971. English Caroline Minuscule. Oxford: Clarendon. Blake, E. O., ed. 1962. Liber Eliensis. London: Royal Historical Society. Translated by Janet Fairweather in Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). Bright, James W., and Robert L. Ramsay, eds. 1907. Liber Psalmorum: The West Saxon Psalms, Being the Prose Portion or the First Fifty, of the so-called Paris Psalter. Boston: D. C. Heath. Brown, Michelle P. 1990. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. London: The British Library. Colgrave, Bertram. 1958. The Paris Psalter: Ms. Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8824, EEMF 8. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger. Conti, A. 2009. “The Taunton Fragment and the Homiliary of Angers: Context for New Old English”. The Review of English Studies NS 60: 1-33. Crick, Julia. 2011. “Script and the Sense of the Past in Anglo-Saxon England”. In Anglo-Saxon Traces, edited by Jane Roberts and Leslie Webster, 1-29. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 405. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. —. 2012a. “English Vernacular Script”. In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, edited by Richard Gameson, 174-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2012b. “The Art of Writing: Scripts and Scribal Production”. In The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, edited by Clare Lees, 50-72. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

26

Chapter One

Curran, Collen M. 2017. “Changing the Tradition: The Morphology of Nascent Insular Caroline Minuscule in Tenth-Century Britain”. Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London. D’Aronco, M.A. 1983. “Il IV capitolodella Regula Sancti Benedicti del ms. Londra, B.M., Cotton Tiberius A.iii”. In feor and neah. Scritti di filologia germanica in memoria di Augusto Scaffidi Abbate, edited by P. Lendinara and L. Melazzo, 105-28. Palermo: Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell’Università di Palermo. Discenza, Nicole G. 2005. The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius. Albany: State University of New York Press. —. 2011. “Writing the Mother Tongue in the Shadow of Babel”. In Conceptualising Multilingualism in England, c. 800-c. 1250, edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler, 33-55. Studies in the Early Middle Ages 27. Turhout: Brepols. Discenza, Nicole G., and Paul E. Szarmach, eds. 2014. A Companion to Alfred the Great. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 58. Leiden: Brill. Dumville, David N. 1993. English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950-1030. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Gameson, R. 1999. The Manuscripts of Early Norman England (c. 10661130).Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2010. Manuscript Treasures of Durham Cathedral. London: Third Millennium Publishing. Gneuss, Helmut. 1968. Hymnar und Hymnen im englischen Mittelalter: Studien zur Überlieferung, Glossierung und Übersetzung lateinischer Hymnen in England. Buchreiche der Anglia 12. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. —. 2001. Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241. Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. —. 2003. “Addenda and corrigenda to the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts”. Anglo-Saxon England 32: 293-305. —. 2005. “The Homiliary of the Taunton Fragments”. Notes and Queries 250: 440-2. Grestch, Mechtild. 1974a. “Æthelwold´s Translation of the Regula Sancti Benedicti and its Latin Exemplar”. Anglo-Saxon England 3: 125-51. —. 1992. “The Benedictine Rule in Old English: a Document of Bishop Æthelwold’s Reform Politics”. In Words, Texts and Manuscripts: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Culture Presented to Helmut Gneuss on the

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

27

Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by Michael Korhammer et al., 131-58. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. —. 1999. The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2004. “The Taunton Fragment: A New Text from Anglo-Saxon England”. Anglo-Saxon England 33: 145-193. Godden, Malcolm. 2007. “Did King Alfred Write Anything?”. Medium Ævum 76: 1-23. Hallinger, K. 1969. “Das Kommentarfragment zu Regula Benedicti IV aus der ersten Hälfte des 8. Jahrhunderts”. Wiener Studien 82: 211-32. Hartzel, K. D. 2006. Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1200 Containing Music. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Jayatilaka, Rohini. 1996. “The Regula Sancti Benedicti in Late AngloSaxon England: The Manuscripts and Their Readers”. DPhil Dissertation, University of Oxford. —. 2003. “The Old English Benedictine Rule: Writing for Women and Men”. Anglo-Saxon England 32: 147-87. Ker, Neil R. 1957. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon. Keynes, Simon, and Michael Lapidge, eds. and trans. 1983. Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Krapp, George P., ed. 1932. The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius. New York: G. Routledge. Lapidge, Michael. 1975. “The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century AngloLatin Literature”. Anglo-Saxon England 4: 67-111. Liuzza, Roy M. 1998. “Who Read the Gospels in Old English?”. In Words and Works: Studies in Medieval English Literature in Honour of Fred C. Robinson, edited by Peter S. Baker and Nicholas Howe, 3-24. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press. O’Neill, P. P. 2001. King Alfred’s Old English Prose Translation of the First Fifty Psalms. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America. Orchard, Andy. 2003. “Latin and the Vernacular Languages: the Creation of a Bilingual Textual Culture”. In After Rome, edited by Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, 191-219. Oxford: OUP. Pratt, D. 2012. “The Voice of the King in ‘King Edgar’s Establishment of the Monasteries’”. Anglo-Saxon England 41: 145-204. Roberts, Jane. 2005. Guide to Scripts Used in English Writings up to 1500. London: The British Library.

28

Chapter One

—. 2011. “Some Psalter Glosses in their Immediate Context”. In Palimpsests and the Library Imagination of Medieval England, edited by L. Carruthers et al., 61-79. New York: Palgrave. Robinson, P. R. 1988. Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 737-1600 in Cambridge Libraries. 2 vols. Woodbridge: DS Brewer. Rudolf, W. 2010. “The Homiliary of Angers in Tenth-Century England”. Anglo-Saxon England 39: 163-932. Rushforth, Rebecca. 2012. “Latin Script in England: Caroline Minuscule”. In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, edited by R. Gameson, 197-210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schröer, Arnold, ed. 1885-88. Die angelsächsischen Prosa arbeitungen der Benedictinerregel. Kassel: Grand. Scragg, D.G. 2012. A Conspectus of Scribal Hands writing English, 9601100. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Stanton, Robert. 2002. The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Stephenson, Rebecca. 2011. “Byrhtferth´s Enchiridion: The Effectiveness of Hermeneutic Latin”. In Conceptualising Multilingualism in England, c. 800-c. 1250, edited by Elizabeth M. Tyler, 121-43. Turhout: Brepols. Stokes, Peter A. 2011. “The Problem of Grade in Post-Conquest Vernacular Minuscule”. In Producing and Using English Manuscripts in the Post-Conquest Period, edited by Elaine M. Treharne et al., 2347. Turnhout: Brepols. —. 2014. English Vernacular Minuscule from Æthelred to Cnut, circa 990 - circa 1035. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Tite, Colin G. C. 2003. The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use. London: British Library. Treharne, Elaine M. 1998. “The Dates and Origins of Three TwelfthCentury Manuscripts”. In Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, edited by. P. Pulsiano and E. M. Treharne, 227-53. Aldershot: Ashgate. —. “Medieval Manuscripts: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly”. In The Genesis of Texts: Essays in Honour of A. N. Doane, edited by M. T. Hussey and John D. Niles, 265-87, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 9. Turnhout: Brepols. Whitelock, Dorothy, ed. 1955. English Historical Documents, c. 5001042. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Whitelock, Dorothy. 1970. “The Authorship of the Account of King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries”. In Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Language and Literature in Honour

Bilingual Manuscripts in Late Anglo-Saxon England

29

of Herbert Dean Meritt, edited by James L. Rosier, 125-36. The Hague: Mouton. Whitelock, Dorothy et al., eds. 1981. Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, AD 871-1204. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Also printed in Thomas O. Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England. 3 vols. Rerum Britannicarum medii aevi scriptores, no. 35 (London: Longman, (1864-66) 1965). Wieland, G. R. 2009. “A Survey of Latin Manuscripts”. In Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker, 113-57. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Wulfstan of Winchester. 1991. The Life of St Æthelwold, edited by Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Manuscripts Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 178, Part B. Canterbury, Cathedral Library, Add. MS 20. Durham, Cathedral Library, B.iii.32. Durham, Cathedral Library, MS B. IV. 24. Gloucester, Cathedral Library, MS 35. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Augustus II 91. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Claudius D III. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Faustina A X, Part B. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Tiberius A III. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Tiberius B V. London, British Library, Cotton MSS, Titus A IV. London, British Library, Harley Charter 43 C. 6. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 197. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS lat. 8824. Taunton, Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DAD C/1193/77. Wells, Cathedral Library, MS 7.

CHAPTER TWO THE ‘BEASTS-OF-BATTLE’ STYLISTIC MOTIF IN BRUNANBURH: SENTENCE ORGANIZATION, CONTENT, FORM AND HIERARCHY IN TRANSLATION JORGE LUIS BUENO ALONSO UNIVERSITY OF VIGO1

1. Introductory Remarks, or What the text says: 937 Her Æthelstan cyning… With his characteristic and widely acknowledged sense of humour, Umberto Eco (2004, 137) began a long epigraph on poetic translation with the following statement that recalled the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: It is universally acknowledged that in translating poetry one should render as much as possible the effect produced by the sounds of the original text, even though in the change of language a lot of variations are unavoidable. One can miss the real body of a discourse, but try at least to preserve, let us say, rhythm and rhyme. So in these kinds of translations we have a process of this kind:

Research made to write this chapter was funded by the Galician Autonomous Goverment (Plan de Axudas para a consolidación e estruturación de unidades de investigación competitivas do Sistema Universitario Galego, grant number ED431C 2017/50). This grant is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Although I have expanded the analysis, added more data and carried out a thorough revision of the materials that conform the present chapter, parts of sections 2 & 3 already appeared in Bueno 2009. I thank the editors at Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses for granting me permission to use them here in this book.

32

Chapter Two LS1ES1 / C1 —–> LS1a ES1a / C1a where not only Linguistic Substance1 but also many Extra-Linguistic substances1 conveying a Content1 are transformed into a Linguistic Substance1a and Extra-Linguistic Substances1a supposed to be aesthetically equivalent to the source ones, and conveying a Content1a aesthetically equivalent to the source one.

If in any given poetic text understanding variation, taking into account linguistic substance and bearing in mind a coherent idea of the discursive body of the poem, are important features to obtain a successful rendering, in Old English poetry these aforementioned features are vital to produce such a successful translation. This assumption is even more relevant when translating a text whose understanding depends more on a having a clear idea of the overall structural organization of its elements than on obtaining a clear equivalent meaning of its words in isolation. Such is the case of the poem contained in the annal for the year 937 of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In this entry the events that took place are narrated by means of a poem, which constitutes one of the main pieces of Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poetry: The Battle of Brunanburh. The verses contained in this annal are important because those lines fall into the rhythmical units of Old English verse and have diction and imagery associated with heroic poetry. This poem, as many others in Old English literature –e.g. the case of Deor (Bueno, 2003)–, uses history as a narrative device to build the inner story of the text experimenting with the topics (style, diction, imagery) of heroic poetry: alliterative style, formulaic vocabulary, the beasts-of-battle topos, phrases taken from the stock of the heroic corpus, etc. It seems most evident that a careful consideration of these topics has to be made when translating the text into other languages. In a previous work (Bueno, 2011) I took into account how that careful consideration had been accomplished in a corpus of English and Spanish translations and recreations, those which were the most frequently used Brunanburh texts in both languages. The corpus I selected, though reduced, was useful enough to establish a translation taxonomy in which to fit in the future the rest of translated texts. So I revised and analyzed three different groups of translations –and translators– that considered the poem a) in isolation, b) in the context of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or c) as an excuse for poetic inspiration. In this chapter I want to concentrate only in texts from category a), and within them, I will exclusively revise the so-called beasts-of-battle topos (57-56a), something I did not discuss in my previous research and that constitutes a very interesting topic from the point of view of poetic translation studies. If, as Susan Bassnett said

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

33

(2002, 98), “any translator must first decide what constitutes the total structure and then decide on what to do when translating a type of poetry which relies on a series of rules that are non-existent in the Target Language”, the detailed revision of this topic is a very appropriate example of such a twofold translatorial decision. Using previous analyses as a starting point (Bueno, 2009) my aim will be then to revisit how this topos (57-65a) has been dealt with in the aforementioned corpus of English (Treharne 2010, Hamer 1970, Rodrigues 1996, Crossley-Holland 1982 as revised and edited by Barber 2008, Raffel 1998, North et al 2011, Hass 2011) and Spanish (Lerate & Lerate, 2000, Bravo 1998, Bueno, 2007) translations. As an interesting complement, a not very known version in Asturian (Santori, 1999) will be briefly discussed. The poetic recreations I discussed in my previous research (Bueno, 2011) –i.e. the cases of Tenysson and Borges– will not be dealt with in this chapter as they present a kind of text that deserves a study of its own to be fully analyzed.

2. The Nature of the Beasts: What the translations say” From the stock of the heroic corpus the beasts-of-battle topos is by no means a familiar and highly interesting stylistic motif. In the case of Brunanburh its appearance is connected with the realistic terms in which the slaughter of the warriors is described. As Elizabeth Solopova & Stuart Lee (2007, 90) have noted, “to accentuate this carnage the poet uses the common ‘beasts of battle’ type-scene in which carrion creatures (commonly a raven, eagle and wolf) are listed to either report the forthcoming slaughter, or in this case, highlight the bloodshed”. The placing of this scene almost at the very end of the poem, as Louis Rodrigues (1996, 20) has also noted in the introduction to his own rendering, constitutes also a relevant fact as it “both precludes dramatic tension and diminishes the sinister associations of the motif itself; these beasts who emerge only after the battle has been won share some of the cowardice of the fugitives”. In Brunanburh, then, the scene appears between lines 57 and 65a with the following structure:

34

Chapter Two Swilce þa gebroþer begen ætsamne, cyning ond æþeling, cyþþe sohton, Wesseaxena land, wiges hremige. Letan him behindan hræw bryttian saluwigpadan, þone sweartan hræfn, hyrnednebban, & þane hasewanpadan, earn æftan hwit, æses brucan, grædigne guðhafoc ond þæt græge deor, wulf on wealde.

Introductory lines: Fraternal heroic bond

The Beasts themselves: Sentence organization.

(OE text as edited by Treharne 2010, 46)

Let us revise then how the different translators have dealt with the content and structure of these lines.

2.1. The beginning: Brothers in arms? The fraternal heroic bond Before the beasts-of-battle topos in itself, the selected extract begins with some lines that emphasize what Jayne Carroll (2007, 330) defines as “fraternal bond between the poem’s two heroes”. Perhaps this fraternal bond functions as a contrast with the aforesaid cowardice symbolized by the forthcoming beasts of battle (Rodrigues 1996, 20). Be that as it may, these heroic ‘brothers in arms’ come back home after victory. So, the key thematic issue here is connected to their fraternal bond (“Gebroþer ætsamne”), their going back home and the term given to name that home (“cyþþe sohton”, “Wesseaxena land”) and their attitude towards victory (“wiges hremige”). As it is seen in the following table the English versions offer different solutions:

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

35

Table 1. English Translations (57-59) Gebroþer ætsamne

cyþþe sohton

Brunanburh

Wesseaxena land

wiges hremige

Hamer (H)

Brothers both together

went home together / returned to their own country sought their home sought their native land

The land of Wessex

Triumphing in war

The land of Wessex The country of the WestSaxons Wessex

joying in war exultant in battle

Rodrigues (R) Treharne (TH)

Together both the brothers Both brothers together

CrossleyHoland (CH)

Both brothers together

returned to () their own country

Raffel (Ra)

Brother’s mouth, Wessex king and Wessex prince, together both brothers together Brothers, both together

Returning home

_______

the sweetest taste of victory

sought their country sought out their kin

land of West Saxons in the West Saxon Lands

in combat exultant Wild with their winning

North et al (N) Haas (2011)

Exulting in war

The fraternal bond is very easily solved, since we have “both brothers together”, a perfect alliterative line in contemporary English, in different valid layouts. The sole exception is Raffel’s expansive and much rewritten line. No need for such an expansion in a very clear, simple and direct line. Their going back home and its name present two main options: to keep the etymological “sought” (R, TH, N, Ha) combined with “home”, “native land” or “kin”, which render “cyþ” very appropriately, or to use as an alternative “returned/went”. With some variation, the name given to that native land is always the same, being again the sole exception Raffel’s as he used Wessex as an adjective to qualify the brothers in the previous line. It is their attitude towards victory the item that presents more variation: “triumph”, “joy”, “exult”, “glad”, “win” combined with “war“, “battle”, “combat”, or the very bizarre and quite irregular “sweetest taste

Chapter Two

36

of victory”, which constitute a rewritten text with no textual evidence from the Old English original. Different degrees of intensity that are more related to the style of the translated text than to the understanding of the meaning of the items in isolation. The Spanish/Asturian versions offer something similar, as it could be seen in the following table: Table 2. Spanish/Ast Translations (57-59) Brunanburh Gebroþer ætsamne cyþþe sohton Wesseaxena land wiges hremige

Lerate & Lerate (LL) Los hermanos también/juntos /dos volvieron a casa tierras de Wessex en Guerra gloriosos

Bravo (BR)

Bueno (B)

Santori (S)

Dos hermanos juntos Regresaron a su reino de Inglaterra

Asimismo ambos hermanos partieron a su patria el solar de los sajones del oeste contentos y colmados de combates

hermanos /dambos xuntos tornaron al llugar de so El llar anglo-saxon

felices por aquella batalla

trunfantes na guerra

The fraternal bond shows very little variation again. The concepts are all there in every rendering. It is their incorporation into the general layout what changes from one rendering to the next: rigid verse pattern (L), prosaic transliteration (BR), alliterative verse structure (B) rhythmic prose (S). Their going back home and its name –if we leave aside the somewhat extravagant “reino de Inglaterra” (BR)– present the same variation arguments in the four translators, as it is also the case with the attitude towards victory. So, if they all keep in similar ways all the lexical meanings, where is the difference in their being successful or unsuccessful as translations? Let us say for the time being that the more competent ones are those which, apart from correctly identify the lexical meaning, have been able to incorporate that meaning into a given rhythmic structure, those which have taken into account the overall poetic layout of the verse. That is to say: they saw the trees of the units to be translated but also seeing the woods of their syntactic organization. As the set out the content quite simply, maybe these introductory lines are not very interesting to see any major structural difference, but even so, just a quick glance is enough to notice some details:

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

37

TARGET LANGUAGE: ENGLISH The brothers also both went home So together both the brothers, together, king and Ætheling, sought their The king and prince returned to their home, own country, the land of Wessex, joying in war. the land of Wessex, triumphing in (Rodrigues 1996, 29) war. (Hamer 1970, 43) Likewise, both brothers together, the king and the prince, sought their native land, the country of the West Saxons, exultant in battle. (Treharne 2010, 47)

Likewise both brothers together, king and prince, returned to Wessex, their own country, exulting in war. (Crossley-Holland 1982 as revised and edited by Barber 2008, 68)

But those ashes Of defeat were the sweetest taste of victory In the brother’s mouths, Wessex king And Wessex prince, returning home Together. (Raffel 1998, 42)

Leaving likewise, both brothers together, king and prince, sought their country, land of the west Saxons, in combat exultant, (North e al 2011, 472)

In the same way the brothers, both together, The king and the prince, sought out their kin In the West Saxon lands, with their winning. (Hass 2011, 115) TARGET LANGUAGE: SPANISH/AST Los hermanos también, el rey el Del mismo modo los dos hermanos príncipe, juntos, juntos a casa, a tierras de Wessex, el rey y el príncipe regresaron los dos volvieron, en guerra gloriosos. a su reino de Inglaterra felices por (Lerate & Lerate 2000, 141) aquella batalla. (Bravo 1998, 254) Asimismo ambos hermanos, rey y príncipe, partieron a su patria, el solar de los sajones del oeste, contentos y colmados de combates. (Bueno 2007, 132)

Los hermanos tamién dambos xuntos, el rei y el caballeru tornaron al llugar de so el llar Anglo-Saxon trunfantes na guerra. (Santori 1999, 143)

38

Chapter Two

As far as the English language versions are concerned, Hamer and Treharne clearly favour a more prosaic and explanatory, almost literal, organization (somewhat expansive in Hamer’s case with the unnecessary repetition of “cyþþe sohton”), whereas Rodrigues, Crossley-Holland, North and Hass opt for a poetic organization of the OE half-lines using a verse layout that renders both structure and content in a much more poetic and rhythmic way than that present in Hamer’s and Treharne’s texts. The case of Raffel, though poetic and symbolic, is somewhat problematic as his rendering present an excessive number of additions, rewrites and expansions, which are neither present in nor deducible from the Old English original. The Spanish versions produce something similar and they follow the aforementioned outline: Lerate & Lerate’s rigid verse pattern reproduces so tightly the OE half-line that it isolates the parts in such a restricted Spanish discourse that it exterminates the natural flow of the language. Bravo offers a prosaic transliteration of the content that, apart from the verse-like array of the lines, is pure 100% prose. Santori uses a kind of rhythmic prose that, like in Bravo’s case (more natural, though), seems like poetry only because its lines present a verse-like layout. My own text adapts a poetic alliterative pattern that is more natural with Spanish and its rhythm, offering thus lexical fidelity that abides by some formal poetic regulations that work in Spanish much better than other rhythmical experiments such as the one offered by Lerate and Lerate. To define this idea more accurately, let us go deeper in this structural wood and focus on how the beasts have been rendered. It will show with more detail how relevant it is to take into account the structure when translating the text as a whole.

2.2. The Beasts themselves or deep in the woods of sentence organization: Translation units and lexical items. In our extract there are four items involved in the structural organization of lines 60-65a: the food for the beasts and the beasts themselves. “Hræw”, that is commonly defined as “corpse, carrion, dead or living body”, and “Æs”, which is also “food, meat, dead carcase, carrion”, are two very interesting terms structurally speaking, as they frame the appearance of the beasts of battle. The brothers leave behind the beasts to feed on the corpses of their enemies. So, the arrangement of these lines spins around the appearance of the beasts (“Hræfn”, “Earn”, “Wulf”), their portrayal (“sweartan”, “saluwigpadan”, “hyrnednebban”, “æftan hwit”,

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

39

“hasewanpadan”, “grædigne guðhafoc”, “græge deor”) and their eatingactivities (“hræw bryttian” and “æses brucan”). As the following tables reveal, translating the plain meaning do not present a high range of choices. Broadly speaking a first main level of meaning is considerably well rendered into both target languages. Tables 3a & 3b: English Translations (60-65a)

Brunanburh

Hamer (H)

hræw bryttian æses brucan hræfn sweartan saluwigpadan

Corpses -------------To enjoy Raven Dark Blackcoated Hornybeaked Eagle Whitebacked Dun-coated Greedy war-hawk Forest wolf

hyrnednebban earn æftan hwit hasewanpadan grædigne guðhafoc wulf (weald) græge deor

Grey wild beast

Rodrigues (R) Corpses Sharing out Carrion Eating Raven Swart Duskdressed Horn-beaked Eagle Whitebacked Greay-coated Greedy war-hawk Weald wolf Grey beast

Treharne (TH) Corpses To Enjoy Carrion To Enjoy Raven Black Dark-coated

CrossleyHolland (CH) Corpses To devour Carrion Relish Raven ------Garbed in black

Hornybeaked Eagle White from behind Dun-coated Greedy bird of war Wolf in the wood Grey animal

Horny-beaked Eagle With its white tail Grey-coated greedy warhawk Wolf in the wood Grey beast

Chapter Two

40

Brunanburh

Raffel (Ra)

North et al (N)

Hass (Ha)

hræw bryttian æses brucan hræfn sweartan saluwigpadan hyrnednebban

Corpses (dismembered) Carrion -------Raven ------Black-plumaged Horny beak

Corpses (a scattering) Carrion Feast Raven Black Dark ones Horned beaked

earn æftan hwit hasewanpadan grædigne guðhafoc wulf (weald)

Eagle Splashed white on his tail Gray-feathered Greedy war-hawk Forest wolf

The dead Share out Carrion To use Raven Black Dusky-coat The curved of beak Eagle White-reared

græge deor

Gray-flanked

Tawny-coated Greedy war-hawk The wolf in the woodland Grey beast

Dusky Greedy war hawk The wolf in the woods Gray beast

Eagle White back

As far as English renderings are concerned, and taking into account the aforementioned four items, the following aspects could be noticed: a) Eating-activities: practically no variation at all, although there are three options: joining both categories (nouns and verbs) into one (H); repeating the same meaning twice (TH); or specifying four items individually (R, CH, Ra, N, Ha). As it will be seen these options are very much related to the general structural idea of lines 60-65a as a whole in each translation. b) Hræfn: Adjectivizing the raven. As expected, agreement in the beast, and minor variations in the adjectives. The only question seems to be whether to keep OE variatio or not, and that’s again a structurally-based selection; for example, the poetic style of Rodrigues is very appropriate and structurally coherent, whereas (CH) mixes two adjectives into one. c) Earn: Describing the war-hawk eagle. Something of the sort takes place here. The name of the beast is kept, the adjectives are rendered either poetically, apart or all together. Structure and rhythm are crucial. d) Wulf, se græga: Whose wolf it is?: In this case the beast goes with the place (“wood”, “forest”, “weald”, “woods”, “woodland”) and

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

41

its description ranges from beast to animal, wild or not. The translators follow a given preconception, as we shall see, so lexical options are rendered accordingly Table 4: Spanish/Asturian Translations (60-65a)

Brunanburh Hræw Bryttian Æses Brucan Hræfn Sweartan saluwigpadan hyrnednebban

Lerate & Lerate (LL) Cuerpos de muertos Gozara Carroña Ofrecida Cuervo Negro --------

hasewanpadan

Duro el pico Águila La blanca a la cola Parda

Grædigne guðhafoc

Halcón de la guerra

wulf (weald)

Lobo del bosque Gris alimaña

Earn æftan hwit

græge deor

Bravo (BR)

Bueno (B)

Santori (S)

Carroña

Cadáveres

Zalego

Disfrutara Cadáveres Cebarse cuervo Negro Oscuro plumaje Pico corvo

Disfrute Carroña -----Cuervo Negro Negra cubierta Compacto pico Águila Blanca rabadilla Pardo plumaje Belicosa ave

Esfrutar Festín de carne Curiando?? Cuervo Negru Vistíu de solombra Picu combu

Lobo en los bosques Bestia gris de la guerra

El llobu la viesca Pelleya buxa

Águila Cola blanca De plumas grises Ávido halcón de la Guerra Lobo del bosque Fiera de pelo gris

Aigla Blanca cola Marrón Falcón de guerra

In Spanish/Asturian the situation is somewhat similar although some changes are worth noticing: a) Eating-activities: no variation, similar to what happened in the English renderings: either you keep the four items or you blend some of them. The chosen structure will be the key, as we shall see. Perhaps the most divergent semantic option is found in Santori: “festin de carne” could gather both corpse and carrion. But, if it is so, why do we have “zalego”, a term which by the way is not semantically correct? In Asturian “zalego” means the remains of a

42

Chapter Two

cow that are left after being devoured by some beasts, and I think that will be a far too metaphorical use for “hræw”. “Curiar” means to tend animals, to look after them, to watch, to haunt” so I cannot imagine any metaphorical rendering of “brucan” with such a range of meanings. Something along the lines of “taking care of the corpses” would be possible, but even so the meanings offered by “brucan” would not be properly represented by “curiar”. b) Hræfn: Adjectivizing the raven: As expected, agreement in the beast, and minor variations in some adjectives. Structure seems to be the governing key. c) Earn: Describing the war-hawk eagle: A similar thing takes place here. The beast is agreed on, the adjectives are semantically correct and structurally-driven, and in some occasions (LL) with a far too crooked syntax. Whether the eagle is more connected with hawks, war or its being greedy is again a matter of rhythm or structure, as it happens to be the case in the OE original text. d) Wulf, se græga: Whose wolf it is?: For these translators the beast and its place is clear, it’s in the description where they turn either poetic (B, LL) or descriptively prosaic (BR, S). As we began to notice in the introductory lines, once the lexicon has been rendered, the organization of the content and its layout constitute the key concepts to evaluate the success of the rendering. The underlying philosophy of every translation and its way of understanding the lines are responsible for giving us the degree of adequacy of the text as a whole. Apart from considering how the items have been rendered, it is also capital to analyze their structural placement. Let us proceed with that, then.

2.3. The beasts themselves or deep in the woods of sentence organization: Structural arrangement of the translation units The translators of our first target language, English, have presented the structure of the beasts-of-battle verses in the following arrangement: They left behind them corpses for the dark Black-coated raven, horny-beaked to enjoy, And for the eagle, white-backed and dun-coated, The greedy war-hawk, and that grey wild beast, the forest wolf. (Hamer 1970, 43)

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh They left behind them, sharing out corpses, the swart, dusk-dressed, horn-beaked raven, the grey-coated, white-backed eagle, eating carrion, the greedy war-hawk, and that grey beast, the weald-wolf. (Rodrigues 1996, 29) They left behind them to enjoy the corpses the dark-coated one, the black raven, the horny-beaked one, and the dun-coated one, the eagle, white from behind, to enjoy the carrion, the greedy bird of war, and the gray animal, the wolf in the wood. (Treharne 2010, 47) They left behind them to devour the corpses, relish the carrion, the horny-beaked raven garbed in black, and the grey-coated eagle (a greedy war-hawk) with its white tail, and that grey beast, the wolf in the wood. (Crossley-Holland 1982 through Barber 2008, 68) They left a gift of dismembered Corpses to the horny beak of the black-plumaged Raven, and the gray-feathered eagle, splashed white On his tail, to the greedy war-hawk and the gray-flanked] Forest wolf, a feast of carcases For lovers of carrion meat. (Raffel 1998, 42) left behind them to share out the dead old dusky-coat the black raven, the curved of beak, and the tawny-coated white-reared eagle to use the carrion, the greedy war-hawk and grey beast, the wolf in the woodland. (North e al 2011, 472) They left behind a scattering of corpses, For the dark ones, for the black raven With its horned beak, and for the dusky eagle With his white back, for that greedy war hawk, A carrion feast, and for the wild gray beast, The wolf in the woods. (Hass 2011, 115)

43

44

Chapter Two

Hamer and Treharne, as it was the case in the introductory lines, opt for a more prosaic and explanatory way of organizing the content. The former, where he used repetition and expansion, now abbreviates eliminating the frame marked by “hræw” y “æs” and organises the adjectives around the beasts quite randomly. The latter, keeps the frame with a very appropriate rendering of the content but excessively prosaic and not poetic, abusing in my opinion of combinations with “one”, which is a burden for the poem’s rhythm. Rodrigues, Crossley-Holland, North and Haas preferred poetic translation, although they abandon any attempt of offering a metrical adaptation of the Old English system. Rodrigues keeps the structural elements of the extract –i.e. the “hræw” and “æs” frame, the beasts and their qualities– and organizes them in something similar to half-lines that provide the whole text with a quite clear rhythmical poetic shape, as Hass and North similarly do. Crossley-Holland produces a very interesting text as he keeps the items of the frame but moving them to a frontal position, which gives them more thematic relevance. By fronting the elements of the frame he is able to focus at the end of the text on a very efficient, clear and poetic organization of the beasts and their description. As said earlier, Raffel, despite his attempts at offering poetry (which he does, his text is highly poetic) composes a rendering with an excessive number of expansive rewrites, which fails to offer what the text implies. Rather than an accurate rendering, his version is closer to a poetic recreation similar to those analyzed in Bueno 2011. It is a great poem but it is his poem, not the scop’s. The Spanish/Asturian renderings present the following array: Tras ellos dejaban cuerpos de muertos que el cuervo gozara, para el pájaro negro con duro el pico, para el águila parda, la blanca a la cola –carroña ofrecida al halcón de la guerra–, y la gris alimaña, el lobo del bosque. (Lerate & Lerate 2000, 141) Dejaron tras ellos al negro cuervo de oscuro plumaje y pico corvo para que disfrutara con la carroña, y el águila de plumas grises y cola blanca para cebarse con los cadáveres, al ávido halcón de la guerra, y a la fiera de pelo gris, el lobo del bosque. (Bravo 1998, 254)

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

45

Cadáveres y carroña para el cuervo negro, dejaron detrás, para que disfrute el del compacto pico y negra cubierta, también para el águila de pardo plumaje y blanca rabadilla, belicosa ave, y para el lobo en los bosques, bestia gris de la guerra. (Bueno 2007, 132) Curiando los zalegos dexaron detrás vistíu de solombra al cuervo negru col so picu combu y l’aigla marrón de blanca cola falcón de guerra a escrutar del festín de carne y tamién al de pelleya buxa el llobu la viesca. (Santori 1999, 143)

As it could be noticed the results are quite similar to those previously stated. Lerate & Lerate as we all know tried to transfer into Spanish a kind of half-line rhythm similar to that of Old English, abandoning alliteration as a distinctive feature. Although it is a very interesting experiment, and it maintains the frame and the beasts, it presents the reader with a very unnatural reading, which excessively restricts the narrative progress. The rhythmic effect is interesting and praiseworthy but it is all form and heavily hinders the appreciation of the content of the poem. Spanish syntax is extremely twisted in some lines and forced to offer a somewhat distorted order, which is not poetic anyway. Bravo (1998), on the other hand, brings about just the opposite by offering a totally explanatory text, almost in prose. In fact, if we rearrange the final lines without their apparent verse structure, the resulting text has the appearance of mere prose: Dejaron tras ellos al negro cuervo de oscuro plumaje y pico corvo para que disfrutara con la carroña, y el águila de plumas grises y cola blanca para cebarse con los cadáveres, al ávido halcón de la guerra, y a la fiera de pelo gris, el lobo del bosque.

Santori provides a kind of rhythmic prose that, like Bravo’s text, constitutes much more a formal structure that a poetic layout, although it offers a more natural rhythm. My rendering offers a poetic alliterative structure (as explained in Bueno 2007 & 2011) that achieves a more natural poetic and rhythmic standard in Spanish language poetry. It respects at the same time the structure and the semantic content of the source text with the same technique Crossley-Holland used: fronting and highlighting the frames, which in my case alliterate with “Raven”, and

46

Chapter Two

leaving the beasts at the end. This text abides by some formal poetic regulations than work in Spanish much better than other rhythmical experiments such as the one offered by Lerate and Lerate.

3. Final Remarks: “The feast of the crow and the eagle” In this chapter, which served to complete the analysis previously offered (Bueno 2009 & 2011), I have just wanted to present a brief revision of the treatment the beasts-of-battle topos have received in different translations of The Battle of Brunanburh as a means of highlighting the importance of understanding not only both the words and their meaning but also their structure and relationships within a given poetic structure assumed beforehand. When discussing the issues facing translators of OE poetry into contemporary English, Carole Hough and John Corbett (2007, 122) used the aforementioned statement by Susan Basnett (2002, 98) to insist on the important decisions you have to make when translating and Old English text on several key questions: possible structure, range of meanings, poetic form, constraints, and so long and so forth. The words and their meaning are crucial, but style, abiding by a general structural/poetical idea, is capital. As Renée R. Trilling (2008, 475) has very properly stated: “The peculiar beauty of Old English poetic aesthetics, however, makes translation difficult; translators often opt for prose paraphrase rather than verse translation, focusing on content rather than form”. Verse translation containing both content and form: that’s the option that always works. In the final chapter of his aforementioned monograph on translation Umberto Eco (2004, 192) stated the following: [Translation] will be a matter of negotiation between the translator, the reader and the author, whose unique voice should remain in the text (…) Faithfulness is not a method which results in an acceptable translation. It is the decision to believe that translation is possible, it is our engagement in isolating what it is for us the deep sense of a text, and it is the goodwill that prods us to negotiate the best solution for every line. Among the synonyms of faithfulness the word exactitude does not exist. Instead there is loyalty, devotion, allegiance, piety.

In the examples revised in this article the renderings that offer better results are those which have taken into account the organization of the content –not only the content itself–, those which have gone deeper into the woods of syntactic organization, those which have kept the voice of the text through a successful negotiation of the best solution possible

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

47

according to some poetic formal regulations –as it happened in Old English poetry– but not strictly governed by them. The lack of such formal regulations produces prose or prose with the appearance of poetry (B, TH, S, H). The tight restrictions of an excessive formality produce exotic failures like Lerate & Lerate. I defend a rendering that at all times a) presents some degree of structural flexibility, b) holds a certain pattern from the original rhythmical structure, c) possesses a poetical language that avoids prosaic explanations and d) tries to translate poetry into poetry. Rodrigues, Crossley-Holland, North, Haas and myself offered such renderings. In “To a Saxon Poet” –“A un poeta sajón”, published in El otro, el mismo (1964)” – Borges (1989, 284) referred to this saxon scop as follows: tú que con júbilo feroz cantaste la humillación del viking el festín del cuervo y del águila, tú que en un tiempo sin historia viste en el ahora el ayer y en el sudor y sangre de Brunanburh un cristal de antiguas auroras (…)

Perhaps that is precisely the function of poetic translators: trying to see the present moment in yester texts, to bring the past into sympathy with the present. When it comes to uncovering and exposing the emotional essentials of human interaction, there is no 'then' - only 'now'. When a great number of readers do not have direct access to a given source language, translations constitute then the only possibility to savour a given literature, to see those ancient dawns through the poetic crystal of the text. The light reflected on our target language text has to burn with the same brightness it had on the source poem. To polish that poetic crystal is our duty as translators.

References Barber, Richard. Ed. 2008. Chronicles of the Dark Ages: The Fall of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. London: The Folio Society. Bassnett, Susan. 2002. Translation Studies. London: Routledge. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1989. Obras completas. 1952-1972. Barcelona: Emecé Editores.

48

Chapter Two

Bravo, Antonio. 1998. Los lays heroicos y los cantos épicos cortos en el inglés antiguo. Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo. Bueno, Jorge Luis. 2003. “Less Epic Than It Seems: Deor’s Historical Approach as a Narrative Device for Psychological Expression”. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. 46: 161-272. —. 2007. La épica de la Inglaterra anglosajona. Historia y textos desde el auge de Mercia al declive de la monarquía (750-1016). Vigo: University of Vigo Press. —. 2009. “Grædigne guðhafoc and þæt græge deor”: Revisiting Brunanburh’s beasts-of-battle topos (57-65a) in translation”. Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses 10: 19-32. —. 2011. “Eorlas arhwate eard begeatan”: Revisiting Brunanburh’s (hi)story, style and imagery in translation”. Babel: International Journal of Translation 57.1: 58-75. Carroll, Joyce. 2007. “Viking wars and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle”. Beowulf and Other Stories: A New Introduction to Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures. Eds. Richard North & Joe Allard. Harlow: Pearson Longman. 301-323. Conner, Patrick W. 2001. “Religious Poetry”. A Companion to AngloSaxon Literature. Eds. Phillip Pulsiano & Elaine Treharne. Oxford: Blackwell. 251-267. Crossley-Holand, Kevin. Ed & Trans. 1982. The Anglo-Saxon World. Oxford: The Boydell Press. Eco, Umberto. 2004. Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. London: Phoenix Books. Hamer, Robert. Ed & Trans. 1970. A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse. London: Faber & Faber. Hass, Robert. trans. 2011. “The Battle of Brunanburh”. The Word Exchange. Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation. Eds. Gregg Delanty & Michael Matto. New York: WW Norton & Company, 112-117. Hough, Carole. & Corbett, John. 2007. Beginning Old English. London: Routledge. Lerate, Luis & Jesús. Trans. 2000. Beowulf y otros poemas anglosajones (S. VII-X). Madrid. Alianza editorial. Marsden, Richard. 2005. The Cambridge Old English Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niles, John D. 2007. Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers [Studies in the Early Middle Ages SEM 20]

The ‘Beasts-of-Battle’ Stylistic Motif in Brunanburh

49

North, Richard; Allard, Joe& Gillies, Patricia. Eds & Trans. 2011. Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Rodrigues, Louis. Ed & Trans. 1996. Three Anglo-Saxon Battle Poems. Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers. Raffel, Burton. trans. 1998. Poems and Prose from the Old English. New Haven: Yale University Press. [edited by Burton Raffel and Alexandra H. Olsen] Santori, Xuan. Trans. 1999. Poesía épica anglo-saxona. Antoloxía Billingüe. Oviedo: Librería Académica, Academía de la Lingua Asturiana. Scragg, Donald. G. 2001. “Secular Prose”. A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Eds. Phillip Pulsiano & Elaine Treharne. Oxford: Blackwell. 268-280. Solopova, Elizabeth & Lee, Stuart. 2007. Key Concepts in Medieval Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Treharne, Elaine. Ed & Trans. 2010. Old and Middle English. c.890c.1400: An Anthology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Trilling, Renée R. 2008. “The Order of Things in Anglo-Saxon Studies: Categorization and the Construction of a Discipline”. Literature Compass 5/3 (April 2008): 472–492 [Published Online. D.O.I: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00534.x]

CHAPTER THREE MAPPING THE LANGUAGE OF GLASGOW UNIVERSITY LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT FERGUSON 147 ISABEL DE LA CRUZ CABANILLAS1 UNIVERSITY OF ALCALÁ

1. Introduction The present study discusses the language and linguistic provenance of a collection of medical recipes in MS Ferguson 147 housed in Glasgow University Library (GUL). The manuscript forms part of the collection of John Ferguson, former student and Chemistry Professor at Glasgow University from 1874 to 1915. Ferguson’s personal library was extensive, containing approximately 18,000 volumes. After his death an important part of his collection was purchased by Glasgow University in 1921 (Weston 2004). GUL MS Ferguson 147 dates to the beginning of the fifteenth century and comprises 159 folios on paper and parchment, mainly devoted to medical recipes in Middle English (folios 63r-91r and folios 92r-158r). The manuscript measures 165 x 113mm, whereas the writing space is 122 x 80mm. My focus is on the medical recipe collection found in folios 63r91r. The hitherto unexplored compilation contains mostly medical recipes for different diseases, but prognostic texts and charms also form part of this miscellany. Apart from the recipe compilation the manuscript includes the following items: A translation of the alphabetically arranged Antidotarium Nicholai or Antidotary of Nicholas (folios 1-55v), and Sarum calendar in Latin (folios 57-62). The text contains some annotation 1

This work was made possible through a Salvador de Madariaga Mobility Grant for Senior Researchers, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture (Ref. PR2015-00248).

52

Chapter Three

after the Antidotarium Nicholai, as well as on folio 91, where some recipes were added in a sixteenth century hand. Likewise, at the end of the manuscript a sixteenth century hand added some recipes for conserves and a charm on the flyleaf (folio 159). It was paginated twice. The recipe collection starts again at number 1 in ink, but next to it, following the previous pagination, the number 63 in pencil can be seen. Most folios have 27 lines, with some exceptions, like fol. 84r, where 30 lines can be found, and fol. 69r, which contains just 24 lines. According to Ker (1977, 892) the manuscript was produced by one single scribe, but some differences in the layout can be observed. The Antidotarium displays two-line initials in red for each of the alphabetically arranged items, whereas in the recipe collection in folios 63r-91r the only rubrication included is boxes around the title of the recipes. The general layout in this collection of recipes is much more careless than in the Antidotarium. The other recipe compilation (folios 92r-158r) also shows different rubrication from the previous one, as here the whole title of the recipe is usually written in red. The chapter is structured as follows: First, an introduction to the text under consideration; second, the methodology is explained; third, the analysis is presented and its results discussed; fourth, the findings drawn from the investigation are summarised in the conclusions. Finally, the references and an appendix with the linguistic profile of the recipe compilation in MS Ferguson 147 are supplied.

2. Methodology The text of this research forms a corpus of approximately 13,000 words, of which approximately 11,300 were used for analysis (with Latin and deleted material excluded). The manuscript was first transcribed from digital scans from microfilm and then checked against the original, afterwards, a slightly modified transcription (in which word division had been regularized and abbreviations expanded) was produced. A concordance programme (AntCorc) was then used to retrieve the frequency of words in the manuscript. A number of problems arose with the concordance programme which required manual intervention. Some of these are general issues to do with spelling alternations or homonymic words,2 others pertain specifically to the manuscript itself; for example, 2

For constraints on the use of corpus linguistics in historical studies, see Begoña Crespo García and Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas, “Corpus Linguistics and the History of English: When the Past Meets the Future”, in Input a Word, Analyse the

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

53

the use of abbreviations in this manuscript is idiosyncratic making it sometimes difficult to interpret some of them. The real number of expanded forms with the same ending helps to establish which the right way of reading the abbreviations is. Even if all spelling variants are taken into consideration for the analysis, the focus of investigation is on those which occur more frequently in the compilation in order to identify the dialectal area where it was produced. I discuss these issues further below.

2.1. Editorial practice The scribe’s spellings conventions have been fully respected throughout the transcription, including the distinction between and , although, as happens in other texts according to the authors of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME 1986, xvi, vol. II), “in some parts of the manuscript the two forms are not sharply distinguished. This is so especially in the correspondents of modern capital I and J which are hard to be distinguished in the manuscript”. The expansion of abbreviations is marked with italics. The recipe collection shows different kinds of abbreviations: a. Contractions, where the suspension mark above a vowel usually marks the omission of , as in womman, or , as in medicyn, although it can also signal omission of several letters as in Latin dmi for domini. b. Curtailments or shortenings. Honkapohjia (2013) warns about abbreviated words and claims that “encoding them presents a challenge, because the correspondence between the orthographic sign indicating abbreviation and what the sign stands for is more complex than in non-abbreviated words”. The manuscript displays shortenings in Latin and English words. For instance, the compilation shows a kind of superscript number 9, and some other symbols, which are usually transcribed as , and . This practice works perfectly well in Latin words but may pose some problems in native words. Thus, the superscript number 9 is found in Latin latus, Longius, but very often it is also found in English words, such as wormus and tymus. These forms in -us are attested in some western profiles. Therefore, it has World. Selected Approaches to Corpus Linguistics, edited by Francisco Alonso Almeida and others (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), 49-75.

54

Chapter Three

been preserved, as its Latin equivalent is undeniably the abbreviation for – us. Another argument supporting its preservation in English words is the presence of this ending expanded in words like cornus, monthus, shepus, and gostus “juniper”. Very often it corresponds to a plural form, but not always, as it is expanded as a singular form in clothus, clessus “a seed”, cropus “any part of a medicinal herb except the root”, and brerecropus “a bud or shoot (of a plant)”. LALME shows the -us ending is possible as a plural marker for nouns in some Linguistic Profiles (hereafter LP). It is true that words in plural can also be found in the compilation ending in -is/ys, as in schepis, boxys, leuys, snaylys, þingis, monthys, or vermys, but plurals in –es are also attested, both expanded and in an abbreviated form, displaying a specific symbol for this kind of plural form. Thus –es documented plural forms are þinges, leues, gobbetes “a medicinal pellet”, and snayles. As it can be observed, the same words can be made plural either by adding –is/ys or –es, as þingis/þinges, leuys/leues, snaylys/snayles show. Another controversial abbreviation is –ur, which appears quite often in Latin words, especially in sanabitur “will be healed”. This symbol is often displayed with native English words, such as aftur, watur, togedur or powdur. Some other times the ending is found in full in anothur, botur, othur, lykur, plastur, rethur “an ox, a cow, bull”, safur, and soffur “suffer”. In fact, the presence of anothur expanded totals up to fifty-two instances out of sixty occurrences, which leads to the confirmation that the form is available within the scribe’s repertoire. In addition, LALME has attested this form instead of final –er in English native words in the following Linguistics Profiles: 1400, 1453, 1454, 4003, 4005, 4006, 4009, 4014, 4015, 4017, 4018, 4019, 5051, 5052, 5064, 5291, 5411, 5412, 5652, 5654, 5656, 5660, 5802, 5840, 6240, 6270, 7080, 7500, some of which share a wide variety of different forms with the MS Ferguson 147 Linguistic Profile. c. Brevigraphs and Superior Letters. Brevigraphs, such as per, par or pro, are sometimes documented in MS Ferguson 147. The last one is mainly found in Latin words, such as probatum, but the other two are attested in English words, such as peper or parte. Finally, the use of superior letters is extremely common in the case of with, þat, þe, and þou.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

55

2.2. The use of concordance programmes and LALME online functions Concordance programmes are a powerful and reliable way of treating data efficiently. Since this is a qualitative approach to the study of the language of MS Ferguson 147, the number of occurrences is used just to account for the most common forms found in the text in order to make decisions about the expansion of abbreviations and the possible provenance of specific linguistic items. Nonetheless, the data have to be revised by scholars. Since the corpus is not tagged, a recurrent problem is the failure to distinguish between homonymic words. With the exception of hym, used for him and them, and the forms the/þe, being used for the definite article and as a 2nd person singular pronoun, and, whose differentiation is not useful for the linguistic analysis, in all the other cases, the data retrieved from the concordance programme have been read in context. For instance, it is necessary to disambiguate between may as an auxiliary verb and a noun in May butter; вef attested both as an imperative form from geuen and the conjunction if; wolle meaning the verb will and the noun wool; ere documented as an adverb and as a noun meaning “ear”; hole, which can correspond to whole, or hole as an adjective meaning “healthy”, and as a noun to designate “a hollow place or cavity in a solid body”. A frequent case of homonymy is that of egg and eye. Both terms can be spelled in diverse manners. Thus, eye is attested as eye, but also as eyy and eyye. In plural the forms eyyn, eyen, eyynn, yen, eyyun, yввen are retrieved. In turn, egg appears as eye on sixteen occasions,3 out of which six correspond to singular uses, while in the plural the forms eyrin, eyryn, eyrun, and eyryun are also employed. In the singular form eyer, eyyer are found as well. The differentiation between both nouns is easier when they are in the plural form. However, the concordance programme cannot distinguish between the forms attested as eye corresponding to eye and those belonging to egg. As the corpus is not tagged, the programme cannot differentiate between singular or plural forms within the egg paradigm. Likewise, the programme will not be able to mark a neye as a form corresponding to egg, since a eye, a neye, and an neye are found in the manuscript. The confusion with forms either beginning with a vowel or a nasal is also found in the co-occurrence of noyngtement and oynement, and in adderys and nadderys, where the metanalysis process seems to be in progress, as both forms are attested in the text. 3

Egg is the Scandinavian form of the word while eye comes from its Old English cognate.

56

Chapter Three

Concordance programmes are similarly not able to distinguish between a genuine form and a spelling error. Some instances are clearly errors. For example, the following cases: “Take arnement & hony & þe whyt o a eye” (fol. 70v), where an is missing in “the white of an egg”. Another case of elision is found in the verb bleed, in “Medicyn for a man þat bedeþ at þe nose” (fol. 86r). More dubious instances are found on fol. 64r where more is spelled mo, “þat he haþe mo holis than on & a kucker ys withou‫܌‬t hole”. LALME includes some LPs where no-mo can be found, but it is always in the negative form. The Middle English Dictionary includes mo as adjective and adverb as an early or mainly northern form. None of these statements, mo being either an early or a northern form, seems to apply here. Finally, thogedur, which may be perceived as a spelling mistake, can be considered a true form. LALME mentions just two LPs where the tho- form is possible: tho-gedyr in LP 357 corresponding to Staffordshire, and thogederis in LP 5920 corresponding to Sussex. As the form is attested beginning with tho-, it cannot be completely disregarded. All in all, the use of machine retrievable data allows us to deal with the information in a more efficient and reliable way. Thus, along with the traditional four volume LALME 1986 edition, the online version revised in 2013 has also been consulted. The online version allows for the search and retrieval of specific questionnaire items or Linguistic Profiles in seconds and, what is more important, the information can be stored in Excel spreadsheets or Word format documents to allow comparison between the different LPs found in the text. The online version also allows one to view maps (both static and dynamic); create one’s own maps combining different forms and “fit” (i.e. localise) texts. This function therefore helps to contextualise the distribution of the selected features, since several features can be displayed on the same map. A minor detail is the fact that sometimes the printed version does not completely coincide with the online version. For example, when consulting the Linguistic Profiles for Shropshire, the online version retrieves seventeen Linguistic Profiles, whereas the printed version includes four more not present in the online version (LP306, 312, 418 and 435). It is very likely that the online version was under a process of revision and, as a result of this, some data were updated. Likewise, the maps available online and in the printed version are slightly different in the sense that some details can just be observed when consulting one format or the other.4 4

Some methodological issues related to the use of LALME are further discussed in next section.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

57

3. Analysis and discussion Once the recipe collection was transcribed and the frequency of words retrieved and manually filtered, the next phase involved the application of the fit-technique. To this end, well attested forms were chosen to be checked against the dot maps. Then, to narrow down the provenance and find the exact location of the items variants, a set of them was selected and scrutinized against the corresponding item maps. Some of the most frequent terms in Ferguson 147 are included in the LALME questionnaire. Nonetheless, items such as THE, AS, IT, IS, and THERE are of little help, since the forms found in MS Ferguson 147 are common throughout the whole territory analysed by the LALME team. The Ferguson 147 recipe compilation shows either highly standardised forms, as it is the case of THERE, or the variation in the item is so little that it can be documented all across the country. This is the case of items such as MANY, MAN, ANY, AS, which show very few variants, making it compatible with almost any Linguistic Profile. Likewise, the wide variation found in IT, which appears as hyt, yt, hit, turns this form into a feasible one in almost any middle or southern profile. Other terms, such as MILK, MOUTH, LEECH, which could provide clues on the provenance of the collection, were not included in the questionnaire. Thus, even if the whole LALME questionnaire has been used, we have concentrated on those forms that were distinctive enough to trace a possible Linguistic Profile. An item is considered diagnostic in proportion as its examination produces significant information. Therefore, special attention has been paid to forms that seem to be unusual at first sight, such as endings in –ur in anothur, for instance. Endings in –us as in monthus, FIRE variants, etc. have also been considered diagnostic, even though some of these features were more widespread than expected at the beginning of the research. Carrillo Linares (2005) studied the Antidotarium Nicholai, also contained in this manuscript. Some differences even in the layout can be observed, as was mentioned above. Regarding the provenance of the language, Carrillo Linares (2005) referred to a western origin and documents forms like þilke that restrict the area to Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire (2005, 79), but the form in Ferguson 147 is the same. This is not the only case where the forms are different. By comparing the information provided by her (2005, 91) with the forms found in the recipe collection, it is apparent that some of the forms do not coincide. Thus, items such as THESE, WILL, BUT, EYES, HEAD, THE SAME, THOU, and TWO are spelled in a completely different way in both texts.

Chapter Three

58

THESE WILL BUT EYES HEAD THE SAME THOU TWO

Antidotarium þees woleþ (pl.), will (sg) bote ey‫܌‬en hed þilke þu, þau tweyen, twyn, tweye

Recipe Collection þese, þis, þes wol (pl. & sg.), wolle (sg) but, bot eyyn, eyen, eyynn, eyyun, y‫܌‬en, yen hede the same þou, thow, thou tooe

Table 1. Different readings in Antidotarium Nicholai and the Medical Recipe Collection Some other terms coincide in some of the spelling variants but the most frequent forms used in each text are not necessarily the same. Thus, the Antidotarium shows her, ‫܌‬heare, heare for THEIR. On the contrary, the recipe collection does not include the last two forms, but just her, and hare. Whereas the Antidotarium displays furst, furste for FIRST, the first form is not even attested in the recipe collection, whose most frequent form is fyrste followed by furste. The same applies to FIRE, whose most frequent variant is fuyre in Antidotarium with occasional use of the covariant fyre. The tendency in the recipe collection is quite the opposite. The most widely used form is fyre, followed by fuyre, but then another three co-variants are found: fere, fure and furye. The last one is not documented in the LALME.

3.1. Verbal endings and the verb to be The comparison of the verbal forms in both texts shows similar results, although the 3rd person singular present endings are more varied in the recipe collection. In turn, the Antidotarium includes a past particle weak form in –id which is not found in the recipe collection.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147 Antidotarium Present ppt. Verbal subs 3sg. pr Pr pl Weak ppt. Strong ppt.

-ynge -ynge –inge eþ –iþ -eþ -uþ -ed –id –yd -de -ed

59

Recipe Collection -ynge -ynge, -inge -eþ(e), ethe, -iþ -eþ -uþ -ed, yd -de -ed

Table 2. Verbal inflection in Antidotarium Nicholai and the Medical Recipe Collection Table 3 shows the distribution of the verb to be. Here considerable differences can be seen in the use of reflexes of Modern English are. Whereas only two forms are documented in Antidotarium, one of which is not attested in the recipe collection, the latter includes five different forms for ARE, with various frequencies of appearance: beþe (3x), beþ (1x), bethe (1x), are (1x) and art (2x) for the 2nd person singular. Antidotarium ARE

beþ (beþe)

WAS WERE IS BEEN BE

was X ys ((is)) be be5

Recipe Collection beþe, beþ, bethe, are, art was were ys, is be be, bee

Table 3. Forms of the verb TO BE in Antidotarium Nicholai and the Medical Recipe Collection In general, there are various reasons that can account for the differences in spelling. Very often recipe compilations are unique. Both Eggins and Martins (1997, 230-231) and Taavitsainen (2001, 2) mention the fact that the realisations of texts vary according to the target audience in terms of the style of writing, adjusting it to professional, lay or more heterogeneous readership according to their knowledge of the topic. Even if the scribe was based on a common western tradition, the copyist could enlarge the original compilation with some other recipes from different 5 This form is not included in Carrillo-Linares’ Table 2 (2005, 75), but the form be is documented profusely in examples from the text.

Chapter Three

60

sources. The difference could therefore be a matter of textual variation which involves the alteration of the original text “whether by addition, subtraction, reordering or revision” (Laing and Williamson 2004, 86). The other reason involves the changes in the form of words because of dialectal variation. Thus, when copying a text, scribes have several options to carry out the task, as they have passive and active repertoires (Benskin and Laing 1981, 59), and their selection in a particular text does not mean that they would do the same in other contexts. It would be ideal to have parallel texts by the same copyist to compare the results of the analysis of every text, but the scribe has not been identified as working elsewhere. Thus, as the manuscript does not have any extra linguistic evidence of provenance, the language is the only resource available to place it geographically. In the General Introduction (1986, 13, vol. I), the team working on LALME refers to the mixture of spelling variations in Middle English texts arguing that it can be due to the following reasons: (i) (ii)

“Normal dialect variation, e.g. as in border-areas’”. “Variation of textual or codicological origin, e.g. layers of variants resulting from successive copyings”. As mentioned above, the fact that the Antidotarium and the recipe collection are copied by the same person does not necessarily imply that the scribe copied both from the same exemplar. Even if he did, the original exemplar could show different regional varieties. (iii) “Sociolinguistic variation, especially in writers affected by the spread of Standard English”. (iv) “The combination of two separate dialects in a writer of mixed upbringing”. (v) “Especially in the fifteenth century, an unusually wide range or eclectic combination of spellings in a single writer”.

The last three reasons cannot be disregarded either. It follows from here that a combination of the five above mentioned reasons (i-v) can account for the spelling differences found in this scribe. Laing & Williamson (2004, 92) also claim that This linguistic variability between texts copied by one and the same scribe is an indication that Scribe B was, to some extent, a literatim copyist. The forms of language he writes reflect not his own dialect entirely, but also some of the usage of his exemplars. His copies therefore have the potential to provide us with dialectal information for up to eight different locations, as well as that of his own usage, some of which may be superimposed over the substrata of the exemplar usage.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

61

This is the case of a scribe copying the same text. However, as the language in MS Ferguson 147 appears mixed, the scribe could be reflecting his own usage and that of the language of his exemplar. Laing and Williamson (2004, 92) add that in cases where there is a mixed language we cannot establish which the scribe’s true scenario is: We cannot always tell whether the scribe is a translator or a literatim copyist. If the language of this text is homogenous, he may be either. If the language appears mixed, he may be a literatim copyist whose exemplar was in mixed language, or he may a scribe whose habit is to translate only partially. His copy would then reflect a mixture of his own usage and that of the language of his exemplar. But without further evidence we have no means of knowing which scenario is the ‘true’ one.

3.2. Some other linguistic features By browsing the recipe collection contained in folios 63r-91r, a western flavour can be easily perceived in the treatment of the Old English closed rounded vowel, represented as in hylle, hulle (“hill”), or just , as in thruste from Old English þyrstan. Even must “the juice of grapes”, which had original in Old English, as it comes from classical Latin mustum and was reinforced by Anglo-Norman must and Old French must, most, moust in Middle English, appears in the text as myste. This could be a case of analogy, where the usual spelling for the front closed rounded vowel is adopted in a word whose original vowel was a back rounded vowel rather than a front one. Another diagnostic feature which allows us to ascribe the recipe collection to the western area is the ending -us in plural nouns. As can be seen in Figure 1, with some scattered forms elsewhere in the South, its distribution is clearly concentrated on the West Midland area, specifically in the South-West Midlands. Furthermore, the specific plural forms which are used in MS Ferguson 147 (ordered by frequency) are: - ys, -es, -is-, us, -uus. The combination of all these forms is found only in LP 7300, which corresponds to South-East Herefordshire on the border with Gloucestershire.

62

Chapter Three

Figure 1. Map for -us in plural substantives, LALME dot map 958

Likewise, the ending –ur points to the South-West Midland variety. In fact, forms in –ur in some cases outrank the number of forms in –er. This is true in the case of pronouns like anothur (60x), anoþur (5x), which contrasts with the presence of alternative forms like anoþer (25x), another (14x). The distribution of this ending as –ur is clearly concentrated in the Midlands area with a use as a comparative in the South-West Midland variety. Additionally, some other forms point to a South Midland area, which, in the case of the forms found for UNTIL, are also attested in southern and Kentish varieties. See Figure 2 for the distribution of tylle, which is the prevalent form with thirty-six occurrences for UNTIL, while the other attested form tille appears just on three occasions.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

63

Figure 2. Distribution of tylle, LALME dot map 277

Likewise, the form of IF, вef, with medial presents a dense distribution in the South Midlands, both East and West, and in the southern counties as well.

64

Chapter Three

Figure 3. вef for IF, LALME dot map 33

The maps in LALME offer a quick graphic image of the distribution of the items, but other leads have also been followed in the comparison of the Ferguson 147 Linguistic Profile. One of the problems is determining the items to be used in the questionnaire, as the forms for these items must be representative enough to trigger significant dialectal information. The items must be selected on the grounds of two criteria: the degree to which they display dialectal variation and their frequency. Thus, the quest for some diagnostic features led to the examination of some specific items, which may turn out not to be so suitable in the end. This is the case of the form woldeste as a 2nd person singular for WOULD, which is just documented in LP 4225 corresponding to Staffordshire. Nonetheless, the other features recorded for this linguistic profile do not seem to coincide with the ones attested in MS Ferguson 147. The weak attestation of this form in some counties does not necessarily imply the exclusion of the

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

65

possibility in nearby counties. As mentioned below, some counties are better represented in LALME than others, which means there may a be a lack of evidence for some specific features in the texts analysed for those counties, rather than the possibility of the forms being excluded completely for those counties. Likewise, exclusive forms like þoroв found only in LP 177 and LP 189 (Staffordshire), LP 5371 (Wiltshire), LP 6410 (Middlesex), and LP 7300 and LP 7460 (Herefordshire) drifted the investigation in the direction of those profiles. Notwithstanding, just the LPs 7300 and 7460 corresponding to Herefordshire were worth continuing investigating, as the other linguistic profiles did not share enough forms with the Ferguson 147 profile. More relevant for the purpose of localisation is the presence of other forms that reveal a western provenance, specifically the border between the Midlands and Wales. Thus, the forms of FIRE, FIRST and LITTLE. The variants of these items in Ferguson 147 are FIRE fyre (11x), fuyre (6x), fere (4x), fure (1x), furye (1x); FIRST fyrste (7x), furste (3x); and LITTLE lytylle (14x), lytille (13x), lytul (1x). The form fyre and fuyr(e) are densely distributed throughout the western part of the border between the South and the Midlands, and there are some occurrences in the southern counties. The variant furste for FIRST also appears in the western areas of the South Midlands and the South, and in the eastern areas of the Midlands and the South (dot map 414). Fyrst is not as useful for localisation as it is highly standardised, as shown in dot map 415. Likewise, the distribution of lytylle and lytille is very wide and does not allow us to draw any significant conclusion for localisation either. Thus, the maps and the comparison of the different items in a specific profile were used to narrow the localisation of the text. Subsequently, the profiles that seemed to bear the closest relationship to the language of the recipe collection were examined. However, the high frequency criterion can be misleading, as a wide varied range of profiles turned out to share diagnostic features with the language of recipe compilation under study; namely, LP 4005 (Northamptonshire), LP 4063 (Warwickshire), LP 4239 (Shropshire), LP 4685 (Warwickshire), LP 5051 (Devon), LP 5052 (Devon), LP 5291 (Wiltshire), LP 5420 (Wiltshire), LP 6890 (Oxfordshire), LP 7250 (Monmouth, Wales), LP 7300 (Herefordshire), LP 7351 (Herefordshire), LP 7392 (Herefordshire), LP 7460 (Herefordshire), LP 7841 (Worcester) and LP 8050 (Warwickshire). The reason for the appearance of profiles such as Devon responds to the fact that there is a clear southern substratum in the language of MS Ferguson 147, including southeastern forms, such as fere for FIRE or ferthe for FOURTH.

66

Chapter Three

Potential correspondence was often the result of the occurrence of high frequency, standardised forms. For example, forms for BOTH (bothe, boþe), IT (yt, hyt, hit), or THEY (þei, thei) are found in any of these sixteen linguistic profiles. Likewise, the variant any is not helpful for localisation as it is widespread (dot map 97). Eny, however, provides more useful information (dot map 98), and it is found in the South and southern Midland counties, especially in Monmouth, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, also with dense pockets in London, Kent and Essex. The quantification serves to rely on the most frequent form in the text and to take it as a base form for linguistic investigation, but other qualitative criteria have to be taken into consideration. All in all, I have tried to fit the recipe collection in the manuscript within narrower boundaries than those just mentioned. For this microfitting I made use of a series of forms that strongly reduce the area of occurrence. From the initial selection of comparable sixteen Linguistic Profiles, the set was restricted to eight, four of which belong to the same county. The Linguistic Profiles given in Table 4 are the result of the questionnaire of all the items listed below following the LALME categories. Words in bold mean the forms found in Ferguson 147 are compatible with those attested in a given LALME Linguistic Profile. In the Annex, the full Linguistic Profile of GUL MS Ferguson 147 is provided. The real frequency of spelling forms is given rather than the traditional parentheses system used by LALME, as this information is retrieved by means of AntConc. The selection of these items follows from a careful reading of the manuscript in order to identify those forms which are frequent enough to be considered for the localisation. Thus, in Table 4, some forms have been disregarded because they are highly standardised; namely, THE, THEY, MANY, ANY, MAN, IS, THAN, THEN, WHEN, BOTH and THOU. Others correspond clearly to the West, but are not distinctive as they coincide in the chosen profiles to a greater or lesser degree. For instance, forms for THESE, THEM, THEIR, SUCH, EACH, MUCH, ARE, SHALL, WILL, BURN and CHURCH. Weak attestation of some items, such as ABOUT, ENOUGH, FLESH, OTHER, ANOTHER, OUT or WITHOUT, makes these items unsuitable for comparison. In fact, ENOUGH is just attested in one of the Linguistic Profiles scrutinized, Warwick 4063, but not recorded in any of the seven remaining Linguistic Profiles. Consequently, just diagnostic features (in bold) are included in Table 4.

no‫܌‬t, nou‫܌‬t

Thorw, þorw (Thorow, þorwe) ((thorw, thorow))

not

a‫܌‬en

AGAIN a‫܌‬en (7x) a‫܌‬eyn (1x) NOT nou‫܌‬t (4x)

THROUGH þoro‫( ܌‬22x)

a‫܌‬eyn

‫܌‬if ((if))

IF ‫܌‬ef (37x)

thorthe, Thor‫܌‬, thor‫܌‬oh, thor‫܌‬h, þor‫܌‬, þor‫܌‬h, Thor‫܌‬e, thorth, þor‫܌‬e, thor‫܌‬we,

aftur, after (efter, eftur) ‫܌‬ef (and) ((‫܌‬if))

aftur (efter, after)

AFTER aftur (8x), aftir (1x)

LP 4239 Shropsh.

LP 4063 Warwick.

Ferguson 147

no‫܌‬t, nat (nauht, nouht, nou‫܌‬t, ne, ne+nat) þorw, þorgh, Thorgh (þorwe, thourh, Thoruh)

a‫܌‬en

yf, if

after

LP 7250 Monm.

þor‫܌‬ ((þro‫܌‬, þoro‫܌‬, þoru‫܌‬, þorou‫܌‬, þoru, þrou‫))܌‬

not, nat ((noght, nou‫܌‬t, no‫܌‬t))

‫܌‬if ((‫܌‬ef, ‫܌‬yf, and, if)) a‫܌‬en

aftur ((aftur))

LP 7300 Heref.

þrowe

a‫܌‬enne, a‫܌‬en, agayn not ((no‫܌‬t))

if ((yf, ‫܌‬if, yefe, and))

aftur, aftur

LP7351 Heref.

þorow (þurgh) ((þorowe, þorgh))

not, ne+nou‫܌‬t ((ne+not))

a‫܌‬en (a‫܌‬eyne)

yf, if, ‫܌‬if

aftir, aftur

LP 7392 Heref.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

þoro‫܌‬, þorow‫܌‬, þorow (þorou‫)܌‬

ne+no‫܌‬t, ne+not (ne+nou‫܌‬t, no‫܌‬t, not)

a‫܌‬eyn

‫܌‬ef (‫܌‬if)

aftur

LP 7460 Heref.

þoru‫܌‬ ((þor‫܌‬, þor‫܌‬h))

a‫܌‬eyn, a‫܌‬ayn, a‫܌‬en nou‫܌‬t (nat) ((not))

‫܌‬ef

aftur (eftur)

LP 8050 Warwick.

67

EYES eyyn (18x), eyen (4x), eyynn (1x), eyyun (1x), y‫܌‬en (1x), yen (1x) FIRE fyre (11x), fuyre (6x), fere (4x), fure (1x), furye (1x)

Sb pl. - ys, -es, -is-, us, es, -uus EVIL euelle (8x), yuel (6x), euel (5x), euell (1x)

68

fure, fuyre

ei‫܌‬en

yuel

-es (-is)

fyer, fuyer, fuyr, fuyre

eyen

vuel (yvel, veuele)

euel, euuel (euul)

eynen

-es (-ys, us)

thorowe, thorw‫܌‬, thor‫܌‬w -us, -es (es, -us)

fuyre (fuyr)

-us ((-uus, -is, -ys, es)) euyl, euel, vuele ((yuel, euele, vuel)) yen (yes, yun)

Chapter Three

fuyr

fuyr, fuyre

fyre ((fire, fyre))

yuel, yfel (efel, euel)

-es (-ys, -is)

y‫܌‬en, yen

-us (-is, ys, -us) ((e‫))܌‬ vuele, yuele, euele

yes

euyll, euell

-ys, -is (es) ((-is))

fuyre ((fyre))

yene

yuele

-us (-is, ys)

furst

hulle

litel

self, selue

to-gidre, togidre

FIRST fyrste (7x), furste (3x)

HILLE hylle- (2x), hulle- (2x), hil- (1x)

LITTLE lytylle (14x), lytille (13x), lytul (1x)

SELF hymsylf (1x), hymsilue (2x), yt sylfe (1x)

TOGETHER togedur (45x), togeder (1x), thogedur (1x)

to-geder, togeder (togederes togedor, togederes)

self (selue, selfe, seluen)

lyte, lytul, lytel (leytel)

hul

furste, furst (frust, fruste, fyrste)

to-gederes (togedderes)

self, selue (silue)

lyte, lytel

hull-

ferste, ferst (furst, furste, fyrst)

selue (sulf, self, silue, silf) ((sulue, sylue)) to-gederus ((togedere, togederus, togederes))

lite (lytul, litul)

hull-

furst (furste) ((erst, formust))

togedur (togedure) ((togedur))

lytel, litel (lytell, lytyll, lytyl, litell) selfe

furste, Furste, fyrste ((vyrste, Fyrste))

to-gadere, togadre

self (sylf, selue)

lytel, lyte, litulle, litull

-hul

arst, furst, Furst

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

togederetogydere

self, selfen, selfe

luytel, lytel

hul

furst

togedere, togeder

selue (seluyn)

lytil, lytyl

hulle

Furst, furst

69

til-þat, til

UNTIL tylle (36x), tille (3x)

til, till (tilþt, till-þt, tyll-þt, fort, tille, tyl, tylleþt, tyll)

too

twey (two) ((tweyn))

Table 4. Comparison of forms in the Recipe Collection and the most akin LALME LPs

tyl, tyl-þet

til, tyl

til ((for-to, tyl))

two (tweye) ((to))

two, to

two

TWO tooe (1x)

tooe, to (towe, too, toe, tow, two)

Chapter Three

70

forte, forto-þat, forto

tweyn, twey, two

til, tyl (to)

two

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

71

Even though the number of variants is extensive for some items, we cannot claim that the scribe is using a Mischsprache, but rather a mixture of forms that make it impossible to attribute them all to a specific linguistic profile. This mixture may respond to the influence exerted by other dialectal areas. The exact localisation of the recipe compilation in MS Ferguson 147 can only be based on a small number of significant forms that clearly suggest an area delimited by Shropshire to the North, Herefordshire to the South and Monmouth to the west. A comparison of the Ferguson 147 Linguistic Profile with the Linguistic Profiles assigned to the areas mentioned above reveals a high degree of similarity between them. More specifically, I have found that LPs 7300, 7351, and to a lesser extent, LP 7392 and LP 7460, corresponding to Herefordshire, are particularly akin to Ferguson 147; and this suggests a Southwest provenance of Ferguson 147 within this area, even if features of nearby counties are found, such as Warwickshire, as well as traces of some other southern counties, like Wiltshire. Nonetheless, this finding needs clarification, as some methodological caveats must be mentioned when using LALME. The first has to do with the fact that the material included in LALME cannot be considered synchronic. Williamson (2004, 101) warns about this explaining that the linguistic material in the work “comes from texts datable from the early fourteenth century to the late fifteenth century, and its core period is 13501450. A LALME map therefore presents this material as if it were synchronic when there is in fact considerable time-depth”. The second constraint has to do with the number of texts analysed for each county and the subsequent Linguistic Profiles provided. We find that counties such as Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Herefordshire, for instance, are heavily documented. Thus, we find thirty-five LPs in Gloucestershire, thirty-four in Warwickshire and twenty-seven in Herefordshire. Shropshire is also represented with seventeen distinctive profiles, while Monmouth is just identified in LPs 1365, 7240, 7250, and 7271. Thus, the weak attestation of some forms in some areas should be treated with caution, as this is less likely to mean the exclusion of the possibility of occurrence in nearby counties than just lack of evidence in the texts analysed in LALME. Therefore, even if the language of MS Ferguson 147 cannot be mapped in any of those specific profiles, once the territory of provenance has been narrowed to a specific area, it is more likely to find coincidences in the more attested counties than in those areas where little evidence survives.

72

Chapter Three

4. Conclusions The language of the medical recipe collection in folios 63r- 91r in Glasgow University Library MS Ferguson 147 has been analysed in order to trace its localisation according to the fit-technique established by the team working on the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. The combination of forms and features (linguistic assemblage) supplies the Linguistic Profile in Annex I. More than thirty years after its publication and despite its flaws; namely, the fact that its core period (1350-1450) cannot be understood as synchrony and the fact that some counties are more heavily represented than others, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English continues to stand as a valuable resource for localisation of the language of Middle English manuscripts. Thus, even if the language of recipe compilation in MS Ferguson 147 does not seem to coincide fully with any of the identified Linguistic Profiles in LALME, the analysis of the forms and features makes it compatible with several of them. Some forms are highly standardised and therefore cannot be used to identify the dialect of the collection. Nonetheless, some conclusions can be drawn from the combination of these and more diagnostic forms. The medical recipe collection under scrutiny (folios 63r-91r) represents the language mapped in several Linguistic Profiles corresponding mainly to the county of Herefordshire, but also with influences from Shropshire, Monmouth and Warwickshire. This differs slightly from the localisation provided by Carrillo Linares. Her study of the Antidotarium Nicholai, also contained in MS Ferguson 147, concludes stating that the text “can rstebe placed around the most north-western part of Gloucestershire stretching out to the borders of Herefordshire to the north and Monmouth to the west” (2005, 84). My own analysis of the data suggests a more northerly provenance of the recipe collection that includes Shropshire and probably not Gloucestershire. The last claim is possible, as differences in the spelling of the Antidotarium and the recipe collection have been pointed out above. In addition, one can never be sure about whether the attested forms are part of the scribe’s own dialect, or constitute an attempt on the part of the scribe to accommodate his own repertoire to that of the exemplar (constrained usage) or include relict forms. Here is where concordance programmes can be of help to establish the real frequency of variants, regardless of their origin. The undeniable western flavour of the language in the recipe collection is then validated by the frequency of some items that help to determine the provenance of the recipe collection to be finally mapped according to the LALME criteria. The other reason for the

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

73

discrepancy is the fact that the scribe could have been using several sources for the texts compiled in MS Ferguson 147, as the layout and rubrication are completely different in every single piece of work included there.

References Benskin, Michael. 1991. “The ‘Fit’-Technique Explained”. In Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, edited by Felicity Riddy, 926. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Benskin, Michael, and Margaret Laing. 1981. “Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle English Manuscripts”. In So meny people longages and tongues. Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, edited by Michael Benskin and Michael L. Samuels, 55-106. Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project. Carrillo Linares, María José. 2005. “Middle English Antidotarium Nicholai: Evidence for Linguistic Distribution and Dissemination in the Vernacular”. International Journal of English Studies 5: 71-92. Crespo García, Begoña, and Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas. 2016. “Corpus Linguistics and the History of English: When the Past Meets the Future”. In Input a Word, Analyse the World. Selected Approaches to Corpus Linguistics, edited by Francisco Alonso Almeida and others, 49-75. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Eggins, Suzanne, and James R. Martin. 1997. “Genres and Registers of Discourse”. In Discourse as Structure and Process, edited by Teun A. van Dijk, 230-256. London: Sage. Honkapohja, Alpo. 2013. “Manuscript Abbreviations in Latin and English: History, Typologies and how to Tackle them in Encoding”. Varieng, Studies in Variation, Contact and Change in English 14. http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/14/honkapohja/. Kurath, Hans, Sherman M. Kuhn, John Reidy, and Robert E. Lewis. 1956. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med/. Ker, Neil Ripley. 1977. Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laing, Margaret, and Keith Williamson. 2004. “The Archeology of Medieval Texts”. In Categorization in the History of English, edited by Cristian J. Kay and Jeremy J. Smith, 85-145. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

74

Chapter Three

Laurence, Anthony. 2014: AntConc (Version 3.4.0) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/. McIntosh, Angus, Michael L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. With the assistance of Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/elalme.html. Taavitsainen, Irma. 2001. “Middle English Recipes. Genre Characteristics, Text Type Features and Underlying Traditions of Writing”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 2(1): 85-113. Weston, David. 2004 “Ferguson, John (1838–1916)”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition edited by Lawrence Goldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/view/article/53857. Williamson, Keith 2004. “On Chronicity and Space(s) in Historical Dialectology”. In Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology, edited by Marina Dossena and Roger Lass, 95-136. Bern: Peter Lang.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

75

Annex 1 GUL, Ferguson MS 147 LINGUISTIC PROFILE THE þe (500x), the (150x)6 THESE þese (7x), þis (4x), þes (1x) SHE sche (4x) HER her (2x) IT yt (493x), hyt (2x), hit (1x) THEY þei (6x), thei (5x) THEM hem (96x), hym (68x) THEIR her (3x) hare (1x) SUCH suche (1x) EACH eueryche (34x), eche (4x) MANY many (1x) MAN man (30x), mann (1x), mans (1x), mannys (6x) ANY any (9x), eny (1x) MUCH moche (68x), meche (1x), muche (1x) ARE beþe (3x), beþ (1x), bethe (1x), are (1x) WERE were (5x) IS ys (71x), is (9x) ART art (2x) WAS was (6x) SHALL 3 p. sg. schal (50x), schalle (6x), 2p.sg. schalt (7x), schalte (5x) SHALL Pl. schul (5x), schulle (1x) WILL 3sg. wolle (11x), wol (6x) WILL Pl. wol (1x) WOULD 2sg. woldeste (1x) TO to (245x) FROM from (1x), fram (1x) 6

No differentiation has been made between forms pertaining to the and thee.

AFTER aftur (8x), aftir (1x) THEN þan (61x) THAN than (21x) THOUGH thow‫( ܌‬1x) IF ‫܌‬ef (37x) AS as (96x) including AS..AS as..as AGAIN a‫܌‬en (7x) a‫܌‬eyn (1x) ERE adv ere (1x) WHILE whyle (4x), while (1x) NOT nou‫܌‬t (4x) THERE þer (19x), þere (5x), ther (5x), there (2x) þerof (53x), þerto (36x), þerwith (29x), þerewith (1x), þerynne (3x), þerynn(3x) WHERE where (2x) MIGHT 2sg. myght (3x), my‫܌‬t (1x) THROUGH þoro‫( ܌‬22x) WHEN whan (34x), when (2x) Sb pl. - ys, -es, -is-, us, -es, -uus, ABOUT abowte (6x), abowt (1x) abou‫܌‬t (1x) ABOVE aboue (10x) ADDER adderys (1x), nadderys (1x) AFTERWARDS afturwarde (3x) AIR eyre (5x) ALL al (57x), alle (43x) ALSO also (11x), ellso (1x) ANSWER 3rd sg. answere (1x) AT at (32x) AWAY awey (20x), aweye (2x), away (2x)

76

Chapter Three

BE be (97x) inf. and 3rd sg., bee (1x) 3rd sg. BEGAN-TO 0 in past (1 in present tense begynne) BOTH bothe (2x), boþe (1x) BURN imp. bren (6x) BURN inf brenne (3x), verbal noun brennynge (3x) BURNED ppt. ybrend (3x), brend (1x), brende (1x), ybrende (1x) BUSY bysynes (2x) BUT but (11x), bot (7x) BY by (20x) CALL pl clepeþ (7x), clepuþ (1x), cleþ (1x), clept (1x) CALLED ppl cleped (1x) CAST vb caste (8x), cast (2x) CHURCH churche (1x) DAY daye (25x), day (4x), dye (1x) DAYS dayes (28x) DIE dye (5x) DO do (118x) DONE don (2x) DOWN doun (6x), down (3x) DWELL dwellynge (1x) EARTH erthe (3x) (erþyn, erþine as adj. one instance each) ENOUGH ynow (3x) EVIL euelle (8x), yuel (6x), euel (5x), euell (1x) EYE eye (10x), eyy (1x), eyye (1x) EYES eyyn (18x), eyen (4x), eyynn (1x), eyyun (1x), y‫܌‬en (1x), yen (1x) FAIR fayre (5x) FILL fylle (5x), yfollyd (1x)

FIRE fyre (11x), fuyre (6x), fere (4x), fure (1x), furye (1x) FIRST fyrste (7x), furste (3x) FIVE fyue (2x) FLESH flessche (1x), fleshe (1x), flesynge (1x) FOR-TO for to (14x), ffor to (5x) FOURTH ferthe (3x) FRUIT frute (1x) GATHER ppt. gadered (1x), gaderethe (1x), gadur (1x), imp. gadery (2x) GIVE Imp. ‫܌‬ef (12x), geue (4x) GO 2sg. gooste (9x), goo (10x) (3rd sg. pres.5, inf. 3, imp. 1x) GONE go (1x) GOOD goode (29x), good (11x) GREAT grete (9x) GROW 3sg. present grow (1x), groweþe (1x) GROW inf growe (2x), ppt. growe (1x), ygrowe (1x) HAVE pres haue 2 sg. (2x), 3sg. (1x), 3pl. (1x) HAVE inf haue HAVE 2sg. haste (2x) HAVE 3rd sg. haþe (9x) HEAD hede (7x) HEAR here (8x) HEART hert (6x) HENCE henc (1x) HILL hylle- (2x), hulle- (2x), hil- (1x) HIM hym (68x)7 HIS hys (1x) 7

No differentiation has been made between forms pertaining to them and him.

Mapping the Language of GUL Manuscript Ferguson 147

HOLD holde (8x) (5 imp, 1 inf, 2 ppt. ), hulde (1x) HOLY holis (1x) HOW how (1x) KNOW pres knowe 2sg. (1x) KNOW inf knowe (3x), know (1x) LET lete (25x), let (15x), late (6x) LIE (DOWN) lye (6x) LIFE lyf (1x) LITTLE lytylle (14x), lytille (13x), lytul (1x) LIVE inf. lyue (2x) LONG longe (11x) LORD lorde (1x) LOVE sb loue (1x) MAKE make (76x), 3 sg. makeþ (2x) MAY may (13x), 2sg. mayste (10x), myste (3x), maiste (1x) MAY pl. mow (1x) MONTHS monthys (1x), monthus (1x) MOON mone (2x) NAME sb name (2x), vb. name (1x) NE+IS, ARE, AM, ART nys (2x) NEVER neuer (5x) NEW new (8x), new (3x) NO-MORE no more (2x) OLD olde (12x) ONE pron one (3x) OR or (61x) OTHER oþer (27x), other (9x), othur (8x) ANOTHER anothur (60x), anoþer (25x) OUR oure (1x)

77

OUT ou‫܌‬t (26x) OWN owne (1x) THE-SAME þe same (24x) SAY seye (8x), sey (6x) SAID seyde (4x) SEE se (2x), see (1x) SEEK seke (6x) SELF hymsylf (1x), hymsilue (2x), yt sylfe (1x) SILVER syluer (1x) SOME sum (3x) SORROW sorrow (1x) STAND standyynge (1x) STIR stere (5x), sterynge (1x) STRONG stronge (4x), strong (1x), stron (1x) SUFFER soffery (4x), soffry (1x), soffur (1x) SUN sonne (4x) TAKE imp. take (310x) TAKES 3sg. takeþ (1x), takeþe (1x) THOU þou (79x), thow (5x) thou (1x) THEE þe THY +C þi (59x), thi (20x), þy (8x), thy (3x) THY +h thy (2x), þynne (1x) THY + V þinne (22x), þynne (6x) TOGETHER togedur (45x), togeder (1x), thogedur (1x) TRUE trew (1x) TWO tooe (1x) UNDER vnder (2x) UNTIL tylle (36x) (incl. 1 instance of tylle þat), tille (3x) UPON vpon (5x) WELL welle (41x) WHAT (3x)

78

WHETHER (1x) WHO ho (1x) WHOLE hole (4x) WIT KNOW 2 sg. pres. woste (1x) WITH with (150x), wiþ (1x) WITHIN withynne (2x) WITHOUT* ‘-ou‫܌‬t’ withou‫܌‬t (5x), withowt (3x)

Chapter Three

YE ‫܌‬e (3x) MORROW morow (18x), morowe (3x) NAVEL nawle (3x), nawel (1x) NEVER neuer (5x) THAT þat (165x), þet (1x) THUS þus (4x) WAX wax (4x), wex (4x)

CHAPTER FOUR ASTROLOGICAL MEDICINE IN MIDDLE ENGLISH: THE CASE OF ÞE BOOKE OF YPOCRAS ISABEL DE LA CRUZ CABANILLAS AND IRENE DIEGO RODRÍGUEZ UNIVERSITY OF ALCALÁ

1. Introduction: Medieval Medicine and Middle English Lunaries Medicine in the Middle Ages is conceived as a wide area that comprehends command of diverse disciplines. Wallis refers to the fact that apart from the word medicine, which was still in use in some expressions, medical knowledge could be referred to as physica (2010, 129): “physica's primary meaning was “natural philosophy.” Hence, equating medicine with physica shifted the epistemological status of medical knowledge toward what modern doctors call basic sciences: anatomy, physiology, and pathology.” Thus, physicians, whose name derive from physica, needed to be acquainted with what Wallis calls “basic sciences”: Anatomy, Physiology and Pathology, but they should also be aware of the properties of plants and the effect of planets1 on people’s health. The approaches to the study of medieval medical writings rely chiefly on two criteria: the type of text and the audience. Regarding the former, Robbins (1970) establishes three groups:

1

The Sun and the Moon were considered planets from a medical point of view during the Middle Ages.

80

Chapter Four

a) Prognosis: defined as “the astrological determination of the possibility of effecting a cure and the most favorable times for treatment” (1970, 395). b) Diagnosis: following the European tradition, illness is mainly diagnosed by urinoscopy or inspection of urine. This is related to the theory of the four humours which affected the colour of the urine when superfluous humours were present and needed excreting. c) Treatment or medication by means of herbs, bloodletting and empirical remedies: Robbins (1970, 406) includes here obstetrical and gynaecological treatises written presumably for midwifes. If we have into consideration the audience, according to Robbins (1970, 394) the difference lies in the language. On the one hand, the relatively university-trained physicians who could read Latin and, on the other, “the on-the-job-trained surgeon, barber-surgeon, apothecary, apprentice, cunning man, wise woman, lay sister in a convent, and midwife”. Notwithstanding, Voigts (1984, 322) and Taavitsainen (1988, 134) contend that Robbins’s classification is not accurate since even a short text can include all the information mentioned by Robbins. Thus, according to Voigts (1984) medical writing could be divided into: 1. Academic treatises; 2. Surgical Treatises and 3. Remedybooks. Likewise, remedybooks or materia medica is an umbrella term to refer to diverse kinds of treatises: herbaries are alphabetically ordered lists of plants with therapeutical effects; receptaria or recipe collections that were rooted in the western medical tradition from Greek and Latin physicians mainly and proliferated especially in the fifteenth century in Britain. Alchemy texts could also include medical recipes like cordial waters and elixirs. Finally, there were astrological treatises related to Medicine. Apart from lapidaries, which are tracts on astrological properties of precious and semi-precious stones, Means (1992) deals with the main astrological writings to be found in the Middle Ages: 1. The electionary is “a guide for choosing (or electing) activities according to the most favorable astrological conditions” (1992, 370). This is considered by Means the most important of all prognostic texts as it establishes the astrological basis for “the qualities of heavenly bodies and their influences upon each other and the microcosms” (1992, 370). Its origins go back to Ptolomy’s Tretabiblos. Some electionaries can be highly specialised, as John of Seville’s translation of Haly Embrani’s De Electionibus

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

81

Horarum. In at least two versions, the work concerns only with “elections favourable to phlebotomy” (Means 1992, 373). 2. The lunary (from Latin luna) is very much related to the electionary, as they both focus on planetary influence, although the lunary selects only one planet, the Moon. 3. The destinary (from Latin destinaria) or horoscope, a group of prognostications based upon the time of birth, determining destiny. 4. The questionary, which is only concerned with specific questions, who and how they are asked, and the means by which they may be answered. The treatise under consideration in this chapter is part of the lunaries whose study has been undertaken by Taavitasainen at different times. She refers to this kind of treatises as zodiacal lunaries (Taavitsainen 1994). Thus, Middle English lunaries are within the prognostic material based on astrological principles. They are tracts which deal with “the incidence and course of diseases and their treatment, as well as the imminence of death, according to the phases of the moon in the twelve Signs of the Zodiac” (Kibre 1977, 94). Regarding the relationship established between Astrology and Medicine, it is possible to assert that “Astrology found its culmination in medieval medicine” (Taavitsainen 1988, 91), when the belief that each of the twelve parts in which the body was divided was ruled by a zodiacal sign spread in western Europe. It was assumed that the Moon “had a negative influence on the part of the body in whose sign it was” (Taavitsainen 1994, 289). As a result, physicians advised people to “abstain from phlebotomy, medical treatment, or operating on that particular part” (Taavitsainen 1994, 290), if the lunaries suggested to do so. Astrological considerations were therefore taken into account regarding diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. These tracts were present in the Antiquity, from Egypt to Greece and Rome. Most of them seem to have been translated into English in “the first half of the fifteenth century, the range being from the end of the fourteenth to the very end of the period and beyond.” (Taavitsainen 1988, 152). In fact, all the copies of the text under consideration are fifteenthcentury copies. The abundance of material can be explained because the potential readership of these treatises in fifteenth-century England was wide, according to Taavitsainen (1988, 195). People from different social classes could have been interested in them: from the upper classes of society to the middle layers and clergy. The emphasis is on books of medicine for medical practitioners; their medieval ownership ranges from doctors of the highest rank to country leeches who ranked below the

82

Chapter Four

barber-surgeons. The mid-position is well represented. The interest in this kind of medical writings would account for the number of extant copies and related texts in the late Middle English period.

2. Transmission of the Latin Text in the Middle Ages The English texts of the lunary under scrutiny are allegedly translations of a Greek treatise by Hippocrates. The Hippocratic Corpus reached the west at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when it was translated from Greek and Arabic sources into Latin and subsequently, during the late medieval period, when it was translated into different European vernaculars. “The preservation of these writings through all the vicissitudes of the ancient world and their transmission to the west provides an interesting illustration of continuity of medical thought” (Kibre 1945, 371). Nonetheless, the extensive circulation of Hippocratic writings during the medieval period originated the appearance of several works inaccurately attributed to Hippocrates, a fact that contaminated the Corpus with spurious treatises. They were clearly “fabrications of the Middle Ages” (Kibre 1945, 371) and have been usually referred to as the “medieval Hippocratic collection” (Kibre 1945, 371). In this sense, it is possible to assert that some of the medieval “Hippocratic writings are Hippocratic in the sense that our medieval manuscripts and printed editions routinely label them “of Hippocrates” (Potter 1988, 13). The existing controversy that surrounds the authenticity of the works ascribed to Hippocrates has come to be called the “Hippocratic question” (Craik 2015, xxi). As a matter of fact, Astrologia Ypocratis,2 as the treatise was usually known in Latin, is one of these spurious pieces of work. The tract does not appear in the Corpus Hipocraticum. According to French (1994, 39), twelfth-century physicians, like Maurus in Salerno, attributed this Astrologia Ypocratis to Hippocrates, as it was a well-known text before him. Others suggest that the author could have been Polybus, Hippocrates’s son-in-law, disciple and true successor. However, the aim of this study is not the question of authorship nor to consider further the antecedents of the current text before the Middle Ages, but to concentrate on the Latin versions as a means to find out about its rendition into English and process of transmission in the late Middle Ages. 2

In the Middle Ages Astrology and Astronomy were used indistinctively. Thus, the treatise appears as Astrologia Ypocratis or Astronomia Ypocratis. However, when we are referring to the texts, either in Latin or English, the terms Astronomia or Astronomy are preferred, as these are the words employed in the different copies.

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

83

According to Kibre (1978, 136), Astrologia Ypocratis had wide circulation in the Middle Ages in three different Latin translations. Both Kibre and Thorndike have dealt with this treatise, especially their Latin versions, at different times. Kibre published several articles in Traditio and other journals, specifically covering the English translations in 1977. However comprehensive Kibre’s article can be, there are still manuscripts not included in her work. In turn, Thorndike (1960) also worked on the search for manuscripts and their filiation. She grouped the extant Latin copies according to the translation they follow. In order to do so, she concentrated on some specific parts of the tracts: the incipit and a following paragraph about physicians behaving like blind people if they do not know Astronomy, Taurus and Pisces signs, and the final part or explicit. According to her analysis, there are three groups of Latin texts: A group of texts in the translation by William Moeberke that “comprises some thirty-five manuscripts of the thirteenth through the sixteenth century”, according to Kibre (1978, 136). The second group of texts in the translation of Peter Abano contains only twelve witnesses of late fifteenth through the seventeenth century. The third group is much more numerous comprising some sixty copies of the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In addition to the above three groupings, there are others that include “Commentaries, Epitomes and fragments dating from the ninth to the sixteenth century, as well as translations into the three vernaculars, English, French and Spanish” (Kibre 1978, 136). She continues mentioning that in practically all of them Hippocrates is named as an author.

3. English translations According to Taavitsainen (1988, 113) “Latin lunaries are found in great numbers in MSS in English libraries from the eleventh century onwards […] They, and several others that have not survived, provided exemplars to copy and translate. Evidence of the process involved can occasionally be verified in the MSS; for example, copying a Latin lunary has been abandoned for a translation into English”. This could explain why the Latin versions in Britain are not so abundant. This Middle English Pseudo-Hippocratic text has “largely escaped the attentions of scholarship” (Voigts 1994, 123) and there have been very few attempts to gather together and study the manuscripts that contain the text under consideration. This is mainly due to the fact that “astrological literature is one of the neglected areas of scholarship in ME” (Taavitsainen 1988, 39) and that the treatise is incorporated into medical codices which

84

Chapter Four

contain more extensive and relevant works and therefore, the focus tends to be on these pertinent lengthy texts (Voigts 1994, 123). The English translation of the tract first caught the attention of Pearl Kibre. When working on the Latin translation she came across some versions in the vernaculars. Apart from the three Latin translations mentioned by Thorndike (1960), Kibre includes a fourth group of variant texts, also fragments or excerpts and vernacular (English) translations and final fifth group comprising a few examples of what appears to be commentaries on the work (Kibre 1977, 96). As Taavitsainen points out (1988, 134), “this area is still uncharted: we do not know what there is or how much there is”. Although the scholars Linda E. Voigts (1994), Laurel Means (1992; 1993) and Irma Taavitsainen (2005) have already worked on a large number of manuscripts that include Þe Booke of Ypocras, the treatise has not been edited or studied, with the exception of the edition of British Library, MS Harley 2378 by Means (1993). The very first task is undoubtedly to identify and localise the copies of Þe Booke of Ypocras, as it is usually known in English. However, “zodiacal lunaries are often incorporated into medical codices in sections of astrological medicine without further notice” (Taavitsainen 1987, 20). As a result, the existing versions have remained comparatively unknown, and the only way to identify parallel copies is by consulting different catalogues and medical manuscripts (Taavitsainen 1987, 20). However, specialised catalogues are rarely comprehensive and do not include crossreferences to other catalogues. Thus, Kibre (1977 and 1978) and Voigts and Kurtz (2000) mention different texts which are not complementary, a fact that makes the identification of parallel texts an arduous task and, consequently, their edition and study. Moreover, “problems of false ascriptions, multiple titles or the lack of titles, incorporation into longer treatises, extracts and fragments, and the use of two or three languages, are all encountered in the process of identifying these texts” (Taavitsainen 1987: 18). The first copies of the treatise under consideration were identified in Kibre (1977, 107) in Cambridge: Trinity College, MS R.14.52; London: British Library, MS Additional 12195 and MS Sloane 73; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 210 and MS Ashmole 393. Later, Means (1993, 245) spotted six more copies of the zodiacal treatise: London: British Library, MS Harley 2378; Cambridge: Gonville and Caius College MS 336/725 and MS 475/395; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1405 and MS Selden Supra 73; Glasgow: Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 513. On the online catalogue of the Digitalised Manuscripts of the British Library another English copy was found in MS Harley 1736.

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

85

Nevertheless, the most useful resource so far has been the catalogue by Keiser (1998, 3779) that, besides the above-mentioned manuscripts, refers to Cambridge: Trinity College MS 1404, London: British Library, MS Sloane 340; Royal College of Physicians MS 384 and Durham: Durham University MS Cosin V.IV.7. We have consulted the manuscripts from Glasgow and London libraries and acquired digitalised images from those in Oxford, Cambridge and Durham. It was when transcribing this corpus that we realised that MS Ashmole 210 is not a copy of the treatise under consideration. Furthermore, MS Ashmole 393 and MS Selden Supra 73 stand for incomplete copies of it, since some of the zodiac signs have been omitted. Finally, Voigts and Kurtz (2000) suggested other twenty-nine related texts, which are not parallel to the treatise under consideration but versions of it. Therefore, all these manuscripts that include incomplete copies or variant versions have not been take into account in this study. We have finally concentrated on the thirteen full extant versions of Þe Booke of Ypocras.

4. English manuscripts filiation 4.1 Methodology For the present study, the thirteen extant English manuscripts containing the full version of the treatise are taken into consideration. Following Thorndike’s methodology (1960) we will concentrate on some specific parts of the tracts: the incipit and a following paragraph about physicians behaving like blind people if they do not know Astronomy, Taurus and Pisces signs, and the final part or explicit in order to determine whether the English text is a translation of an anonymous one from Arabic, the one by William Moerbeke or Peter Abano’s translation. The Latin translations are clearly different in their incipits according to Thorndike (1960): 1) William Moerbeke’s translation begins with the sentence “Sapientissimus Ypocras, omnium medicorum peritissimus ait: Cuiusmodi medicus est qui astronomiam ignorat, nemo quidem in manus illius se committere debet, quia imperfectus est et cecus, et ideo non merito talis medicus reputatur” (Thorndike 1960, 105106). Probably more important than the incipit in the identification process is a passage concerning a blind man. Physicians who do not know

86

Chapter Four

Astronomy are like blind people who carry a staff but do not know their way. This is followed by a paragraph which corresponds to the beginning of Abano’s translation. There are two more paragraphs and then the transition to Aries. Another peculiarity of Moerbeke’s versions is a passage on fixed stars appended after Pisces, though it is not common to all of them. In her collation of manuscripts following Moerbeke’s translation, Thorndike did not take into account two of them which were available to us. One is Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 461, a fifteenth-century copy and the other one is Gerona Cathedral MS 75, a thirteenthfourteenth-century text (although according to Kibre 1978, 140, they are both fifteenth-century copies). Although some variants are found in the word order and the use of some lexical items, they can clearly be assigned to this group. 2) The second translation by Peter Abano lacks the introductory part mentioned in Moerbeke’s and is peculiar in the sign of Taurus. Whereas the other two Latin translations picture the patient as unable to sleep and wanting to drink wine and cold things, Abano’s version represents him as wanting to drink wine and hot things (Thorndike 1960, 124). 3) The third translation is really the first one in time. It was translated probably from Arabic (Thorndike 1960, 113). By the time it was done the translation could be by a scholar from the School of Toledo. For instance, Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114–1187) who read Latin, translated from Greek and learned Arabic in Toledo, where he had access to the Ptolemy’s Almagest and produced a Latin translation of the Arabic version c. 1175. There were other scholars who were also proficient in the three languages, such as Johannes Hispanicus or Hispalenses and Dominicus Gundisalvi, who are also well-known for translating medical and astrological texts into Latin at the end of the twelfth century. These thirteenth to fifteenthcentury manuscripts could well be copies of the original Latin translation from Arabic produced at the School of Toledo. For her classification of the Latin manuscripts Thorndike (1960) did not take into consideration any of the three Arabic versions we had access to: these are all copies held in Madrid Biblioteca Nacional: MS 10063, MS 17961 and MS 3370. The earliest one is BN MS 10063, a thirteenthcentury version included in a manuscript where a text by Johannes Hispalenses is also present. It is probably the earliest of all those

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

87

mentioned by Thorndike (1960, 111-112) and its provenance was the Cathedral of Toledo. BN MS 17961 is a fourteenth-century manuscript according to the BN catalogue, although Kibre (1978, 150) includes it within the fifteenth-century copies. And finally, BN MS 3370 is a fifteenth-century manuscript. It also includes the Regimen sanitatis by Arnaldus de Vilanova. As suggested by Kibre (1978, 136), the Arabic texts need further research as “it is possible, that upon a more detailed comparison of the texts, this group might fall into more than one division, since the individual items are more numerous and verbally more heterogeneous than the preceding two”. As noted by Kibre (1978, 136) the version from Arabic is closely related to the translation by William Moerbeke, from which it is, however, differentiated by the opening words of the prologue. However, the incipits in this groups vary among themselves. The most frequently encountered are “Dixit [Dicit] Hypocras…; Dixit Hippocras medicorum optimus. Cuiusmodi medicus est…; Dixit [Dicit] Ypocras qui [cum] fuit medicus et magister optimus…; Sicut dicit Ypocras qui fuit medicus et magister optimus…and so on” Since the English versions are supposed to be translations of one of these three Latin texts, we have taken the same pieces to be examined in the English manuscripts: incipit, passage on the blind man, Taurus, Pisces and explicit. The comparison is based upon direct examination of the texts in the thirteen extant manuscripts, which have never been published, with the exception of the BL, Harley MS 2378 by Means (1993).

4.2 The findings According to previous studies, it is undeniable that the great majority of “Middle English scientific texts are translated from or, in one way or another, derived from Latin” (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004, 13). In order to trace their transmission, it is first of all important to highlight the fact that during the late Middle Ages, the period when the treatise under consideration was translated into the vernacular, Latin medical texts “must have lost some of their original functions and gained new applications” (Taavitsainen 2004, 38). Medical knowledge needed to reach a wider audience and therefore, “the patterns are likely to have been modified or changed” in English (Taavitsainen 2004, 38). As a result, it is important to consider that to trace the transmission of some medical doctrines, we need to take as a starting point the idea that some Latin academic treatises will turn into popular vernacular adaptations, especially as far as astromedical literature is concerned (Taavitsainen 2004, 45). That is why regarding this

Chapter Four

88

kind of treatises, it is highly unlikely to find “word-for-word” or “sensefor-sense” translations. Translators “come close to original compositions” (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004, 13), and they often adapt their exemplars. In these texts, “the translator acted as an editor and compiler, freely excepting, rearranging, and paraphrasing the material of the source text and blending it with material from other sources” (Taavitsainen and Pahta 2004, 13). Thus, the English treatise does not necessarily will be a literal translation but a different text which only resembles its source because it reproduces the ideas of its Latin original. The dissimilarities between the Latin and English versions can be perfectly noticed from the very beginning in the zodiacal lunary in question. Comparing the incipits of the three Latin versions transcribed by Thorndike (1960) [Table 1] to the incipits of the thirteen English copies [Table 2], we became aware of the fact that they all mentioned Hippocrates in the very first line, and except for Peter of Abano’s translation, they refer to the importance of doctors knowing Astronomy in the Latin versions or the connection between planets and diseases in the English ones. However, the syntax and lexicon are completely different in both languages. Latin Translation Moerbeke

Peter of Abano

Arabic anonymous translation

Incipit Sapientissimus Ypocras, omnium medicorum peritissimus ait: Cuiusmodi medicus est qui astronomiam ignorat, nemo quidem in manus illius se committere debet, quia imperfectus est et cecus, et ideo non merito talis medicus reputatur (Thorndike 1960, 105) Cum legerem libros Ypocratis medicorum optimi inveni hunc parvum sed magne utilitatis librum, et valde necesse est omnibus medicis. Qui hunc bene sciverit, sanitatem mortem vel vitam infirmi poterit pronunciare (Thorndike 1960, 116) Dixit Ypocras, qui fuit medicus et magister optimus, Cuiusmodi medicus est qui astronomiam ignorat, nullus homo debet committere se in manus illius, qui non est medicus perfectus (Thorndike 1960, 113)

Table 1. Latin translations and incipits

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

89

English Translation

Incipit

GUL, MS Hunter 513 (ff. 98r-104r) BL, MS Add. 12195 (ff. 185r190v) BL, MS Harley 2378 (ff. 7r-11v)

This is the boke of ypocras in this boke he techith for to knowe by planette Sykenesse lyfe & deth

BL, MS Harley 1736 (ff. 232r234v) BL, MS Sloane 73 (ff. 128r131r) BL, MS Sloane 340 (ff. 75v78v) RCP MS 384 (ff. 85r-86r)

This ys þe boke off ypocras in this boke he techyth ffor to know be planets both lyffe & dethe

Gonville and Caius College, MS 336/275 (ff. 98v-101r) Gonville and Caius College, MS 457/395 (ff. 77v-78v) Trinity College, MS R.14.52 (ff. 143r- 145r) Trinity College, MS 1404 (O.8.29) (ff. 6v10r) BodL, MS Ashmole 1405 (pp. 139-146r) Durham, MS Cosin V.IV.7 (ff. 2r-5v)

This is the techinge of ypocras. In þis book he techiþ for to knowe bi what planete syknes comeþ lyf & deeþ

Thys bok of ypocras tech for to knowe Be þe planetes of seknes both of lyf & deyth hys his þe booke of ypocras in þis book he techyt for to knowe be planete seknesse lyf & deth

This is þe techinge of ypocras In þis book he techiþ for to knowe bi what planete syknes comeþ. lyf and deeþ this is þe techyng of Ipocras. In þis boke he techyth for to knowe be what planete siyknsse comeþ liyf & deþ Tthis is þe boke of ypocras in this boke he techith forto knowe by planet sekenessis liffe & deþe

Thys ys þe boke of ypocras in þis booke he techith for to knowe by what planete Sykenesse lyf & deth This is the booke of ypocras in this book he techith to knowe the planete Sikenes lif and deth This is the booke of hipocras, in this booke hee teacheth to knowe the plannet, Sicknes life & death This ys the booke of ypocras ye teachethe for to knowe by what planyt syknis lyfe & deathe This is the boke of ypocras. In this boke be tokenys for to knowe e planet. sekenes bothe of lyf & of dethe

Table 2. English translations and incipits

90

Chapter Four

Latin treatises are also characterised by a short passage which describes physicians as blind people when they are unacquainted with Astronomy. This paragraph is inexistent in the thirteen English translations where the incipit is immediately followed by an explanation of the text’s main purpose: to indoctrinate about the influence of the planets as far sicknesses and their denouement – life or death – are concerned, as well as to offer a training regarding prescriptions. There are three main points that ought to be considered prior to a treatment. First of all, to observe the Moon thoroughly; secondly, to be aware of the time when the disease was caught; and finally, to know in which sign of the Zodiac it falls. After that, the structure of the treatise is provided, explaining that it is going to provide an overview of each of the twelve signs of the Zodiac from this medical astrological perspective. 3 They are addressed in the following order with the exception of BL, MS Harley 2378 in which the position of Virgo and Leo has been swapped: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. This order exactly coincides with the one found in the Latin versions. Thorndike (1960) points out that another significant fragment to consider is Taurus. This is due to the fact that Peter of Abano pictures a patient who “non potest dormire et habet voluntatem bibendi vinum et res calidas” (Thorndike 1960, 123), whereas the other two represent him as wanting to drink also wine but “res frigidas” (Thorndike 1960, 119 & 121). In the English versions, 4 we find a man who may suffer from “feuer quarteyne colde dropesy, colde gowte & oþer þat beth passionnes of splene” (Hunter 513 f.98v), and then the right moment to apply a treatment is elucidated. However, there are no references to drinking wine neither hot nor cold drinks. Therefore, it is not possible to rely on these three Latin exemplars of Taurus to trace the source of the English translation. What is more, one can easily become aware of the fact that both versions are completely different not only regarding syntax and lexicon, but also as far as length and content are concerned [Table 3]. If we analyse the anonymous Arabic translation and we compare it to the English one in Hunter 513, it is possible to notice at first sight how the Latin text is significantly longer. Furthermore, as for the content, the Arabic translation concentrates on diets to restore health and equilibrium, whereas the focus 3

The beginning of the treatise in GUL, MS Hunter 513 can be seen in the Appendix. 4 For purposes of comparison, the version in Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 513 is the English translation selected in this chapter to be compared with the Latin parallel texts.

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

91

of the English version is on a list of diseases that people born under the sign of Taurus are bound to suffer, as well as the right moment to administer a treatment, but there are no specific indications with regard to a treatment or diet to follow. Anonymous Arabic Translation

English Translation

Quando incidit infirmitas, et luna est in Tauro, et aspicit eam Mars ab apposito vel quarto, illa infirmitas est ex sanguine, et sentit caliditatem et siccitatem, et dolet in nocte et non potest dormire, et habet voluntatem bibendi vinum aut res frigidas, et est necessarium ei minuere sanguinem et dare ei medicinam que reddat eum frigidum et humidum. Si fuerit in isto Saturnus cum luna, aut venerit ad eum et non invenerit fortunam, morietur usque ad dies 9 quando primum capit eum infirmitas. Et si fuerit luna addens suo lumine et gradibus, et aspexerit eam Mars ex septimo vel quarto, et luna venerit ad Saturnum, et Mercurius cum ea, erit hec infirmitas ex frigiditate, et erit totus fractus et disruptus, et vix pauca loqui poterit, et stomachus erit ei indigestus, et non poterit digerere, et interius calorem habebit, et medicina laxativa erit ei necessaria, quia ista infirmitas est de colera alba. Aspice lunam quando venerit ad oppositum loci in quo fuerat et cum ibi fuerit, habebit magnum periculum et laborem et morietur, si non invenerit cum luna aliquam fortunam in uno signo. Et si invenerit cum ea fortunam, evadet usque ad octo dies. Sed quando acciderit alicui infirmitas, et luna fuerit in Tauro, et sol ibi cum ea, habebit istam infirmitatem in nocte in pectore, et lingua erit sibi combusta, et habebit magnum calorem in ore et in oculis. Vadit enim ad

Whan þe mone is in a signe clepled Tawrus, þis signe is of þe kynde of þe erþe colde & drye & in a planet that is Saturnes with þe mone in þis signe & mars þat is a planet contrary to the mone þis signes shall be of codenus & drynus þese signes hath of a man þe þrote & þe sikenesse be feuer quarteyne colde dropesy, colde gowte & oþer þat beth passionnes of splene whereof if þe mone be in þis signe and þe planet with hym colde þat sigkenesse may not be heled or þe mone be contrary to þe planet if þe mone holde with mars & caste lyght to hym within xxvij dayes he shall dey jf þou wilte a medisignewhen þe mone & venus & þe sonne beth togyder of Surger Cankers marmolis & oþer woundis with ded flessh cure in Þis tyme all oþer tymes medicynus worch nought to none afecte and þat is for þe kynde inpressyne þat prelaytes haue þat accordith in kynde with þe sikenesse; (Hunter 513 f. 98v)

92

Chapter Four

sellam et balbutit at habet febres ex sanguine, et nimiam sitim patitur. Est ei opus medicina laxativa et sanguinis minutione. Et manducet quicquid vult, et bibat de frígido, et caveat a calido. Et aspice quando luna fuerit in trino aspectu ad solem. Si minuatur infirmitas, vivet; et si crescat, morietur quando luna erit in oppositione solis. Sed si invenerit Iovem vel Venerem, non morietur. (Thorndike 1960, 121123) Table 3. Latin and English translations of Taurus

Pisces stands for another relevant passage. We have concentrated on the end of this zodiacal sign and on the differences found among the three Latin versions to try to reveal the origin of the vernacular translation: 1. Moerbeke’s translation: “et quando pervenerit luna ad locum in quo erat, si Venus aut Iupiter fuerit cum ea, evadet. Si autem fuerit Mars cum ea, erit infirmitas ex colera et sanguine. Et per auxilium fortunarum ad lunam liberabitur et per nocumentum malorum morietur.” (Thorndike 1960, 126) 2. Arabic translation: “cum luna fuerit in Piscibus et Mars cum ea, erit infirmitas ex nimio calore interiori et est opus ei ut minuat sanguinem. Et si fortuna aspexerit eam, vivet; sin autem morietur.” (Thorndike 1960, 128) 3. Peter of Abano’s translation: “si autem fuerit Mars cum ea, erit infirmitas ex colera et sanguine et per auxilium fortunarum ad lunam liberabitur, et per nocumentum malorum morietur.” (Thorndike 1960, 129) Collating these three different Latin passages with the English translation taken from MS Hunter 513, again we became aware of the fact that neither the syntax nor the lexicon nor the content are related: “whanne þe mone is in þis signe it is vncurable but hit so be þat þe medycyne be yeve þerto anon aftour þat þe mone and Saturnus partith and so of sonne and mars afterward and a man may ese hym and with medycynes cure hym;” (Hunter 513 f.103v) Since the incipts, passages and explicits studied so far cannot explain how the translation process from Latin into the vernacular was

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

93

carried out, and it cannot either reveal the Latin source for the English translations, we can only focus on one last extract. The thirteen English manuscripts contain a text relating to apostemes, or abscesses. It advises the reader regarding a general rule to recognise the different kinds of abscesses, and to know their connection to different parts of the body to apply a treatment. The first requisite is to consider the colour. If it is red in the outside and the patient is born under the signs of Gemini, Libra or Aquarius, if Jupiter or Mercury are close and the Moon is next to one of these signs and one of these planets, it is inappropriate to administer medicine. If the sore is red inside and the patient is Aries, Leo or Sagittarius, and the planets are Sun or Mars, while the Moon is around, it is not advisable to take any medicine. If the sore is white, grey or blackish, and the patient is Taurus, Virgo or Capricorn and the planet Saturn, it is not the right moment to apply a treatment. If it is yellowish, and the patient is Cancer, Scorpio or Pisces, and the planets around are Venus and Moon; it is not the appropriate moment to take medicines. These rules are addressed to the surgeons specialising in the treatment of external inflammations. The treatise concludes by emphasising the professionalism and the accuracy of this translation: “here endith þe boke of ypocras of deth and lyfe translate of Astrolamyors þe best þat euer were founde;” (Hunter 513 f. 104r). It is important to highlight the fact that all the English copies do not only contain the explanation on the twelve zodiacal signs, but also this text on apostemes and the previously mentioned closing sentence. Some manuscripts of Moerbeke’s version also contained “a passage on the fixed stars (Stelle fixe) which is appended at the close, after the treatment of the influence of the moon in the twelve signs which terminates the treatise with the consideration of Pisces” (Thorndike 1960, 109). Table 4 contains the transcription of this Latin text and also the Middle English treatise on apostemes. It can be seen how the Latin appended text does not have a closing sentence as the English one has, and therefore we “should yield preference to the closing words of the text on the last sign Pisces” (Thorndike 1960, 11).

Chapter Four

94 Stelle Fixe

Apostemes

Porro stelle fixe in firmamento sunt multarum et diversarum qualitatum bonarum atque malarum secundum eorum proprietatem, et sic habent diversos et varios effectus. Nam canicula que est quedam stella fixa habet hoc de sui natura quod duplicat solis calorem, cum sol appropinquat ei. Et si Mars tunc fuerit in ipso signo iunctus vel propinquus canicule, tunc temporis calor quadruplicatur et in tantum intenditur quod vix ab hominibus et plantis poterit substineri, nec evadunt quamplurimi absque infirmitate et diversis passionibus. Generaliter autem scias quod omnes stelle que sunt de natura Veneris vel Iovis vel lune, cum fuerint ad bonum coniungitur eis immediate quartus aspectus et in quarto et in trino et sextil, primo vel secundo vel oppositione. Et stelle fixe que sunt de natura Martis vel Saturni nocent in locis predictis, quia in aspectibus illis sunt dies cretici, id est, medicativi, id est, in quibus corpora celestia fortius imprimunt in omnibus operationibus et accidentibus malis et bonis tunc incipientibus. Et scias quod per aspectum et coniunctionem fortunarum ad lunam et ad lumina in illis aspectibus terminatur crisis ad bonum gratia bonorum. Et per aspectum malorum et coniunctionem et dominum domus mortis ad malum. Et Saturnus nimis nocet in talibus egritudinibus et in frigidis minus. Mars minus, tamen uterque semper nocet ubique fuit preterquam suis. Suis autem promittunt et non perficiuntur, et quicquid dederunt dabunt cum labore et difficultate. (Thorndike 1960, 109-110)

For to knowe of all maner soris within and withowte and of what complexione, they be knowe be þis rule if þou se a sore or apostyme þat is withoute and of what party þat þey be in þe body, ffirst take kepe of þe colour if hit be rede and nessh in felyng he is gendred of evell blode & if he be hote and moyste his signes beth Gemyny lybra and Aquarius and the planettis is jubiter and mercurij while þe mone is in þis signe with þe planet do no medsyne to no suche sore, *Iff þe colour of þe sore be rede insight and somewhat harde he is gendred with colde & he is hote & drye his signes beth Aries and leo a Sagittar, his planettis ben Sol and mars while þe mone is in þis signe with þese planettis do no medisyne þereto, *Iff þer be a sore þat is white or grey or blakyssh if hit be harde he is gendred of coldenesse and drynesse and his signes ben tawrus virgo and Capricornyo his planettis ben Satournus, *Iff hit be of the chis colour and nessh in felying hit is kynde of fleme gendred of Colde and moystnesse þe signes ben Cancer Scorpyo pisses, his planettis ben Venus and luna Þese rulis ben generall for all maner Sorgeons of postumus outewarde here endith þe boke of ypocras of deth and lyfe translate of Astrolamyors þe best þat euer were founde (Hunter 513 f. 104)

Table 4. Latin Treatise on Stelle Fixe and Middle English Treatise on Apostemes

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

95

As can be deduced from the analysis of the selected passages, the English versions are quite different from the Latin ones, so no direct relationship can be established. Kibre (1978, 135) refers to the fact that no Latin translations are found before the thirteenth century, which makes her think that they may derive from an earlier Greek or Byzantine source. She also mentions that Richard Durling spotted a copy of a text similar to Astrologia Ypocratis signed by a Byzantine scholar, Imbrasius of Ephesus, which is based on Galen’s Prognostication of Diseases by Astrology. As the text is very similar but not the same, Kibre considers it can derive from an earlier Byzantine or Greek text “relating to lunar and other prognostications in medicine, which are extant in manuscripts of the ninth century onward”.

5. Conclusions Medieval Medicine cannot be understood without Astrology. There were several astrological genres that helped the physician in his work of diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Zodiacal lunaries are within these astrological medical genres on which the physician relied before deciding whether it was the right time to carry out a given medical procedure. Thanks to the research on medieval zodiacal lunaries by previous scholars this genre has been brought to light. This piece of work contributes to the formerly carried out research in identifying unexplored copies of one of these treatises, Þe Booke of Ypocras. Furthermore, not only have we followed Kibre’s attempt (1977, 96) to identify the variants texts in English translations, but we have taken a step forward in finding out about the filiation of the extant English versions and their relationship with the Latin late medieval translations. Thus, this chapter completes Kibre’s and Thorndike’s research in Latin versions of the texts, as we have examined five Latin copies, three of which were not accessible to neither of the two. The Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid copies (MS 10063, MS 17961 and MS 3370) are of special interest to academia, as they are considered by both Kibre and Thorndike to come from Arabic. After the examination of the texts, it can be stated that they follow the patterns established for the Arabic Latin versions. In fact, the other Latin copies available to us, Gerona Cathedral MS 75 and GUL, MS Hunter 461, are not from Arabic, but they are William Moerbeke’s copies, as noted by them. To conclude, we agree on Kibre’s idea (1978, 136) that despite word variance and arrangement, the content is similar in the Latin versions. With regard to the main purpose of the chapter, the identification and filiation of extant English translations, although we managed to deal

96

Chapter Four

with a much higher number of copies, we have specifically concentrated on the full versions, narrowing down the search to thirteen. Thorndike’s methodology (1960) was adopted, inasmuch as the incipit, the transition to Aries and Taurus and Pisces signs, as well as the explicit of each of the thirteen English translations were collated and compared with both, the other English versions and the three Latin groups of translations. As a result of this comparison, it is undeniable that the English texts must have shared an exemplar now lost or unidentified, as the texts are extremely similar in their contents, despite usual manuscript transmission variation. The collation of the incipit made it clear that English versions did not follow Moerbeke’s Latin translation, as there is no passage about the blind man, neither do they coincide with Abano’s copies nor the Arabic ones. An important difference is the fact that the English translations contain an additional treatise on apostemes appended at the close of Pisces. As a matter of fact, the explicit comes after the apostemes tract and not after the sign of Pisces, as it is the case in the Latin translations. No appendix of Fixe Stelle is found either. Another peculiarity of the English texts is the content. Whereas Latin versions concentrate on the diet that people from the zodiacal signs may follow, the English copies focus on the diseases they are prone to suffer from and their treatment. Therefore, we must conclude by stating that there is a missing exemplar from which all the thirteen English versions derive. As it is widely acknowledged, medieval translators did not feel committed to carry out a word-for-word translation and commentaries and free versions of a well-known text are common in the period. Therefore, there is a need to fill this gap, whereby a missing English exemplar have escaped scholar’s attention so far. Zodiacal lunaries have revealed themselves as a genre worthy to be further explored and the question of the provenance of English translations is left open for future research.

References Primary Sources Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 336/275. Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 457/395. Cambridge, Trinity College MS 1404. Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.14.52. Durham, Durham University Library, MS Cosin V.IV.7. Gerona, Gerona Cathedral MS 75. Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 461.

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

97

Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 513. London, British Library, MS Additional 12195. London, British Library, MS Harley 1736. London, British Library, MS Harley 2378. London, British Library, MS Sloane 73. London, British Library, MS Sloane 340. London, Royal College of Physicians MS 384. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 3370. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 10063. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 17961. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 210. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 393. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1405. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 591. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 73.

Secondary Sources Craik, Elizabeth M. 2015. The Hippocratic Corpus: Content and Context. New York: Routledge. French, Roger. 1994. “Astrology in Medical Practice”. In Practical Medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, edited by Luis Garcia Ballesteros and others, 30-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keiser, George R. 1998. “Works of Science and Information”. In A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500, Vol. 10, edited by Albert E. Hartung. New Haven, Conn.: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Kibre, Pearl. 1945. “Hippocratic Writings in the Middle Ages” In Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 18, 371-412. —. 1977. “Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages (III)”. In Traditio, Vol. 33, 253-295. Reproduced in Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985. —. 1978. “Astronomia or Astrologia Ypocratis”. In Science and History: Studies in Honor of Edward Rosen, Studia Corpenica, Vol. 16, 133166. Wroclaw, Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk and Ossolineum: The Polish Academy of Sciences Press. Reproduced in Studies in Medieval Science. Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine. London: The Hambledon Press, 1984.

98

Chapter Four

Means, Laurel. 1992. “Electionary, Lunary, Destinary, and Questionary: Toward defining Categories of Middle English Prognostic Material”. In Studies in Philology, Vol. 89, No.4, 367-403. —. 1993. Medieval Lunar Astrology: a collection of representative Middle English texts. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press. Pahta, Päivi and Irma Taavitsainen. 2004. “Vernacularisation of scientific and medical writings”. In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, 1-22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Potter, Paul. 1988. Short Handbook of Hippocratic Medicine. Quebec: Les Éditions du Sphinx. Robbins, R. Hope. 1970. “Medical Manuscripts in Middle English”. In Speculum, Vol. 45, 393-415. Taavitsainen, Irma. 1987. “The Identification of Middle English Lunary Manuscripts” In Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Vol. 88, 18-26. —. 1988. Middle English Lunaries. A Study of the Gender. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. —. 1994. “A Zodiac Lunary for Medical Professionals”. In Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, edited by Lister M. Matheson, 283-399. East Lansing: Colleagues Press. —. 2004. “Transferring Classical Discourse Conventions into the Vernacular”. In Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, 37-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2005. “Standardisation, house styles, and the scope of variation in ME scientific writing”. In Rethinking Middle English: Linguistic and Literary Approaches, edited by Nikolaus Ritt and Herbert Schendl, 89109. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Thorndike, Lynn. 1960. “The Three Latin Translations of the PseudoHippocratic Tract on Astrological Medicine”. In Janus, Vol. 49, 104129. Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. 1984. “Medical Prose”. In Middle English Prose: A critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, edited by A.S.G Edwards, 315-335. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. —. 1994. “The Golden Table of Pythagoras”. In Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England, edited by Lister M. Matheson, 123-140. East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press. Voigts, Linda Ehrsam and Patricia Deery Kurtz. 2000. Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference CD. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Astrological Medicine in Middle English

99

Wallis, Faith. (ed.). 2010. Medieval Medicine. A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Appendix

Fol 98r, Glasgow University Library MS Hunter 513 by permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

CHAPTER FIVE THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA: FINDING THE VIKING INFLUENCE ON MEDIEVAL ENGLISH VOCABULARY RICHARD DANCE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

There is, of course, no dilemma about the kind of horns we most naturally associate with the Vikings. There is not the slightest support in the archaeological record for the helmet of popular imagination, which we know is a nineteenth-century romantic fantasy, impossible though it may now be to shake off as an image for the exploits of medieval Scandinavians.1 But it seemed like a good starting point for a title for this chapter. In what follows, I shall suggest that the idea of painfully difficult or finelybalanced decisions encapsulated by the phrase ‘the horns of a dilemma’ is — unlike the helmets — very much relevant when it comes to some other aspects of the Vikings’ legacy, where it can take considerably more effort to tell what is really ‘Viking’ and what isn’t. In particular, my topic in this chapter will be how we trace the influence of the early Scandinavian languages on English vocabulary. This is a subject which has fascinated generations of scholars, and with good reason. David Wilson’s well-known and nicely romantic encomium to what the Vikings did for the very stuff of the English language is typical of the sort of statement one finds in introductory books:

1

For a fascinating account, and further references, see Roberta Frank, ‘The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet’, in International Scandinavian and Medieval Studies in Memory of Gerd Wolfgang Weber, ed. by Michael Dallapiazza, Olaf Hansen, Preben Meulengracht Sørensen and Yvonne S. Bonnetain, Hesperides: Letterature e Culture Occidentali 12 (Trieste: Edizione Parnaso, 2000), pp. 199–208.

102

Chapter Five We cannot die without using a Norse word, we cannot go to law, or eat an egg. Familiar place-names of history and geography — Naseby, Whitby, Longford, Lundy, Anglesey — were given by Scandinavian settlers. Yorkshire Ridings, the Manx Tynwald, English earldoms, Irish trading towns have roots deep in Scandinavian administration and thought. The English-speaking peoples are bound by ties to a colourful and mixed past in which one of the more gaudy elements is Viking.2

This last sentence is an appealingly lurid metaphor, and expressing our cultural relationships with long past ages is of course hard to do without using some sort of figurative language. The image of ties or connections is a favourite one; amongst others, it will re-emerge several times in the course of this chapter. Unsurprisingly, however, tracing this ‘join’ from modern, or even medieval, English words to the Viking past is not quite as straightforward a matter as it might seem. Wilson’s ‘ties’ was, one presumes, meant to suggest a palpable connectivity, implying a link between Present-Day English lexis and the medieval Scandinavian languages which is manifest, there to be followed. But (to pursue this same metaphor a bit further) the threads of word history are, in reality, not always as well behaved as that: they have a tendency, as readers of this chapter will be well aware, to get tangled up in something of a cat’s cradle of other strands, leading us off in all kinds of unexpected directions. There are many aspects of lexical history which can exemplify these hermeneutic challenges in the case of the Old Norse borrowings in English, including their distribution and spread in medieval and later English dialects, and their semantic and stylistic contexts; and these aspects of the subject are very much worth pursuing.3 But in this chapter, I would like to explore just one, absolutely crucial aspect of the study of these words (and one which in important ways underlies all the others), the etymological. I shall introduce the etymological evidence for a few, particular words which have interested 2

David M. Wilson, foreword to James Graham-Campbell, The Viking World (London: Book Club Associates, 1980), p. 5. 3 For detailed studies of the distribution and contexts of Norse loans in Old and Middle English texts, see esp.: Sara M. Pons-Sanz, Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts: Wulfstan's Works, a Case Study, NOWELE supplement series 22 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2007) and The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Richard Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the SouthWest Midland Texts, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 246 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003).

The Horns of a Dilemma

103

me in my recent work (including some slightly less well-known examples than die, law and egg), and use these as an opportunity to stand back and think a little about the whole issue of what it means to say that we have identified Old Norse influence on this or that English word. This is a procedure last interrogated from first principles in a full-length study more than a hundred year ago; and, as we shall see, it is one which can often leave us perched on those tricky metaphorical horns. The idea of Viking encounters with the peoples of the British Isles, and the cultural hybridity that followed, is supported by a great variety of evidence, be that documentary, onomastic, archaeological, or art historical.4 The prima facie case for Scandinavian influence on the English language is therefore extremely powerful. What is more, of course, the dialects of Old English and the language varieties spoken by Viking Age Scandinavians (conventionally referred to as ‘Old Norse’)5 were closely 4

For some recent guides to the evidence and its historical background, see e.g. Simon Keynes, ‘The Vikings in England, c. 790–1016’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. by Peter Sawyer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 48–82, Julian D. Richards, Viking Age England, rev. ed. (Stroud: Tempus, 2000), David N. Dumville, ‘Vikings in the British Isles: A Question of Sources’, in The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective, ed. by Judith Jesch (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 209–40, Dawn M. Hadley, The Vikings in England: Settlement, Society and Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), Jayne Carroll, Stephen H. Harrison and Gareth Williams, The Vikings in Britain and Ireland (London: British Museum, 2014), and the essays in James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch and David N. Parsons, eds., Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001) and Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D. Richards, eds., Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); and for a model study of Scandinavian influence in a major English region see now Matthew Townend, Viking Age Yorkshire (Pickering: Blackthorn, 2014). On place-names in particular, see esp. Lesley Abrams and David N. Parsons, ‘Place-Names and the History of Scandinavian Settlement in England’, in Land, Sea and Home, ed. by John Hines, Alan Lane and Mark Redknap, The Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 20 (Leeds: Maney, 2004), pp. 379–431, and Matthew Townend, ‘Scandinavian Place- Names in England’, in Perceptions of Place: Twenty-First-Century Reassessments of English Place-Name Studies, ed. by Jayne Carroll and David N. Parsons (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2013), pp. 103–26. 5 The term ‘Old Norse’ (ON) is retained here in its broad philological sense, i.e. to refer (collectively or non-specifically) to the Scandinavian languages in the period approximately 700–1500 AD. OIcel forms are usually taken to represent ON, but it

104

Chapter Five

related descendants of their Germanic parent language, very similar in terms of phonology and morphosyntax; and they were in intimate contact from at least the settling of the North and East of England in the late ninth century, in some areas perhaps until as late as the early twelfth.6 So it would hardly be surprising if originally Norse lexical material ended up being transferred into English, and since the middle of the nineteenth century there has been a wealth of scholarship attempting to pin down examples of Norse loan-words.7 Table 1 shows some examples of is sometimes necessary to refer also to Viking Age Norse (VAN) reflexes. 6 On the circumstances of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact and the transfer of linguistic material see esp. Matthew Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), and for the genetic relationship of English and Norse within the Germanic language family see further Hans Frede Nielsen, Old English and the Continental Germanic Languages, 2nd ed (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck), esp. pp. 187–220. The principal discussions of the survival of Old Norse in England are: Eilert Ekwall, ‘How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England?’, in A Grammatical Miscellany Offered to Otto Jespersen on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. by Niels Bøgholm, Aage Brusendorff and C. A. Bodelsen (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), pp. 17–30; R. I. Page, ‘How Long Did the Scandinavian Language Survive in England? The Epigraphical Evidence’, in England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources Presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. by Peter Clemoes and Kathleen Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 165–81 (reprinted with a Postscript in R. I. Page, Runes and Runic Inscriptions: Collected Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Viking Runes, ed. David Parsons (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 181–96); David N. Parsons, ‘How Long Did the Scandinavian Language Survive in England? Again’, in Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997, ed. James Graham- Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch and David N. Parsons (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), pp. 299–312. 7 Important early discussions and lists of Norse loans in English are: Herbert Coleridge, ‘On the Scandinavian Element in the English Language’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 6 (1859), 18–31; Walter W. Skeat, Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882), pp. 750–1; Johannes C. H. R. Steenstrup, Normannerne. Volume IV: Danelag (Copenhagen: Rudolph Klein, 1882); Erik Brate, Nordische Lehnwörter im Orrmulum, Sonderabdruck aus den Beiträgen zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10 (Upsala: Halle, 1884); Friedrich Kluge, ‘Geschichte der englischen Sprache’, in Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. 1, ed. by Hermann Paul (Strassburg: Trübner, 1891), pp. 780–930 (2nd ed. 1901). Since then, notable studies and influential summaries of Old Norse lexical influence (esp. in medieval English and Scots) are: Erik Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words in

The Horns of a Dilemma

105

Middle English, 2 vols., Studien zur englischen Philologie 7, 11 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900–1902); Alan van Keuren McGee, ‘The Geographical Distribution of Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English, with Special Reference to the Alliterative Poetry’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale University, 1940); Alarik Rynell, The Rivalry of Scandinavian and Native Synonyms in Middle English, Especially Taken and Nimen (with an excursus on Nema and Taka in Old Scandinavian), Lund Studies in English 13 (Lund: Håkon Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1948); Dietrich Hofmann, Nordisch-Englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana 14 (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1955); Hans Peters, ‘Zum skandinavischen Lehngut im Altenglischen’, Sprachwissenschaft, 6 (1981), 85–124 and ‘Onomasiologische Untersuchungen zum skandinavischen Lehngut im Altenglischen’, Sprachwissenschaft, 6 (1981), 169–85; Sibylle Hug, Scandinavian Loanwords and their Equivalents in Middle English (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1987); David Burnley, ‘Lexis and Semantics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language II, 1066–1476, ed. by Norman Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 409–99 (at pp. 415–23); Dieter Kastovsky, ‘Semantics and Vocabulary’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language I, The Beginnings to 1066, ed. by Richard M. Hogg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 290–408 (at pp. 320– 36); Alfred Wollmann, ‘Scandinavian Loanwords in Old English’, in The Origins and Development of Emigrant Languages. Proceedings from the Second Rasmus Rask Colloquium, Odense University, November 1994, ed. by Hans Frede Nielsen and Lene Schøsler (Odense: Odense University Press, 1996), pp. 215–42; Paul Bibire, ‘North Sea Language Contacts in the Early Middle Ages: English and Norse’, in The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe, ed. by Thomas R. Liszka and Lorna E. M. Walker (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001), pp. 88–107; Sara M. Pons-Sanz, Analysis of the Scandinavian Loanwords in the Aldredian Glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels, Studies in English Language and Linguistics, Monographs 9 (Valencia: Universitat de València, 2000); Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English; Susanne Kries, Skandinavisch-schottische Sprachbeziehungen im Mittelalter: der altnordische Lehneinfluss, NOWELE supplement series 20 (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003); Pons-Sanz, Norse-Derived Vocabulary in Late Old English Texts; Janne Skaffari, Studies in Early Middle English Loanwords: Norse and French Influences, Anglicana Turkuensia 26 (Turku: University of Turku, 2009); Magdalena Bator, Obsolete Scandinavian Loanwords in English, Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 26 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010); Isabel Moskowich, Language Contact and Vocbulary Enrichment: Scandinavian Elements in Middle English, Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 34 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012); D. Gary Miller, External Influences on English, from its Beginnings to the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 91–127; Pons-Sanz, Lexical Effects of Anglo- Scandinavian Linguistic Contact; Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 171–221. I shall not touch here upon claims for Norse influence

Chapter Five

106

commonly accepted and commonly cited Norse loans in (Present-Day) English. die

cp. OIcel deyja (VAN *døyja)

egg

cp. OIcel egg

law

cp. OIcel lІg (VAN *lagu)

leg

cp. OIcel leggr

loan

cp. OIcel lán

meek

cp. OIcel mjúkr (VAN *miukr)

seem

cp. OIcel sœma

sky

cp. OIcel ský

take

cp. OIcel taka

they

cp. OIcel þeir

till

cp. OIcel til

Table 1. Some frequently cited PDE words derived from ON It will be evident that, as well as not being able to die or eat eggs without the Vikings, we also would not be able to talk about loans. By way of quantifying their impact in very bald terms, Hogg and Denison notice approximately 1500 items in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary with some sort of Scandinavian input, and Nielsen estimates about 600–900 words with this origin in Present-day English.8 Simply put, their effect seems huge. This sort of list is often as far as the handbooks and general histories of English get. But once we probe below the surface, and beyond on English morphology and syntax, but research on these topics has also been extensive; for helpful guides see notably D. Gary Miller, ‘The Morphosyntactic Legacy of Scand-English Contact’, in For the Loue of Inglis Lede, ed. by Marcin Krygier and Liliana Sikorska (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), pp. 9–39, and Miller, External Influences, pp. 127–47. 8 Hans Frede Nielsen, The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154, North-Western European Language Evolution supplement vol. 19 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998), p. 181; Richard Hogg and David Denison, ‘Overview’, in A History of the English Language, ed. by Richard Hogg and David Denison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–42 (at p. 2).

The Horns of a Dilemma

107

these favourite examples, the etymological identification of words borrowed from or in some way influenced by Old Norse often turns out to be quite difficult — in large measure, of course, because the very similarity of the language systems that makes cross-influence so plausible also conspires to make it hard in practice to sieve out originally Norse from other material when we meet it in later (sometimes much later) medieval English texts. The watershed moment in scholarship is Erik Björkman’s book Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English, from 1900–1902. This was the first thoroughgoing attempt to set down the etymological ‘ground rules’ for identifying Norse input, and in many respects it is still unsurpassed in scope and detail.9 Needless to say, however, much has happened since 1902 in the study of Old English and Old Norse, in Germanic etymology in general and in work on Old and Middle English language, texts and dialectology. It has therefore seemed to me worthwhile over the last few years to revisit these principles, and I have been doing this by reviewing all the evidence and all discussions of it in the scholarship pertaining to the almost 500 Norse loans variously claimed for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a text which is usually supposed to be at the high water-mark of Norse influence on English literary vocabulary).10 This is a very large body of material; and here, by 9

Björkman distinguishes between words for which there is a ‘phonetic test’ (see below) and others, which he divides broadly into those for which a Scandinavian origin is ‘tolerably certain’ and those which are only ‘possibly borrowed’. Other notable discussions of the identification of Norse loans include: T. F. Hoad, ‘English Etymology: Some Problematic Areas in the Vocabulary of the Middle English Period’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 43 (1984), 27–57 (at pp. 32–40); Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 201–5; Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English, 74–91; Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 169–73; Richard Dance, ‘“Tomar‫ݤ‬an hit is awane”: Words Derived from Old Norse in Four Lambeth Homilies’, in Foreign Influences on Medieval English, ed. by Jacek Fisiak and Magdalena Bator (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 77–127 (at pp. 85–93); Richard Dance, ‘English in Contact: Norse’, in English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 2, ed. by Alex Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton, Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science 34.2 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 1724–37 (at pp. 1728– 31); Pons-Sanz, Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact, pp. 25– 8 (and applied throughout chapter 2); Richard Dance, ‘Getting A Word In: Contact, Etymology and English Vocabulary in the Twelfth Century’ (The Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture 2013), Journal of the British Academy, 2 (2014), 153–211 (at pp. 163–7); Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 190–213. 10 For previous claims about the Norse influence on the Gawain-poet’s vocabulary,

108

Chapter Five

way of a short progress report, I shall simply glance at a small handful of examples which happen to have interested me just lately. There are various ways in which one could approach the etymological evidence. But the foundations of etymology are preeminently comparative, comparing the structures (especially formal and semantic) of language systems — and when it comes to establishing foreign influence that is where we must start. The best and clearest evidence for Norse input into the history of a medieval English word is when we have a phonological (or occasionally morphological) feature which we know is characteristic of Norse rather than Old English descent from their common Germanic ancestor, and which therefore acts as a ‘signature’ of Norse influence. As an example, take ME skete ‘quickly’ (which can also serve, if you like, as a tribute to Prof. Walter Skeat, one of the first people to attempt an etymologically sensitive list of Norse loanwords in English, in 1882).11 The sound /sk/ at the beginning of the Proto-Germanic root *skeut- was palatalized (to /‫ݕ‬/) in Old English, but not in Old Norse: contrast OE scƝot- (as in the verb scƝotan, and its PDE reflex shoot) with OIcel skjótt ‘quickly’.12 The /sk/ in the Middle English and for some preliminary findings from my research on this text, see Richard Dance, ‘“Tor for to telle”: Words Derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066–1520), ed. by Judith A. Jefferson and Ad Putter (with the assistance of Amanda Hopkins), Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 41–58. My full etymological survey of words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain will appear separately as a monograph, and my data will also form part of ‘The Gersum Project’, a collaborative investigation of the Scandinavian influence on the vocabulary of late Middle English alliterative poetry which began in January 2016 (see http://www.gersum.org). 11 Skeat, Etymological Dictionary, pp. 750–1. 12 For these Old English and Old Norse words and their etymological context see esp.: Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog / A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, ed. Helle Degnbol et al (Copenhagen, 1989–, in progress; access to slips and draft entries at http://dataonp.hum.ku.dk/index.html), s.v. skjótr (2) (adj.); Jan de Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1962), s.v. skjótr (2); Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk Orðsifjabók (Reykjavík: Orðabók Háskólans, 1989), s.v. skjótur; Harald Bjorvand and Fredrik Otto Lindeman, Våre Arveord: Etymologisk Ordbok, rev. ed. (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2007), s.v. skyte; Frank Heidermanns, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der germanischen Primäradjektive, Studia Linguistica Germanica 33 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), s.v. skeuta; Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), s.v. *skeutaz; Guus Kroonen, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 2 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), s.v. *skeutan-. There are no undisputed

The Horns of a Dilemma

109

form (skete) is therefore a marker of Old Norse input, of descent from the Scandinavian version of this root.13 This sort of evidence, what Roger Lass calls regular ‘correspondence sets’, is of course a mainstay of comparative philology;14 and so long as we are confident that the respective instances of OE scƝot- used as an adj. (or adv.) stem; for late OE (ge)scƝot adj. (which might be the first record of the Norse-derived word) see the discussion at Pons-Sanz, Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact, p. 403. On OE palatalization generally see esp. A. Campbell, Old English Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), §§426–41, Karl Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache, reprint with a glossary by R.F.S. Hamer, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1964), §§633, 637, 685–90 (c, g), 691–2, Richard M. Hogg, A Grammar of Old English. Volume One: Phonology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), §§7.15–43, Richard Jordan, Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology, trans. and rev. Eugene Joseph Crook, Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 218 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974), §§177–94; and also notably Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 147n, Olga Gevenich, Die englische Palatalisierung von k > þ im Lichte der englischen Ortsnamen, Studien zur englischen Philologie (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1918), Karl Luick, ‘Zur Palatalisierung’, Anglia, 59 (1935), 273–86, V. Royce West, Der etymologische Ursprung der neuenglischen Lautgruppe [sk], Anglistische Forschungen 83 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1936), John W. Watson Jr., ‘Non-initial k in the north of England’, Language, 23 (1947), 43–9, Herbert Penzl, ‘The Phonemic Split of Germanic k in Old English’, Language, 23 (1947), 34–42, Hoad, 34–8, Marcin Krygier, ‘OE (non-)palatalized */k/: Competing forces of change at work in the “seek”-verbs’, in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta and Matti Rissanen, Topics in English Linguistics 35 (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 461–73. 13 For the Norse origin of ME skete, see esp. Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn and Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956–2001) (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/) (hereafter MED), s.v. skƝt(e (adv.), The Oxford English Dictionary (first published as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles), ed. James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions (Oxford, 1928; 2nd ed. prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 1989; 3rd ed. in progress) (http://www.oed.com) (hereafter OED), s.v. skeet (adv. and a.), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, pp. 125–6, 307. For the instance at Sir Gawain l. 19 see the glossary entries in J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd ed. rev. Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) (hereafter TGD), and Sir Israel Gollancz ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, re-edited from MS. Cotton Nero, A. x, in the British Museum, with introductory essays by Mabel Day and Mary S. Serjeantson, Early English Text Society o.s. 210 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) (hereafter GDS). 14 For discussion see e.g. Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, pp. 123–39, 195–7.

110

Chapter Five

developments we see are characteristic of distinct languages, we can be relatively secure in attributing Old Norse input here. There are many other examples of these ‘sets’.15 Another good one (and, by coincidence, also the surname of an eminent medievalist) is ME ker ‘thicket on marshy ground’.16 Again, this is a matter of a palatalization test (PGmc /k/ before an early front vowel became /t‫ݕ‬/ in Old English, but not in Old Norse), and here it illustrates another one of the great values of these regular correspondence sets, which is that they are systematic: we don’t need a cognate of ON kjarr to have survived in Old English (and in this case, there does not seem to be one) to know that it wouldn’t have looked like this if it had.17 Björkman rightly treats this type of ‘phonetically testable’ evidence as a category apart: so long as we are happy that we understand all the etymological variables, the evidence for Norse input is here relatively very robust.18 Note that I include in this category instances where it is hard to find a parallel for a particular series of Old Norse formal developments beyond the stem of the word in question, and so to 15

For extended discussions of the phonological (and morphological) markers of loan, see esp. Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, pp. 30–185, Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English, pp. 74–86, Pons-Sanz, Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact, pp. 28–76, Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 191–201; and for a detailed comparison of the OE and ON phonological systems see Townend, Language and History, pp. 31–40. 16 See MED s.v. kƝr (n.), OED s.v. carr (2), car, Björkman, Scandinavian LoanWords, p. 142, A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Elements, 2 vols., English PlaceName Society 25–6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), s.v. kjarr; and for the instances at Sir Gawain 1421, 1431 see further TGD and GDS, glossaries s.vv. (GDS introduces another instance of ker at l. 1434, but this emendation has not been generally accepted.) 17 For the ON word and its etymology see esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog, s.v. kjarr (sb.), de Vries s.v. kjarr, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. kjarr, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. kjerr, Orel s.v. *kerzan. Despite The English Dialect Dictionary, being the complete vocabulary of all dialect words still in use, or known to have been in use during the last two hundred years, ed. Joseph Wright, 6 vols. (London: Frowde, 1898–1905) (hereafer EDD), s.v. char(e (sb.2), the first element in the Cambridgeshire place-names Chare Fen and Littleport Chair is best explained as a reflex of OE *cearr ‘turn, bend’ rather than as an otherwise uknown native cognate of ON kjarr; see The Vocabulary of English Place-Names, ed. David Parsons and Tania Styles with Carole Hough, 3 vols., English Place-Name Society (Nottingham: Centre for English Name Studies, 1997–2004) (hereafter VEPN), s.v. *cearr. 18 Björkman’s main discussion of the ‘phonetic tests’ is at Scandinavian LoanWords, pp. 30–185 (though notice that he does not treat morphological evidence as a formal test in the same way).

The Horns of a Dilemma

111

establish a ‘set’ of correspondences; but where that group of changes looks vanishingly unlikely to have occurred in Old English. A good example is ME (and PDE) sister.19 Here we start from a PGmc *swestƝr (or *swestǀr), from which descends OIcel systir with a /y/ on the one hand, and its cognate OE sweostor (with /weo/, and variants including swester, swustor) on the other.20 This correspondence is not part of a set, as such, in that an ON /y/ vs. OE /weo/ (/we/, /wu/) is the outcome of PGmc */we/ only in this one lexical item. This is perhaps the reason why some etymological accounts are slightly hesitant about calling sister a loan (OED says only that it ‘appears to be from Scandinavian’, for example).21 But the fact is that a /y/ is known for this Proto-Germanic stem only in Old Norse (cp. further Go swistar, OFris swester (suster), OS swestar, OHG swester), and we can explain it there by the rules of early Scandinavian phonological change, but not by any mechanism proper to Old English or Middle English phonology.22 And so when we see Middle English spellings which indicate a /y/ or later /i/, we ought again to be confident that they show influence from the Old Norse form.23 At other times, however, the comparative phonological evidence is not as safe as it has sometimes been taken to be. A rather interesting 19

In Sir Gawain ME sister appears only in the compound sister-sunes ‘sister’s sons, nephews’ at l. 111. 20 See Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog, s.v. systir (sb.), de Vries s.v. systir, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. systir, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. søster, Alfred Bammesberger, Die Morphologie des urgermanischen Nomens, Untersuchungen zur vergleichenden Grammatik der germanischen Sprachen 2 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), p. 208, Orel s.v. *swestƝr, Kroonen s.v. *swester-, Ferdinand Holthausen, Altenglisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1934), s.v. sweostor, swustor. 21 OED s.v. sister (n.). 22 The changes usually adduced to account for the ON form are: ON */we/ > */wi/ by i-umlaut in the nom./acc. pl. *swistriR; */wi/ generalized through the paradigm; */wi/> */ui/; finally */ui/ > /y/, probably via labial mutation in the acc./gen./dat. sg. form (*suistur > systur). For discussions see Andreas Heusler, Altisländisches Elementarbuch, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1921), §75.1, Adolf Noreen, Altnordische Grammatik I: altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik (Lautund Flexionslehre) unter Berücksichtigung des Urnordischen, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1970), §77.12, Johs. Brøndum-Nielsen, Gammeldansk grammatik i sproghistorisk fremstilling, Vol. 1: Indledning, tekstkildernes lydbetegnelse, vokalisme, 2nd ed. (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1950), §88, de Vries s.v. systir, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. søster. 23 Thus MED s.v. suster (n.), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, pp. 117–18, 177n.1, and for Sir Gawain the glossaries in TGD and GDS s.v. sister(-)sunes.

112

Chapter Five

example is ME gate ‘way, road’.24 This word is not attested in Old English,25 but on the basis of reflexes in the Scandinavian languages (cp. OIcel gata ‘way, path, road’; wk. fem., nom. pl. gІtur), Go gatwǀ ‘street’ (wk. fem.) and OHG gazza ‘street’ (wk. fem.), we reconstruct a PGmc etymon *gatwǀn, i.e. a weak feminine noun in the derivational suffix -wǀn.26 Now, on the face of it we have an environment here susceptible to a ‘phonetic test’, and that is what Björkman claimed.27 But actually I think this is a more complicated example. This derivational type, a weak feminine with theme-initial /w/, is a rather rare kind of Germanic noun, and its hypothetical Old English outcome is harder to predict than Björkman assumes. If one posits retention of the /w/, as is the case in OE swealwe ‘swallow’ (< PGmc *swal(g)wǀn),28 then an Old English cognate of our ‘gate’ word should have had first fronting (of /‫ܤ‬/ > /æ/) and consequently palatalization (once again) throughout the paradigm, giving WS *geatwe (nom. sg.),*geatwan (acc./gen./dat. sg., etc.) (Angl. *gætwe, *gætwan), with /j/;29 and so the presence of /ܳ/ in ME gate is then a good test of Norse input, a clear ‘Viking sound’. But other ways of reconstructing a hypothetical Old English form of this word exist, since several nouns of this -wǀn class seem early on to have fallen in with the standard weak feminine type. If one follows the model of njhte ‘early morn’ (< PGmc *njhtwǀn) instead,30 then one should expect restoration of 24

It occurs seven times in Sir Gawain as a simplex (at ll. 696, 709, 778, etc.) and at l. 141 in the compound adv. algate ‘at any rate’. 25 It is not to be confused with PDE gate as in a ‘garden gate’, which comes from OE geat < PGmc *gatan (cp. OIcel gat, OFris gat, jet, OS gat ‘hole, opening’). 26 See esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog, s.v. gata (sb.), de Vries gata, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. gata, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. gate, Orel s.v. *Ҋatwǀn, Kroonen s.v. *gatwǀn-, and further Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen, ed. Albert L. Lloyd, Rosemarie Lühr and Otto Springer (Göttingen and Zürich: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988–), s.v. gazza, Winfred P. Lehmann, A Gothic Etymological Dictionary (based on the third edition of Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der Gotischen Sprache by Sigmund Feist), with bibliography prepared under the direction of Helen-Jo J. Hewitt (Leiden: Brill, 1986), s.v. gatwo, MED s.v. gƗte (n.2), OED s.v. gate (n.2), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 151. 27 Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 151. 28 Cp. OIcel svala, OFris swale, OS swala, OHG swalawa, and see e.g. Orel s.v. *swal(Ҋ)wǀn, Kroonen s.v. *swalwǀn. 29 For OE first fronting, see esp. Campbell §§131–3, Luick, Historische Grammatik, §§115–16, Hogg §§5.10–15. 30 Cp. Go njhtwǀ, OIcel ótta, OHG uohta, and see esp. Lehmann s.v. uhtwo, Kroonen s.v. *unhtwôn-.

The Horns of a Dilemma

113

/‫ܤ‬/ and no palatalization anywhere in the paradigm other than in the nominative singular (WS *geate, Angl.*gæte), and in such cases levelling to the oblique stem (thus WS *gatan, Angl. *gatan (acc./gen./dat. sg., etc.)) seems regular in Old English; with generalized /‫ܤ‬/ cp. OE hrace ‘throat’.31 In that event, we would get a /ܳ/ in a native form of this word, and so the presence of /ܳ/ in Middle English is no sure sign of Norse input after all. There is potentially some wriggle room here, then. The evidence for Norse derivation of ME gate is still quite good, in fact, but rather than being phonological, the main weight of the argument instead falls on the fact that the Germanic root of this word is not attested in early Old English texts. Given that the Old English corpus is a very imperfect record of all the words once in use, we cannot of course completely rule out the possibility that a native cognate of ON gata, Go gatwǀ and OHG gazza once existed; but for a root lexicalizing a relatively basic concept like this its non- occurrence is significant. Plus there is some quite telling evidence beyond the structural, in what we could term circumstantial or incidental support, since this word in Middle English texts and in place-names and street-names has a predominant Northern English distribution, coinciding rather nicely with the areas of heaviest Scandinavian settlement; notice the well-known phenomenon of street-names ending in -gate in northern towns and cities like York, Lincoln and Doncaster.32 It must be said that evidence from distribution is, generally speaking, a very difficult matter in its own right, quite often far more equivocal;33 but in cases like these it adds important support to our reading of the high probability of Norse

31 See Richard M. Hogg and R. D. Fulk, A Grammar of Old English, Vol. 2: Morphology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), §3.116. For OE restoration of /‫ܤ‬/ see esp. Campbell §§157–61, Luick, Historische Grammatik, §§160–7, Hogg §§5.35– 8. 32 For the mainly northern/eastern distribution of ME and PDE gate, see esp. MED s.v. gƗte (n.2) (though notice that there are signs of wider distribution inc. in alliterative texts, e.g. Piers Plowman, William of Palerne), and further OED s.v. gate (n.2), EDD s.v. gate (sb.2, v.2), Per Thorson, Anglo-Norse Studies: An Inquiry into the Scandinavian Elements in the Modern English Dialects. Part I (Amsterdam: N. V. Swets en Zeitlinger, 1936), pp. 20, 27. On the place-name evidence see esp. Smith s.v. gata and Carole Hough, Toponymicon and Lexicon in North-West Europe: ‘Ever-Changing Connection’, E. C. Quiggin Memorial Lectures 12 (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 2010), pp. 10–11. 33 For some discussion see e.g. Dance, ‘English in Contact: Norse’, pp. 1731, 1733–4 and ‘Tor for to telle’, pp. 46–7, 51–6, Durkin, Borrowed Words, pp. 211– 13.

114

Chapter Five

origin.34 But in very many other insecure cases, it is much more difficult to assess that probability. Remaining with palatalization as a test, let us consider ME blenken ‘to gleam’,35 which is an example of etymological problems of a different order. In this case, unlike with gate, the Germanic root in question clearly does occur already in Old English. If we compare OE blencan (recorded meaning only ‘to deceive, cheat’) with OIcel blekkja (‘to deceive, betray, seduce’) as reflexes of PGmc *blank-jan-,36 then it could be argued again that a Middle English form without palatalization (with a /k/) shows Old Norse input. But the possible sources of lack of palatalization non-initially are in fact a notorious bone of contention, much argued about, and there is a variety of other possible means of obtaining a /k/ in ME blenken.37 For example, we could have influence across the paradigm from a native part of this same verb without palatalization, perhaps the pres. 3 sg. indic. blenc-þ, or the pret. ind. (e.g. 3 sg. blenc-te); or influence from a derivationally-related native verb form without palatalization, such as the related strong verb which appears in Middle English as blinken meaning ‘to move suddenly’.38 Textual support is indeed available for the latter hypothesis: see the Harley 1701 version of 34 ME gate is accepted as a loan from ON by all commentators, inc. MED s.v. gƗte (n.2), OED s.v. gate (n.2), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 151, and for Sir Gawain see the glossaries in GDS, TG(D). 35 The word occurs in Sir Gawain at ll. 799, 2315. 36 See esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog s.v. blekkja (vb.), de Vries s.v. blekkja (1), Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. blekkja (1), Heidermanns s.v. blanka-, Orel s.v.*ΰlankjanan, Holthausen s.v. blencan, Dictionary of Old English: A–H, ed. Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey and Haruko Momma (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for the Dictionary of Old English Project, 2016) (http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/) (hereafter DOE), s.v. blencan. Most authorities now explain the wk. verb *blankjan- as a derivation on the adj. PGmc *blanka-, whose original meaning was perhaps ‘shining weakly’ (thus Heidermanns; cp. OIcel blakkr ‘pale, dark’, MLG, OHG blanc ‘shining, white’ and probably OE poetic blanca ‘(shining or white) horse’); see further Orel s.v. *ΰlankaz, Kroonen s.v.*blanka-, de Vries s.v. blakkr, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. blakkur, Holthausen s.v. blanca. The wk. verb could then originally have had a literal sense (as does NNo blekkja ‘to glisten, shine’), and developed via ‘to blind’ towards ‘to deceive’ (etc.) as in OIcel and OE. 37 For discussion of the issues, refer to the works cited in note 12 above, in particular Luick, ‘Zur Palatalisierung’, Hoad, 34–8, Krygier and references given there. 38 For the strong verb, attested later than the weak one in Germanic and most likely a secondary formation, cp. MLG, MDu blinken and see e.g. OED s.v. blink v., Heidermans s.v. blanka-.

The Horns of a Dilemma

115

Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, which is cited in MED with the form in the sense ‘deceive’ historically associated with the weak stem.39 What is more, unlike for gate, the circumstantial evidence is also rather less impressive here: MED’s spellings come mainly from Northern or Eastern witnesses, but there are exceptions (as in South-West Midland texts like the AB Language Seinte Iuliene, and the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester).40 In cases like these, then, deciding whether there might be Old Norse ‘DNA’ in the evolution of an English word-form is much more difficult, since the evidence is not compelling either way. From one point of view, it is certainly possible that there was Norse influence — perhaps in promoting the frequency of some variants, and/or in some speech communities. But from another angle, the [k] forms have other plausible causes, and it is far from absolutely necessary to invoke Norse input in order to explain them. In such instances (and there are very many similar ones, as will become clear below), one finds some etymological accounts which give the benefit of the doubt to Norse influence, and others which prefer to do without it; in the case of blenken, the glossaries in the Tolkien-Gordon-Davis and Gollancz-Day-Serjeantson editions, as well as MED, fall into the former camp, while OED falls into the latter.41 By and large, however, — and this is crucial — the alternative judgements presented by our authorities seem to depend not upon any differences in the evidence they have before them, but upon how they interpret that evidence. The reasons for a commentator deciding one way or the other usually go unexpressed. But the way one inclines, especially in the more finely balanced cases, may well have to do with one’s broader epistemological leanings as a linguist — specifically, how keen one is to invoke the effects of contact as an engine in historical language change. This is, of course, a well-known source of debate in the scholarly literature. One finds eminent historical linguists who argue (reasonably 39

See MED s.v. blenchen (v.), sense 4(a), citing from Robert of Brunne's Handlyng Synne, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, 2 vols., Early English Text Society o.s. 119, 123 (London: Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1901, 1903), line 4166. 40 See the citations at MED s.v. blenchen (v.) from Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene ed. S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège 64 (Liège: Librairie E. Droz, 1936), reprinted with corrections as Early English Text Societry o.s. 248 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), line 699 (Bodley 34 text), and The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William A. Wright, Rolls Series 86 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1887), line 6951. 41 See TGD and GDS s.vv., MED s.v. blenchen (v.), OED s.v. blenk (v.).

116

Chapter Five

enough) in favour of the general explanatory potential of contact, as well as those who are (no less reasonably) far more cautious about using it as the default account for anything.42 Moreover, when it comes to the specific problem of identifying Old Norse input, one’s predisposition to see it can reflect how attached one is to the idea of the Vikings as agents of historical and cultural change in early medieval Britain; in other words, how fascinating one finds the notion of Wilson’s ‘colourful and mixed past’, or (to try another metaphor) how long one is prepared to stand, ear cocked, straining to hear those Viking sounds.43 In the case of words for which the evidence could in principle point in either direction (like blenken) there never will be universal agreement as to which narrative we favour, as to whether we should allow for Norse input or not. In Sir Gawain, for instance, the really compelling stems which everyone agrees should be derived from Old Norse come to no more than about 140; but if we add together everything claimed as Norse-derived, on whatever grounds, in the last hundred and fifty years of scholarship, that number is nearly 400.44 So, what do we do with the difficult words? In work like mine, at least, where I am primarily interested in cataloguing the possibilities, and in understanding the reasons for differing interpretations, it has seemed best to adopt a ‘lexicographical’ approach — in other words to record all the evidence and step back, having first established a typology of the characteristic etymological situations we find with these words, so as to promote at least a consistent approach to evidence of similar types. I suggest that there are four prototypical categories under which the structural evidence for any arguably Norse-derived word can be filed (i.e. 42

Compare, for instance, the remarks in Jeremy J. Smith, An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 48, with those in Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, p. 209. 43 On the attractiveness of the ‘other’ (including Scandinavian influence and dialectal remoteness) in Sir Gawain scholarship in particular, see the remarks at Dance, ‘Tor for to telle’, pp. 51–3. 44 In my work on Sir Gawain I have identified almost 500 different lexical items (i.e. glossary head-words) for which some ON input has been claimed somewhere in the scholarly tradition with at least a degree of plausibility. It is often more useful when discussing these results to treat together items which are or might be sub-derivations on word bases elsewhere in this list, which gives a total of approximately 400 different stems; it is to stems that I generally refer in this chapter when giving overall figures. For some further remarks on the Sir Gawain data, see Dance ‘Tor for to telle’, including pp. 47–9 for a demonstration of minimalist vs. maximalist claims for Norse lexical input in a short sample passage of the poem.

The Horns of a Dilemma

117

what emerges when we compare the Old English and Old Norse lexicons). These four types are summarized in Table 2 below.45 Type A Formal comparative evidence for derivation from ON, i.e. one or more regular and predictable ON phonological and/or morphological developments not supposed to have occurred in OE. Type B The (Germanic) root of the lexeme *is not* recorded (early enough) in OE, but recorded in ON. Loan from ON has therefore been proposed. Type C The root of the lexeme *is* recorded (early enough) in OE (or its form can be accounted for by loan from a third language). But some aspects of form/sense/usage are unparalleled in OE (etc.), and paralleled in ON. Loan or influence from ON has therefore been proposed, more or less convincingly, to account for one or more of: (1) derivational form; (2) orthographic (phonological) form (where this does not constitute a decisive ‘test’ of type A); (3) sense; (4) formation of a compound or phrase; (5) frequency. Type D Etymology obscure. Comparable forms in ON have been suggested as sources, but explanatory power is at best partial.

Table 2. An etymological typology of Norse input: structural evidence. Type A is what we encountered with skete and ker (and sister) above, hence when we have systematic formal evidence (which can sometimes be morphological as well as phonological).46 The remaining types comprise words which are not susceptible to any such formal ‘tests’. Gate, where the Germanic root of a Middle English lexeme is not recorded (early enough) in Old English, but is known in Old Norse, is a Type B.47 And Type C, where the root is attested in Old English, but 45

For a fuller description of this system, and an experimental application of it to a complete small corpus of early ME texts, see esp. Dance, ‘Tomar‫ݤ‬an hit is awane’, pp. 88–107; and further Dance, ‘English in Contact: Norse’, pp. 1728–31, and ‘Tor for to telle’, pp. 42–7. 46 Morphological criteria include e.g. the presence of the distinctively Scandinavian neut. nom./acc. sg. -t in e.g ME wiҊt ‘valiant’ (cp. OIcel vígt, neut of vígr). 47 For words of this type, which encompasses a wide variety of etymological evidence, the case tends to be strongest (and is almost always accepted) for items

118

Chapter Five

where some tell-tale aspect of the form, sense or usage of the Middle English word under discussion is better paralleled in Old Norse, is exemplified by blenken.48 These three types respectively make up about 70, 50 and 180 of the total supposed Norse-derived stems in Sir Gawain. The super-abundance of Type C in my data, where the etymological case is relatively weak, seems to me a particularly noteworthy finding at this stage. As well as these three categories A, B and C, a further 100 or so possible Norse-derived stems in Sir Gawain belong to a further type, D, which I have reserved for those cases when (for several different reasons) the origin of a word is more or less obscure. Unlike the examples seen so far, that is, where the ulterior (Germanic) origin of the form has generally been apparent, even if the precise route it took down to Middle English might have been open to question, for words of Type D we are just not sure what on earth the most plausible root is — leaving us to take our best guess from amongst an array of quite different explanations which often in themselves present etymological problems. Let us take just two examples. Both are words which have caused me a disproportionate amount of headscratching recently in my work on Sir Gawain, and both I think illustrate nicely the sheer range of different materials and issues which often need whose ON equivalent is frequently attested and lexicalizes a relatively common concept, e.g. ME taken ‘take’ (cp. OIcel taka), ME grið ‘peace’ (cp. OIcel grið), ME ille ‘bad’ (cp. OIcel illr). The case is less strong for those items whose ON equivalents lexicalize relatively uncommon concepts, e.g. ME glam ‘din, merrymaking’ (cp. OIcel glam(m)); or whose failure to be attested in (earlier) OE texts is arguably explicable on other grounds, e.g. ME hǀre ‘prostitute, fornicator’ (cp. OIcel hóra). 48 Amongst the most plausible (and commonly accepted) supposed loans in Type C are those which belong to a derivational class (stem) not recorded (early enough) in OE but paralleled in ON, e.g. ME cost ‘nature, quality’ (OIcel kostr = PGmc *kust-a-, cp. OE cyst ‘choice’ = PGmc *kust-i-), ME lǀn(e) (OIcel lán < PGmc *laixw-na-, cp. OE lϾn < PGmc *laixw-ni-). The case is less strong (but still frequently accepted) for words or phrases which equate to recorded (earlier) OE stems, but which differ in noteworthy ways in their sense or usage (e.g. ME genge ‘troop’, cp. OIcel gengi ‘help, company’, OE gegenga ‘companion’; ME drƝme ‘dream’, cp. OIcel draumr ‘dream’, OE drƝam ‘joy, noise’; ME layne ‘to conceal’, cp. OIcel leyna ‘to conceal’, OE lƯgnan ‘to deny’; the sheer frequency of ME til ‘until’, cp OIcel til but also OE (Nhb) til; etc.). The case is more tenuous (but still sometimes advanced) for those words or phrases whose form/sense/usage differs relatively little from those of their (earlier) OE counterparts, in ways that are just as (and perhaps more) readily explicable by changes in the native language (e.g. ME blende ‘to blend’ (with weak pret.); ME borde in the sense ‘table’; ME uppon as a compound preposition; etc.).

The Horns of a Dilemma

119

pursuing, the back-and-forth through dictionaries and texts in various languages (not just English and Norse) which can occupy us, when we try to understand why the various etymological authorities have tried the solutions to them that they have. One might assume that words which present such difficulties will necessarily be obscure in meaning and usage, too, or odd in some other way. And it is true that several Type D items are rare words, unique to Middle English alliterative verse, or else (potentially) explicable as ideophonic or imitative, with no ‘orthodox’ etymology. Nonetheless, there is also a surprising number which are very widely attested, both in medieval and present-day English, and whose senses and functions are quite clear; and yet we still do not have a single, agreed etymological word-family to put them into.49 Such a word is ME grome, PDE groom.50 Note that we are not concerned here with groom in OED’s sense (6) ‘bride-groom’ (this meaning did not, of course, originally belong to this word, but was transferred to it from the etymologically distinct OE (brшd)guma),51 but with its historically proper senses, which may be summarized (based on OED) as follows: (1) a man-child, boy (from ?c1225); (2) a man, male person (from c1330); (3) a man of inferior position; a serving-man; a man- servant; a male attendant (from 1297); (4) the specific designation of several officers of the English Royal Household (from 1464); (5) a servant who attends to horses (from 1340). Middle English dictionaries down to Stratmann-Bradley, and Kullnick in his study of the vocabulary of Sir Gawain,52 derive ME grome from an Old Norse word grómr meaning ‘man’. On the face of it, this looks like a very 49

Another very well-known example of such a word is ME, PDE big, which has often been connected to the root of OIcel byggva ‘to settle, inhabit’, and/or to Norw dial bugge ‘important man’, but for which no generally agreed etymology has been found. See esp. the discussion in OED’s revised third-edition entry s.v. big (adj. and adv.), and further MED s.v. big (adj.), Björkman, Scandinavian LoanWords, pp. 157n.1, 259–60. 50 See in general MED s.v. grǀm (n.), OED s.v. groom (n.1). The Sir Gawain occurrences are at ll. 1006, 1127, glossed by TGD as ‘lackey, servant; man’. 51 See the remarks at OED s.vv. bridegroom (n.), groom (n.1 sense 6); groom is first attested as a simplex with this sense a1616 in Shakespeare’s Othello. 52 A Middle-English Dictionary, Containing Words Used by English Writers from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Franz Heinrich Stratmann, revised by Henry Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), s.v. grom. Max Kullnick, Studien über den Wortschatz in Sir Gawayne and the Grene KnyҊt, Inaugural-Dissertation zur Elangung der Doctorwürde von der hohen philosophischen Facultät der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zur Berlin (Berlin: Mayer und Müller, 1902), p. 15.

120

Chapter Five

attractive source. Closer inspection of the Scandinavian material,53 however, reveals that OIcel is clearly attested just once in one fourteenth-century copy of Snorri Sturluson’s prose Edda, in an extravagantly expanded list of poetic expressions or heiti in a revised version of Skáldskarparmál. These words are alternative ways of referring to (‘Sua heita …’) hІlðar, i.e. yeomen, free farmers who owned their own land: Sua heita h lðar: halr, drengr, haulldr, þegn, smiðr, breiðr, bondi, bundinskeggi, bui, ok boddi, brattskeggr, kauði, fnauði, foli, fifli, flangi, gassi, gokr, gromr, gogr […]54

Some of these Old Icelandic words are more or less synonymous basically with ‘man’ (e.g. halr, drengr), but others denote more specific male roles (e.g. smiðr, bóndi) and still others are downright odd or mysterious (e.g. flangi, gassi). So we can say that was another loose, roundabout way of referring to a ‘man’, but it is far from clear what its literal meaning might have been outside poetic usage, nor (importantly, if we are to consider it as a possible origin of a ME word in /o䩊 /) the length of its vowel. These problems persist if we connect in the Edda with a nickname with the same spelling belonging to a royal retainer (‘Þorbiorn gromr hirðmaðr konvngs …’) in Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar (first recorded in an early fourteenth-century manuscript).55 If this is the same word, then a plain meaning ‘man’ does not seem very apposite (it would hardly make for a distinctive by-name), but we are no nearer a literal denotation. In order to tell an original sense for OIcel , we really need to know its ulterior etymology; but unfortunately it is thoroughly obscure. OED, in fact, suggests that this Old Norse word is a loan from ME grome, an explanation which is plausible enough, especially for a retainer’s nickname.56 But the Scandinavian etymological dictionaries get 53

See esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog s.v. grómr (sb.), de Vries s.v. gróm, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. gróm, and the remarks in OED s.v. groom (n.1). 54 Finnur Jónsson ed., Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, Codex Wormianus, AM 242, fol. (Copenhagen and Oslo: Gyldendalske boghandel, Nordisk forlag, 1924), p. 104 l. 5, cited from AM 242 fol. (det Arnamagnæanske Institut, Copenhagen), the ‘Codex Wormianus’, c. 1350. 55 ‘Thorbjörn gromr, a retainer of the king …’. Hákonar saga Hákonarsonar, chap. 143, in Codex Frisianus: En Samling af norske Konge-Sagaer, ed. by C. R. Unger (Oslo: P. T. Malling, 1871), p. 460 l. 23. The citation material available at Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog s.v. grómr (sb.) includes three manuscript variants of this same passage. 56 OED s.v. groom (n.1).

The Horns of a Dilemma

121

their hands much dirtier.57 They explain OIcel instead as a native word, and identify it (more or less tentatively) with OIcel gróm ‘grime, dirt’; with this cp. Far gróm ‘sediment’ and MDu groom ‘entrails, dirt’, and a range of near-cognates with different vocalism such as ODan grwm ‘fish scrap’ and NNo grumen ‘muddy’ (these are derived ultimately by Ásgeir Magnússon from a suggested PGmc root *grem- (*gram-, *grum-) ‘to grind into small pieces’).58 This is fishy territory indeed; but neither of these possible ways of explaining OIcel seems to make it any more attractive as an etymon for ME grome. However, there is an alternative way of approaching the history of the English word. This is to connect ME grome with a French word, viz. medieval Fr gromet ‘servant, valet, shop-boy, wine-merchant’s assistant’, and its rare variants grom, grome.59 Apart from its -et ending (the standard French diminutive suffix, which it only very rarely lacks in the French 57 See esp. de Vries s.v. gróm, Ásgeir Magnússon s.vv. gróm, Gromr, Alexander Jóhannesson, Isländisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Bern: Francke, 1956), pp. 397–8. 58 Ásgeir Magnússon, s.v. gróm. The other comparanda most frequently cited are Sw, Dan grums ‘sediment’, EFris grum ‘sediment, dirt’, OFris gram, grim ‘entrails’, Go gramst ‘dry particle, speck’; see further Lehmann s.v. gramst, Orel s.v. *Ҋrǀmaz ~*Ҋrǀman. Related to this is the attempt by Johan Frederik Bense, A Dictionary of the Low-Dutch Element in the English Vocabulary (London: Oxford University Press, 1926–39), p. 128, to explain ME grome as a borrowing of a Dutch word belonging to the same word-family, viz. MDu grom ‘fish entrails or waste’, via a supposed sub-sense ‘fry of fish, offspring, hence children’; but the vowel length of the Dutch word does not correspond closely enough to that of ME grome, and OED (s.v. groom n.1) regards this theory as problematic. 59 See esp.: Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. by William Rothwell and Louise W. Stone, T. B. W. Reid (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992), 2nd ed., ed. by Stewart Gregory, William Rothwell and David Trotter (London: Maney, 2005–) (http://www.anglo-norman.net/) (hereafter AND), s.v. grom; Dictionnaire de moyen français, version 2015 (Analyse et traitement informatique de la langue française, CNRS and Nancy Université) (http://www.atilf.fr/dmf) (hereafter DMF), s.v. gromet (subst. masc.); Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch: eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes, ed. Walther von Wartburg et al, 25 vols. (Bonn: Klopp, 1922–78) (https://apps.atilf.fr/lecteur FEW/) (hereafter FEW) (Germanische Elemente) s.v. grom; Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français, ed. by Kurt Baldinger, Frankwalt Möhren, Thomas Städtler et al (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971–) (http://www.deafpage.de/index.php) (hereafter DEAF), s.v. gromet (m.). A suffixless variant is attested just twice in the Anglo-Norman corpus (see AND; from Records of the Borough of Leicester I.312 and Rotuli Parliamentorum IV.194), and the forms are recorded from fifteenth-century Brittany.

122

Chapter Five

sources), this word is appealingly similar in both form and sense to English groom, and most commentators recently have felt there that must be some actual connection beyond pure coincidence. The case is reinforced by the fact that Fr gromet was undeniably loaned into English as grummet, for which OED records senses beginning with ‘ship’s boy, cabin boy’.60 So could ME grome be a loan from medieval French? It looks like an attractive possibility, and this is the etymology given by Skeat, Björkman and some other early commentators.61 Sadly, however, its appeal starts to dissolve when one consults the French etymological authorities and discovers that the ulterior history of Fr gromet is also entirely obscure. Several works, notably the great Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, explain it as a loan from ME grome (with the addition of diminutive -t), and this is likewise how AND explains the (rare) Anglo-French ;62 and in that case we are simply going round in circles. Not all French etymologists believe that the influence happened that way round, it is true. Kahane and Kahane (followed by the ongoing Dictionnaire étymologique de l’ancien français) argue that Middle English borrowed grome from French.63 But in that case they need to find a source for the French word — which they account for as an originally Norman nautical term derived from an ON grómr ‘man’. So frustratingly we have landed right back where we started. It is just about possible, if smacking of the desperate, to connect Fr grom(et) with OIcel grómr, if we follow the Scandinavian etymologists as to the identity of the latter: at least, the Germanic family of words to which OIcel grómr may belong, having to do 60

OED s.v. grummet (n.1). Even though English grummet is first attested only in 1576, there is much earlier evidence for the word in this precise meaning in a medieval Latin context, in a thirteenth-century charter for the Cinque Ports describing what each one of the king’s ships must have (including uno gartione qui dicitur gromet, ‘a boy who is called the gromet’); see OED, citing Samuel Jeake, Charters of the Cinque Ports, Two Ancient Towns and their Members (London: Bernard Lintot, 1728), p. 25n. 61 See Walter W. Skeat, Notes on English Etymology, Chiefly Reprinted from the Transactions of the Philological Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 125–6, and Erik Björkman, ‘Etymological Notes’, Englische Studien, 30 (1902), 377–81 (at p. 379), and earlier works there cited. 62 FEW (Germanische Elemente) s.v. grom; AND s.v. grom. 63 Henry Kahane and Renée Kahane, ‘Germanic Derivations of Romance Words’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 460–76 (at pp. 464–7); DEAF s.v. gromet (m.). Some earlier commentators tried to derive OFr gromet < Lat grnjmus ‘little heap’; thus Friedrich Christian Diez, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen, 5th ed. (Bonn: Marcus, 1887). But this suggestion is not entertained by more recent French etymologists.

The Horns of a Dilemma

123

with dirt, sediment and fish scraps, would make a plausible enough source for a word which might have started life as a nick-name for a ship’s cabin boy, wouldn’t it? Perhaps. But there are giant leaps of faith in that chain of argument; and the best it provides us with is a broad Germanic wordfamily, which could find us an ulterior source for ME grome not just in Old Norse but in any North Sea Germanic language. (Though perhaps I am not alone in admiring the irony that results, if we do derive medieval French gromet ultimately from a word referring to muck and fishy gunge, given where this word ends up — it’s the modern French word gourmet, of course.) Given this trail of etymological devastation, one cannot really blame the original OED, which very tentatively points (‘conceivably’, as it puts it) to a reconstructed OE *grǀm ‘boy’, and conjures up for it an etymology relating it to the PGmc root *grǀ- ‘grow’. This will do the job very well (and it is the solution followed by MED, amongst others),64 so long as one appreciates that coming up ad hoc with an unattested Old English word of exactly the right shape and sense, for which there is not the slightest comparative evidence elsewhere in Germanic, is, if not exactly cheating, then the etymologist’s equivalent of shrugging the shoulders and admitting defeat. My second example of a ‘type D’ word is much rarer and its meaning far more opaque, being attested only twice, and only in the Gawain manuscript. It is ME rass, which refers to where the wild boar hides out at Sir Gawain line 1570 (‘he to a hole wynnez / of a rasse bi a rokk þer rennez þe boerne’), and to where Noah’s ark comes to rest at Cleanness line 446 (‘On a rasse of a rok hit rest at þe laste, / on þe mounte of Ararach of Armene hilles’).65 No one has been very sure what landscape feature, which would fit these two scenes, is being described here (and even whether rasse has to be the same word in each case). Accordingly, there is an extraordinary range of entirely different explanations in the scholarship, which wrestle with their own variety of etymological problems and draw on several different languages as putative sources. In 1902, Kullnick attempted to connect rasse with the PDE dialect word raise ‘mound, cairn’, which must derive from Old Norse, cp. OIcel hreysi ‘heap 64

MED s.v. grǀm (n.), and also e.g. Arne Zettersten, Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle, Lund Studies in English 34 (Lund: Håkan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1965), p. 217. 65 Sir Gawain, ed. TGD: ‘he makes it to a hole of a rass by a rock where the stream runs’. Cleanness, in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, 5th ed. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007): ‘On a rass of a rock it rested in the end, on Mount Ararat in the hills of Armenia.’

124

Chapter Five

of stones’; but this is a poor fit for the phonology of the Middle English word, assuming that it contains a short /a/.66 Similarly awkward formally is Emerson’s suggestion of an OE *rƗs ‘rising or perpendicular slope’ (of a cliff), an unattested formation on the a-grade of the strong verb rƯsan ‘to rise’ which he concocts in order to supply a word with the right kind of sense.67 More convincingly, Tolkien and Gordon proffer as etymon the early French adjective ras ‘level’ (ultimately < Lat rƗsus), giving a ME noun meaning ‘level ground’; this is the explanation adopted also by MED and some others, including the most recent scholarly edition of the Gawain-manuscript poems by Putter and Stokes.68 An alternative, which has also garnered some support, is suggested by Elliott, who separates the Cleanness and Gawain instances of rasse as distinct words.69 He envisages the feature described at Gawain 1570 as a channel with holes at each end, in which the boar becomes trapped, and derives it from an ON word for 66

Kullnick, p. 16. For OIcel hreysi see esp. ONP hreysi (sb.), de Vries s.v. hreysar, Ásgeir Magnússon s.v. hreysi, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. røys, Kroonen s.v.*hrauza- and OED s.v. raise (n.2), EDD s.v. raise v., sb. (sense 14), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 67. 67 Oliver Farrar Emerson, ‘Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 21 (1922), 363–410 (at pp. 391–2). For the verbal root see e.g. Elmar Seebold, Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wörterbuch der germanischen starken Verben, Janua Linguarum, series practica 85 (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1970), s.v. reis-a-, Orel s.v. *rƯsanan, Kroonen s.v. *rƯsan-, Holthausen s.v. rƯsan (1), OED s.v. rise (v.), but notice that there are no other known derivations on this grade of the root of PGmc *rƯsan- with quite such a meaning (see the various formations cited by Seebold). 68 See J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), glossary s.v. (repeated in TGD), MED s.v. rasse (n.), OED s.v. rasse (n.1), Ad Putter and Myra Stokes eds., The Works of the Gawain Poet: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2014), note to Sir Gawain 1570. For the French word see AND s.v. ras (1), DMF s.v. ras (adj. et subst. masc.), FEW s.v. rasus, DEAF s.v. res (m. adj. adv. prép.). It may be noted, however, that there are no other known instances of a loan of this French word in English before the 1670s (when OED has two isolated citations of a n. rase meaning ‘a levelled (as opposed to a heaped) measure’), and the noun is attested in Anglo-French only in the sense ‘a measure of herrings’ (AND). The ongoing third edition of OED compares ME rasse instead to AN ras ‘head’; but this word is attested only once in medieval French (see AND s.v.), and its etymology is obscure. 69 R. W. V. Elliott, The Gawain Country, Leeds Texts and Monographs n.s. 8 (Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1984), pp. 78–9. He explains the Cleanness instance as meaning ‘border (of a field or forest)’, and derives it from OFr ras in this sense (again < Lat rƗsus).

The Horns of a Dilemma

125

‘water course, channel’ as in OIcel rás (> ME rƗs(e)); this is a plausible enough reading in context, and will work well enough if we can assume a shortened vowel (perhaps via the probably related ON ras- as in OIcel ras ‘rush’, rasa ‘to rush headlong; stumble’, or perhaps owing to input from MFr ras(s)e ‘irrigation channel’).70 My personal favourite theory is however the rather neglected explanation set out by Sundén in 1930, who relates rasse to the Old Norse word for ‘arse’, i.e. OIcel rasse, raz (the metathesized variant of ars).71 It takes slightly more of an imaginative leap to see how a bit of topography could be described with such a word; but there are good analogues in OE ears and buttoc, both of which are recorded in place-names and field-names being used in exactly the same way.72 70

Elliott, pp. 78–9 (followed by Andrew and Waldron (see their glossary) and William Vantuono ed., The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus edition, 2 vols., The Renaissance Imagination 5–6 (New York and London: Garland, 1984) (see his 1570n)), refers only to ON rás, but at p. 140 he adds that this was ‘perhaps reinforced by French ras, raz “strong current”’. On OIcel rás, ras etc. see esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog s.vv. rás (sb.) and ras (sb.), de Vries s.vv. rás and ras, Ásgeir Magnússon s.vv. rás and rasa (1), Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. rase, Orel s.v. *rƝso ~ *rƝsan, and for the loan of ON rás into ME as rƗse (PDE race) see also the discussions at MED s.v. rƗs(e (n.), OED s.v. race (n.1), Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, p. 96. For MFr ras(s)e ‘irrigation channel’ (also ult. < Lat rƗsus), see FEW s.v. rasus, and furthermore the discussion by J. J. Anderson ed., Cleanness, Old and Middle English Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977), note to line 446, who argues for it as the (sole) etymon of ME rasse in both Cleanness and Gawain. As OED notices, some influence from this MFr word is also possible on ME rƗse, PDE race when it means ‘channel or bed of a stream’. 71 K. F. Sundén, ‘The Meaning and Source of ME. rass’, Göteborgs Högskolas Årsskrift, 36 (1930) minneskrift 15–19. The only commentators to follow Sundén’s lead are McGee (p. 343), who cites him, and Hug (p. 217), who does not (and who has, therefore, conceivably come up with the same idea independently). For the ON word see esp. Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog s.v. raz (sb.), de Vries s.vv. ars and rass, Ásgeir Magnússon s.vv. ars and rass, Bjorvand and Lindeman s.v. rass, Orel s.v. *arsaz. 72 See esp. Smith s.v. ears, who cites the word as being ‘used occasionally of some landscape feature resembling a buttock’ in names such as Trollesers (N. Yorks.), as well as in later field-names e.g. Lund’s Arse Acre (Devon); and further DOE s.v. ears, which cites several toponymic usages (to denote ‘a rounded hill’) from the OE charter record. OE buttoc (see Smith s.v. buttoc, VEPN s.v. buttuc) is found in field-names including Le Buttokes (Wilts., 1328). Sundén moreover reports that Norw rass is used in the northern part of Bohuslän (Sweden, formerly Norway) to describe parts of mountains. For general discussion of the metaphorical association of toponyms and words for body-parts, see moreover Hough, pp. 14–16.

126

Chapter Five

These two examples of words of ‘Type D’, splendidly problematic as they are for quite different reasons, may therefore be added to the items belonging to categories A, B and C introduced earlier in this chapter as representative of the principal kinds of etymological evidence for Old Norse input into the development of Middle English vocabulary. Needless to say, these categories are very broad: all of them contain words which, each in its own way, presents us with difficulties to try to fathom, possible connections to trace or discard; and types B, C and D, at least, all incorporate items for which the likelihood of Norse input has seemed, at different times to different people, greater or lesser, and which will continue to be argued about. For each of our four structural categories A to D there is also, as I have noticed in the course of my discussion of several of the words above, other evidence of a more ‘circumstantial’ sort to take into account. This is to do with where and how a word is attested, including its distribution amongst the other Germanic languages, in English dialects and in regional toponymy. This species of evidence is not really ‘etymological’ in the comparative, structural way I have chiefly been exploring in this chapter, but it can often be a very useful adjunct in helping us to form opinions about the probability we attach to the structural cases for Old Norse input we have worked out. Four main types of circumstantial evidence have often been considered relevant, and are generally referred to in the scholarship; these are listed in Table 3 below.73 (a) cognates are known (in substantially the same stem-form and sense) in West Germanic (b) principally confined to the North and/or East Midlands in the onomastic (esp. toponymic) record (c) principally confined to the North and/or East Midlands in the lexical record (d) association with a demonstrably (Viking-Age) Scandinavian ‘cultural artefact’, including association with Scandinavian practices in the word’s earliest English usage

Table 3. An etymological typology of Norse input: circumstantial evidence. To give a parting sense of the range of types of evidence that apply even to some very commonly cited Norse loans, Table 4 below repeats the 73

For some discussion of these types of evidence and their value see e.g. Björkman, Scandinavian Loan-Words, pp. 193–8, Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English, pp. 86–7, Dance, ‘English in Contact: Norse’, p. 1731, Pons-Sanz, Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact, pp. 26–7, and more generally the references cited at notes 9 and 33 at above.

The Horns of a Dilemma

127

examples given in Table 1 above, this time with the addition of some basic category labels. It will be apparent that very few even of these very commonly cited Norse borrowings are of the most secure type, and that the variety of etymological evidence in use even for these few is striking.74 die

cp. OIcel deyja (VAN *døyja)

[C1a]

egg

cp. OIcel egg

[A]

law

cp. OIcel lІg (VAN *lagu)

[C3d]

leg

cp. OIcel leggr

[B]

loan

cp. OIcel lán

[C1a]

meek

cp. OIcel mjúkr (VAN *miukr)

[B]

seem

cp. OIcel sœma

[C3]

sky

cp. OIcel ský

[A]

take

cp. OIcel taka

[B]

they

cp. OIcel þeir

[Ac]

till

cp. OIcel til

[C5ac]

Table 4. Some frequently cited PDE words derived from ON, with etymological labels. In themselves, and as we have seen, these labels conceal a great deal of complexity and argument; each word must be dealt with individually. But it does seem to me that there are interesting things to be learned by probing and grouping together the types of evidence we use to identify words as having some ‘Viking heritage’ in them: if nothing else, it helps highlight the difficulties, the hermeneutic challenges, the extent to which the etymologist versus the Vikings is a really scrappy, muddy and hard74 For the essential information about the etymologies of these words see OED, s.vv. die (v.1), egg (n.), law (n.1), leg (n.), loan (n.1), meek (adj. and n.), seem (v.2), sky (n.1), take (v.), they (pron., adj., adv. and n.), till (prep., conj., adv.), MED s.vv. dƯen (v.), eg(ge (n.1), laue (n.), leg (n.), lǀn(e (n.1), mƝk (adj.), sƝmen (v.2), skƯ(e (n.), tƗken (v.), thei (pron.), til (prep.) and (conj.).

128

Chapter Five

fought battle. Readers who have been keeping an eye out for metaphors in this chapter will have spotted (amongst others) narratives, listening and genetics, as well as the battles in the last sentence, to add to Wilson’s image of ties with which we began. Patently, there are many ways of imagining the recovery of the Viking presence in English words; and rest assured, that influence is really there, and the idea of connection, stressing the continuity from Anglo-Scandinavian contacts in the Viking Age, to Middle English poetry, to us today, is a genuinely important and compelling one. But in a great many cases the etymological evidence resists a single, or a simple, interpretation. Some of the examples I have introduced (especially when it came to type D) might have seemed no more than an excuse to chase some weird and wonderful connections through the scholarship, and to some extent that was quite deliberate, of course: it’s one of the great epistemological pleasures of doing etymology, of following those threads (nay, clues), that one bumps into all manner of surprises lurking around the corners of the lexicographical labyrinth. But one of the points I have been aiming at making in this chapter is that this colourful tangle, this interpretive journey, isn’t just a bi-product of the study of word-history, something that we’re entertained or distracted by along the way as we try to get from A to B, from some deeper point in a word’s story to the place where we meet it. Rather, the hermeneutic processes that we follow must in fact be one of the objects of our study, since they are crucially important to the results we come up with, to what we decide to say about how a lexical item evolved. To put it another way, the ‘ties’ that link us to our words’ starting points can disappear off in a very convoluted, knotty manner, getting wound around and snagged on all sorts of other things en route — including our fundamental predispositions as linguists, and our attitudes towards the centrality of contact as a factor in language change, and towards the whole role of Old Norse in the development of English in particular. Or, if you prefer, the horns of our dilemmas are much more real and pressing than any other sorts of horns we might associate with the Vikings.

CHAPTER SIX LANDSCAPES OF EVIL AND THE NARRATIVE PATTERN IN BEOWULF: THE ANGLO-SAXON HERO’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE LABYRINTH MIGUEL A. GOMES GARGAMALA UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND

Literary thinking is akin to walking a labyrinth —Harold Bloom

In The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages, Penelope Reed Doob suggests that while “Interlace does very well as a model for the inner workings of a complex (medieval) poem, the labyrinth accounts for both the inner workings and the shape of the whole […]. (The labyrinth) is the best model for one intriguing aspect of much medieval poetry: it incorporates both linearity and circularity”.1 Doob’s focus is on the medieval and the literary, with special attention paid to the significance of the labyrinth as a symbol. As complete and detailed as her study of the labyrinth as topos and tropos is, there is (surprisingly?) no mention of any Anglo-Saxon text, with the exception of the stylistic labyrinths of the works of Aldhelm and Alcuin. It is my aim in this chapter to show how a metaphorical and symbolic use of the idea of the labyrinth may provide a new insight into the structure, themes and narrative patterns of heroic poetry in Old English, especially Beowulf, including the confrontation with the agents of Evil. The maze, writes

 1

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity Through the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), 207-209.

130

Chapter Six

Fisher “has proved a powerful prompt in sustaining an oral tradition on fundamental issues of life and love, security and prosperity, birth and death, earliest origins and life hereafter”.2 Harold Bloom has identified “labyrinth haunted geniuses” in classical, medieval, post-medieval and modern literature: Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Blake, Yeats, Joyce, or Kafka, just to mention a few writers in whose work the idea of the labyrinth is prevalent. 3 Was the Beowulf-poet, then, also offering us a literary labyrinth? An answer to this question implies a certain degree of compromise between a contemporary analysis, which looks at the source text from a cultural and historical distance, and the underlying patterns of composition and storytelling that we might hold as true then and now. Analysis of the language and the design of poetry in Beowulf lends support to the idea that the poem should be seen as “a web of words to be apprehended as an interlaced unity controlled by thematic design”. 4 Bernard Huppé described the rhetorical and thematic structure of AngloSaxon poetry as almost interchangeable, while stressing that “the development of the theme in the rhetorical structure of the poem tends to be serpentine, elusive, difficult, puzzling”.5 All of these are terms clearly associated with visual and literary depictions of labyrinths. What is important here, I believe, is how the focus is put on what Huppé calls the “topography of the journey, and the delight of the maze”. The poem advances alongside the hero’s progress on a path full of distractions, which ultimately leads to an unavoidable end. I will return to this idea later. Within a web of words, of alliterative patterns, of repetitions and variations of recurrent concepts and themes, we are presented with a language and a syntax of twists and turns, one which rises and falls, mirroring the heroic journey and the core idea behind the poem. Old English literature has often been compared to the art of the period, AngloSaxon seventh- and eighth-century art. The interlace, the curvilinear and rectilinear patterns of the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells have

 2

Adrian Fisher and Georg Gester, The Art of the Maze (London: Seven Dials, 1990), 142. 3 Blake Hobby, ed. The Labyrinth, Bloom’s Literary Themes, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, NY: Bloom’s Literary Criticism / Infobase Publishing, 2009), xv-xvi. 4 Bernard F. Huppé, The Hero in the Earthly City: A Reading of Beowulf, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 33 (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1984), 22. 5 Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words; Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems: Vainglory, The Wonder of Creation, The Dream of the Rood, and Judith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), xiv.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

131

been described by art historians such as Carl Nordenfalk as of “labyrinthine quality, to the delight and despair of the spectator trying to disentangle them”. 6 Hiberno-Saxon ornament parallels the labyrinth, he adds, in “its conglomeration of undulating and swirling forms” unlike the much more immediately graspable designs of Classical decorative art.7 Labyrinths were certainly popular in Britain through the Middle Ages. P. R. Doob explains how the classical heritage of Virgil, Ovid and Pliny the Elder defined the idea of the labyrinth for early Christian and medieval writers, thereby creating a literary and visual background for the use and understanding of the literal and metaphorical mazes of the literature of the Middle Ages.8 Labyrinths as carvings and constructions were also common in the British Isles. The Hollywood Stone (dated to around 550), found buried beside the pilgrim route of St Kevin’s Road towards Glendalough in Ireland, could well be symbolic of “the tortuous physical and spiritual journeys ahead” through a fourteen-mile pathway through the Wicklow Mountains. 9 The hard-to-date turf labyrinth in Alkborough in North Lincolnshire could relate either to an original festive and recreational celebration or, less likely, a religious one. Turf labyrinths might be dated as early as Norse and Danish settlement in the British Isles, if we follow the suggestion by John Aubrey in the late seventeenth-century that we received the Mazes from our Danish Ancestors. Fisher perceives a correlation between the areas invaded by Nordic settlers in England during the early medieval period and the sites of turf labyrinths. These labyrinths certainly show similarities in their layout to the crossable stone mazes in Scandinavia, which could have served as a protection and guide for sailors, as they are usually found near the coastline. 10 Labyrinths were used to contain the forces of nature, the monstrous storms that fishermen thought mazes could trap like a Minotaur, with power over sea life. In a labyrinth one could lose sight of evil spirits which were unable to turn corners (i.e. “the little people”), or use them as protection against wolves and evil gnomes.11 In fact, as Fisher reminds us: in Scandinavia there are over five hundred stone-lined path labyrinths, mostly along the shores of the Baltic sea […]. There are over twenty



6 Carl Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting (London: Chatto and Windus Ltd., 1977), 7-26. 7 Nordenfalk, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting, 17. 8 Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, I. 9 Fisher and Gester, The Art of the Maze, 28. 10 Fisher and Gester, The Art of the Maze, 30. 11 Fisher and Gester, The Art of the Maze, 144.

132

Chapter Six labyrinths which could be pre-medieval… and their sites are associated with ancient barrows, cairns and graves.12

He points out that, interestingly enough, there are nearly forty stone labyrinths on the island of Gotland. Further speculation on the dating of other mazes around the British Isles, and the possible use of turf by Nordic settlers faced with the lack of stones, would go beyond the scope of this chapter. Their representations in manuscripts seems perhaps more reliable. For example, four out of the five manuscripts that survive from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which was certainly well-known and translated in Anglo-Saxon England, end with a graphic labyrinth. Boethius discusses the nature of Evil as privatio boni and the dialectical complexity of such an argument is, significantly, compared to the paths of a labyrinth: “Nobody would care to doubt that God is all-powerful?” “At any rate, no sane man would doubt it.” “Being, then, all-powerful, nothing is beyond His power?” “Nothing.” “Can, then, God do evil?” “No.” “Then evil is nothing, since it is beyond His power, and nothing is beyond His power?” “Are you playing with me,” I asked, “weaving arguments as a labyrinth out of which I shall find no way? You may enter a labyrinth by the way by which you may come forth: come now forth by the way you have gone in: or are you folding your reason in some wondrous circle of divine simplicity?”13

In the thirteenth-century we find a labyrinth illustrating the Island of Crete in the Hereford mappa mundi, evidence of familiarity with the Cretan myth. George Bain, back in 1951, noted the obvious connections between Mycenaean, Cretan and Maltese, and British and Irish Celtic art cultures. He wrote that “The labyrinth or maze and the meander symbols have both influenced the key patterns of the Pictish school of Celtic art”. 14 He identified the labyrinth in the Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and four times in the single XHI-RHO page of the Book of Kells as well as

 12

Fisher and Gester, The Art of the Maze, 28. Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. W. V. Cooper (The Ex-classics Project, 2009), 43. Accessed from , 07-08-2014. 14 George Bain, Celtic Art. The Methods of Construction (London: Constable, 1977), 72. 13

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

133

in several ornamented stones. As in the most complex carpet pages of an illuminated manuscript, “where the eye first sees only a maze of serpentine lines until suddenly the initial stands out in sharp relief”15, Old English poetry, similarly, also requires an effort from the reader or listener. The Anglo-Saxon poem, B. Huppé writes, “does not move in a straight line […]. It demands of us a willingness to follow a subtle metaphoric thread in order to intensify the reader’s intellectual excitement in rediscovering the truth in words”. 16 The knot work in pre-Norman Northumbrian crosses, the limbed lacertines with their woven appearance in the artefacts found at Sutton Hoo and more recently in the Staffordshire Hoard, and multiple interlaced designs in metal work, ivory and stone, all give increased credibility to John Leyerle’s words: Study of Anglo-Saxon art is most useful as an aid to the reassessment of early English literature because it is an important reminder that the society was capable of artistic achievements of a high order which can be looked for in poetry as well.17

Leyerle’s view of the interlace structure is supported by the use of phrases such as wordcraeftum waef by Cynewulf in Elene (l. 1237) or the wordum wrixlam of the scop in Beowulf (l. 874a). Words are varied or woven. The idea of weaving is certainly not foreign to the myth of the Labyrinth. The poet knows the complexity of his task, he proudly announces it, and like Ariadne he makes sure that we follow his thread of words to achieve the desired knowledge. Many throughout the history of humanity have found in the journey through the labyrinth the most adequate form to describe the path that leads mankind from ignorance to knowledge. This is a route that must also be taken by those who venture to read in Old English the gnomic verses, The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, and – even more – the Riddles of the Exeter Book. It is the ambivalent condition of the maze as whimsical and mysterious, but also its connection with the process of learning that appears as analogous to these texts. In his analysis of Riddle literature Agop Hacikyan pointed out that “once man is aware of the presence of something disguised, he is by nature curious to discover what is concealed […] a riddle therefore appeals to the basic

 15

Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words, xvi. Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words, xvi-xvii. 17 John Leyerle, “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf”, University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967): 3-4. 16

134

Chapter Six

human urge to find and solve”.18 Umberto Eco talks in similar terms of his fascination with labyrinths because they express one of the tendencies underlying all human curiosity, the desire to get out, to find an exit and at the same time the terror of being unable to achieve it, of being incapable I add- to find a solution.19 In much the same way as the Sphinx tests Oedipus, and the Queen of Sheba undergoes a contest of wits with Solomon, the reader of an Anglo-Saxon riddle feels the need to solve an enigma. The riddler’s object, says Hacikyan, “is to confuse rather than to strike the reader’s apprehension”,20 and Beeche notices how riddles “exploit the conventions of oral-formulaic tradition in order to throw the riddle-guesser off the track by leading him or her into wrong associative networks”.21 Such confusion creates intellectual stimulation and a desire to reach the centre of the poet’s puns and double meanings. We need to remember that a labyrinth involves ideas of both hope and salvation; the idea of the centre is implicit in the idea of labyrinth. Unlike chaos, riddles and labyrinths are always built with a centre that can be found, whatever the distractions. They might have an order hard to apprehend, but comfort lies in its mere existence and the desire to turn chaos into knowledge. If indeed the labyrinth was not at all unknown to Anglo-Saxon people, as I am suggesting, it could have influenced their literature as it did their art. In the case of heroic poetry and the ethos underlying its compositions, my aim is to show that the labyrinth as a concept, metaphor, and physical and mental representation might be a better and more comprehensive alternative to previous analogous models for the poem. These insightful approaches include ring composition, envelope pattern, spiral, circular, and interlace structures, among other suggestions to account for the formal and narrative patterns of Beowulf. In the case of other Anglo-Saxon heroic poems, there are certainly some labyrinthine connections to be made. Anglo-Saxons delighted in stories of the defence of a narrow place against great odds, as C .E. Wright

 18

Agop Hacikyan, A Linguistic and Literary Analysis of Old English Riddles (Montreal: Casalini, 1996), 2-3. 19 Umberto Eco, “Et in labyrintho ego”, in Por Laberintos, Catalogue of exhibition, edited by R. Espelt and O. Tusquets (Barcelona: RGM, 2010), 8-12. 20 Agop Hacikyan, A Linguistic and Literary Analysis, 35. 21 Tiffany Beeche, “Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle”, in On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010), 57.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

135

explained.22 This kind of situation goes normally hand in hand with the hero’s sense of isolation, such as that experienced by the consecutive victims at Finnsburgh or in Hildeburgh’s wretchedness. She loses everyone, and finds herself lost in a world in which treachery and revenge prove their perpetual circularity. Germanic women in literature usually play the role of peace-weaver, although failure is common. The thread of Ariadne is constantly severed by an ethical code that - like the animals of the illuminated manuscripts - tends to bite its own body, destroying itself and causing the eventual fall of those who follow it blindly. The two manuscript leaves of Waldere, if we accept Hildegund as one of the speakers, give us a female character who finds relative success in encouraging the hero, who is apparently at bay with no way out. Both The Finnsburgh episode and fragment, and Waldere, then, explore episodes of conflicting loyalties, for which the model of the multicursal Labyrinth, in which one has to choose between two forking paths, is obvious. It is a choice between two evil courses leading to suffering. Nevertheless, as I will try to show shortly when dealing with Beowulf, the idea of voluntary choice in Anglo-Saxon heroic literature might be misleading. Any other relevant parallel to be drawn from the overall structure of the legend and any conclusion to be taken from the Anglo-Saxon fragments of Waldere would be somewhat unclear without an exploration of the entire legend of Walter of Aquitaine, which I will not attempt here. However, the Old English text is long enough to attest to the popularity of the character of Weland, establishing an interesting link with the Cretan myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, since Weland has been referred to as the Northern Daedalus. 23 He represents the ideal of craftsmanship, and King Alfred even associates him with the sun when translating Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, an association directly linked to the very structure of the labyrinth and to the character of Daedalus in the classical myth. In his study of legendary metal smiths and early English literature James Bradley has written that ‘The core of the Weland legend strongly suggests the influence of the Daedalus story’.24 Without venturing into a

 22

C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939). 23 Thompson’s (2004, 132-170) analysis of “the gravestone, the grave and the wyrm”, discusses the context for the appearance of the winged Weland motif on stones, and notes that Weland is presented as an emblem of skill, wisdom and endurance in Deor, Beowulf, Waldere and Alfred’s translation of Boethius’ (p.165). 24 James Lyons Bradley, “Legendary metal smiths and early English literature” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 1987), 160.

136

Chapter Six

deep comparative analysis of both stories, I would say that both figures represent “cunning workers” and the two legends imply “imprisonment in”, and “escape from”. “Although there is no labyrinth in the Weland legend”, says Bradley, “the similarity between the two stories has apparently given rise to the Icelandic word for labyrinth, which is völundarhus, literally, ‘Weland's house’”. 25 As pointed out by Kerényi (2006), humanism, popular folklore and a strong biblical tradition have contributed to the naming of labyrinths in the northern European landscape that may take us away from their original meaning.26 The terms, however, invite reflection: Pietar-inleikki (“Saint Peter’s Game”) but also Jatulintarha (“Forrest of Giants”) in Finland, Wunderkreis (“wonder circle”) in Northern Germany and Jungfrudans (“dance of the maidens”), used by Swedish peasants in Finland. There are several other poems or episodes from the Old English heroic corpus which I will not deal with in depth here, but might benefit from an analysis that bears in mind the idea of the labyrinth as a mythological supportive structure for a heroic narrative. One of them is the description of the English victory in The Battle of Brunnanburgh, in terms that Greenfield and Calder rightly relate to the idea of “progression and circularity, kinesis and stasis, in historical events”.27 The poet also makes use of the sense of mystery in journeys: the sun departing to return to its source, connecting the victory with the symbol that Pliny thought was at the very centre of the idea of the Labyrinth, and with the wonder of creation. On the other hand, in The Battle of Maldon, in which the loyalty of the retainers to the lord becomes the central theme, some of the fears that the treader of mazes faces are clearly reproduced: the frequent testing, the loss of confidence, and the possibility of retracing one’s steps, here presented as shameful, compared to the bravery of those who advance encouraged by the words of the old retainer Byrhtwold (ll. 312-313): “Mind must be firmer, heart the keener, courage the greater, as our might falls”. One can hardly find better advice for those who wander through the maze of destiny; like Bloom, I wonder if there is any other image that so fuses high literature and life as does the labyrinth. The labyrinth, after all, as Michel Conan affirms “encourages self-reflection and a search for a personal code of conduct”.28 Once such a

 25

Bradley, ‘Legendary metal Smiths’, 160-161 Karl Kerényi, En el Laberinto, ed. Corrado Bologna (Madrid: Siruela, 2006), 68. 27 Stanley B. Greenfield and Daniel G. Calder, A New Critical History of Old English Literature (London, New York: New York University Press, 1996), 149. 28 Michael Conan, ed., Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (Harvard: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003), 295. 26

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

137

code is found and defended, the warriors in Maldon can die proud if not victorious. The Labyrinth as a metaphor, and also as either a conscious idea or an unconscious impulse, was present in the Beowulf-poet’s mind. The labyrinth functions as a central image in Beowulf as a whole, as it does in an even more recognizable way in the Aeneid, a text often compared to the Anglo-Saxon poem. Beowulf, a longer composition than the minor poems mentioned before, allows us to stress the importance of the overall design of the artist. A comparative analysis of certain elements of the story against the Cretan myth would present us with obvious parallels. Both Beowulf and Theseus are Indo-European “Sword Heroes”, a category recently analysed in detail by C. Scott Littleton.29 The Athenian and the Geat both come from afar to become monster slayers who fight man-eating enemies in underground realms. It is also relevant that, as Littleton points out, after returning to Athens Theseus has only two significant heroic adventures, the war against the Amazons and the killing of another animal-monster, the “ferocious Bull of Marathon”. The similarities with the structure of the second part of Beowulf are interesting, to say the least. Littleton is confident enough to claim that although “the back stories are very different; the central elements of the two legends are so similar, however, that they almost certainly derived from a common Indo-European prototype”.30 The structure of Beowulf presents us with a hero who goes into two mazes which I will call, for the sake of clarity, the Danish and the Geatish Labyrinths, the second being nothing but a mirror image of the first, maintaining the principle of symmetry at work in the poem. In the first half of the poem, Beowulf, a young hero eager for adventure, arrives at Heorot with the idea of killing Grendel and increasing his fame. The unexpected presence of Grendel’s mother, the subverted image of “the maiden at the centre”, is going to force the hero to take the decision to enter a maze which is both real and metaphorical. The struggle with a monster inside a labyrinth is often understood as a mythological representation of humanity’s conscious and unconscious fears and demons. Here the female monster has no name and therefore is placed outside the familiar frame of language; the act of naming as disempowerment does not take place.

 29

C. Scott Littleton, “Theseus as an Indo-European Sword Hero, with an Excursus on Some Parallels between the Athenian Monster-Slayer and Beowulf”, The Heroic Age 11 (2008): 1-17. 30 C. Scott Littleton, “Theseus as an Indo-European Sword Hero”, 4.

138

Chapter Six

The monsters’ lair is a hellish space of the borderlands; however, as their own independent dwelling, it reassures them of their very own existence, in spite of belonging to the realm of the monstrous and Evil. This is “a landscape of desolation and despair”.31 Nature, understood as Creation, a concept semantically different from today’s use of the term, is described in Beowulf’s fight against Grendel’s mother as chaotic and unlimited. The landscape, seascape, and even the soundscape, which encircle her lair and hall, are vividly drawn. This landscape of the mind is a place of fear, a terrain riddled with the power of the poet’s art. Nature and wildlife can be incredibly haunting and haunted. Against the anthropocentric order, the human-built limits of a hall which is finite, such as Heorot when is at peace; nature is chaotic, tumultuous, unlimited and infinite, terms one could apply to the ideas of “ugliness” and Evil. Not only does the nature around the mere mocks the vision of the perfect hall but also that of paradise. Catherine Clarke, following Hugh Magennis, notes how this subversion forms part of the tradition of the inverted locus amoenus; “the home of Grendelkin parodies the stock image of the delightful place; the running water, trees and shade of the pastoral idyll are corrupted into a hideous and deadly landscape: a grotesque parodic power”.32 If this is a landscape of Evil it is because “it feeds off already created forms, mocking and travestying them”.33 “Claene wæs þeos eorðe on hyre frumsceafte, ac we hi habbað syððan afylede swyðe ond mid urum synnum þearle besmitene” writes Wulfstan: earth, like the human body which is made of it, is created good but has become corrupted and affected by mankind’s sins.34 Nature, as Jennifer Neville has noted, is precisely that for AngloSaxons: creation and the things created in this world (sceaft, gesceaft); a word for “nature”, meaning the natural world that surrounds us, does not exist in Old English.35 Grendel’s mother, as Shari Horner has rightly pointed out, is the less controlled feminine figure in the poem, although the language and theme of enclosure is used in her description - boundaries, movement,

 31

Terry Eagleton, On Evil (Yale: Yale University Press, 2010), 78. Catherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 37. 33 Eagleton, On Evil, 63. 34 See CCCC 421: Secundum Lucam. 35 Jennifer Neville, Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 32

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

139

space. 36 The monster’s relationship with these is in contrast to that of Wealhtheow, Hildeburh or Freawaru. If the remaining feminine figures in Beowulf are somehow culturally or physically enclosed and limited in their actions, Grendel’s mother is characterised by freedom of movement, and an active process of revenge, which makes her even more monstrous. Yet the monster’s dwelling is nothing but an underground enclosure. McLennan, in an analysis of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic texts in which the worlds of the supernatural and the mundane come into contact with each other, sees in the character of Hlégunnr in Þáttr Stjörnu-Odda draumr, the breaking of society’s conventions of gender which, I believe, could easily be applied to Grendel’s mother: “an extreme example of the dangers of breaking out of gender roles to medieval Icelanders since she is turned into a monster as a direct consequence of her refusal to behave in a feminine manner”.37 The space occupied by Grendel and his mother is certainly indescribable but seems to match the very nature of the creatures that inhabited it. Paul Oppenheimer points out that The view of nature, or Natura, as itself a daemon capable of gargantuan malevolence is at least as old as the Stoics. In Stoic philosophy, the earth and all created beings are periodically consumed by an apocalyptic fire. Natura was a monster, though one with creative impulses, which human beings must teach themselves to accept.38

Nature’s power to fascinate, to give life but also to destroy, is something which should not surprise the ancient or the modern reader. Grendel and his mother made their home in a ghostly landscape infested with wolves on the hills, with sea-monsters swimming upon the surface of a deep pool of water: Nis þæt heoru stow! (l. 1372b); that is not indeed a pleasant place. The French historian Jules Michelet once claimed that: The early Christians, as a whole and individually, in the past and in the future, hold Nature herself accursed. They condemn her as a whole and in

 36

Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure Representing Women in Old English Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), 81-83. 37 Alistair McLennan, “Monstrosity in Old English and Old Icelandic literature”. (PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2010), 7. 38 Paul Oppenheimer, Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behaviour (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 37.

140

Chapter Six every part, going so far as to see Evil incarnate, the Demon himself, in a flower.39

The physical portrayal of Grendel’s mother’s lair is certainly Labyrinthine: the underwater cave-like hostile hall which operates as a counterpoint to Heorot, into which the hero descends to fight a climactic battle as Theseus did, parallels the multiple depictions of underground labyrinths in literature. Examples would include subterranean Egyptian galleries, or the ones described as connected to the temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus. Asclepius is associated with moles and serpents, and consequently with the natural Labyrinths among which the monster’s lair could belong. Kerényi explained how the fourth-century first witnesses of the Minotaur’s cave were taken to an underground quarry near Gortina, shown to travellers as the famous Labyrinth.40 Even more important is the mental image created by the double depiction of the monster-mere, by Hrothgar and by the poet himself (ll. 1357-79, 1408-17). Beowulf and his companions, as translated by A. Orchard, “pass over steep, rocky, slopes, thin courses, narrow single tracks, unknown paths” in their way to the lake.41 So labyrinth-like is the landscape that Heaney’s translation describes it with the following words, “A few miles from here a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch above mere; the overhanging bank is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface” (emphasis mine).42 Orchard suggests “that several of the physical features of the home of Grendel and his mother should match those of the otherworld is scarcely surprising, given the poet’s constant identification of Grendel with demonic foes”. 43 This association brings back the idea of the labyrinth in early classical literature, since Plato described Hades as a Labyrinth with many forks and circuits.44 The landscape the reader or hearer pictures from the descriptions of the mere is “a landscape of the mind”. Hildegard Tristam, in her discussion of stock descriptions of Hell in Old English prose and poetry, stated that the Beowulf-poet adapted a stock description from homiletic

 39

Jules Michelet, The Sorceress, trans. A. R. Allinson, (Evinity Publishing Ink, [1939] 2009), Kindle edition, 4. 40 Karl Kerényi, En el Laberinto, 77. 41 Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulfmanuscript (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 38. 42 Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (New York and London: Norton, 2000), 95. 43 Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 39. 44 See R. Espelt and O Tusquets, eds. Por Laberintos (Barcelona: RGM, 2010), 25.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

141

writings: “not [only] the phraseology of the Blickling Homily XVI, and Beowulf passages is parallel, but their rhetorical properties of wolves, wind, forbidding mountains, dark colours, inaccessibility to living creatures etc.”. 45 On the ground of philological similarities, diction, phrasing and narrative details, Wright has convincingly argued that the Beowulf-poet was familiar with a version of the Visio S. Pauli, with the borrowed motifs naturalised into the setting of the poem: his hell is still in the north, because that is where the Danes live, his frosty trees, bereft of the souls that once were suspended for the branches, are left to ‘hang’ over the water below; and his water monsters have been exorcised of their demons.46

Andy Orchard has observed further parallels that link the passages in both Beowulf and Blickling Homily XVI to sections of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle.47 Anyone who reads the description of the mere for the first time is bound to be surprised by the conjunction of certain elements in the depiction of the landscape: fenland, headlands, a mountain, a narrow path, a course unknown, a joyless wood looming over water… Inland and by the sea at the same time, the scene appears difficult to interpret, labyrinthine in nature, a conglomeration of elements which do not seem to belong together. It may be an impossible setting in realistic terms – I find it hard to believe that this could be the description of a fjord or an arm of the sea – but it is a very effective landscape of the mind. Charlotte Ball prefers to speak of a “landscape of meaning”: Grendel’s mere defies natural geography by incorporating standing water, the open sea, the bare rocks of the Danish headlands and overhanging trees in a configuration which is difficult to realize into one scene even within the mind.48

Beowulf is confronted, according to Knapp with a landscape that

 45

Hildegard L. C. Tristam, “Stock Descriptions of Heaven and Hell in Old English Prose and Poetry”, NM 79 (1978): 111. 46 Charles D. Wright, The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 135. 47 Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2003), 158. 48 Charlotte Ball, “Monstrous Landscapes: The Interdependence of Meaning Between Monster and Landscape in Beowulf”, Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies 5 (2009): 1, accessed 20 November, 2014.

142

Chapter Six threatens horror and death in a very real world. Yet the heroic Geat’s progress through this adventure figures Christ’s point by point, and a focus that cannot settle a single concept – either Germanic heroism or likeness to Christ – establishes much of the aesthetic power of the episode.49

Roberta Frank suggested that the poet made use of both the prosaic (“pool, lake”) and poetic (“sea”) senses of the word mere.50 The OE word is also used for “the lake of fire” (Revelation 21:8) into which sinners will be thrown come the time. In the poem, interestingly, the mere is already the dwelling of felasinnigne secg (l.1379). As K. Malone puts it, the poet’s account is “a consistent and carefully-wrought picture of a hell on earth, an imaginative construction based on traditional Christian ideas about hell”.51 Nevertheless, another possible parallel for the (un)natural world described around the monsters’ dwelling in Beowulf, with clear labyrinthine echoes, has been suggested by Richard North. He argues that the passage in which the mere is depicted is indebted not only to St Paul’s vision of hell, but also to Vergil’s description of Avernus, the Roman underworld in the Aeneid.52 In fact, the only cognate of the word landscape in Old English, landscipe, appears in Genesis B (ll. 375-376) where it is used as part of a description of hell: ic a ne geseah laðran landscipe. Fisher’s discussion of water mazes emphasizes how “a large water surface is visually fascinating, constantly changing as the breeze plays upon it, as well as reflecting the images of reeds, vertical elements and people beyond”. 53 Although the monsters’ mere in Beowulf could well prove fascinating for the reader, it is also terrifying, as no twigs or leafs float on the surface but monsters and blood. Della Hooke explains that Lucan described, in Pharsalia, how Caesar felled a sacred Celtic Grove near Marseilles in the first century BC; and certain similarities with the landscape around the monsters’ dwelling in Beowulf are striking:

 49

Peggy A. Knapp, “Beowulf and the strange necessity of beauty”, in On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, ed. John M. Hill (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010), 96. 50 Roberta Frank, “The Beowulf poet’s sense of history”, in The Wisdom Poetry; Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, 53-65 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 1982). 51 K. Malone, “Grendel and his abode”, in Studia Philologica et Literaria in Honorem L. Spitzer (Bern: A. G. Hatcher, 1958), 306. 52 Richard North, The Origins of ‘Beowulf’: From Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8-10. 53 Fisher and Gester, The Art of the Maze, 130.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

143

The axe-men came on an ancient and sacred grove. Its interlacing branches enclosed a cool central space into which the sun never shone, but where an abundance of water sprouted from dark springs […]the barbaric gods worshiped here had their altars heaped with hideous offerings, and every tree was sprinkled with human blood[…].Nobody dared enter this grove except the priest; and even he kept out at midday, and between dawn and dusk – for fear that the gods might be abroad at such hours (emphasis mine).54

In the case of the Danish Labyrinth, Beowulf is able to return from the mere, not an easy task because in Labyrinths, wrote Isidore of Seville, it “seems impossible to emerge from the darkness and return to light”.55 The hero’s victory, from the point of view of a Christian poet, could operate neatly to equate the Beowulf-Theseus type solver of the Labyrinth with Christ as harrower of Hell. The killing of the monster leads to the purification of the landscape. It is also relevant that the description of watery bodies in Beowulf is ambiguous and conveys multiple senses. The energy of moving water pushes the plot forward. The sea brings Scyld Scefing and Beowulf to the people who need them at the right time, but also takes back the lifeless bodies of the heroes; it is a medium for travel with but it is packed with dangerous monsters. Beowulf’s descent into the mere brings him into a fluid and liminal space where he is completely isolated from his social group, an isolation which might remind us of other exiles on the sea in Old English lyrical poetry, likewise battling with the forces of nature. Oppenheimer’s description of the aesthetics of nightmares comes close to the feeling we experience as readers at this point in the story, when we visit an “alien landscape”. “The dreadful acts occur in a timeless, intricate cabinet, on a wicked stage of calculation and falsity, in a smothered semi-dark in which all rules or laws become the accomplices of destruction”.56 Regions where water met land, or rather were intertwined, as boundaries are blurred in the landscape of the moors and fens, were surely not unusual in north-western Europe during the migration period, when the area was subject to rising sea levels.57 Siewers adds that “To the evolving

 54

See Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England. Literature, Lore and Landscape, Anglo-Saxon Studies 13 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 12. 55 The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, edited by W. J. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 307. 56 Oppenheimer, Evil and the Demonic, 112. 57 Kelly M. Wickham-Crowley, “Living on the ecg: the Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Context”, in A Place to Believe In, eds. Lees and Overing (place: publisher, 2006), 85-110.

144

Chapter Six

Anglo-Saxon sense of identity, the sea was both an ethnic historical border and an allegory for the Christian sense of the fleeting nature of mortality”.58 The descent (into hell or underground) also places the AngloSaxon hero within a very long tradition of epic figures who take such a journey into the unknown, which goes from Gilgamesh, Aeneas or Amaterasu, and many others, to Christ. If we think of the Old English poem as of what it is, the work of a Christian poet, and we take into account the ancestors of the Grendel-kin, then Beowulf’s fight against the monsters in the underwater labyrinthine cave, and the way he purges a wasteland of Evil, has to be reminiscent of Christ’s Harrowing of Hell as found in the Gospel of Nicodemus, and therefore of apocryphal visions of Hades. The fight with Grendel’s mother takes place in an anti-hall, where treasure is accumulated and solitude, chaos and danger occupy the space reserved for community, order and safety in a human dwelling. Beowulf is more threatened during this fight than he was against Grendel, and uses armour and a sword to defeat his adversary. Ultimately, his victory depends on God’s help. The uselessness of the sword Beowulf gets from Unferth is, I believe, symptomatic of the limits of human power; as Hrunting fails, the absent comitatus fails with it. The hero himself is shown as vulnerable for the first time in the poem, as only fate in the form of a miracle saves him from being dispatched by the ides monster. In the first maze Beowulf makes the landscape safe for human use by defeating two monsters that share with the Minotaur their humanoid condition. If they stand for the Evil that must be fought and defeated, their place at the centre of the Labyrinth “in malo” (as with Ovid’s prison for the Minotaur) is rather ambiguous. In both heroic traditions they are monstrous as a consequence of their ancestors’ offences to God, which caused Yahvé’s punishment of Cain’s kin and Poseidon’s curse on Minos, respectively. It is worth noting that the labyrinth of classical literature was built to hide royal shame, the very existence of that which is at the same time intimate and “other”: the Minotaur. Nature’s maze in Beowulf is the landscape occupied by the monsters, dwellers at the edges of space and time, the time of creation and destruction, protagonists of the Genesis and the apocalyptic narratives of Christian and Germanic myth. Hrothgar’s royal power represents what Ewa Kuryluk has defined as the world of the established, to which “an anti-world of the hidden, forbidden, apocryphal



58 Alfred K. Siewers, “Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building”, Viator 34 (2003): 28.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

145

and heretical” is opposed.59 In Anglo-Saxon England, as J. J. Cohen has pointed out, “the hybrid body of the monster became a communal form for expressing anxieties about the limits and fragility of identity”. 60 The monsters are presented as descendants of Cain and therefore placed in a biblical context that makes them “quasi-human beings with ancient pedigree in the land”.61 The semantic complexity of the figure of the giant is well observed by Cohen when he states that “fear and envy, attraction and repulsion, prohibition and liberation, ‘other’ and ‘us’”, are contradictions characteristic of the reception of this type of monster. 62 It is precisely because of this that generally the most fascinating monster “is often that which confuses nature’s categories by mixing up body parts or crossing human with animal features”63; that is certainly the case of both Grendel’s kin and the Minotaur. Kerényi has explained how the Minotaur “in the middle” is transformed by Christianity into a devil, 64 the road that leads to the creature is that to perdition, the invitation to enter clear, the way back, obscure and impossible unless is taken by the saviour-figure: Teseus, Beowulf, Christ. A new Christian meaning is given to an old symbol of both the road to the underworld of the dead and yet of (restoration of) life too. If the hero moves within a labyrinth in search of a centre, this contains both the problem and the answer, and yet once solved, the hero needs to leave the space and the logic followed to return to the life outside, now affected by the journey inside the maze. Fifty years after the fight with Grendel’s mother, and now King of his people, the Geats (another parallel with the post-Labyrinth role of



59 Ewa Kuryluk, Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques (Evanston: Northwesterm University Press, 1987), 3. 60 J. J. Cohen, Of Giants, Sex, Monsters, and The Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), xvii-4. 61 Alfred K. Siewers, “Landscapes of Conversion”, 234. 62 J. J. Cohen, “The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages”, SELIM: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval / Journal of Old and Middle English Studies of Spain) 2 (1992): 47-69. 63 Richard Kerney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 115. 64 Beowulf’s monsters live in an untamed nature, which cannot be trusted, but perhaps can be tamed. This hellish landscape is experienced by Christians in a way that invites confrontation. Neville (1999: 43) expresses this idea brilliantly: through the depiction of the natural world, the state of the human race on earth reveals itself to be a state of perpetual siege. Passive endurance against the natural world is thus transformed into, and interpreted as, active performance of heroism against the devil.

146

Chapter Six

Theseus), Beowulf is bound to “enter” a second labyrinth in the fight with the dragon. If labyrinths celebrate vital energy, youthful playfulness, a perfect place for children to run, fearless and frenetically through their paths, it should not come as a surprise that the old hero would find this journey tiring. Like mirrors in the cinematic labyrinths of Orson Welles, characters and episodes in the poem tend to be reflected and make complete sense when compared to the “others” surrounding them. We only need to think of the heroic triad formed by Hrothgar, Beowulf and Wiglaf. The Geatish Labyrinth is not an exception, but adds meaning to the Danish, and provides us with a coherent explanation of the ethos of the entire poem. Ramón Espelt notes that Penelope R. Doob has shown us how The notable discrepancy between the idea of the labyrinth suggested by literature and the depiction of the labyrinth until the 15th c., is a fascinating subject […]. The nub of the paradox lies in the fact that, while the texts that describe the labyrinth encourage us to imagine it as multicursal, the visual representation of the labyrinth is invariably unicursal.65

Such a paradox might help me prove the poet’s use, likely unconscious, of both, the idea of the labyrinth as path and pattern. The digressions in Beowulf move as if in a multicursal network, interlaced with one another, they are not arranged chronologically. The poet can consequently come back to a previous path already explored to describe a certain character, as he does with Hygelac. I entirely agree with Knapp when she writes that “the background tales in Beowulf are puzzling, sinister and densely crowded with striving. The episodes of Beowulf’s career, though, are enacted in linear narrative time”. 66 This double concept of time, which might be explained by its cyclic nature in the Classical world and linear in Christianity, takes us back to the duality of the Labyrinth as model. Beowulf as the hero of the poem walks in a unicursal labyrinth which takes him from A to B, emphasizing humankind’s mortality and the transience of life on earth inherent to the Anglo-Saxon mind. When his retainers flee into the forest they seem to have a choice, but on the contrary, Beowulf has not. The wanderer of a unicursal maze needs to make only one decision, either to enter the Labyrinth or to stay away from it. Beowulf had already taken that decision when he decided to travel to Denmark in order to kill Grendel. Now at home the process is re-enacted. Unlike B. Phillpotts, who claims that “fame in northern poetry is for the

 65 66

Espelt and Tusquets, eds., Por Laberintos, 152. Peggy A. Knapp, “Beowulf and the strange necessity of beauty”, 86.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

147

man who has the courage to choose”,67 I believe that Beowulf is totally aware of the fact that Gæð a wyrd swa hio scel (“fate will always go as it must”), (l. 455). The idea of free choice turns into an illusion. Wyrd as fate or providence or rather both, gives the Christian poet the opportunity to build the hero’s journey as unicursal. It was not by chance that in the Renaissance the multicursal maze became the figurative expression of a profane world governed by human decisions.68 The maze in the land of the Geats is structured around a monster and a treasure. P. R. Doob suggests two possibilities for the Labyrinth as protection – either it is keeping a treasure safe, or it protects the relics of a tomb. 69 In the case of the dragon’s barrow, both are true. The treasure itself shares a basic feature with the labyrinth, movement. That is the essence of the two and therefore it needs to be watched, otherwise they become dangerous. Gold has no negative connotations in the Germanic or the Christian tradition, so long as it circulates and keeps the social order. It is only those who hoard it who show its potential negativity and futility. To be and to move in the labyrinth is for the hero himself a manifestation of his own existence and of the desire to survive. The old hero, like the maze-walker, goes where the road leads, following the only course that can be taken. The labyrinth here does not appear impenetrable for the hero, as he is able to find the centre where the monster waits. However, he is unable to reach the exit, so that the labyrinth has become inextricable. His admiration of the treasure that he acquired for his people, before his death, and the instructions for his barrow to be built respond to the core idea behind the success of those who explore the labyrinth. This is the concept that explains the paradox of the meaning of Ariadne’s thread in a unicursal structure where one cannot stray from the route towards the centre and back to the start - the dual concept of oblivion-memory. Bertrand Gervais explains how the labyrinth of myth constitutes “a theatre of oblivion”.70 Once the centre is reached and the monster killed, the journey is not complete until the hero returns home, tells his story, and shares his booty. Suddenly one discovers the use of Ariadne’s thread: it reminds the hero that he needs to leave the Labyrinth because there is

 67

Bertha S. Phillpotts, “Wyrd and Providence in Anglo-Saxon Thought”, in Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, ed. Robert D. Fulf (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1928] 1991), 6. 68 Por Laberintos, ed. Espelt and Tusquets, 152. 69 P. R. Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth. 70 Bertrand Gervais, “The Broken Line: Hypertexts as Labyrinths”, in Revue d’études anglophones (Orleans: Paradigm, 1998), 26-36.

148

Chapter Six

someone waiting outside, someone who expects him to fulfil his duty towards his people. Beowulf solved the Danish Labyrinth, achieved fame in Hrothgar’s realm, and was able to get back home and tell his tale at the court of Hygelac, making sure that his deeds were made known and celebrated accordingly. However, at home the hero discovers the tragic side of labyrinths. He needs people, his self-group, to remember him because this time he will not be able to achieve a physical return. He hopes gold and monuments will keep his memory alive, that they will, metaphorically speaking, make him complete the hero’s journey. The poet himself contributes to this final goal by the very fact of writing down the poem. Emulating Daedalus, or the Christian God as the creator of the cosmic labyrinth of the universe, he builds a story that in the words of R. M. Liuzza “coils around on itself like a serpent, the reader being lost in the narrative maze of a history that finally seems to consume the Geats themselves”. 71 Having advanced through the poem as mazetreaders, with our vision fragmented and “severely constricted”, we reach the end of the poem and become maze-viewers. We take the wings of Weland and look at the labyrinth from above, discovering the whole pattern, amazed by the complex artistry of the overall design. The tension between linearity and circularity, between the unicursal and multicursal patterns, I argue, should not be underplayed. Putting the blame on Beowulf for his final decision to fight the dragon alone or for his supposed excess of pride or greed is simply pointless if we believe that we have found a solution to the big riddle that this poem is. In keeping this tension alive, and with every new interpretation, we acknowledge the greatness of this literary masterwork. The poet insists once and again on the limits of human knowledge, Men ne cunnon, secgan to soðe (ll. 50-51). The funeral of Beowulf parallels that of Scyld Scefing, so that the story goes back to the start. We feel like Socrates when he confesses his admiration and frustration towards the maze: “we got into the labyrinth and when we thought we were at the end, came out again at the beginning, having to seek as much as ever”.72 The brave in battle ride around the mound, providing a sense of continuity around death and the infinite, as their Greek counterparts did in Anchises’ funeral games in the Aeneid, in a complicated interweaving pattern, which made Virgil think of the pathways of the Cretan labyrinth.

 71

Beowulf, ed. R. M. Liuza, 2nd edition (Toronto: Broadview, 2013), 32. See Plato, Euthydemus, Dialogues, cited in Por Laberintos, ed. by Espelt and Tusquets. 72

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

149

I am with Peggy A. Knapp when she acknowledges that “part of Beowulf’s power to haunt is that it eludes conceptual fixities, continually slipping away from conclusions that at first blush seemed obvious”. 73 Beowulf is labyrinthine in its complexity, “the process by which the essentials of structure are perceived in Old English poetry”, Huppé reminds us, “is more like finding the way in a maze than it is like solving an equation”.74 The tension between coexisting patterns in the poem might help us answer the question of how to judge morally someone who is more than a man and yet no more than a man. I have acknowledged elsewhere75 the inscrutability at the core of this question that addresses the judgement of a hero who is also a king, a folktale archetype, a Germanic Super-man, and God’s agent, and yet just a mortal heathen human being. Much literature has been produced, much ink has been spilled over the moral judgement of the old Beowulf. Many have tried to offer straightforward explanations to a question that resists a simple answer. If one adopts a perspective from “within the labyrinth”, as Doob brilliantly explains when analysing the Aeneid, the reader might find in the poem “a profound sense of human waste and failure”.76 However, if we embrace a more detached overview, we may see the triumph of virtue and appreciate the struggle of those who accept the inevitability of loss, the transient fame of the hero, and the limitations of human nature. Labyrinths and life, writes Doob, “involve chaos and order, destiny and free choice, terror and triumph – all held in balance, all perspective-dependent”. There can be no one better than J. L. Borges, who had a soft spot for both Labyrinths and Anglo-Saxon poetry to corroborate this impression. “Maybe the purpose of the labyrinth – if the labyrinth does have a purpose”, writes Borges, “is to stimulate our intelligence, to make us think about the mystery and not the solution. Seldom do we understand the solution; we are human beings, nothing else. But, of course, there is something beautiful about looking for the solution and knowing that we

 73

Peggy A. Knapp, ‘Beowulf and the Strange Necessity of Beauty’, p. 82. Bernard F. Huppé, The Web of Words, p. xiv 75 Miguel A. Gomes, ‘Confronting Evil and the Monstrous Other in Beowulf and its Filmic Adaptations: Understanding Heroic Action and the Limits of Knowledge’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Vigo, 2015). 76 Penelope Reed Doob, ‘Virgil’s Aeneid’ in The Labyrinth, ed. by Harold Bloom, 1-14 (p. 7) 74

150

Chapter Six

cannot find it. Maybe enigmas are more important than solutions”. 77 Maybe our projections on the poem make us go left or right as readers and literary critics without realising that every path takes us back to the beginning.

Bibliography Bain, George. 1997. Celtic Art. The Methods of Construction. London: Constable. Ball, Charlotte. 2009. “Monstrous Landscapes: The Interdependence of Meaning Between Monster and Landscape in Beowulf”. Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies 5:1: 1-26. Accessed 20 November. 2014. Barney, W. J., W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof, eds. 2006. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beeche, Tiffany. 2010. “Bind and Loose: Aesthetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle”. In On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, edited by John M. Hill, 43-63. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010. Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney.2000. New York and London: Norton. Bradley, James Lyons. 1987. “Legendary metal smiths and early English literature”. PhD diss., University of Leeds. Clarke, Catherine A. M. 2006. Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer. Cohen, J. J. “The Use of Monsters and the Middle Ages”. 1992. SELIM: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Lengua y Literatura Inglesa Medieval / Journal of Old and Middle English Studies of Spain 2: 4769. —. 1999. Of Giants, Sex, Monsters, and The Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Conan, Michael, ed. 2003. Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion. Harvard: Dumbarton Oaks. Cooper, W. V. 2009. trans. Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. The Ex-classics Project: 2009. Accessed 07 August, 2014. http://www.exclassics.com.

 77

Interview in Marguerite Yourcenar, “Borges o el vidente”, in Peregrina y extranjera, as cited in Por laberintos, edited by Espelt and Tusquets (Barcelona: RGM, 2010), 167.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

151

Eco, Umberto. 2010. “Et in labyrintho ego”. In Por Laberintos, Catalogue of exhibition, edited by R. Espelt and O. Tusquets, 8-12. Barcelona: RGM. Eagleton, Terry. On Evil. 2010. Yale: Yale University Press, 2010. Fisher, Adrian and Georg Gester. 1990. The Art of the Maze. London: Seven Dials, 1990. Frank, Roberta. 1982 “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History”. In The Wisdom Poetry; Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, 53-65. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University. Gervais, Bertrand.1998. “The Broken Line: Hypertexts as Labyrinths”. In Revue d’études Anglophones, 26-36. Orleans: Paradigm. Gomes, Miguel A. 1996. “Confronting Evil and the Monstrous Other in Beowulf and its Filmic Adaptations: Understanding Heroic Action and the Limits of Knowledge”. PhD diss., University of Vigo, 2015. Greenfield, Stanley B. and Daniel G. Calder. 1996. A New Critical History of Old English Literature. London, New York: New York University Press. Hacikyan, Agop. 1996. A Linguistic and Literary Analysis of Old English Riddles. Montreal: Casalini. Hobby, Blake, ed. 2009.The Labyrinth. Bloom’s Literary Themes, Harold Bloom, general editor. New York, NY: Bloom’s Literary Criticism / Infobase Publishing. Hooke, Della. 2010. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England. Literature, Lore and Landscape. Anglo-Saxon Studies 13. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Horner, Shari. 2001. The Discourse of Enclosure Representing Women in Old English Literature. New York: State University of New York Press. Huppé, Bernard F. 1970. The Web of Words; Structural Analyses of the Old English Poems: Vainglory,The Wonder of Creation, The Dream of the Rood, and Judith. Albany: State University of New York Press. —. 1984. The Hero in the Earthly City: A Reading of Beowulf. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 33. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, State University of New York. Kerényi, Karl. 2006. En el Laberinto, edited by Corrado Bologna. Madrid: Siruela. Kerney, Richard. 2003. Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness. London, New York: Routledge. Knapp, Peggy A. 2010. “Beowulf and the strange necessity of beauty”. In On the Aesthetics of Beowulf and other Old English Poems, edited by John M. Hill, 81-100. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010.

152

Chapter Six

Kuryluk, Ewa. 1987. Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex: The Grotesque: Origins, Iconography, Techniques. Evanston: Northwesterm University Press. Leyerle, John. 1967. “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf”. University of Toronto Quarterly 37: 1-17. Littleton, C. Scott. 2008. “Theseus as an Indo-European Sword Hero, with an Excursus on Some Parallels between the Athenian Monster-Slayer and Beowulf”. The Heroic Age 11: 1-17. Malone, K. 1958. “Grendel and his abode”. In Studia Philologica et Literaria in Honorem L. Spitzer, 297-308. Bern: A. G. Hatcher. McLennan, Alistair. “Monstrosity in Old English and Old Icelandic literature”. PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2010. Michelet, Jules. 2009. The Sorceress, translated by A. R. Allinson. Evinity Publishing Ink, [1939]. Kindle edition. Neville, Jennifer. 1999. Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nordenfalk, Carl. 1977. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Painting. London: Chatto and Windus Ltd. North, Richard. 2006. The Origins of ‘Beowulf’: From Vergil to Wiglaf. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oppenheimer, Paul. 1996. Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behaviour. New York: New York University Press. Orchard, Andy. 1995. Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf- manuscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Orchard, Andy. 2003. A Critical companion to Beowulf. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer. Phillpotts, Bertha S. 1991. “Wyrd and Providence in Anglo-Saxon Thought” [1928] In Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Anthology, edited by Robert D. Fulf, 1-13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Doob, Penelope Reed. 1990. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Siewers, Alfred K. 2003. “Landscapes of Conversion: Guthlac’s Mound and Grendel’s Mere as Expressions of Anglo-Saxon Nation-Building”. Viator 34: 1-39. Thompson, Victoria. 2004. Dying and Death in Later Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Tristam, Hildegard L. C. 1978. “Stock Descriptions of Heaven and Hell in Old English Prose and Poetry”. NM 79: 102-13.

Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf

153

Wickham-Crowley, Kelly M. 2006. “Living on the Ecg: the Mutable Boundaries of Land and Water in Anglo-Saxon Contexts”. In A place to Believe In: Medieval Monasticism in the Landscape, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, 85-110. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Wright, Charles D. 1993. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Wright, C. E. 1939. The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939).

CHAPTER SEVEN ORRMULUM AND THE TESTAMENTS OF THE TWELVE PATRIARCHS NILS-LENNART JOHANNESSON STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

1. Introduction1 The aim of this article is to discuss the possibility that a medieval Greek text whose reception history in the West is well-known may actually have had an earlier “underground” existence in Western Europe, an existence which can only be seen reflected in some passages in a twelfth-century Middle English homily collection. To complicate matters further, the Middle English passages that reflected the content of the Greek text were written on manuscript pages that disappeared in the seventeenth century; as a consequence our only evidence is a transcript of the passages made before the Middle English manuscript pages were lost. The medieval Greek text is the work given the modern title The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Testaments in the following); the Middle English homily collection is Orrmulum, written by the Augustinian Canon Orrm, presumably in the second half of the twelfth century, presumably at Bourne in southern Lincolnshire.2 The manuscript, 1 The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Swedish Research Council, project 421-2010-2094. 2 Orrm states in the introduction to his work that he was an Augustinian canon; he is reticent, however, about the time and place of his work. Parkes (1983) claims, on the basis of paleographical evidence in MS Junius 1, that the Latin incipits of the gospel texts for the individual homilies cannot have been written later than c. 1180. A consideration of Orrm’s selection of text extracts from Acts in the last part of Orrm’s table of contents made Parkes look for an abbey dedicated to Peter and Paul in the East Midland area (as suggested by Orrm’s dialect), which led him to the Abbey of SS. Peter and Paul at Bourne in southern Lincolnshire.

156

Chapter Seven

Orrm’s holograph, is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1; between 1659 and 1667 it was in the possession of the Dutch philologist Jan van Vliet, who copied passages of text, partly from pages that have since been lost. In the following sections I will provide brief introductions to the three texts involved: Testaments, Orrmulum, and van Vliet’s notebook. I will then discuss the possibility that Orrm had access to a copy of Testaments in a language that he could understand.

2. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs Testaments is a pseudepigraphical work that purports to be the dying words of each of Jacob’s twelve sons, addressed to their gathered offspring. In its current form, the work was presumably written in the second century AD (“Testaments” 2012). The question whether this was originally a Jewish work that later had Christian interpolations added to it, or whether it was originally written as a Christian work posing as a Jewish text, and whether the original language was Aramaic or Greek, has caused much scholarly debate, but is immaterial for the purposes of the present article. What matters more here is how and when the text reached Western Europe. An English student, John of Basingstoke, went on a trip to Paris after completing his studies at Oxford; from Paris he went on to Athens around the year 1200. At Athens he was shown a manuscript of Testaments, a work not known in Western Europe at the time. In the late 1230s he mentioned this manuscript to Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste obviously found Basingstoke’s account interesting, since he sent messengers to Athens to purchase the manuscript; these messengers actually managed to accomplish their mission and returned to Lincoln with the manuscript, now Cambridge, University Library, Ff 1.24 ff. 203a sqq. By 1242 Grosseteste had completed (with the aid of one Nicholas the Greek from St Albans) a Latin translation of the text, which was widely circulated both in England and on the Continent. A contemporary account of these events can be found in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora; the summary above is based on the story as retold in H. J. de Jonge (1975) and McEvoy (2004). More than 80 manuscripts of Grosseteste’s translation are known; the Latin text was in its turn translated into English, Anglo-Norman, French, German, Dutch, Danish and Czech. In the Netherlands, more than thirty editions of the Dutch translation were published between 1571 and 1679 (H. J. de Jonge 1975, 179–80).

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

157

3. Orrmulum Orrmulum is a Middle English homily collection which has come down to us in an incomplete and mutilated condition. Orrm’s table of contents lists 242 numbered homilies, identified by the Latin incipits of the gospel text for each homily, or in the case of the last twelve, plot summaries for extracts from the Acts of the Apostles. The extant manuscript breaks off after the beginning of homily xxxii. In each homily Orrm retells the relevant gospel verses in Middle English verse renderings, followed by interpretations of most of the gospel verses; for a more detailed description with examples, see my Orrmulum website “The Orrmulum Project”. Orrm’s interpretations were based on such exegetical material as was available to him in the Latin patristic tradition. Orrm never identified his source texts. He refers, frustratingly, from time to time, to a work he simply calls þe boc “the book”, but so far no one has been able to identify a single Latin text that would correspond to þe boc. But with the aid of modern technology (such as the database version of Migne’s monumental Patrologia Latina) it has been possible to demonstrate that Orrm used several different Latin texts for different purposes and for different parts of his homily texts. Thus, it has become clear that for the three groups of extant homilies in MS Junius 1 based on Matthew, Luke and John, Orrm relied on three separate Latin source texts: the homilies on Matthew are primarily based on the Expositio In Evangelium Matthaei by Paschasius Radbertus (Paulus 1984), the homilies on Luke are based on Bede’s In Lucae Evangelium Expositio (Hurst 1960), and the homilies on John are chiefly based on the Commentarius In S. Evangelium Secundum Joannem by Johannes Scotus Eriugena (Jeaneau 1972); for a more detailed analysis, see Johannesson 2007a. The Orrmulum manuscript was presumably produced at Bourne Abbey in southern Lincolnshire in the late twelfth century (cf. Parkes 1983). We know nothing about its fate before the seventeenth century, although it presumably remained in the abbey library until the dissolution of the monastery in 1536 (Bourne Abbey Church n.d.). In the seventeenth century the manuscript was in the possession of Sir Thomas Aylesbury (1579/80-1658), Surveyor of the Navy, Master of the Mint and Master of Requests under Charles I, in addition a patron of mathematical learning. After the execution of the king in 1649, Aylesbury went into exile in the Low Countries, living first in Antwerp and later at Breda, where he died in 1658. After his death, his relations started selling off books and manuscripts from his library (Alsbury 2008). The Orrmulum manuscript was purchased for fl 18 by Jan van Vliet, town clerk of Breda and amateur

158

Chapter Seven

antiquarian, who made a note of the price on folio 2r in the manuscript along with his signature and the date “1659, 6 Febr.”. In his notebook van Vliet prefaced a transcript of Orrm’s Preface with the Latin text given in (1) below (with a modern English translation on the right), which is our only evidence for Sir Thomas Aylesbury’s ownership. (1)

MDCLIX. Janio. Bredæ.

“1659, in January. At Breda.

Paraphrasis in |Euangelia, aut. |Ormo Monacho |Augustiniano, |Angl. Sax. v. præf. N. versus in MS. |conjunctos legi, |non discretos, |ut hic posui.

Paraphrase of the Gospels by Orm, Augustinian monk, in Anglo-Saxon. See Preface.

EXCERPTA Ex Rithmis Saxonicis MSS. |e Bibliotheca P.M. Thomæ |Alesburiensis Equitis |compositis ex Euangelijs etc. |quorum Præfatio sequitur. (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783, f. 73r)

EXCERPTS from handwritten Saxon verses from the library of the late Sir Thomas Aylesbury, composed from the Gospels etc., whose Preface follows”.

Note: the verses are presented consecutively in the MS., not separately, as I have placed them here.

During the years of van Vliet’s ownership, from 1659 to his death in 1666, two major changes affected the manuscript. Firstly, van Vliet introduced various types of markup in the manuscript: in order to facilitate text references he numbered the columns of text (two per page, four per folio) on the full-size folios (a numbering that is still used to refer to passages in the manuscript, as opposed to verse numbers that are used to refer to passages in edited text), and he added notes and comments in various places. This kind of engagement with the text was invasive but not really destructive. The second type of change, on the other hand, was seriously destructive. Van Vliet, or somebody else, removed folios of text from the manuscript after he had numbered the columns; no detached folios have ever appeared, so they are probably gone forever. It is hard to imagine why anybody would wish to remove them from the manuscript (for ease of

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

159

reference? to carry with him for comparison when he visited other manuscript owners?), or, for that matter, why they did not stay with the manuscript (did his widow lend the manuscript to other collectors after van Vliet’s death? or did she simply find the loose folios convenient for lighting the fire after the manuscript had been auctioned off?). We will presumably never know.

4. Van Vliet’s notebook Although the folios carrying columns 13–28, 45–52, 69–76, 97–104, 137– 44, 157–60, 181–204, 221–24, 237–44, 257–60, 277–80, 297–300, 399– 406, altogether twenty-seven folios with 108 columns of text, are completely gone from MS Junius 1, van Vliet read those columns and recorded material from them, in some cases single verses or groups of verses, in other cases (the majority) individual words, typically (but not invariably) with specification of senses and with reference to the text columns where the word occurred (occasionally with reference to gospel verses rather than columns). The lexical material was organized as a draft for a glossary, but as more and more words were added the neatly laid out glossary was growing increasingly chaotic. All this material van Vliet wrote down (in some haste, it seems) on old note paper from his student days (now London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783 3 ). This very rich material was unknown to the nineteenth century editors of Orrmulum (White 1852, Holt 1878); those passages of running text4 from folios 51r–

3

Van Vliet’s draft for an Orrmulum glossary is written on pages with the occasional cancelled heading of the type “DICTATORUM, |Quæ ex ore legentis Jacobi Mæstertij |in collegio Pandectario excer- |pebam, |Pars Altera. |A LIB. XVIII VSQUE” (folio 43r). “Second part of dictated lessons, which I excerpted from the mouth of Jacobus Maestertius reading in the College of Pandects. From Book 18 up to”. At the bottom of the page is written (not cancelled) “Postridie Kalendas Januarias |ANNI JULIANI M DC XLI”. “On the day following the Kalends of January [2 January] in the Julian year 1641”. Jacobus Maestertius was Professor of Law at Leiden University from 1639 until his death in 1658 (van Kuyk 1914, 810). Van Vliet studied law at Leiden 1639–1641 (Dekker 1999, 62– 63). The Pandects of Justinian are a central document in the study of Roman Law; book 18 deals with the legal principles underlying purchase and sale (Scott 1932). 4 “Running text” as opposed to single words or phrases, not in the sense of a verbatim representation of Orrm’s running text. As Ker (1940, 2–3) points out, “Vliet’s interest was lexicographical and his excerpts on ff. 51–72v are not continuous blocks of text, but illustrations of the use and meaning of particular words and phrases, which he has underlined in his copy. Excerpts often begin in

160

Chapter Seven

72v in MS 783 that had subsequently been lost from MS Junius 1 were published by Neil Ker in a diplomatic edition (1940); a commentary on the text, which was promised at the end of the article, seems never to have materialized. The Orrmulum material in MS 783 was investigated by Burchfield (1961) in order to find words which do not occur in the extant parts of MS Junius 1. Otherwise no-one seems to have paid any attention to van Vliet’s notebook since Ker published his 1940 edition. But during my work on establishing the Latin sources for Orrmulum, work that has been in progress intermittently since 2002, but which culminated during the period 2011–13, there was one passage in van Vliet’s transcript that remained problematic. In it, Orrm (according to van Vliet) claims that the Patriarchs served as examples of all kinds of virtues. This did not seem to fit the way the twelve sons of Jacob are portrayed in Genesis; searches of the Patrologia Latina database failed to turn up a Latin text that might have been Orrm’s source for such claims. Van Vliet copied no expository text, only lists of virtues (to be imitated) and vices (to be rejected), from these pages, but he did supply the heading “De XII Patriarchis” in his notebook. All fell into place once I decided to look at Testaments, which I had previously ignored, since Grosseteste’s translation did not become available until 12425, which was far too late for Orrmulum. Van Vliet’s added heading would seem to suggest that he recognized the source of this particular passage in Orrmulum; after all, Testaments was widely read in The Netherlands in his day (see above, section 2).

5. Orrm’s list of vices and virtues Orrm’s passages dealing with the virtues exemplified by the Patriarchs and the vices they teach their offspring to avoid will be presented below in a version with Orrm’s characteristic spelling restored.6 A diplomatic edition of van Vliet’s version, with his simplified spelling of Orrm’s text, can be found in Ker (1940, ll. 328–68). After the text I will demonstrate the correspondences between items in Orrm’s list and the relevant passages of Testaments. For my comparisons with Testaments, I have relied on the modern English translation in Charles (1908). Occasionally I have turned the middle of a line or include an essential word from further up the column, or omit words or lines which were not strictly necessary to the sense”. 5 This is also the reason why the text of Testaments did not make it into Patrologia Latina, which ends with the writings of Pope Innocent III, who died in 1216. 6 The translation of the verses into Modern English is my own.

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

161

to Sinker’s 1886 translation (in the revised form of Knight (2009)), when the wording there fitted Orm’s lexis better. (2)

5

FOO¶
PQ>KKABKK
FKK

KFJBKK
DLJ7


2L
CLIIBKK
>II
¶B
?FPKB
)CC
>II
¶>QQ
E>IIB
CIL@@
De XII. Patriarchis8 mB
ŸCBKK
?FPKB
LCC
>II
¶>QQ
FPP
%LA
EBIIMB
QL
¶B
P>TIB
)CC
PL¶C>PPQ
¶FIA
LCC
PL¶
JB@IB@



-CC
PL¶C>PPQ
EBOOPRJJKBPPB
)CC
PL¶C>PPQ
IRCB
QLT>OOA
DLAA


… ought to make an effort to take heed to follow all the example of all that holy flock … They gave an example of all that is good help to the soul: of true patience, of true humility, of true obedience, of true love towards God.


>II
FCBII
R¶BKK


10

15

20

25

7

… grant all evil,


@TBIIBKK



And kill …

mB
ŸCBKK
?FPKB
LCC
PL¶
@IŸKIB@


They gave an example of true chastity, …

)CC
QL
CLOOTBOOMBKK
JLAFIB@


of the rejection of pride,





TBOBIIA¶FKDBPP
IRPPQBPP
mB
ŸCBKK
?FPKB
LCC
JBQQ

J٦



'
JBQBPP

F
AOFKK@EBPP

LCC
QL
PEFIABKK
¶B
CO>
H>IA



5F¶¶
CRII
RKKLOKB
TŸAB


and the desire of earthly possessions; they gave an example of moderation in food and in drink, and of protecting yourself from cold with very plain garments; …

)CC
QL
CLOOTBOOMBKK
PTFHBALJ




>IIB
TF@@EB@O>CCQBPP
)CC
QL
CLOOTBOOMBKK
FII@
RKK¶ŸT




EFKABOOŸMB
TFIBPP


of the rejection of deceit and all kinds of witchcraft; of the rejection of each iniquity and deceitful tricks.

—————— 
EBQB

KF¶



@EŸPQ

DO>JJ@RKKAKBPPB

OLPFKKD

>II
FABII
BIIM




PFKKCRII
CLIIEPRJJKBPPB
.L
PMŸ@EBKK
FCBII
EFKABKK
LKK



2L
TOBBKK

QL
TO>??BKK


… and hatred and envy, and strife and anger and boasting and vainglory and sinful courtship; to speak evil behind someone’s back, to tell tales and to bear malice …

Columns 13–28 are missing from MS Junius 1. According to van Vliet, the extract started in col. 27 and ended in col. 28. 8 This heading must be van Vliet’s addition to Orrm’s text.

162

Chapter Seven

30

——————— 
>II
¶>QQ
FPP


˜B
I>CBOOA
DLAA
RKK@TBJB
#KK
FII@
RKKTFQQ
FKK
FII@
RKKFQQ



'KK
ŸDBAB

F
IBHBPP


… and all that is displeasing to the Lord God in all ignorance, in each vain action, in folly and in dissolute actions …

35

)CC
QL
?BK
?REPRJJ
QL
¶F
MOBPQ




QL
¶F
QRKBPP
I>CBOOA
)CC
I>BIF
QL
IBABKK
¶B



ŸK
¶FKB
IBBPTBKBPP
)CC
>
QL
CFIIPQKBKK
TOB@@EB
JBKK


… of being obedient to your priest and to the master of your household, of conducting yourself humbly towards your hirelings, of always helping poor people …

)
PTFIIHB
TFPB
ŸCBKK
RPP



˜B
M>QOF>OO@EBPP
?FPKB

TBI
?FOO¶
B¶BOO
CLIIBKK
EBJJ



>
IŸOBAA
J>KK
>
IŸTBAA


In such a manner the patriarchs gave us an example; and both really ought to follow them, both the educated man and the ignorant one. And that was very clearly to us revealed through their names …

40


Q>QQ
T>PP
RPP
CRII
LMBKKIF



˜ROOE
EBOB
K>JBPP
>TTKBAA


The following paragraphs will present Orrm’s vices and virtues and their counterparts in Testaments. All the entries will have the same structure: Orrm’s label for the relevant virtue or vice in italics, with an implied to @ILLQ?LLJ?HH “to reject” in brackets, followed by the line number from (2) above, followed by a modern English gloss, followed by corresponding passages from Testaments (in some cases only a small selection of many correspondences). The underlinings in the quotations are meant to help the reader identify the word or phrase that matches Orrm’s word or phrase. MI‡@;MMN
‡CF> 6 “true patience”. The value of patience is most clearly illustrated by Joseph: “In ten temptations He showed me approved, And in all of them I endured; For endurance is a mighty charm, And patience giveth many good things.” (T Jos II.7), and: “Ye see, therefore, my children, how great things patience worketh, and prayer with fasting. So ye too, if ye follow after chastity and purity with patience and prayer, with fasting in humility of heart, the Lord will dwell among you, because He loveth chastity” (T Jos X.1–2). MI‡
G?=F?= 6 “true humility”. Humility is enjoined by Reuben on his listeners: “And draw ye near to Levi in humbleness of heart, that ye may receive a blessing from his mouth”. (T Reu VI.10), and its effect is described by Gad: “Righteousness casteth out hatred, humility destroyeth envy” (T Gad V.3).

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

163

MI‡@;MMN
B?LLMOGGH?MM? 7 “true obedience”. Obedience is represented as the root of Judah’s success: “I was swift in my youth, and obedient to my father in everything” (T Jud I.4), and “the kingdom of Judah …, which the Lord gave me because of my obedience to my father” (T Jud XVII.3). MI‡@;MMN
FO@?
NIQ;LL>
I>> 8 “true love towards God”. Loving the Lord is chiefly enjoined and exemplified by Issachar, as in “… love the Lord and your neighbour” (T Iss V.2), and “I loved the Lord; Likewise also every man with all my heart. So do ye also these things, my children, And every spirit of Beliar shall flee from you, And no deed of wicked men shall rule over you” (T Iss VII.6–7). MI‡
=FpHF?= 11 “true chastity”. The prime example of chastity is of course Joseph in his dealings with Potiphar’s wife, and we find some strong statements about chastity from Joseph, such as “the wickedness of the ungodly hath no power over them that worship God with chastity” (T Jos VI.7), and “For God loveth him who in a den of wickedness combines fasting with chastity, rather than the man who in kings’ chambers combines luxury with licence. And if a man liveth in chastity, and desireth also glory, and the Most High knoweth that it is expedient for him, He bestoweth this also upon me” (T Jos IX.2–3). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
GI>CF?= 12 “(to reject) pride/arrogance”. Old English as well as early Middle English lacked the lexical means to distinguish between “pride” (Lat superbia) and “arrogance” (Lat arrogantia); by 1340, however, Dan Michel of Northgate could treat arrogance, represented by the French word, as a subcategory of pride: “Þe þridde bo‫ ܌‬of prede: is / arrogance” (Gradon 1999). Searching for a counterpart of Orrm’s GI>CF?= it will therefore be necessary to search for both pride/proud and arrogance/arrogant. As an introduction to the story of his life Reuben gives a list of the seven spirits that were given to man at his creation: the spirits of life, sight, hearing, smelling, speech, taste, and begetting; against these are posited the seven spirits of error from Beliar (Satan): “The fifth is the spirit of pride, that one may be boastful and arrogant” (T Reu III.5). Different patriarchs derive arrogance from different roots: Judah claims it derives from what we may call “fast living”: “Beware, therefore, my children, of fornication and the love of money, and hearken to Judah your father. For these things withdraw you from the law of God, And blind the inclination of the soul, And teach arrogance” (T Jud XVIII.2–3); Gad, by contrast, derives it from hatred: “the hater … dispraiseth the truth, he envieth him that prospers, he welcometh evil-speaking, he loveth arrogance, for hatred blindeth his soul; as I also then looked on Joseph” (T Gad III.2–3). Joseph, receiving his

164

Chapter Seven

brothers in Egypt, rejected arrogance in an exemplary manner: “And I exalted not myself among them in arrogance because of my worldly glory, but I was among them as one of the least” (T Jos XVII.8). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
Q?L?FF>‡CH?MM
FOMMN?MM 13 “(to reject) the desire of worldly possessions”. Benjamin stresses the importance of such rejection: “the good man … gazeth not passionately upon corruptible things, nor gathereth together riches through a desire of pleasure” (T Ben VI.1–2). G?NN

Gp‡
Y#
G?N?MM

C
>LCHH=B?MM 14–15 “moderation in food and drink”. Judah warns against the consequences of immoderate drinking, something which caused many problems in his life: “Observe, therefore, my children, the (right) limit in wine; for there are in it four evil spirits – of lust, of hot desire, of profligacy, of filthy lucre” (T Jud XVI.1). Benjamin recommends moderation in eating in somewhat less dramatic terms, but the comment is still there: “the good man … sateth not himself with luxuries” (T Ben VI.1–3). NI
MBCF>?HH
‡?
@L;
E;F>
Y1C‡‡
@OFF
OHHILH?
Qp>? 16–17 “to protect yourself from cold with very plain garments”. Issachar includes elegant clothing among the pleasures and vices that the single-minded man will abstain from: “The single-(minded) man coveteth not gold, He overreacheth not his neighbour, He longeth not after manifold dainties, He delighteth not in varied apparel. He doth not desire to live a long life, But only waiteth for the will of God. And the spirits of deceit have no power against him” (T Iss IV.2–4). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
MQCE?>IG 18 “to reject deceit/guile/lies”. Issachar includes both “guile” and “lies” in the list of deadly sins he never committed in his long life: “I am a hundred and twenty-two years old, and I am not conscious of having committed any sin unto death. Except my wife I have not known any woman. I never committed fornication by the uplifting of my eyes. I drank not wine, to be led astray thereby; I coveted not any desirable thing that was my neighbour’s. Guile arose not in my heart; A lie passed not through my lips. If any man were in distress I joined my sighs with his, And I shared my bread with the poor” (T Iss VII.1–5). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
;FF?
QC==B?=L;@@N?MM 19 “(to reject) all kinds of witchcraft”. Witchcraft is mentioned once in Testaments, when Judah prophecies about the future iniquities of his offspring: “Now I have much grief, my children, because of your lewdness and witchcrafts, and idolatries which ye shall practise against the kingdom, following them that have familiar spirits” (T Jud XXIII.1).

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

165

NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
CFF=
OHH‡pQ 20 “to reject each iniquity/wickedness”. Iniquity and wickedness are major topics in Testaments, either as parts of the life-stories of a number of patriarchs or as parts of general moralizing; only two examples can be given here. Zebulun claims that he never did any iniquity, thus serving as an example: “I am not conscious that I have sinned all my days, save in thought. Nor yet do I remember that I have done any iniquity, except the sin of ignorance which I committed against Joseph; for I covenanted with my brethren not to tell my father what had been done” (T Zeb I.4–5), and Asher exhorts his offspring to flee from wickedness, thus providing a model for Orrm’s @ILLQ?LLJ?HH: “But do not ye, my children, wear two faces like unto them, of goodness and of wickedness; but cleave unto goodness only, for God hath His habitation therein, and men desire it. But from wickedness flee away, destroying the (evil) inclination by your good works” (T Ash III.1–2). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
BCH>?LLpJ?
QCF?MM 21 “(to reject) deceitful tricks/chicanery”. Reuben, in his list of the spirits of error, includes chicanery: “The fourth is the spirit of obsequiousness and chicanery,9 that through officious attention one may be fair in seeming” (T Reu III.4). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
B?N? 22 “(to reject) hatred”. Gad’s story is very much about how he hated Joseph for telling their father about a lamb that Gad had slaughtered and eaten. Gad sums up his warnings to his listeners thus: “Hatred, therefore, is evil, … it filleth the heart with evils and devilish poison. These things, therefore, I say to you from experience, my children, that ye may drive forth hatred, which is of the devil, and cleave to the love of God. Righteousness casteth out hatred, humility destroyeth envy” (T Gad V.1–3). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
HC‡ 22 “(to reject) envy”. Simeon’s tale is one of envy of Joseph, to the extent that he wishes to destroy him. Simeon sums up his warnings against envy thus: “And now, my children, hearken unto me and beware of the spirit of deceit and envy. For envy ruleth over the whole mind of a man, and suffereth him neither to eat nor to drink, nor to do any good thing. But it ever suggesteth (to him) to destroy him that he envieth; and so long as he that is envied flourisheth, he that envieth fadeth away. Two years therefore I afflicted my soul with fasting in the fear of the Lord, and I learnt that deliverance from envy cometh by the fear of God” (T Sim III.1–4). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
=BpMN 23 “(to reject) strife”. Strife (or more precisely, striving) is touched upon briefly by Gad while he exhorts his 9

In Sinker’s translation this is rendered as “the spirit of fawning and trickery”.

166

Chapter Seven

offspring to maintain brotherly love: “And now, my children, I exhort you, love ye each one his brother, and put away hatred from your hearts, love one another in deed, and in word, and in the inclination of the soul. For in the presence of my father I spake peaceably to Joseph; and when I had gone out, the spirit of hatred darkened my mind, and stirred up my soul to slay him. Love ye, therefore, one another from the heart; and if a man sin against thee, cast forth the poison of hate and speak peaceably to him, and in thy soul hold not guile; and if he confess and repent, forgive him. But if he deny it, do not get into a passion with him,10 lest catching the poison from thee he take to swearing and so thou sin doubly” (T Gad VI.1–4). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
L;GG=OHH>H?MM? 23 “(to reject) anger”. Anger was the besetting sin of Dan, and made him wish to slay Joseph. On his deathbed he summarizes what he learnt from this and teaches his offspring the following lesson: “And now, my children, behold I am dying, and I tell you of a truth, that unless ye keep yourselves from the spirit of lying and of anger, and love truth and longsuffering, ye shall perish” (T Dan II.1). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
LIMCHH 24 “(to reject) boasting/pride”. The noun rosing is glossed in MED as both “pride” and “boasting”, i.e. as denoting both a psychological state and its verbal expression. Its nearest counterpart in Testaments is in Judah’s warning against pride in one’s own capability: “And walk not after your lusts, nor in the imaginations of your thoughts in haughtiness of heart; and glory not in the deeds and strength of your youth, for this also is evil in the eyes of the Lord” (T Jud XIII.2). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
C>?FF
?FFJ 24 “(to reject) vainglory”. Vainglory is mentioned once by Dan as one of the reasons for his wish to destroy Joseph: “I confess, therefore, this day to you, my children, that in my heart I resolved on the death of Joseph my brother, the true and good man. And I rejoiced that he was sold, because his father loved him more than us. For the spirit of jealousy and vainglory said to me: Thou thyself also art his son” (T Dan I.4–6). NI
@ILLQ?LLJ?HH
MCHH@OFF
@IFFBMOGGH?MM? 25 “(to reject) sinful courtship”. The adjective @IFFBMOGG occurs once in the extant parts of MS Junius 1: “
FTEFII@
>K
?FOO¶
JFIAB
?¢K
Y
CLIIEPRJJ
QLT>OOA
L¶BOO” (H7748–49) “And we ought to be gentle and kind to each other”. MED glosses the adjective as “compliant, agreeable” (s.v. follhsumm) and derives it from “folwen sense 4 obey”. In its context of sins and vices, however, the noun @IFFBMOGGH?MM? must have a different sense. I assume it is derived from the same verb, OE folgian, ME folwen, but from sense 6(d) in MED, “to consort with (a woman)”, “to have intercourse with”. I 10

In Sinker’s translation this is rendered as “do not strive with him”.

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

167

have glossed MCHH@OFF
@IFFBMOGGH?MM? as “sinful courtship” in order to suggest that the expression was a euphemism on Orrm’s part. In the Modern English translations of Testaments the corresponding expression is “fornication”. Fornication is a central concept in Testaments, with several of the patriarchs exhorting their offspring not to do what they have done, but to abstain from fornication, e.g. Reuben: “Flee, therefore, fornication, my children” (T Reu V.5), Simeon: “Beware, therefore, of fornication, For fornication is mother of all evils, Separating from God, and bringing near to Beliar” (T Sim V.3), and Judah: “Beware, therefore, my children, of fornication, and the love of money, and hearken to Judah your father. For these things withdraw you from the law of God, And blind the inclination of the soul, And teach arrogance, And suffer not a man to have compassion upon his neighbour’ (T Jud XVIII.2–3). Issachar, once again, has led a blameless life and can serve as an example: “I never committed fornication by the uplifting of my eyes” (T Iss VII.2). NI
MJp=B?HH
C@?FF
BCH>?HH
IHH 26 “to speak evil behind someone’s back”. This finds its counterpart in Testaments in the “evil-speaking” that Gad mentions as one of the consequences of hatred: “Whatsoever a man doeth the hater abominates him: and though a man worketh the law of the Lord, he praiseth him not; though a man feareth the Lord, and taketh pleasure in that which is righteous, he loveth him not. He dispraiseth the truth, he envieth him that prospers, he welcometh evil-speaking, he loveth arrogance, for hatred blindeth his soul; as I also then looked on Joseph” (T Gad III.2–3). NI
QL??HH 27 “to slander”, NI
QL;?HH
‡?
YpH
‡CH?
F??MQ?H?MM 33–34 “to conduct yourself justly towards your hirelings”. The patriarchs, admittedly, do not discuss the treatment of servants specifically, but Dan testifies to the importance of “just dealing”: “I have proved in my heart, and in my whole life, that truth with just dealing is good and well pleasing to God” (T Dan I.3). This is an idea that Orrm comes back to later in Homily IX, where he provides a series of admonitions to different categories of people, including how servants should be treated by their masters (the dual second person pronouns are due to Orrm addressing a married couple in this passage): (3)



RKK@
?FOO¶
RKKHBOO
IBBJBKK



0FEEQ
I>BIFHB
IBABKK
-T>
¶>QQ
FQQ
KLEEQ
>QQ
ELCBIŸP



,B
KBAB
¶BJ
QL
PTFKKHBKK
LOO
RKK@
?FOO¶
TFQBKK
PTF¶B
TBI




FKKT>OOAIFHB
QOLTTBKK
m>QQ
KFPP
?FQTBKBKK
RKK@

EBJJ



,>K
PEŸA
F
J>KKBPP
HFKAB

Q>QQ
QB
JRBKK
DLAB
?¢K



FCLOBKK
DLABPP
BEKB

Q>QQ
FQQ
JRBKK
TO>¶¶BKK
DLAA



FCC
FQQ
EBJJ
LCBOO?BABKK

E¢OB
IBB
?FOO¶
EBJJ
?¢K



0ŸAF
¶>KK
FQQ
FPP
>AAIBAA
LOO
¶>QQ
FPP
DLABPP
?LABTLOA



*L@
FCC
¶R
TFIIQ
FQQ
CLIIBKK
m>QQ
E¢OB
A>TE>JJIFHB
PTFKK@



¢
A>TE>JJIFHB
EBJJ
LIABKK
(H6222–39)

“And you should your servants very justly manage so that you do not excessively force them to toil, for you ought to know well and believe sincerely that there is between you and them no difference as human beings, and that they may be good people before the eyes of God, and that you may anger God if you give them excessive work. And their wages should be for them ready when they are due, for it is commanded by God –make sure that you follow it– that their daily toil should be paid for daily”.

Orrm here refers to Leviticus 19. 13b, “non morabitur opus mercennarii apud te usque mane” (Vu), “The wages of him that hath been hired by thee shall not abide with thee until the morning” (Douay11

The gloss “worldly authority” is used in order to capture the vagueness of Orrm’s tuness laferrd, which could mean anything from “master of the household” to “lord of the manor”.

170

Chapter Seven

Rheims), or to Deuteronomy 24. 14–15, “14non negabis mercedem indigentis et pauperis fratris tui sive advenae qui tecum moratur in terra et intra portas tuas est 15sed eadem die reddes ei pretium laboris sui ante solis occasum quia pauper est et ex eo sustentat animam suam ne clamet contra te ad Dominum et reputetur tibi in peccatum” (Vu), “14Thou shalt not refuse the hire of the needy, and the poor, whether he be thy brother, or a stranger that dwelleth with thee in the land, and is within thy gates: 15But thou shalt pay him the price of his labour the same day, before the going down of the sun, because he is poor, and with it maintaineth his life: lest he cry against thee to the Lord, and it be reputed to thee for a sin” (DouayRheims). To Orrm’s mind, Dan’s injunction about “just dealings” must no doubt have appeared as including also the just dealings to hirelings enjoined in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. ;
NI
@CFFMNH?HH
QL?==B?
G?HH 35 “always assist poor men”. Showing mercy to the poor is exemplified by Issachar: “If any man were in distress I joined my sighs with his, And I shared my bread with the poor” (T Iss VII.5), and is held up to praise by Benjamin, who says about the good man, “on the poor man he hath mercy; on the weak he hath compassion” (T Ben IV.4). This concludes the presentation of the correspondences between Orrm’s list of vices and virtues and the representation of these in the text of Testaments, as represented primarily by R. H. Charles’s English translation. To my mind it seems extremely unlikely that Orrm could have ascribed all these vices and virtues to the patriarchs unless he had access to a version of Testaments.

6. A possible route of transmission Since Orrm finished working with his text and handed it over to his assistant, traditionally referred to as “Hand C”, to have the Latin incipits inserted no later than c. 118012, it is clear that he cannot have had access to Grosseteste’s Latin translation of Testaments. How could Orrm possibly have come across a copy of Testaments? As I demonstrated in Johannesson (2007a, b), Orrm’s exegesis of gospel passages from John tend to be based on Commentarius In Evangelium Iohannis (Jeauneau 1972) by the Irishman Johannes Scotus Eriugena (fl. c. 845–c. 870; Marenbon 2004). Eriugena was active at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald and has been thought to have taught at the palace school at Laon in Picardy. Marendon expresses some 12

Cf. footnote 2 above.

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

171

doubts as to the existence of a palace school at Laon; be that as it may, when Anselm of Laon taught in Laon between 1080 and 1117 (when he died), he had access to the only known manuscript of Eriugena’s commentary on John, which he used for producing his volume of the Glossa Ordinaria on the gospel of John (see Johannesson 2007a; Andrée 2005, 20–21). Eriugena translated a number of works from Greek to Latin; if a Greek manuscript of Testaments somehow reached him, he may have produced a Latin translation nearly four centuries before Grosseteste, the main difference being that Eriugena’s hypothetical translation, unlike Grosseteste’s, never had any circulation. The Basingstoke / Grosseteste manuscript has been dated to the end of the tenth century, but “the archetype of the textual tradition known to us must go back beyond the ninth century” (M. de Jonge 1993, 8); if so, it must have been physically possible for a copy of that archetype to have been made early enough in the ninth century to have reached Eriugena while he was still active. Orrm clearly had access to Eriugena’s commentary on John, which apparently did not circulate, either: the only extant copy, with what seem to be Eriugena’s own corrections, never seems to have left Laon 13 (Jeauneau 1972). In Johannesson (2007b) I speculated over the possibility that one or more copies of Eriugena’s commentary were produced at Laon when Anselm used it as input to his Glossa project. After Anselm’s death in 1117, a scribe who had been working with him on the Glossa may have left Laon for the abbey of Arrouaise, taking one of the Eriugena copies with him. When, in 1138, a small company left Arrouaise to cross to England and found Bourne Abbey at the invitation of Baldwin Fitzgilbert (Bourne Abbey Church n.d.); the Eriugena copy would have been taken along to form part of the new abbey library, thus being available to Orrm a couple of decades later. To be viable after the discovery of the link between Testaments and Orrmulum, that story would now have to include the bringing of a second Eriugena copy from Laon to Bourne. An alternative hypothesis would have Orrm himself spend some time in northern France in his youth, visiting Laon where he could study Eriugena’s commentary on John at first hand, and where Eriugena’s putative translation of Testaments might also have been available for study. The fact that he uses scriptural names in French rather than Latin forms may mean no more than that he was active in a francophone milieu at Bourne Abbey, but at the same time it

13

The manuscript is now Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 81.

172

Chapter Seven

does not preclude the possibility of a few years of study in northern France.

7. Conclusion The central part of this article has been the analysis of the correspondences between the items in Orrm’s list of vices and virtues attributable to the patriarchs (as transcribed by van Vliet) and the statements made by individual Patriarchs in Testaments. These correspondences are so allembracing that it is hard to believe that Orrm could have produced such a list without access to a pre-Grosseteste Latin version of Testaments. But the recognition of Orrm’s dependence on Testaments leads inevitably to the question of how he could have access to that text sixty years or more before Grosseteste produced his translation.14 The links of Orrm and of Bourne Abbey to northern France are indisputable: the abbey was founded from Arrouaise in 1138, and Orrm demonstrably uses for his exegesis a gospel commentary on John by Eriugena, the only extant copy of which seems to have been kept in Laon at least since the early twelfth century, when Anselm of Laon used it for his work on the Glossa Ordinaria. Since Eriugena was engaged in the translation of Greek works into Latin around the middle of the ninth century, it remains a possibility that he may have translated a copy of Testaments as well, and in whatever way Eriugena’s gospel commentary became available to Orrm, that putative translation may also have become available to him. And if Eriugena’s gospel commentary could reach Orrm, so could an Eriugena version of Testaments. We may never be able to determine the precise route the text of Testaments followed on its way to being used as a source text for Orrmulum, but on the basis of the evidence of van Vliet’s transcription of Orrm’s list of the vices and virtues of the Patriarchs it seems clear that Testaments entered western Europe and was translated into Latin not once, but twice: once prior to the twelfth century, as far as we can tell leaving no trace apart from Orrm’s list, and a second time through the intervention of John of Basingstoke and Robert Grosseteste, a series of events recorded by Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora (Luard 1880, 284–85).

14

Parkes’s suggested dating of Orrmulum prior to 1180 was published in 1983 and his suggestion has not been questioned by either palaeographers or linguists since then; the date of Grosseteste’s translation is long-established: the only possible conclusion is that Orrmulum predates that translation by sixty years or more.

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

173

References Primary sources Biblia Sacra Vulgata. Online at www.biblegateway.com. (Vu). Charles, R. H., ed. 1908. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Translated from the Editor’s Greek Text, and edited, with introduction, notes and indices, by R. H. Charles, D.D., D.Litt. London: Adam & Charles Black. Online at https://archive.org/stream/testamentsoftwel08char#page/182/mode/2up. (Testaments). The Douay-Rheims Bible. Online at www.drbo.org. (Douay-Rheims). Gradon, Pamela, ed. 1999. Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt: or, Remorse of conscience: Richard Morris’s transcription now newly collated with the unique manuscript British Museum MS. Arundel 57, volume 1, text. Online at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Ayenbite/1:21?rgn=div1;view=fulltext, accessed 28 February 2016. Hurst, D., ed. 1960. Bedae Venerabilis Opera. Pars II. Opera Exegetica. 3. In Lucae Evangelium Expositio. In Marci Evangelium Expositio. Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina CXX. Turnhout: Brepols. Jeauneau, Édouard, ed. 1972. Jean Scot: Commentaire sur l’évangile de Jean. Sources Crétienne 180. Paris: Cerf. Knight, Kevin, ed. 2009. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Translated by Robert Sinker. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0801.htm. London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783. (Van Vliet’s notebook). Luard, Henry Richards, ed. 1880. Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora. Vol. V. A. D. 1248 to A. D. 1259. London: Longman. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1. (Orrmulum). Patrologia Latina. The full text database. http://pld.chadwyck.co.uk/home. Paulus, Beda, ed. 1984. Pascasius Radbertus, Expositio in Matheo libri XII. Instrumenta lexicologica Latina. Series A, Formae, Fasc. 24. Turnhout: Brepols.

174

Chapter Seven

Secondary sources Alsbury, Colin. 2008. “Aylesbury, Sir Thomas, baronet (1579/80–1658)”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/929, accessed 27 February 2016. Andrée, Alexander, ed. 2005. Gilbertus Universalis. Glossa Ordinaria In Lamentationes Ieremie Prophete. Prothemata et Liber I. A Critical Edition with an Introduction and a Translation. Studia Latina Stockholmiensia 52. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Bourne Abbey Church. n.d. “Our History”. Online at http://www.bourneabbey.org.uk/history/4584284083, accessed 27 February 2016. Burchfield, Robert W. 1961. “Ormulum: Words Copied by Jan van Vliet from Parts Now Lost”. In English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, edited by Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn, 94–111. London: Allen & Unwin. De Jonge, Henk Jan. 1975. “La bibliothèque de Michel Choniatès et la tradition occidentale des Testaments des XII Patriarches”. Dutch Review of Church History 53 (2): 171–180. De Jonge, Marinus. 1993. “The Transmission of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs by Christians”. Vigiliae Christianae 47 (1): 1–28. Dekker, Kees. 1999. The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries. Leiden: Brill. Johannesson, Nils-Lennart. 2007a. “Orm’s relationship to his Latin sources”. In Studies in Middle English Forms and Meanings, edited by Gabriella Mazzon, 133–43. Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 19. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. —. 2007b. “Icc hafe don swa summ þu badd: An Anatomy of the Preface to the Ormulum”. In SELIM: Journal of the Spanish Society for Mediaeval English Language and Literature 14: 107–40. Online at http://www.unioviedo.es/SELIM/publicaciones/publicaciones/SELIM1 4.pdf. Ker, N. R. 1940. “Unpublished Parts of the Ormulum Printed from MS. Lambeth 783”. Medium Ævum 9: 1–22. van Kuyk, Johannes. 1914. ”MAESTERTIUS (Jacobus)”. In Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek. Deel 3 [New Dutch Biographical Dictionary. Part 3], edited by P. C. Molhuysen and P. J. Blok, 809–11. Leiden: A. P. Seithoff. Online at http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/molh003nieu03_01/molh003nieu03_01_127 8.php, accessed 28 February 2016.

Orrmulum and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

175

Marenbon, John. 2004. “John Scottus (fl. c.845–c.870)”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24940, accessed 28 February 2016. McEvoy, James. 2004. “Basingstoke, John of (d. 1252)”. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online at http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezp.sub.su.se/view/article/1617, accessed 27 February 2016. The Middle English Dictionary. 2001. Online at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. “The Orrmulum Project”. 2013–17. Online at www.orrmulum.net. Parkes, M. B. 1983. “On the Presumed Date and Possible Origin of the Manuscript of the ‘Ormulum’: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 1”. In Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, edited by E. G. Stanley and D. Gray, 115–27. Cambridge: Brewer. Scott, Samuel Parsons. 1932. The Civil Law. Vol. 5. Cincinnati: The Central Trust Company. Online at http://droitromain.upmf-grenoble.fr/ Anglica/digest_Scott.htm, accessed 27 February 2016. “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs”. 2012. Encyclopædia Britannica. Online at http://global.britannica.com/topic/Testaments-of-the-TwelvePatriarchs., accessed 29 February 2016. (‘Testaments’).

CHAPTER EIGHT A LITERARY HISTORY OF WORMS IN EARLY MEDIEVAL ENGLAND HARUKO MOMMA NOTRE DAME INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

Introduction: A Game of Survival There is no doubt that the turmoil following the Norman Conquest had a profound impact on the state of the English vernacular as well as literature written in that language. And there is no doubt also that both English language and literature survived and eventually came to prosper in the land. The question, then, is how. While Early Middle English has been a topic of interest for linguistic scholars for more than a century, thanks largely to that marvelous field of study known as the history of English language, Early Middle English literature remained off the radar of many scholars for much of the last century. Fortunately, recent years have seen the revival of interests in the subject, a revival that we owe to the publication of a good number of books and articles and also to the operation of various projects undertaken by groups of scholars.1 In this essay, I will conduct a case study on the vernacular literature of postConquest England in order to argue that at least one of the beginnings of the literary renewal in this period was what might be called creative 1

For example, Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/index.html) [accessed 20 March 2017]; the Archive of Early Middle English (http://scottkleinman.net/aeme-dev/) [accessed 20 March 2017]; see also French of England Project (https://frenchofengland.ace.fordham.edu) [accessed 20 March 2017]. As for publications, see, for example, Elaine M. Treharne, Living through Conquest: the Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

178

Chapter Eight

recycling: that is, through re-assembling and re-formatting materials from the cultural depository of the previous era. When we hear such a script, we may think of “bricolage,” an anthropological concept first proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and since applied to various other fields of study.2 But the image I would like to provoke here is one that is popular in the genre of science fiction—a scene from, say, a post-apocalyptic world where the survivors salvage bits and pieces of material found in the ruins of the lost civilization in order to build a new community, which simultaneously exhibits disjunctive continuity and archaic innovation.3 The type of writing I hope to discuss in this essay concerns the theme of soul and body, and especially the use of a trope of ravenous worms in conjunction with the theme. The original premise of the theme of soul and body is that the postmortem soul is allowed to return to this world at a certain interval to speak to its former partner now lying in the grave.4 If the soul has been condemned, it will berate the body for its wanton conduct while still on earth. In the Old English poem known as Soul and Body II, recorded in the Exeter Book, the condemned soul calls the body wyrma gifl (‘food for worms’, 22b). Throughout the soul’s longwinded, vituperative address, the body lies passive and mute.5 Once this virtual monologue is over, the narrator takes the floor again and explains the reason for the body’s silence: Bið seo tunge totogen on tyn healfe hungrum to hroþor. Forþon heo ne mæg horsclice wordum wrixlan wið þone wergan gæst. (Soul and Body II, ll. 108-10)6 2

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), esp. 17–33; see also Christopher Johnson, “Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept,” Paragraph 35 (2012): 355–72, and MarieHélène Huet, “Art, Bricolage, and Engineering at the End of the World,” Science Fiction Studies 41 (2014): 642–49. 3 What probably comes to our mind first is the desert world of Jakku in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, dir. by J. J. Abrams (Walt Disney Studios, 2015); one of the cinematic precursors may be Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind [Kaze no Tani no Naushika], dir. by Hayao Miyazaki (Topcraft, 1984). 4 On the historical background of the theme of soul and body, see Antonette DiPaolo Healey, ed., The Old English Vision of St. Paul (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1978), 42–48. See further Louise Dudley, The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1911). 5 For the few known exceptions, see Antonette diPaolo Healey, “The Vision of St. Paul” (Ph.D. Dissertation, 1973), 71–72, note 20. 6 The text is taken from George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds.,

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

179

[The tongue is torn into ten pieces as pleasure for the hungry (worms). Therefore, it cannot exchange witty words with the wretched soul.]

A similar poem, known as Soul and Body I, occurs in the Vercelli Book. Unlike its counterpart in the Exeter Book, this poem concludes with a blessed soul’s caring address to the body: Wine leofesta, þeah ðe wyrmas gyt gifre gretaþ, nu is þin gast cumen, fægere gefrætewod, of mines fæder rice, arum bewunden. (Soul and Body I, 135-8a)7 [Dearest friend, even though greedy worms yet assault you, your soul has now come, adorned beautifully, from my Father’s kingdom surrounded with honor. ]

Even in this happy scenario, worms are still the unavoidable companion of the body. And the soul undertakes to cheer up the (equally mute) body by contrasting the body’s miserable physicality with its own blessed state in heaven. In the rest of this essay, I will use the trope of ravenous worms to conduct a case study, so that we may observe how post-Conquest vernacular writers, to quote Levi-Strauss, “make do with ‘whatever is at hand’” and “renew or enrich the stock [. . .] to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.”8 The trope of ravenous worms feasting on human flesh has a long literary life that most likely goes back to the Pre-Christian period. As an accoutrement to the theme of soul and body, this rather repulsive image may be traced to Latin literature of late antiquity, and, perhaps more specifically, to the so-called Nonantola version, which contains a brief reference to worms: the soul of a condemned man, as it is taken away to hell by a band of demons, calls the body contemptuously “food for worms and dust’s decay” (esca vermium et putredo pulveris).9 There are two extant Old English prose translations of The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). All translations in this essay are my own unless otherwise noted. 7 The text is taken from George Philip Krapp, ed., The Vercelli Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932). 8 Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, 17. 9 Michael J. B. Allen and Daniel G. Calder, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), 42. Théodor Batiouchkof, “Le Débat de l’ame et du corps,” Romania 20 (1891): 1–55, 513–78, at 577. See also Douglas

180

Chapter Eight

the Nonantola version. In one version, edited by Benjamin Thorpe, the soul says to the body: eala þu earma, nu þu byst geworðen þæt fuleste hreaw and wyrma mete. Þu rest þe nu medmicle tid on eorðan, and ic mid sare and geomurunge to helle sceal beon læded.10 [Alas, you wretch! You have now become the foulest corpse and food for worms. You are resting in the ground for a little while, but I must be led to hell with sorrow and sadness.]

The expression “food for worms” and its variations also occur in other Old English texts, both verse and prose. For instance, Vercelli Homily IV not only uses phrases like wyrma mete and wyrma gifel (both signifying ‘food for worms’) but also augments the horror of the body’s decay by elaborating on its process: “the dead flesh” (ðæt deade flæsc) “will sweat very loathsome sweat, and ugly drops will fall down from it” (swæt swiðe laðlicum swate, ond him feallað of unfægere dropan).11 As far as literary adaptability is concerned, however, the trope of ravenous worms seems to have been a particularly good “match” for vernacular poetry, for we find these creatures in, for instance, the Soul and Body poems of the Vercelli Book and the Exeter Book—two of the only four extant Old English poetic codices. In these texts, the entombed body is repeatedly referred to as wyrma gyfl (‘food for worms’, Soul and Body I, 22b), wyrmum to wiste (‘as a feast for worms’, Soul and Body II, 117a), and the like. The motif seems to have been well known among Old English poets and their audience, for Cynewulf, whose works are also recorded in the Vercelli Book and the Exeter Book, has only to mention the formulaic expression wyrme to hroþor (‘as food for a worm’, Juliana, 416b) or its variation to conjure up the image of a soul journeying to the Moffat, ed. and trans., The Old English “Soul and Body” (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Wolfeboro, NH: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 28–35; and Louise Dudley, The Egyptian Elements in the Legend of the Body and Soul (Baltimore: J. H. Furst Company, 1911), esp. 18–24, 104–10. 10 Benjamin Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, 2 vols. (London: Public Records, 1840), 2: 394–401 at 398; the punctuation has been modified here. The other version is edited by Arthur Napier, Wulfstan: Sammlung der ihm zugeschribenen Homilien nebst Untersuchungen über ihre Echtheit, vol. 1 Text und Varianten (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1883), 134–43 (Napier XXIX); the passage corresponding with the excerpt from Thorpe’s edition made above occurs on 140–41 of the edition. 11 D. G. Scragg, ed., The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 98 and 100–01.

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

181

otherworld after its separation from the body. This Anglo-Saxon tradition of literary worms seems to have survived the Norman Conquest, for two of the relatively small number of newly composed Early Middle English poems from this period also deal with the trope as part of a variation on the theme of soul and body: namely, The Grave, in which the body is the lonely occupant of a doorless house in the ground; and The Soul’s Address to the Body from the Worcester Fragments, in which worms have a grand tour of the abdomen (wombe), moving from the liver (lifre) to the lungs (lihte) to the stomach (mawe) to the spleen (milte).12 Both of these post-Conquest poems are devotional in register, but, like the Old English Soul and Body poems, they still exhibit some homiletic characteristics, most likely because of the origin of the theme itself. The trope of ravenous worms is also found in other types of English texts produced in the post-Conquest period. The writers of such texts often give new expressions and new applications for ravenous worms, implying that the trope was still part of the living literary tradition, thus capable of multiplying, migrating, and mutating. In the rest of this essay, I will focus on prose homilies that use the trope of ravenous worms in conjunction with the theme of soul and body. In demonstrating how Early Middle English writers turned to pre-Conquest materials as building blocks in a creative way, I will pay special attention to the connection between this new method of literary production and the continuation of the literary tradition from the Anglo-Saxon period. For this purpose, I will analyze a certain vernacular homily recorded in a manuscript from the second half of the eleventh century and used for more than a century afterwards.13

The Hatton Worm Homily and Vercelli IX The homily in question is probably best known from P. R. Robinson’s “Self-contained Units in Composite Manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Period,” in which it is given limelight as one of the texts circulated as an independent “booklet.” According to Robinson, this homily was originally written in a quire as a sole text with its end portion left blank. It was 12 Christopher A. Jones, ed. and trans., Old English Shorter Poems, volume 1, Religious and Didactic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 214–5 (C46–9). 13 See, for example, Jonathan Wilcox, “The Use of Ælfric’s Homilies: MSS Oxford, Bodlean Library, Junius 85 and 86 in the Field,” in A Companion to Ælfric, ed., by Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 345–68, at 353.

182

Chapter Eight

apparently circulated independently, at times being “folded across the middle” to allow for an easy transportation.14 The homily eventually found its permanent abode in a composite manuscript, known as Hatton 115, where it now occupies a middle section, preceded by texts written in the second half of the eleventh century, and followed by texts from the twelfth century.15 In this essay, I will refer to this homily—largely for the lack of a better name—as the Hatton worm homily, because of its effective use of the trope of ravenous worms. Just as Hatton 115 is a composite manuscript, the Hatton worm homily is itself a composite text. Its base text has a common origin with the ninth homily in the Vercelli Book.16 According to Scragg, the original form of this homily is “best represented” by the Vercelli version, “despite many corruptions and the loss of a leaf.” The theme of the homily is stated at the beginning of Vercelli IX: “we should be mindful of our souls’ need, and also of our last day and the separation of our souls when they are [each] led out from the body” (we sien gemyndige ymb ure sawle þearfe, 7 eac swa ures þæs nehstan dæges 7 þære tosceadednesse ure sawle þonne hio of ðam lichoman lædde bion). While the homily further underlines the importance of thinking about the “coming of that horrifying day” (þæs egesfullican dæges tocyme), the rest of the text pays greater attention to the stretch of time from here to eternity, and especially the experience of the soul between the time of its separation from the body and its reunification with the body at the end of time.17 The Hatton version of this homily has, to quote Scragg, retained “much of the original central part of the homily,” and yet it offers “a new beginning and end,” with “extra material in the middle.” For these and other reasons, some of which will be discussed later in this essay, the 14

P. R. Robinson, “Self-contained Units in Composite Manuscripts of the AngloSaxon Period,” Anglo-Saxon England 7 (1978): 231–38, at 231. 15 See N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 399–403: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Hatton 115 (no. 332), fols. 140–47 (article 34). Ker deduces the use of the quire as an independent unit from the following evidence: “2 out of 7 wormholes on f. 139 do not reappear on f. 140”; furthermore, “the outer pages of the quire,” that is, folios 140 and 147, “show signs of exposure” (ibid., 399). Ker further points out that compared to texts in the earlier part of the manuscript, the homily recorded in this quire “is in a hand of quite different and perhaps rather earlier type” (ibid., 403). 16 The Hatton worm homily is edited in Scragg’s Vercelli Homilies, as MS. L, side by side with Vercelli IX (159–90). In the Dictionary of Old English, the text is catalogued as HomU 15.1 (B3.4.15.1); http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/#listoftexts [accessed, March 23, 2017]. 17 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 158 (Vercelli IX, ll. 1–5).

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

183

Hatton version is considered “overall a less reliable representation of the original.” In the new introduction, the Hatton homilist emphasizes the importance of righteous living and atonement of sins. And it is in this context that “he adds lists of eight capital sins and seven torments of hell.”18 I believe that the Hatton homily’s new introduction effectively prepares the audience for the subsequent section (which is common to both this version and the Vercelli version), as it provides a series of lists to trace the trajectory of the soul’s journey. To take the list of deaths as an example, there are three of them to be experienced by the soul of a condemned person: Ĉonne syndon þreo deaþa leornode on bocum: an þara deaþa bið þæt mon swelte on his synnum; ðonne bið oðer deaþ þæs lichoman 7 þære saule gedal; ðonne bið se ðridda deaþ þæt he bið on helle cwylmed, þær ne mæg nænig sawl hire waldend herian for þon sare þe hire onsiteð.19 [There are, then, three deaths to be read in books: one of those deaths is that a person should perish in his sins; then the second is the death of the body and the separation of the soul; then the third death is that he is tormented in hell, where no soul can praise its lord because of the sorrow that oppresses it.]

This tripartite structure is duplicated when the homilist speaks of life for the righteous men: the first life is according to the flesh; and the second according to God’s will; and the righteous will have a third life in the world to come, together with all other blessed ones.20 At this point, the Vercelli version and the Hatton version of the poem begin to differ once again. Generally speaking, the Hatton homily shows a tendency to condense the material, sometimes even at the expense of rhetorical effects. Where, for example, Vercelli IX gives an eloquent personification of death, the Hatton homily is far more selective in its treatment of the subject.21 Likewise, when Vercelli IX provides an elaborate list of “five likenesses of hell,” the Hatton homily goes through it relatively quickly, progressing from likenesses experienced in this world, such as an old age with falling hair and yellowing teeth, to the 18

Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 152–53. Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 163 [my emphasis] (Hatton homily, ll. 34–38). The corresponding section of Vercelli IX is very similar to this passage (162, ll. 32– 37). 20 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 163 (Hatton version, ll. 38–41). Its counterpart in Vercelli IX is similar but somewhat less clear (ibid., 162, ll. 37–40). 21 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 162–65 (esp. Vercelli IX, ll. 42–52 and the Hatton homily, ll. 43–46) 19

184

Chapter Eight

torment to be experienced in the hereafter.22 There is, however, one likeness of hell that the Hatton homily does not condense but gives virtually in full. This is the fourth likeness, “named the grave” (byrgen genemned): þæs huses hrof is genyþrod for þon hit him siteþ onufan on þæm breostum, and his gestreona þæt wyrreste þæt bið þonne hine mon besiweð on anum hrægle. Siþðan hine mon gebringæþ æt ham, hafaþ him þonne syþðan þreo gebeddan, þæt bið greot and molde and wyrmas.23 [The roof of the house is kept so low that it sits on his breast, and (he is given) the worst of his possessions, when people fit him in a single shroud. Once he is brought to his home, then three bedfellows will keep his company: that is, dirt, dust, and worms.]

The description of the grave in this homily anticipates the Early Middle English poem The Grave, not only because of its comparison of the grave to a house but also because of its reference to worms as the body’s cruel companions in the low and unpleasant abode of the body: Ladlic is þet eorð-hus and grim inne to wunien. Ðer þu scealt wunien and wurmes þe todeleð. (The Grave, ll. 15-16)24 [Horrible is the house of earth, and gruesome to stay in. There you must stay, and worms will dismember you.]

The Creativity of the Hatton Worm Homily There is no doubt that the Hatton version of the homily emphasizes the separation of soul and body and their subsequent fate. The Hatton homilist usually carries it out by either shortening or condensing other parts of the exemplar. But there are a few places where he provides material not found in either Vercelli IX or any other known witness of the homily. For instance, in a section that gives a list of various separations, the Vercelli version identifies one “from all his friends” (wið eallum his freondum) as

22

Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 166–71 (Vercelli IX, ll. 84–113 and the Hatton homily, ll. 67–88). 23 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 169 (Hatton homily, ll. 79–84). The parenthetical portion in the translation has been supplied from the Vercelli version, since this part of the Hatton version is somewhat defective (168, Vercelli IX, ll. 103–04). 24 The Middle English text has been taken from Jones, Old English Shorter Poems, 230.

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

185

“the first separation” (þæt ærest[e] gedal).25 In contrast, the Hatton version begins the section with a sizable passage that has no counterpart in any other extant version of the homily, and which identifies the soul’s departure from the body as the first separation: Þonne eal monna cyn ne mæg wordum asæcgan ne airman þæs deaþes gryre for þæm gedalum þe on him syndon. Þæt æryst gescead bið lichomon and saule. Þæt bið syðþan uncuþ hwæþer seo saul gemeteþ swa god swa yfel, swa hire gegearwod bið and hire geearnung wæs on worulde. For þæm æghwylcum bið sundorstow geteod þa ðe he him selfa ær geworhte.26 [Then the entire race of men can neither express in words nor enumerate the terror of death caused by the separations that are in store for them. The first separation concerns body and soul. It cannot be known in advance whether the soul will face good fortune or ill fortune, for it will be prepared for it according to what it has earned in this world. Thus each individual will be assigned to a separate place that he has earlier obtained for himself.]

It is true that this part of the homily is somewhat unclear in Vercelli IX, and, according to Scragg, “[t]he confusion probably arose early in transmission.”27 These sentences may therefore have been added to the Hatton homily to improve the overall flow of the passage. We may still note that the added portion elaborates on the moment of death and the time immediately following. It is also important to note that judgement is mentioned in conjunction with the first separation, implying that some kind of decree awaits disembodied souls, with a separate place (sundorstow) prepared for each and every one of them. Shortly after this point (line 67), the Hatton homily returns to the source text but omits at least one of the subsequent separations on the list. In so doing the homily foregrounds death’s cruelty, on one hand, in depriving the body of all its ability and, on the other, in sending the guilty soul to hell. Since the list of separations is immediately followed by a list of likenesses of hell, the homily subtly dwells on and expands the space and time that fall between the end of one’s time on earth and the end of time itself. The Hatton homily also provides a passage that has no counterpart in any of the other extant witnesses of this homily. This occurs after the five likenesses of hell and a brief account of the misery of hell. The passage begins thus:

25

Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 164 (Vercelli IX, l. 68). Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 165 (Hatton homily, ll. 56–61). 27 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 186. 26

186

Chapter Eight La hwæt, we us huruþinga ne ondrædaþ þæt we dæghwæmlice geseoþ beforan urum eahum ure nehstan sweltan, and þenne þæm lænan lichoman bið laðlic legerbed gegearwod and in þære caldan foldan lið gebrosnod, and þæt læne lic þær weorþeð to fylnesse and grimmum gylstre and þæm wælslitendan wyrmum to mete. Hwæt, þæt þonne bið sarlic sar and earmlic gedal lices and saule gif se earma innera mon, seo sawul, sceal slidan in þa ecean helle and in þa ecean witu mid ðone awergdan gast Antecrist, and þær mid deofle drohtnaþ habban, in morþre and in mane, in susle and in sare, on wean and on wyrmum, betweonan deaþum and deoflum, in bryne and on biternesse . . . . [Ah, listen, we are not even worried that we see everyday a neighbor of ours die before our eyes, and then a loathsome death-bed is prepared for the mortal body, and it lies in the cold earth all decayed, and there the mortal body will turn to dirt and disgusting muck and food for corpserending worms. Listen, there will be a grievous pain and miserable separation of body and soul if the wretched inner man, the soul, must slide into eternal hell and into eternal torments with the accursed spirit Antichrist, and have society with the devil there, in crime and in sin, in torture and in pain, with woe and with worms, among deaths and devils, in burning fire and in bitterness . . . .]28

This compelling passage is not, however, the Hatton homilist’s own composition. Instead, it comes from another homily, a version of which occurs in Vercelli II: La [hw]æt, we us ne ondrædaþ þæt we dæghwamlice geseoð beforan urum eagum, nu we þam oðrum ne gelyfaþ, ure þa neahstan swelta[n], and þonne þa[m] lichoman bið laðlic leger gegyrwed, in þære cealdan / foldan gebrosnod, and þæt læne lic þær gerotaþ to fulnesse and þam wælslitendan wyrmum to æte. Hwæt, þæt þonne, la, bið sarlic sar and earmlic gedal þæs lichoman and þære sawle, gif þonne se earma innera man, þæt is seo werige sawl . . ., þæt hio þonne æfter þan gedale aslidan scile in þa ecean helle witu, and þær þonne mid dioflum drohtigan in morþre and on mane, in susle and on sare, on wean and on wurmum, betweox deadum and dioflum, and [on] bryne and on biternesse ….29

These two passages are remarkably similar to each other, showing not only how Old English homilies continued to be utilized after the political takeover of the Normans, but also how post-Conquest compilers assembled materials from different sources to produce new texts to fit the need of their audience. 28

Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 173, 175 (Hatton homily, ll. 106–15). Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 58, 60 (Vercelli Homily II, ll. 56–66). A very similar passage occurs in Vercelli XXI, “a compilation . . . unique” to this manuscript (ibid., 347, 360, ll. 207–16).

29

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

187

I may, in fact, even go so far as to argue that the Hatton homilist’s choice of the passage in question is nothing short of a stroke of genius for a number of reasons. First, this added passage fortifies the actual focus of the homily: that is, the trajectory of the soul’s journey as it travels in time from this world to the next. Here, the accursed soul, called “the miserable inner man” (se earma innera mon), is surrounded by “worms” (wyrmum), while the body it has left behind in the grave is also assigned to a similar lot.30 The overall result, as Scragg points out, “is a much more uniform and intelligible piece.”31 Second, Vercelli II is famous for its use of alliteration, and the passage borrowed by the Hatton homilist comes from one of the most alliterative parts of this homily (or, to be more precise, the witness of this homily used by the Hatton homilist). When therefore the Hatton homilist introduces the borrowed passage, it does not cause a stylistic disjunction, since the base text for this homily also uses alliteration in many places. There is, in fact, some evidence that the Hatton homilist has enhanced this stylistic feature. Below I have given another section of the borrowed passage as it appears in the Hatton homily (which I have arranged according to its alliterative phrases): Forlæten we morþor and mæne aþas and oferhygde, æfeste and andan and idelne gylp and arleasnesse and oferfylle and unrihtwisnesse and unnytnesse and unrihthæmed and ærætas and ealogalnesse and oferfylle and unsibbe . . . . [Let us abandon crime and sin swearing and pride, malice and envy and idle boasting and wickedness and gluttony and unrighteousness and vanity and adultery, and eating before proper time and drunkenness and overeating and unpeacefulness . . . .]32 30

In this instance, wyrmum in hell may refer to worms, serpents, and/or dragons, since hell in Old English literature apparently accommodated all of these three creatures expressed by the lexeme: see my “Worm: A Lexical Approach to the Beowulf Manuscript,” in Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R. D. Fulk, ed. Leonard Neidorf, Rafael J. Pascual, and Tom Shippey (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer), 200–14, esp. 211–2. 31 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 153. 32 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 175 (Hatton homily, ll. 126–28).

188

Chapter Eight

The style of this passage, which provides a list of vices to be avoided, reminds us of the homiletic work of Wulfstan, who, not too long after the production of the Vercelli Book, used similar two-stressed alliterative phrases in his homiletic work.33 The borrowing of this alliterative passage by the Hatton homilist implies that the theme of soul and body and alliteration have maintained their close tie. We may notice, however, that the passage uses running or consecutive alliteration, with seven consecutive phrases alliterating on the same sound value (i.e., a group of vowel sounds)—a stylistic feature that is not common in traditional Old English poetry. In fact, it is possible that the last alliterative pair in the passage was added by the Hatton homilist, for it does not appear in the corresponding passage in Vercelli II or Vercelli XXII.34 If so, the homilist was making a conscious effort to expand the consecutive alliteration. It is true that the alliterative phrase thus added seems somewhat awkward: the first alliterating word, oferfylle, has been recycled from one of the preceding pairs, and the second alliterating word is yet another compound starting with un-. Even so, the added phrase is a testimony to not only the continuation of the literary tradition but also the expansion thereof. And third, the borrowed passage, which describes the soul’s separation from the body and its subsequent fate, is better suited for the Hatton homily than for Vercelli II (and hence, presumably, for the original homily). As has been pointed out by Rudolph Willard, the theme of soul and body may be classified into three types, depending on its timeframe: first, at the time of death when the soul is separated from the body; second, in the interim, during which the soul, having received its decree as to happiness or sorrow, is allowed to return to the body at regular intervals; and third, at the Last Judgment, when the soul is reunited with the body.35 The passage in question covers the first scenario and its aftermath, and as such it does not fit quite well in its original context. As Scragg points out, Vercelli II is “an exhortatory homily of the simplest kind, relying,” as it does “for its effect on repetition of the theme of the terror of doomsday and the need for repentance.”36 This Vercelli homily begins with the catastrophe of the last day, when there will be “a flash of lightening” (þæra liga blæstm), a “hot shower” (hata scur), a “fiery rain” (fyrena ren), 33

See my “Old English Poetic Form: Genre, Style, Prosody,” in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 278–308 at 306–07. 34 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 60, 361. 35 Rudolph Willard, “The Address of the Soul to the Body,” PMLA 50 (1935): 957–83, at 957. See also Healey, Old English Vision of St. Paul, 45–48. 36 Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 50.

A Literary History of Worms in Early Medieval England

189

and “burning ground” (byrnende grund). It is only after describing this eschatological scene filled with extreme heat and surging fire that Vercelli II introduces the motif of soul and body. But this particular variation does not belong to the moment of the Last Judgement but, rather, as we have seen, a period immediately following the separation of soul and body: and þonne þa[m] lichoman bið laðlic leger gegyrwed, in þære cealdan foldan gebrosnad, and þæt læne lic þær gerotaþ to fulnesse and þæm wælslitendan wyrmum to æte. [and then an unpleasant bed will be prepared for the body, (it will lie) in cold earth all decayed, and the mortal body will rot away to grow foul and to become food for corpse-rending worms.]37

In placing this soul and body passage immediately after the section dealing with the Last Judgment, Vercelli II disrupts the temporal flow: having read the passage on the conflagration of doomsday, the reader may find a bed prepared for the body in the cold earth to be almost a fine and cozy place. In contrast, the Hatton homily places this borrowed passage before sections on the torments of hell, thus creating a smoother flow. The Hatton homily ends with a brief conclusion, possibly written by the homilist himself, exhorting readers to avoid sin and emphasizing Christ’s mercy for those who strive to live well while on earth. To conclude, our worm homilist in the Hatton manuscript may be a bricoleur who mostly assembles salvaged materials to convey a familiar theme, but his piece gives an effective exposition on the soul’s journey in time, augmenting the original text with a passage taken from another homily of Anglo-Saxon origin, and introducing the scene of a grave with ravenous worms at the right time. Furthermore, in borrowing one of the most alliterative sections of the homily of Anglo-Saxon origin, the Hatton homilist acknowledges the existing link between this traditional form and the theme of soul and body. This literary production may rightly be called a composite homily in that it is made of materials found in the vernacular textual depository from the previous era. And yet, the Hatton worm homily shows how the practice of vernacular preaching lived on beyond the decline and fall of Anglo-Saxon England, not merely as a nostalgic recollection of the past glory but instead a continuing tradition with new life breathed into it through renewal and innovation. After its production 37

Scragg, Vercelli Homilies, 58 (ll. 58–60). The sentence is incomplete in the Vercelli version, whereas the Hatton version supplies lið (‘lies’) between foldan and gebrosnod (see ibid., MS L, line 4). In the translation given above, I have supplied the Hatton reading in parentheses.

190

Chapter Eight

sometime in the second half of the eleventh century, the quire containing this homily circulated on its own for some time, thus developing wear on its first and last pages, until it was at length combined with other texts, most of which are also of homiletic nature. As Robinson points out, the manuscript we now call Hatton 115 “could not have been bound together until sometime after its component parts were copied”—that is, not before the second half of the twelfth century.38 And even in this new environment, our worm homily was not buried into oblivion, for we know for a fact that it was glossed by the Tremulous Hand of Worcester in the thirteenth century.39

38

Robinson, “Self-contained Units,” 235. Ker, Catalogue, 399. See Christine Franzen, The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 38–44; according to Franzen, the “folded booklet (ff. 140–07)” has glosses by the Tremulous Hand in his “mature” state (5 and 41). I would like to thank Carla María Thomas and Benedick Turner. 39