Henry Glassie observes that "buildings, like poems and rituals, realize culture" (Vernacular Architecture, page 17). Lori Ann Garner examines the architectural references in Old English poetry to identify the associative connections to social values and observed environment that contemporary audiences brought to the performance experience.
Garner looks beyond composition and construction to transmission, reception, and performer/audience exchange: “Formulaic oral composition establishes nuanced meanings through subtle manipulation of formulaic phraseology.” Vernacular design and layout fused the mental acuity required in architectural design with collective craft skills. Anglo-Saxon poetics fused individual Germanic Christian traditions into hybridized forms. Likewise, parallel principles in Anglo-Saxon architecture served both individual and hybridizing ends. Like poems, architectural structures “become invested with connotative meanings.”
Positively charged architectural images of the Anglo-Saxon hall connect to Germanic comitatus traits of heroic loyalty, obedience, and generosity. The Norman Conquest and its prolific castle-building connected to hierarchy and subject population. Initially the poetics and architectural imagery of the castle created a good/bad dualism. Later, poetics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries suggest a neutral valence, the hall often contained within the castle. The late-fourteenth-century hall and castle are triangulated with a newly defined chapel, a locus where internalized values must be worked out in an emerging individualism.
Sparsely distributed architectural references leave wide gaps necessitating a fluent co-creative audience. The rhetorical force of audience associations derives from empathically associated values, not from detailed description. Positive Anglo-Saxon architectural images include high structures, rounded openings, gables, and warm association with wood. Garner argues to associate these characteristics with Germanic comitatus values. “Hard stone” marks the otherness of distant Roman construction. The audience responds to explicit and repeated familiar architectural characteristics that imply associative social values. Decorative gold contrasts positively to the negative associations of hoarded gold. The simultaneous downfall of the hall and break-up of Beowulf’s comitatus band links Beowulf’s architecture to comitatus values.
Metaphor, requiring as it does the simultaneous presence of two relatable concepts, “expanded and recast” a Christian, liturgical meaning into a highly charged traditional Anglo-Saxon image. John Foley defines metonymy as “enrichment of oral text by an unspoken context that dwarfs the textual artifact.” Garner notes that metonymy fills performance experience with what the audience extracts from context. Reading offers leisure to reflect, consider, and reconsider. Transient oral performance invokes immediate associations that draw heavily from poetry’s sparse imagery, not dissimilar to an immediate but transient walk through a cathedral.
Mary Carruthers describes architectural space as a mnemonic for storing information. Garner suggests that understanding connotative meaning is more important than discussing the source of images. Architectural images support strong social associations throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry. Height, arches, and roundness mark buildings of great significance. Addressing community poetics incorporates the larger context that embeds the built landscape, “significantly reducing the opportunity to draw the wrong conclusion,” as Glassie puts it. Wood and stone Norman castles articulated “a new and sharply delineated class system situating a ruling elite above a governed populace,” enforcing distance between the two classes. Ecclesiastical buildings on old sites invested new structures with the authority of history, projecting Anglo-Saxon values onto Norman practices and imposing Norman practices on Anglo-Saxon customs.
In Layamon’s Brut, Garner examines connotative meaning in post-conquest use of halle and castel/castle to trace a shift in power structure. Brut’s linear historicizing of British leaders demonstrates its production in a culture of literary and linear thinking. In an architectural landscape influenced by multiple styles but dominated by fortified castles, hall descriptions convey little about specific type or appearance. The terms appear either as grammatical subject/object or governed by a preposition. As subject/object the hall is built, destroyed, or given away as reward for loyal service. Governed by a preposition it is always the locus for heroic behavior. Anglo-Saxon timbered halls were incorporated into the inner space of the stone castle. Comparable post-conquest linguistic changes include loss of inflectional endings and grammatical gender. Case-ending loss increased word order dependency, inducing a shift from alliteration’s initial stress emphasis to privileged word endings with associative meaning accentuated by rhyme and iambic meter.
Connotative associations made through the co-location of rhyming words such as alle and halle evoke associations of the comitatus banded together in knightly solidarity. Communicating obedience and leadership authority, stille and halle often occur following comitatus rage over a challenge, in the imperative mood and with a formulaic command to “be still in the hall.” In a hierarchical landscape dominated by castles, the associative positive social values of the hall are retained in the Brut even though the hall is subsumed within the castle. The fall of Arthur’s hall signifies the end of the comitatus and Arthur’s ability to rule in England.
Norman ecclesiastical buildings erected on Anglo-Saxon foundations are parallel to poetry’s foundation on Old English themes and phraseology. Garner explores the range of this parallel in four poems “exhibiting transformation of Anglo-Saxon architectural ideas as they were sustained and adapted well into the Anglo-Norman period.” Without polarizing into good and bad, King Horn presents the hall associated with community solidarity and the castle with military strength. In Harald the Dane the hall is good and the castle bad, validating hierarchy by investing it with traditional values through the castle-incorporated hall that remains the poetic locus for traditional values. Sir Orfeo draws from multiple traditions, allowing none to exact full authority over the narrative, manipulating audience expectations by drawing from intertwining and competing poetic conventions.
As Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight travels from hall to castle to chapel, architectural description changes from human interaction with architectural features to increasingly detached catalogues of descriptive detail, emphasizing distance from the familiar as audience or reader responds to the increasingly unfamiliar. Between traditional and familiar space and the unfamiliar space of hierarchy and subjugation lies the ambiguous space of the Green Chapel, private worship space rather than public parish space where Gawain must negotiate between individual values and community ideals.
Expanding our window into the past, Lori Garner reads meaning embedded in larger contexts, marking for attention parallels between Anglo-Saxon architecture and poetics. In an academic Green Chapel located between disciplinary borders, she articulates a well-balanced narrative drawn from individualized disciplines. She unites Carel Bertram’s constructed architecture as shared memory with poetics as “carrier of the memory of a once-intact world of spiritual values.”
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[Review length: 1050 words • Review posted on January 30, 2012]