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99.02.12, Griffith, Judith

99.02.12, Griffith, Judith


Even in its incomplete state, Judith is one of the finest Old English narrative poems. It is also one of the most accessible (not least because it is both short and a darned good story), and the frequency with which it has been anthologised attests to its popularity. The Old Testament caught the imagination of Anglo-Saxon poets in ways that the New never did, and Judith is one of a small group of such poems (the others are in Junius 11) which, in 'germanisizing' scripture, surely entertain as well as teach. A companion of Beowulf and other 'monster' texts in the Nowell Codex, the poem is a version of most dramatic part of the biblical Book of Judith, mostly chapters 12-15, which include the heroine's beheading of Holofernes. Here a text which self-evidently demands a good, full, and authoritative edition, yet, astonishingly, we have been making do for almost half a century with B. J. Timmer's woefully thin offering (also from Exeter University Pres) which was published in 1952, though a reissue in 1978 allowed minor revisions to be made. Before that, the last full critical edition had been that of Cook, published in 1888. Mark Griffith's Judith is thus most welcome, and it meets our expectations.

It is a truly scholarly edition, though Griffith is rather reticent about this in his preface. He says he has consciously adopted a 'mixed mode' approach, on the one hand including traditional 'technical' sections (mostly linguistic) to meet the academic's requirements, but on the other hand including the sort of literary-critical introduction which will be expected by a "more general readership." Presumably undergraduate students are meant by the latter. But I cannot be the only academic who welcomes the surveys of literary criticism as well as the technical analyses; as the secondary literature of Judith grows, periodic assessments and syntheses are essential, and this is a good place to put them. Griffith aims to follow the formula of Peter Lucas's edition of Exodus (also from Exeter, reissued with revisions in 1994). Hence the text is preceded by a long introduction (93 pages, in nine parts) and followed by an extensive commentary. There are also a bibliography, three appendices, and a glossary. Several differences from Lucas's book are in fact evident right away, most of them welcome; they include a glossary set in the same type-size as the rest of the work, a luxury no doubt allowed by the comparatively short length of Judith (349 lines, compared with the 590 of Exodus).

It may be useful to list the contents in full here:

Preface List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 The Manuscript 2 Transcipt and Editorial History 3 Language Spelling and Standardisation Phonology and Dialect Vocabulary and Dialect 4 Prosody Alliteration Metre Metrical Grammar Enjambement 5 Date 6 Treatment of the Source 7 Judith and the Old English Poetic Tradition 8 Judith and the Christian Tradition 9 Style and Structure The Text Editorial Procedure Judith: Text with textual notes Commentary Bibliography Appendices I Alliteration and Rhyme II Index and Tables to the Scansion III Latin Sources Vulgate Old Latin Glossary

About half the Introduction (parts 1-5) deals with 'technical' matters and half with literary-critical concerns. The first part briefly rehearses the long debate over the Judith's placing in Nowell Codex (British Library, Cotton Vitellius A XV), the quire-structure of the manuscript, and the scribal contributions, and deals also with matters such as abbreviation, punctuation, and division of the text. On the question of the missing first part of the poem, Griffith is without a doubt right to accept that a comparatively small loss has occurred (up to 100 lines). The structural and thematic integrity of what remains makes a hypothesis such as Timmer's, that the original poem had as many as 1300 lines, quite untenable. In his section on "Transcript and Editorial History," Griffith notes the value of the transcript made by Junius before the manuscript's damage in the Ashburnham fire, and lists previous editions (not an onerous task). I note that in this, the briefest part of the Introduction, the footnotes run to twice the length of the main text, for Griffith takes the opportunity to list all the errors made by Junius (though he describes them as "trivial") and also his sytem of punctuation. Is this material which could have been left out? No; a scholarly edition should offer such information, and I would have included it myself.

One of the notable features of Judith is an unusal degree of standardisation in orthography and spelling, and Griffith begins his first part of the Language section by specifically linking this standardisation to the heightened status which a vernacular acquires when used for Bible translation, an idea explored some years ago by Geoffrey Shepherd. I am not convinced that the link is actually demonstrable here. For one thing, although Griffith here calls Judith a "translation" (as he does also in his preface, though elsewhere he is more circumspect), neither it nor any of the other Old English scriptural poems is any such thing: they are versions, reworkings or reinterpretations, and therefore need not involve their makers or copiers in any undue anxiety about fidelity to the Word of God. Other scriptural poems poems do not show quite such a high degree of standardisation; nor do all of the manuscripts of the prose translations which make up the Old English Hexateuch or Heptateuch, some of which are indeed quite badly written. In other words, the qualities of consistency evident in Judith may simply relate to the standards of learning and copying prevailing at whatever monastic centre was the scene for poem's composition or the manuscript's production, rather than to any awe felt for the divine subject matter.

Throughout his sections on the language of Judith, Griffth takes an avowedly 'traditional approach' and shows himself to be a lucid expositor of complexities. He is, too, properly circumspect in his conclusions, when necessary, and is not tempted, as some past editors of Old English poems have been, to conjure up unprovable theories of origin. The fact that the mix of Anglian with West Saxon forms seen in the language of Judith can be found elsewhere in texts known to be West Saxon, coupled with the likelihood that consciously poetic registers might be in use which cross both synchronic and diachronic boundaries, makes it impossible to draw any useful conclusions about the dialectal origins of the poem.

In the long fourth part of the Introduction, "Prosody," Griffith is clearly in his element and his exposition continues to be persuasive (though, uncharacteristically, there is a lapse in clarity in a monster sentence at the bottom of p. 26, in a discussion of the alliteration of palatal and velar g, where the flow is not helped by the use of a comma instead of a dash after "more likely" in the penultimate line). Complementing this discussion are two of the Appendices (pp. 166-76), which supply data for the specialist: an analysis of specific aspects of alliteration and rhyme, and tables of scansion for the whole poem. The section on metrical grammar is especially good and important, and I must say that I would have liked more here. (In a sense there is indeed more, but not until part 9 of the Introduction, "Style and Structure.") Griffith gets to the heart of the Judith-poet's peculiar style and helps to explain the exhilarating energy of the poem in terms of innovative verbal techniques. While in his metre and alliteration the poet follows closely the same rules as the Beowulf-poet, in his metrical grammar he is idiosyncratic. This is apparent above all in his far greater and more varied use of verbs: his preference for finite verbs; his concentration of many verbs in a few lines; his highlighing of verbs with end-rhyme; and his liking for verbal nouns made from the present participle. Verbal innovation is particularly obvious in the battle-scenes of the poem and Griffith convincingly argues that the presentation of conventional imagery and diction in new syntactical forms is the deliberate policy of the poet, not (as some would have it) a clumsy error. Indeed, what Griffith makes clear, both in this section and cumulatively throughout his introduction, is just how consciously artful the poet of Judith was. Another notable feature is the frequent use of enjamebement, which is not unusual in 'late' Old English poetry but is at its most developed in Judith.

In respect of these syntactical innovations, Griffith is surely right to see them as evidence of the "relative modernity" of the poet (p. 41). This brings us to the vexed problem of the date of Judith, which is dealt with in part 5 of the Introduction. It would have been nice to find some new evidence presented here, or old evidence fruitfully reinterpreted, but instead Griffith wisely and deftly wields Ockham's razor. He briefly identifies seven relevant categories of evidence in the dating debate but notes that only three have any significance (the 'late' verb hopian for hycgan; ofdune for nyther; and alliteration of palatal and velar g). This evidence is, as Griffith allows, consistent with a composition-date of late ninth or tenth century, but the tentativeness of even this conclusion "must be admitted" (p. 47).

The remaining four parts of the Introduction deal with literary-critical matters. The account of the relation of Judith to its biblical source or sources in part 6 picks its way skilfully through the frustrating complexities of the early medieval Latin Bible and is the most helpful of such accounts that I have seen. It is complemented by Appendix 3 (pp. 178-85), which gives not only a text of the Vulgate (in the authoritative Stuttgart edition) but also extensive passages from an Old Latin version (from Sabatier), and even Old Latin variants from two manuscripts. In all these extracts, words and phrases of apparent relevance to the Old English poem are helpfully highlighted. As in some of the other Old English poems of the Old Testament, the influence on Judith of Old Latin versions is almost certain, albeit only in a few places. The problem is to decide how they got there, when the bulk of the poem is manifestly based on the Vulgate text (for there are many long passages where the Old Latin versions differ from the Vulgate, and from the poem). Whether Bible manuscripts with 'heterogeneous mixtures' of Vulgate and Old Latin readings were as common in the earlier medieval period, especially from the second half of the eighth century onwards, as Griffith implies is I think doubtful; among the Latin biblical manuscripts which survive from the Anglo-Saxon period (admittedly few, apart from gospel-books) there is none with any sort of 'mixed' text (if we exclude that puzzlingly eccentric Codex Aureus). Certainly they would have been most unusual as late as the Ælfrician period. Griffith (like Lucas before him, in his edition of Exodus, p. 52) accepts the claim of Nichols (1964) that Ælfric closely translates some Old Latin readings in his version of Genesis in the Old English Hexateuch (p. 47, n. 179). Nichols mis-read the Beuron critical edition of Genesis and there is in fact absolutely no evidence for her assertion; as far as I am aware, Ælfric (like so many church writers) uses Old Latin readings only in homilies, where he takes over material from the Fathers. In my view, the later we get in the Anglo-Saxon period, the less likely we are to find Vulgate bibles 'contaminated' with Old Latin readings; and when they do occur, as in part of the Old English Hexateuch version of Deuteronomy, they are likely to be connected with old readings preserved in the liturgy. I risk oversimplification here: the Old English translation of the Gospels, made probably in the second half of the tenth century, shows apparent Old Latin influences which are as yet unexplained. Nevertheless, I am tempted to put forward the appearance of Old Latin readings in Judith as potential dating evidence, making the original poem earlier rather than later (i.e. ninth rather than tenth century), with the corollary that, the later the poem, the less likely its production in a West Saxon centre would be (on the assumption that old 'contaminated' biblical manuscripts would have ceased to be used there earliest). But I admit that this argument has no more force than the others surveyed, and sensibly dismissed, by Griffith.

In the remainder of the section on the biblical background of Judith, Griffith shows how the poet has simplified and rearranged his source material to produce a "simple exemplum of the triumph of Christian faith over the power of evil" (p. 51). The process has involved the reduction in the number of characters, few of whom are named, and the omission of almost all extraneous detail. There is, too, suppression of any hint of sexual knowingness on Judith's part, or complicity in Holofernes's descent into drunkeness at the feast; his evil desires come from his own sinful self, while she remains virtuously detached. An apparently unique addition by the poet is part of this process of polarisation, where the canopy of Holofernes' bed becomes a device which screens Judith from lustful looks.

To some extent the division between the last three parts of the Introduction is artificial, and I have hinted already that the long separation of part 9, "Style and Structure," from "Metrical Grammar" is an unhappy one). Yet some sort of compartmentalisation is essential, and Griffith's marshalling in these parts of such a large range of published material into a coherent and well-balanced review, frequently adding his own judicious assesments, is in general to be applauded. In reworking his biblical theme, the poet of Judith brings to it the conventions of heroic poetry - its motifs, its diction, its stock phrases. This is apparent above all in the depiction of battle scenes, a subject on which Griffith is an established authority (see, for instance, his article in Anglo Saxon England 22). Famously, the Hebrews become Germanic warriors in all but name. Griffith rightly empahsizes the highly traditional nature of such presentations; it is this, not direct borrowing, which accounts for such striking similarities between certain lines in Judith and those in other Old English poems. He notes too that the heroic conventions may be used by the poet ironically, and that "the relationship between Holofernes and his men is a parody of the usual one between the leader of men and his followers in O.E. poetry" (p. 65).

In discussing the poem in relation to Christian traditions (in part 8 of the Introduction), Griffith stresses the fairly certain role of both exegesis and hagiography on the poet. Holofernes is presented as a type of Satan; for Judith herself, it is her wisdom which is emphasized above all (certainly more than her 'heroic' attributes, though Griffith is right not to underestimate these). This is an aspect of her character largely ignored in the Vulgate account but given great prominence, as Griffith shows (with very useful citations), in the Old Latin versions, which influenced patristic writers. But Griffith rightly notes that the poem is not allegory: the poet of Judith makes 'literal' whatever he takes from the typology of the exegetes. The influence on him of saints' lives, particularly those of female martyrs such as Eugenia, is unmistakable. It is here expecially that we find models for the polarisation of the poem's two main characters: the heroine's preservation of her chastity in the face of a wickedly lustful ruler, and her unwavering faith in divine aid in the face of his intransigent paganism. Right at the end of part 8, Griffith suggests that the "amalgam of Christian saint's life and vernacular heroic form" may point to a secular audience for Judith. This is uncontroversial, I think, but it is a pity that he did not pursue the question of audience further, for it is an important one and has to be asked equally of the Junius poems. Pursuit of the question would involve, of course, a consideration of Judith in its manuscript context, with the Passion of St Christopher, the Wonders of the East, the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and of course Beowulf. This topic receives no treatment at all here.

Lacking also in Griffith's review of interpretative approaches to the Christian themes of the poem is reference to another important aspect of the polarisation of the two major characters in the poem: the overweening pride of Holofernes versus the humility of the heroine. This further dimension of the devil-versus-saint structure is of course always implicit, and usually explicit, in the depiction of martyrs face to face with their persecutors. It is an aspect of the poem stressed by Andy Orchard in his Pride and Prodigies (1995), a work surprisingly not cited by Griffith. Orchard is particularly interested in Judith's relation to the other works in the Nowell Codex and shows how, for instance, a close parallel in terms of pride preceding a fall can be seen in the Passion of St Christopher.

The text of Judith is presented accurately and uncontroversially, and Griffith shows sensible restraint in emendation. He refrains, for instance, from what he admits in his commentary is an "attractive" change of him mon to him on, in l. 291, on the correct grounds that, however awkward the syntax may seem to us, it may be the poet's own. Textual notes at the bottom of the page list such emendations as there are, along with details of manuscript correction. Helpful cross-references to the biblical sources are given in the margins.

The Commentary section is one of the most impressive aspects of the edition. It is, as we would expect from this editor, about as comprehensive as it could be, which means that it is long: thirty-seven pages of commentary serve ten-and-a-half pages of text, which they follow. This is another difference from Lucas's Exodus, where the commentary is given, in smaller type, at the bottom of the page, beneath the text. Certainly this is the ideal place for commentary, for it is tedious in the extreme to have to keep turning pages to seek elucidation of particular lines, especially in a book as tightly bound as this one (a matter which I discuss further below). Yet the rationale for Griffith's arrangement is obvious. For a start, the text may be read with minimal page-turning; such is the fullness of Griffith's commentary that often only four or five lines of text would appear at the top of each page. The usefulness for comprehension of being able to look both backwards and forwards to see the shape of a text one is reading, including emergence of verbal patterns, should not be underestimated. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to read Griffith's separate commentary in the same size as the text itself.

In the writing of the commentary, the editor has made full use of the electronic search resources available to him. As a consequence, he has been able to make exhaustive and often revealing analyses of specific semantic or metrical topics. For example, in his remarks on the alliteration of hl- in l. 205, he can tell us authoritatively that only six lines in the Old English poetic corpus - including this one and also Judith l. 23 - contaian hl- alliteration carried across three alliterative positions; it is fascinating that hlude should occur in three of these (including Judith l. 205).

When it comes to commenting on textual cruces, Griffiths's basic technique is to present succinctly the alternatives which past editors or critics have promoted and leave us to opt for whichever we choose. Every now and then he does he feel obliged to make his own reasoned judgement. For example, he adduces good evidence (from other texts) to insist that the punctuation of ll. 209b-212a should show that salowigpada refers to the raven, not the eagle. This is one of many instances where Griffith effectively corrects Timmer. In several comments (such as the one to l. 206b) he confirms that Timmer was quite unjustified in his view that the Old English poem Genesis B influenced the poet of Judith. Typical of Timmer's approach is his terse comment (in the earlier Exeter edition) on gode orfeorme in l. 271, where he noted the same phrase in Andreas l. 406 and wrote: "As the poet [of Judith] more often copies half-lines from other poems, it seems preferable to read gode here, not Gode, as Cook does." Griffith prints gode orfeorme but notes the probability of intentional ambiguity, which (significantly) the scansion allows; at least one other Old English poet, along with Ælfric in his prose, makes use of this punning potential. A constant alertness to the possibility of creative ambiguity in the composition of Judith is one of the most welcome features of Griffith's commentary. The overall effect is only to increase our admiration for this poet.

There is inded much to be enjoyed, and learned, in the Commentary. My own laziness in my reading of l. 270, for instance, was revealed. I had followed the luckless Timmer in assuming that the verb cohhetan, in the famous scene where Holofernes's men dare not enter his bedchamber in the morning, had the meaning "to cough." But Old English had its own word for "cough" (hwostan), and "cough" in the modern sense is not apparently recorded before the fourteenth century. Holofernes's men are in fact simply making a noise, albeit in the throat. I have not checked out the first fourteenth-century occurrence of "cough" in the modern sense, but I am reminded that the throat-clearing noise was still associated with putative or anticipated sexual encounters in Chaucer. Absolon does it when wooing Alisoun in the Miller's Tale; so does the Merchant's wife when encouraging Damyan into the tree, and so does Pandarus as he begins to work on Criseyde.

The twenty-page Bibliography is divided into "Transcript and Facsimiles"; "Editions"; "Translations"; "General works and other editions"; and "Studies and other works and editions cited" (with items of mainly literary interest asterisked). I found the titles of these last two categories a little confusing, and some of the works from the latter catch-all category (such as biblical editions) might usefully have gone into the former. I wonder too, in view of the otherwise extraordinary comprehensiveness of this edition, whether an attempt to list all works on Judith might not have been desirable. Would this have been prohibitive for space reasons? In the section on translations, for instance, the version in Gordon's 1926 Everyman volume of Anglo-Saxon Poetry is signalled, but not that in Cook's and Chauncey's Select Translations from Old English Poetry (1902), only because the former has been cited by Griffith but not the latter. Clearly Griffith could not (and should not) have tried to work every single published item on Judith into his narrative review of critical work on the poem, but as a result several interesting items remain unknown to the reader - articles, for example, by Raffel (in the McGalliard festschrift, ed. Nicholson and Frese, 1975); by Fry (in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 1967); by Rapetti (in the Lausanne Études de Lettres, 1987); and of course the book by Orchard which I noted above.

I have already commended the use of a good type-size for the Glossary, and there are other differences from Lucas's Exodus (and other Exeter editions). This Glossary is pre-eminently user-friendly. The presentation is analytical, with word-elements, including the prefixes of verbs and the parts of compound nouns, separated by hyphens. There is, too, a rather clearer identification of verb-types than in previous Exeter editions - namely, w.v. (1), (2) etc. for weak verbs and s.v. (1), (2), etc. for strong verbs (cf. w.v. (1) and simply v. (1) in Lucas. It is a pity that no acceptable standard presentation of verb-types has ever been established by editors of Old English texts; my own preference is for the system used by, for instance, Mitchell and Robinson, with strong verbs identified simply by their class number in Roman numerals and weak verbs that number in Arabic numerals. Griffith's Glossary carefully avoids the pitfall of prescriptivism, by giving where approriate two or three equivalents of the Old English words. Less appetising, I suppose, for the 'general reader', but consistent with Griffith's admirable 'traditional' approach, is the classification of nouns historically, according to their stem. I wonder how many readers today, including teachers of Old English, have a knowldge of historical linguistics sufficient to find these meaningful. The Glossary is almost totally inclusive. Every occurrence of every form of the definite article and of particles and pronouns is listed and parsed. Not only that, but each spelling variation (eth or thorn) is noted. Only ond is denied a complete listing.

In conclusion, this an excellent book, full of interesting and absorbing material. Particularly to be admired in Griffith's ability to be both erudite and literate in his presentation of often rather dense detail. The editing is excellent and errors are rare. In my extensive use of the Glossary I have yet to find any problems. In the Commentary, I have noted the lack of an apostrophe on "Holofernes" in the analysis of ll. 1106-11a; the mistranslation of cervicem as "head" in that of ll. 103b-11a; and the odd "both their food" in the commentary to l. 128b, which surely does not make sense? I note too that, in the analysis of l. 26a on p. 113, the Tironian et has been allowed to survive, though the editorial policy throughout has been to expand it to ond. In the Introduction, "him" appears with no near antecedent on p. 56, line 5; and I am confident (unrepentant pedant that I am) that the use of "like" as a conjunction on p.67 is an error.

While admiring the editorial qualities of the edition, however, I have reservations about its binding and the format itself. The little Exeter volumes of the past had the annoying habit of falling apart after several years, when the glue failed. Judith (along with Lucas's Exodus and Woolf's) will not, I think, suffer this problem: it is bound in such a way that, even after considerable use, it is still impossible to lay it down open. This is infuriating. In truth, a volume which will assuredly be the standard edition of Judith for many years to come deserves a good hard-back format - such as it would have got from the Early English Text Society, Cambridge University Press, or Boydell, and such as Exeter itself produced for Bernard Muir's two-volume edition of the Exeter Book (though these are not in fact attractive volumes, not least because of their page layout, which allows too little white space around the text, especially at the top). When Methuen had this series, they did produce hard-back versions (distinguished by extraordinarily lurid covers). The cost would be higher, of course, and so perhaps the 'general reader' would lose out (and Exeter are to be thanked for keeping so many Old English texts cheaply available in the past), but Griffith's Judith deserves the hardback treatment. After only a few months' acquaintance, I find that she has already become indispensable. Incidentally, I think that Griffith is too pessimistic in his preface when he implies that the poem has been declining into obscurity: this reader, at least, has been teaching it for some years with enjoyment both to himself and his students. But if there is such a decline, Griffith may rest assured that his edition will do its bit to halt it, persuading newcomers of the poem's great merits and reminding those of us who already love it just what those merits are.