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99.03.02, Baker and Howe, eds., Words and Works

99.03.02, Baker and Howe, eds., Words and Works


Contributions from seventeen scholars plus a brief preface comprise this collection of essays published in honor of one of the most eminent figures in Medieval Studies today. Over the years Fred Robinson has produced a body of scholarship that has profoundly influenced the training and thinking of countless medievalists, especially, though by no means exclusively, Anglo-Saxonists. Baker and Howe's choice of title for this Festschrift echoes the Beowulf coastguard's words: the articles collected here form a celebration of Robinson's achievements through his worda ond worca. Their content is as far ranging as Robinson's own interests and accomplishments, and the reader will find both philological studies and literary critical essays of the highest quality. Thirteen of these deal with Anglo-Saxon language and culture, the rest treat "later historical moments, as Anglo-Saxon texts and themes reappeared to shape the words and works of later writers" (viii). What follows are necessarily brief comments on the contents of each contribution.

Roy Liuzza leads off the collection with an essay that asks, "Who Read the Gospels in Old English?" He notes the difficulty of determining the purpose and audience of Old English texts in general, an endeavor further complicated by our tendency to forget too easily that "meaning is a conspiracy between intention and reception" (3). With only the sparest notions of context (the authorship and dating of most Old English texts is perpetually vexing) how are we to avoid imagining "a homogeneous and relatively static audience" (3) for any given text? Careful consideration of the evidence for a text's early context and readership is a start; Liuzza mentions the manuscript context of Beowulf (its situation among the legends of Judith and St. Christopher and the Marvels of the East) as an example of the kind of thing often disregarded in discussions of the audience of the poem. While we may infer some things from style and language, says Liuzza, "the actual reception and use of the work by a real audience may be quite different from what its author intended" (3). Liuzza's ultimate aim is to illuminate the "intention and reception" of the Old English Gospels. He begins by outlining the intentions of the earliest editors of the text, Archbishop Parker and John Foxe, who situated them in the vernacular tradition of Bible translation and in so doing established a 'vertical context' for them, regarding them as essentially similar to the later 'Bishops' Bible' and the Authorized Version: "freestanding works of English prose, idiomatic but more or less literal renderings "in effect a replacement for the older text, all of which suggests a history of democratic access to the words of Scripture" (4). It is, among other things, the assumption of Parker and Foxe -- i.e. that the Old English Gospels were similar in function and form to modern translations of the Bible -- that Liuzza's essay questions, and it "tries to view them in the 'horizontal' context of later Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical practice" (5). In what follows, Liuzza reviews and analyzes the manuscript context, possible authorship and date, and relation to other "varieties" of the Bible in Old English, including homilies, saints' Lives, poetic paraphrases, law codes, and glossed texts. Much of the evidence gathered by Liuzza here, including the codicological contexts, points to a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of Parker and Foxe: these texts do not seem to have been in the hands of laymen and as such cannot have been the origin of a continuous tradition of Bible translation in English. Liuzza's meticulous scrutiny of the 'horizontal' context of the Old English Gospels leads him to what he himself labels "an admittedly disappointing and predictable answer: in all probability the Old English Gospels reached the general lay audience, if at all, in the voice of a narrator, as a gloss on a recited Latin liturgical reading rather than as an independent text." If the answer to the question Liuzza poses in the title of his essay is in any way unsatisfying, the path that leads to it is anything but disappointing. This article is required reading for anyone interested in the Bible and biblical translation in Anglo-Saxon England.

Michael Lapidge offers a classic source study in "Byrhtferth at Work." He picks up the trail of the manuscripts Byrhtferth of Ramsey used to produce his own respectable corpus of writings in Latin and Old English. As this and other recent work (much of that also from Lapidge) has shown, Byrhtferth had read widely in Carolingian literature and the Church Fathers. Lapidge attempts to identify manuscripts used by Byrhtferth in order to learn more both about the library available at Ramsey (though it must have been impressive, few manuscripts from there have been identified) and to gain insight into Byrhtferth's working methods. The first endeavor, Lapidge concludes, is a temporary failure. Following the trail of Byrhtferth's glosses and excerpts from identifiable authors, he is able to characterize some of the manuscripts Byrhtferth must have had access to and eliminate many he probably did not use, but discovers none (yet) among the surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts that give an exact match. The second aim of the essay is a decided success and a compelling reason for all interested in Byrhtferth's Old English glosses and source study detective work to read this article. Lapidge notes that this kind of work with glosses was to a great extent initiated by Fred Robinson's 1973 article "Syntactical Glosses in Latin Manuscripts of Anglo-Saxon Provenance". [[1]]

In "An Anser for Exeter Book Riddle 74" Daniel Donoghue offers a faux apology to Fred Robinson for the pun in his title, and an only marginally more serious one to all future students of Old English who will use Mitchell and Robinson's A Guide to Old English. The text of Riddle 74 printed therein is not provided with a solution, hence Donoghue's apology for playing the spoiler. He proceeds to analyze this 5-line poem and offers an answer to it. What could be "a young maiden, a grayhaired woman, and a peerless man at the same time," and moreover fly with the birds and swim with the fish? Donoghue's response is the barnacle goose. There is no consensus solution to Riddle 74, though this semi-legendary bird does enjoy that status as the answer to Riddle 10. Noting that the latter rests largely on post-Conquest materials, Donoghue surveys the evidence for the legend of this bird that was believed to start life as a shellfish and mature into a waterfowl. Following this fascinating account, Donoghue demonstrates that the poet has capitalized on the belief that this bird did not participate in the procreation of its own species -- they were thought to generate spontaneously on driftwood in the sea -- and hence they shared one quality in common with a virgin (faemne geong), old woman (feaxhar cwene) and single man (aenlic rinc): sexual inactiveness. Donoghue succeeds in unpacking this riddle in convincing fashion and his solution strikes one as superior in many ways to others offered before it.

Michiko Ogura ("An Ogre's Arm: Japanese Analogues of Beowulf") takes up the enticing though tenuous theory that the Beowulf story might have been imported into Japanese literature. Having posited this possibility, Ogura presents a brief survey of Japanese legends containing dragon fights, ogres, and especially the latter's loss of an arm. Ogura summarizes the relationships of these tales, complete with stemma, whereupon she concludes that the closest conceivable Japanese analogue to Beowulf, the Rashohmon, cannot have been directly inspired by the Old English poem having been brought to Japan in the Middle Ages.

The next contribution is Eric Gerald Stanley's characteristically learned ruminations on "Courtliness and Courtesy in Beowulf and Elsewhere in English Medieval Literature." Divided into eight sections Stanley's essay ranges widely from a little read passage in the later books of Saxo, to the myth of the Heroic Age, defining along the way the difference between Epic and Romance and showcasing the women in the Old English Waldere fragments, among others. Stanley pays quite a bit of attention to the representation of the courtly in the popular romances Havelok the Dane and Gamelyn, where much of what one would expect to be courtly, but is in fact crude, "is felt from below" (80). It is the women in Beowulf as well as drinking and drunkenness in that poem that capture Stanley's attention here. The end result of his discussion is a rather surprising realization that some narratives created in the age of courtliness (late medieval romances) are in fact a good deal less "courtly" than others produced in or based on the "Heroic Age": "The crude hopes and cruel tyrannies of romances such as Havelok the Dane and Gamelyn are far removed from the royal and noble endeavours of Beowulf" (95).

In "Aethelflaed of Mercia: Mise en page", Paul E. Szarmach follows Fred Robinson's lead ("Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context") and examines the Old English Chronicle Mise en page of the story of Aethelflaed, 'Lady of the Mercians.' His stated intention is to "sound some themes common post theoriae aduentum, particularly those involving the reality and representation of women and the idea of 'erasure'" (106). By means of a detailed examination of the manuscript context (accompanied by nine photographs from the manuscripts) of the so-called Mercian Register, in which Aethelflaed's story appears, Szarmach demonstrates how modern editors have succeeded in obscuring the integrity of this text. His discussion of the internal evidence for the existence of the Mercian Register is lucid and convincing. He next turns to the steps taken by West Saxon chroniclers toward the "erasure" of Aethelflaed in the D and E versions of the Chronicle, and rounds off his argument by treating briefly of her survival in William of Malmsebury's De Gestis Regum Anglorum and Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum. Here Szarmach restates the aim of his essay, which has been "to create a chain of texts, viz., implied Latin sources, Chronicle versions, and William's treatment in an attempt to describe how this figure of history survives in various texts" (123). This last section especially demonstrates how "a methodology, traditionalist in its roots, can assist this major theme of feminist analysis" (123).

Helmut Gneuss' "Old English Texts and Modern Readers: Notes on Editing and Textual Criticism," amounts to a plea "for a pragmatic approach to the editing of Old English texts, an approach that gives us scholarly and yet readable editions and takes into consideration the prospective readership as well as the nature of the particular text; an approach that does not avoid necessary economies and emends (in a clearly marked form) where this seems appropriate; ideally, it would also be an approach that recognizes the needs and interests of the literary reader as well as those of the historical linguist" (135). Gneuss reviews some of the history of and advances in the editing of Old English texts, posing along the way questions designed to stimulate current thinking on editorial practice in Old English studies. He questions as well the existence of any real dichotomy between conservative and liberal editions in the field. He is contemplating a revision of his "Guide to the Editing and Preparation of Texts for the Dictionary of Old English," which first appeared in A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English [[2]] and was recently reprinted in The Editing of Old English. [[3]] This essay may be seen as a kind of prologomenon to that end; the literature in his accompanying footnotes constitutes a fairly comprehensive and useful bibliography on the topic. I wonder, however, what the readers of this review would make of some of Gneuss' questions. For example, after noting the disparate audiences for textual editions -- the scholar, the ordinary reader, and the beginning student -- Gneuss asks: "Can we afford to prepare and print different editions of the same text for each type of reader -- and what would the publishers say?" (131). He laments as well the disappearance of translations from editions in the EETS series. Space is a real concern in print technology publication, but less of one (that is an understatement) in electronic hypertext editions. An obvious omission in Gneuss' "blueprint" for a pragmatic approach to editing Old English texts is any consideration of the promise of digital editions for this field.

Bruce Mitchell's contribution, "The Dream of the Rood Repunctuated," is appropriately juxtaposed to Gneuss' in that he too deals with the problems inherent in using modern punctuation in the editing of Old English texts. Mitchell laments the lack of attention given his proposal for a new system of punctuation since first he made it in 1980. [[4]] Carthago delenda est is his refrain, and in this article he once again sounds the call for us to face "the inadequacy of the manuscript punctuation and the unsuitability and irrelevance of modern punctuation" (144). He modifies here the system proposed earlier to fulfil the following requirements: "It should be used only when essential and should involve a minimum of interfering whistle blasts from an officious umpire-editor. It should allow the river of poetry to ebb and flow so that the reader can appreciate its variety -- now swift-flowing, with swirling currents and rapids, now calm and leisurely, now slow-moving and majestic -- but should not be taken as implying an increase in the speed of delivery" (146). Mitchell's most basic principle is quite simply: No punctuation where the sense is clear without any. The theory is applied to the text in a repunctuated The Dream of the Rood. Those familiar with his previously suggested system will note that most of the unusual punctuation marks have been jettisoned in this new one. There remains only the essentially 'medieval' elevated point, which he uses to indicate "a pause which might vary between today's comma and full stop and in general is used to mark off clauses when this is necessary or desirable" (148). An initial reading of the text proves his point, and I should think that his proposed system will receive a good deal of attention within the context of the current discussions of the editing of Old English poetry; he includes with an invitation to all readers to send him their responses and comments on the system.

As his titles suggests, " Maþelian in Old English Poetry," Matti Rissanen analyzes the semantic range of OE maþelian, 'speak publicly,' 'harangue,' and traces its use in especially the poetry in situations of public occasion and dignified speakers. The ma elode so ubiquitous in Beowulf is never used, he concludes, to introduce indirect speech, and rarely in direct discourse functions such as questions and replies. This is an exhaustive treatment of the word in the Old English corpus. In Early Middle English the word has lost its dignified meaning, and Rissanen speculates that the "The days of maþelian are numbered when the society characterized by speech and recital gradually changes into one leaning more on writing and literacy" (171).

Mary E. Blockley tackles clausal apposition in her densely argued essay, "Apposition and the Subjects of Verb-Initial Clauses." "Is a subject still a subject when it is unexpressed?" is her opening query. There are 185 instances in Beowulf of a construction in which a finite verb appears at the head of a verse with an unexpressed subject. One of her first examples is Beowulf 1273b-1274a: ðy he one feond ofercwom, / gehnægde helle gast "by this means he overcame the enemy, [he] humbled the infernal spirit." As Blockly notes, the verb and object in this clause is appositive in content to some part of the previous half-line, but she asks again: "Does restatement of a verb and its object in Old English inevitably present us with a clause rather than a predicate alone, or is gehnægde helle gast something less than a clause? If it is a clause, is such a construction independent, subordinate, or indeterminate?" (174). Reductively put, her answer is that they should in fact be regarded as independent clauses: "Taking these constructions as wholly independent clauses has difficulties of its own, but these difficulties lead to a new appreciation of the contribution of apposition" (175). Her argument is concerned especially with clausal apposition that crosses boundaries between a subordinate clause and a subsequent main clause. "Perhaps the contrast is just the point," she concludes. "The Beowulf poet might be playing the expectation of full independence generated by the verb-initial construction following a subordinate clause against the surprising parallelism of content between it and the subordinate clause that precedes it. The result is a resumptive statement that uses both the rhetoric of apposition and the grammar of an independent clause" (184).

In "The Inflection of Latin Nouns in Old English Texts" Peter S. Baker considers the use of assimilated and unassimilated Latin loans in Old English. His chief aim is to determine whether the inflexion of Latin nouns in Old English is governed by discernable rules. Baker's collected evidence shows that Anglo-Saxon authors used Latin loans with inflexions that seem to show a disregard for their original case, number, and even gender. This practice suggests that these authors employed principles, other than those most logical to us, of matching case and number when Latin loans needed to be inflected in Old English. Matching sound patterns and the use of unmarked noun-forms for all cases were two such strategies. As Baker reminds us, Aelfric was aware that words for the same concept in Latin and Old English could have different genders (199). In the end, Baker's argument "warns us against the easy assumption that the assignment of gender to loan words was influenced to any significant degree by the source language, for even unassimilated loanwords that still carried unmistakable signs of their Latin gender might be assigned new genders in the work of such learned writers as Aelfric and Byrhtferth" (201).

Roberta Frank gives us an engaging account of the 'discovery' of the Exeter Book by lexicographers in the mid 18th century in "When Lexicography Met the Exeter Book." Assumed by most to have lain neglected until Conybeare got wind of it in the early 1800s, Frank reveals that it was borrowed in 1760 from the Exeter Cathedral Library by Edward Lye, who mined it for entries for his Old English Dictionary. Lye was originally lent the manuscript for a year but held on to it for nearly twice that long despite repeated reminders by the Dean of the Chapter to have it returned. Lye never finished his work, but the Dictionary was completed by Owen Manning and published in 1772. This first encounter of the Exeter Book with lexicography was pretty much ignored by Lye and Mannings' contemporaries and more recent Anglo-Saxoninsts alike. Frank's discussion of their struggles and successes with the contents of the manuscript is informative and in places highly entertaining. Their numerous misreadings and erroneous definitions may seem quaint to us, the heirs of nearly two centuries of work in Old English, but they also made real advances, identifying new poetic headwords in the contents of the Exeter Book. Here Frank analyzes and contextualizes the work of two early Old English lexicographers in a delightful fashion.

Marie Borroff looks closely at end-rhyme in the work of the first major English author to use it, Chaucer ("Chaucer's English Rhymes: The Roman, the Romaunt, and The Book of the Duchess). English developed its own tradition of end-rhyme patterns and vocabulary, but in the early work of Chaucer the French influence is readily discernable. Borroff explores the interaction of this French influence and the native tradition in his translation of Le roman de la rose and The Book of the Duchess. Borroff's approach is inspired to some degree by W.K. Wimsatt's comparison of rhyme in Chaucer and Pope. Wimsatt found that Pope incorporated a higher degree of variation "in which identities of sound in pairs of rhyming words are played off against various kinds of differences between them" (224). [[6]] He did not include Le roman de la rose in his analysis, and Borroff finds the same richness in the rhymes of Chaucer's translation as he had found in Pope. Before embarking on her comparative analysis Borroff takes pains to define her terms, providing definitions and examples (from both French and English) of five categories of rhyme, in ascending order of richness, 'simple rhymes,' 'rich rhymes,' 'double rhymes,' 'double rich rhymes,' and 'triple rhymes' (225). The analysis that follows defies simple summary by virtue of its detail. Suffice it to say that Borroff succeeds in characterizing and illustrating the respective strengths and weaknesses of medieval French and English rhymes in a way that casts light on Chaucer's method and accomplishment in the two poems mentioned above. The two ways of rhyming represented by the English and French traditions might be called 'simple' and 'elaborate', respectively, or, to use more qualitative language, 'naïve' and 'sophisticated'. They require different skills of the poets who practise them, and they produce different effects. In the French tradition, rhyme is literally recherche. The lack of readily available sets of simple rhyming words, the comparative intolerance of repetition, the necessity of adorning passage after passage with rhymes of various degrees of richness: these aspects of the French tradition continually challenge the resourcefulness of the poet and press him towards linguistic diversity. (232) The Middle English poet, on the other hand, used the established groups of rhyming words and devised new ones. Repetition is not avoided where it seems relevant to content, and the skilful poet is one who can do this unobtrusively, partly by working the repetitions into his narrative in such a way that they seem natural, partly by varying their use (in different meanings, idioms or grammatical constructions). "Effectively used, they become 'transparent'; the reader sees through the verbal surface to the meanings that help the narrative or descriptive content unfold" (232).

In "Seeking 'Goddes Pryvetee': Sodomy, Quitting, and Desire in The Miller's Tale" David Lorenzo Boyd explores the use of sodomy as a metaphor for sociopolitical criticism in Chaucer's fabliau. Boyd draws on medieval definitions and uses of metaphorized sodomy by Alan of Lille, Peter Damian, and Wyclif, and applies them to a reading of the Miller's desire to 'quite' the Knight. Absolon and Nicholas (mis)read and (mis)interpret the Body and receive their punishment in the form of sodomitical experience -- Absolon kisses the 'wrong' orifice and Nicholas is of course violated and thereby disempowered by the effeminate Absolon's hot coulter. At a higher level, Boyd reads the Miller as applying the trope by way of reading and protesting "the penetrating control not only of the aristocracy, but also of the Church over the social body" (248). Citing Lee Patterson, Boyd notes that "both the Church and the ruling classes succeeded in keeping the lower classes in their place through social, ideological, and exegetical control. That the Miller would include representatives of the Church in his scalding critique of the Knight's Tale allows him to satirize and disempower further the hegemonic forces of peasant oppression" (254). Boyd's conclusion: Despite the playfulness of its tale, then, Robyn successfully addresses class injustice by associating peasant mistreatment with the queering of the dominant norm. That common people at the end of the Miller's story believe the clerks (and the story of Nicholas and Alisoun) and laugh contributes to the poem's sociopolitical imperative: by falling prey to clerkly (mis)interpretation, the people, just like John, are being duped as well. (257) Whereas Wyclif appropriated sodomy as a metaphor for the clerical abuse of simony, Boyd sees it being appropriated here by Robyn as a metaphor for another clerical abuse, the oppression of the peasants.

Siegfried Wenzel ("Why the Monk?") addresses the discrepancy, noted by generations of critics, between the portrait of the worldly Monk and the tale assigned to him. Why did Chaucer give "such a sorry and sorrowful performance to a man who is willing to abandon the ideals of his professed lifestyle and join the world in jolliness?" (260). A brief review of critical opinion on the question is followed by the suggestion that this is the kind of story contemporary monks, some of whom were noted chroniclers, were expert in. There is, says Wenzel, a clear sociological and historical match between the monastic orders and an interest in historic examples of misfortune (264). Wenzel supports his claim with examples from monastic sermons that involve the de casibus trope and moreover make mention of contemporary tragic figures, a feature which sets them apart from sermons preached by Friars and seculars. In the end, then, the fit between teller and tale that has puzzled critics for so long is a good one: "Chaucer assigned the series of de casibus tragedies to a monk because laments against Fortune, with specific examples taken from ancient as well as contemporary history, were currently used in monastic preaching" (267).

In "The Real Fulk Fitzwarine's Mythical Monster Fights" Marijane Osborn calls our attention to the historical and semi-legendary Anglo-Norman figure Faulk Fitzwarine. Osborn's contribution includes a summary of the extant prose romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn, with special attention to the sequence of fights he has against trolls and a dragon, a "surprisingly complete and hitherto unrecognized English analogue of the three-monster plot of Beowulf" (270). It is this last feature of the narrative that places it on the same axis as that poem, and occasions its comparison with similar fights by Beowulf, Grettir, and Thorvald of Fljotsdæla Saga. Unlike the fights in Beowulf, however, these occur not at the center of the narrative but on its periphery. The first part of this essay contains the summary of Fouke le Fitz Waryn, while the second is devoted to a discussion of the abovementioned texts using J. Michael Stitt's model that "associates these heroes' monster fights with a single narrative sequence established long before their time" (272). [[5]] Osborn's contribution should find a place in the larger discourse on Beowulf analogues. She concludes that Fulk's story demonstrates how the deeper significance of the confrontation with monsters is only available under the leadership of someone like the poet of Beowulf: refined, reflective, and sensitive to a host of religious and cultural implications that transcend the traditional story and inform its ancient meanings, or more precisely re-form them to suit the mood of his age and his own as yet mysterious purpose. (287) Nicholas Howe's "Praise and Lament: The Afterlife of Old English Poetry in Auden, Hill, and Gunn" is an excellent application of an alternative approach to the place of Old English literature in the field of English studies. Whereas it is possible to follow a model of linguistic continuity from Old to Middle English, doing so in our undergraduate literature survey courses may result in the distancing or isolation of Old English texts from the more recent works. Rather than assume and attempt to maintain the fallacy of a chronologically unbroken line stretching from Beowulf to Chaucer, Howe suggests that "Old English may be better placed within the shifting field of literary studies if one holds to a disrupted or fragmented sense of tradition. Instead of assuming a majestic, unbroken sweep from Beowulf onwards, we might remember that Anglo-Saxon materials have had a habit of reappearing and becoming vital to the culture and poetic life of later eras" (294). Howe demonstrates this principle in critically sensitive readings of three modern poets whose work was sometimes obviously, sometimes subtly influenced by the Old English language and literature they learned as university students. Though Howe focuses here on W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, and Thom Gunn, he might also have illuminated the poetry of Basil Bunting, David Jones, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes, or more obviously Tennyson, Hopkins, and Hardy (294). Citing Thom Gunn's pronouncement that "No writer passively inherits "the" tradition, you make your own choices, your own incongruous combinations of literary parents," Howe notes that "For Gunn as well as Auden and Hill, Old English has been one of these necessary choices" (295). What follows is a deftly constructed and detailed analysis of the features of Old English poetry adapted, adopted, and transformed by these poets in their own poetry.

Peter Baker and Nicholas Howe are to be commended for an impeccably edited book. The volume as a whole seems in all respects a fitting tribute to a scholar of Robinson's stature, and it was clearly a labor of love for the contributors who have known Fred Robinson as friend and teacher.

Bibliographical Notes

[[1]] Speculum 48, (1973): 443-75

[[2]] A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, Roberta Frank and Angus Cameron, editors (Toronto, 1973).

[[3]] The Editing of Old English: Papers from the 1900 Manchester Conference, D.G. Scragg and Paul E. Szarmach, editors (Cambridge 1994): 7-26.

[[4]] "Five Notes on Old English Syntax," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70 (1969): 70-84.

[[5]] J. Michael Stitt, Beowulf and the Bear's Son: Epic, Saga, and Fairytale in Northern Germanic Tradition (Garland, New York, 1993).

[[6]] "One Relation of Rhyme to Reason," in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1954): 153-66.