Jonathan Wilcox has been thinking about humor in Old English literature since his 1994 work on "Anglo-Saxon Literary Humor" appeared in Thalia. This seemingly unpromising interest (readers tend not to think of "humor" and "Old English Literature" as a natural pair) has now produced an essay collection, edited by Wilcox, that is both relevant and dynamic, if at times somewhat uneven. Humour in Anglo-Saxon Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2000), when taken as a whole, shows that there is quite a lot of humor in the notoriously unfunny Old English corpus and establishes that humorous strand as an important subject of literary critical inquiry.
Wilcox introduces the collection with a thorough and straightforward overview of developments in "humor theory" since Freud--or, as he puts it, the question "of what constitutes humor in literature, who viewed it as funny, and how we can tell they are amused" (4). Wilcox closes his introduction, after briefly summarizing each essay, with the reflection that "understanding and explicating the act of humor requires all the skills of good literary and cultural criticism" (10).
Following Wilcox's introductory essay, the eight essays in the collection sort themselves into groups of two, surveying the place and use of humor in a variety of genres. John D. Niles' "Byrhtnoth's Laughter and the Poetics of Gesture" begins the collection with an analysis of the most famous laugh in Old English Poetry, that of the ealdorman Byrhtnoth as he kills a Viking enemy in The Battle of Maldon. Niles' essay is followed by T.A. Shippey's "'Grim Wordplay': Folly and Wisdom in Anglo-Saxon Humor"; the two make a pair in that both address a dark underside to specific instances of laughter or humor. A pair of essays on humor in Beowulf follows Niles and Shippey; a pair on riddles and a pair on saints' lives round out the collection. All of the essays, to a greater or lesser extent, provide theoretical background and positioning for their literary analyses. All provide a new theoretical or critical lens through which to view the text in question, for each essay teases out humor and meaning in texts that are not usually construed as funny.
Niles's essay opens the collection to argue the very unfunny proposition that Byrhtnoth's famous laugh "sums up the spirit of Maldon in a single image," (32) epitomizing all that is both admirable and doomed in Byrtnoth's character. Touring through ethnography, poetic gesture, literary history, humor theory, and a variety of examples from other Old English texts, Niles' humor-focused criticism does not so much provide a new reading of the poem as a new way of arriving at a usual reading of the poem--that Byrhtnoth is undone by his pride (Niles calls it "that sudden burst of ofermod"). The most valuable part of Niles' essay is its last paragraph, wherein he warns readers against being "led astray by cultural assumptions"--for if we inject our own ideas about humor or pride or salvation into the text, "in a few years the laugh will be on us."
Shippey's work addresses Byrhtnoth's famous laugh as well, for Shippey argues that "The master maxim of Anglo-Saxon humor might be, 'He who laughs last laughs longest'" (38), and Byrhtnoth, whatever else his good qualities, certainly does not laugh last. Shippey works with a wide variety of texts, including Beowulf, Genesis B, the Durham Proverbs, and Judith, as he analyzes instances of laughter in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records to show the existence of a specifically "sardonic quality in Anglo-Saxon humor" (39). Shippey unfortunately does not cite Karma Lochrie's 1994 work on Judith, wherein she notes that "A strangely humorous episode is generated by the crisis" of Judith's decapitation of Holofernes (Lochrie, "Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Politics of War in the Old English Judith," in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, eds. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, Bloomington: Indianapolis, 1994, 1-20, at 12); his analysis of the scene outside Holofernes' tent (as the Assyrian soldiers cough and shuffle their feet to awaken their dead master) is quite similar to Lochrie's. Shippey provides numerous examples--substantial enough to show a definite trend through manuscript, genre, and dialect--to show that "a characteristic part of Anglo-Saxon humor is grim amusement from the wise at the expense of those who cannot understand" (48). He discusses most fruitfully the possible conflicts that can arise between such scornful, sardonic humor and the principles of Christian charity that many of the texts ostensibly support.
Essays on humor in Beowulf follow this strong introductory pair. Raymond P. Tripp, jr., maintains the lexical focus he established in his 1992 Literary Essays on Language and Meaning in the Poem Called Beowulf as he writes on "Humor, Wordplay, and Semantic Resonance in Beowulf." Tripp ultimately argues that Beowulf is enormously influenced by the "rapid phonological, morphological, and semantic assimilation" of the late Anglo-Saxon period; this process of dramatic linguistic change lends itself to punning, and it is here that Tripp tries to establish the basis of Beowulf's humor. He argues that "many look-and-sound-alike words fall together" during such a process (57) so that doubled meaning can be read into the text. While Tripp's overall argument is engaging, some of his examples of such "double meaning," or puns, seem to stretch the premise of his argument beyond its useful limits--to read "ealath" (ale) as a drinking-joke within the word theling (princeling), as Tripp does (61), is surely to hear too much resonance between words that happen to have some of the same letters. Many of Tripp's examples focus on alcohol (to read the kenning "hronrade," whale-road, as (drinking) horn-road, for instance); in his reading of punning in Beowulf, the poet and many of the characters become early medieval fraternity boys obsessively talking and joking about alcohol.
E. L. Risden's much shorter "Heroic Humor in Beowulf" discusses use of irony, wordplay, and litotes in the poem before looking at two "interesting, if rare" examples of more narrative humor, Beowulf's battles with the Grendelkin. Risden reads the puns about hands and arms in the first fight to provide "visual incongruity" (76); he then discusses the "incongruous sexual undertones" of Beowulf's fight with Grendel's mother (77). Risden concludes with the realistic observation that "humor is not an extraordinary or essential element of Beowulf" although what humor does exist in the poem "seem[s] to support the heroic code at the heart of Anglo-Saxon culture" (78). Risden's essay is itself funny at times, and here I must include the end of his description of the underwater monster fight: Beowulf kills "the she-beast with a 'sword', the blade of which then melts away, leaving only a hilt in the hero's hand (suggesting his 'relief' at the conclusion of the encounter?)" (77).
Such incongruous sexual humor segues nicely into the pair of essays on the riddles, the only part of the Anglo-Saxon corpus generally acknowledged to be funny. As with the essays on Beowulf, the second is much stronger than first; the readings complement but do not engage each other. D.K. Smith's "Humor in Hiding: Laughter Between the Sheets in the Exeter Book Riddles" begins promisingly enough with an engaging discussion of the possible purposes of the riddles within the monastic culture that produced the Exeter Book. Smith uses Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious to suggest that jokes like those of the sexual riddles function "not only to bring certain desirable images to light, but also to protect us from them" (84). The essay founders somewhat as Smith suggests that "In a form of private meditation individuals reading the riddles could have enacted their rejection of bodily desire by eschewing the sexual solution in favor of the innocent one" (86)--so that monks would train themselves to think "key" where the rest of us think "penis" when reading riddle 44. Smith tacks away from this suggestion, thankfully, and ends the essay with an incisive explication of the sexual riddles as textual examples of postmodern tension, in that "the answer exists in its own absence, in what cannot be said" (98).
The focus of Nina Rulon-Miller's essay, "Sexual Humor and Fettered Desire in Exeter Book Riddle 12," is the female slave, the wonfeax Wale, of riddle 12. As such, hers is a much more specific argument than Smith's, although she uses much of the same work on riddles to place her argument in the critical tradition. (I should note here that Rulon-Miller thanks me in note 23; I had read the essay before it appeared in this volume.) Like Smith and most other critics, Rulon-Miller sees riddle 12 to have both a sexual (implicitly wrong) reading and a non-sexual (implicitly right) one. She stresses that riddle 12 is unique for a number of reasons, most evidently in its answer: whether reading the riddle sexually or not, it has only one answer, "ox" (unlike the key/penis answer of riddle 44). The essay uses lexical study and other riddle texts to address gender (the character is a woman), class (she is a slave), and race (she is Welsh, or at least foreign in some way). This overview is merely a warm-up for Rulon-Miller's bravura answer to the old critical question of why this riddle was included in a text made by and for professed religious readers. In her non-sexual reading of riddle 12, Rulon-Miller argues that the wonfeax Wale, the dark-haired Welsh woman, is making a leather bottle using the medieval technique of cuir bouillé, boiled leather. After a detailed discussion of this leather-working process, Rulon-Miller presents the sexual reading, that the wonfeax Wale is engaged in autoeroticsm with the bottle in an ultimately subversive sexual act. The riddler and/or monk can then together "watch" the woman masturbate within the text. Rulon-Miller refers to Freud and to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as she argues that such sharing of this riddle between men "temporarily provides a liberating release from the taboo of homosocial desire" (123). Her answer to the question that begins her essay--"What's so funny about female masturbation?"--is that riddle 12 ultimately provides a forum for homoerotic exchange within the monastic context.
The final pair of essays in the collection address humor in the Old English saints' Lives, and they neatly round out a collection that has been struggling throughout with tensions between devout Christianity and incongruous humor. Both essays argue that humor can be a topos in an Old English devotional text as a technique for promoting Christian virtue and righteousness; Shari Horner sees rather more humor in the corpus than Hugh Magennis does, although both look at the idea of "incongruity" as the source of this humor. In "'Why do you speak so much foolishness?' Gender, Humor, and Discourse in Aelfric's Lives of Saints," Horner details a number of virgin martyrs whose power over their tormentors is incongruous; the protagonists exploit this incongruity, usually through speech, to emphasize the ridiculousness of the situation (that the pagan persecutor's soldiers and oxen cannot drag St. Lucy to the brothel, for example).
In contrast, Magennis dismisses a number of possibly comic moments in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven: Humorous Incongruity in Old English Saints' Lives." He argues that many such instances (he notes the example of St. Edmund's head calling out as it rolls about the countryside) "are often really the creation of the modern reader and were probably originally intended to inspire wonder on the part of the audience rather than being 'designed to amuse or excite mirth'" (142). The one instance of actual humor that Magennis acknowledges in an Old English devotional text comes from the anonymous Legend of the Seven Sleepers; after a quick summary of the narrative, Magennis does an engaging study of the Old English author's expansions on the original Greek source. He shows that the narrative focus is most definitively on the "comedy of errors" section, wherein one of the seven sleepers (who have been asleep for hundreds of years but think it has been only one night) gets lost in his own city, cannot buy bread, and is in fear of a pagan dictator long dead. Magennis sees this text as (slight) evidence against the more typical Old English trend of idealization of the hagiographical hero, an idealization that leaves little room for humor.
Magennis and Horner's essays, then, circle thematically back to the beginning of the collection and Shippey's reflections on the laughter of those in superior positions. They round out the collection generically, so that prose and poetry are both included in this exploration into the place of humor not just in Anglo-Saxon Literature but in our criticism of that literature. The collection could have benefited (as indeed most essay collections could) from more dialogue among the essays--Rulon-Miller and Smith could have an interesting discussion, I think, about the place of the sexual riddles in the daily life of the professed religious at Exeter Cathedral, and Horner and Magennis never address or even acknowledge the substantial differences between their views on the very existence of humor in much of the hagiographic corpus. Each of the essays can certainly be used individually, by scholars and students studying individual texts; the collection as a whole serves to establish humor, finally, as a worthy subject of critical study by Anglo-Saxonists.