Festschriften constitute an important scholarly genre in Anglo-Saxon studies, perhaps more so than in other fields. Known by their short-hand titles, they are important books for library collections and for scholars beginning a personal library in the field: the Dickins festschrift, the Clemoes, the Pope, the Greenfield festschrift, and so forth--all books with important, enduring essays.[[1]] What makes a good festschrift? And what distinguishes it from any other collection of essays?
The personal nature of the collection is, for this reader, appealing. I esteem those festschriften best that give a sense of the person being honored or commemorated. Collections that refer to the honorand's work in some way--through personalized introductions, collected bibliographies, reminiscences--establish a sense of the person's career and what a life of hard work has come to mean. Above all else, a high quality of contributions will ensure that future generations will have reason to pause for a moment over the scholar's name when pulling the book from the stacks.
Unlocking the Wordhord is a successful festschrift. Edward B. Irving, Jr. the man only emerges sporadically in these pages, but any number of the fourteen contributions here are of permanent value. The essays are all uniformly learned and scholarly treatments of their respective subjects and the editors have pulled together an exceedingly clean, well-edited book.[[2]] The dust jacket notes that "these previously unpublished essays illustrate the latest state of particular techniques for literary/critical analysis, textual recovery, and lexical studies." The editors, Mark C. Amodio and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, perform an admirable feat in their "Introduction" (3-13) as they integrate what are really a very divergent set of essays beneath three rubrics: critical, textual and lexical. They tell us that "In gathering together these essays in memory of Edward B. Irving, Jr, we hope to offer a snapshot of current scholarship in the field and to stimulate further discussion as it enters its second millennium" (5).
Amodio and O'Brien O'Keeffe inform us that the first six essays are "literary/critical interpretations written from an array of contemporary theoretical perspectives" (5). This is true in a loose sense, but it is somewhat misleading: it sounds as if the essays are going to be explorations of, perhaps, disability studies, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Some do engage what has come to be known as Theory (Szarmach's essay with a dash of Foucault, for example), some can be claimed as generally Historicist in nature (Scragg's, and maybe Larratt Keefer's contributions), and two (Doane and Foley), given their orientation in oral/formulaic theory, can only be said to exemplify "contemporary theoretical perspectives" if we take that phrase to mean "long-time animating concerns of Anglo-Saxon studies" rather than contemporary critical theory in a broad sense.
Nicholas Howe's essay "Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book" (14-37) begins the book. This work is part of Howe's ongoing exploration of the Anglo-Saxon sense of place and how that dynamic is inflected in various literary texts. With his characteristic elegance, Howe examines the Junius manuscript, a "book of elsewhere" (17), meaning a book of "poetic fictions," both in a geographic and temporal sense, located elsewhere from the here-and-now of Anglo-Saxon England. His focus in particular, across the poems of the codex, is the experience of exile and wandering in Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan: "Wandering, exodus, enforced captivity, spiritual struggle in a figuratively bounded place: these are the settings of Christian experience and history" (17). His concern is to "denote a pattern of human history within the fallen world: that of movement, of the restless search for a place to call home" (18). His technique is to track this pattern by "locating a few crucial moments in each poem" (18). In essence, we have in this essay a dossier of readings that speaks to the critical sensibilities of one of our best literary critics in the field.
In his contribution, "Ælfric Revises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea of the Author" (38-61), Paul E. Szarmach writes a comparative analysis of Ælfric of Eynsham's two separate extant versions of the Life of Saint Martin, one in his Second Series of Catholic Homilies, and the other, later, version in his Lives of the Saints collection. The essay proceeds at first in a traditional fashion, leveraging detailed manuscript and source evidence, combined with a discerning eye for close critical reading to make an argument about Ælfric's experimentations with prose style: "One may reasonably assume that as a writer Ælfric, however sane, sober, and clear literary historians may paint him, had a restless streak in him .... For Ælfric, composition was a process, not an event" (51). In the remainder of the essay, Szarmach steers the argument profitably in an unexpected direction, complicating the fundamental presuppositions of his foregoing analysis, by turning to Foucault's critique of authorship. The sometimes-prickly use of Foucault by Szarmach allows him to cast Ælfric as a writer who, although he saw himself as an author, was seen instead by the subsequent scribal tradition more as an anonymous, impersonal, "author-function." The overall result is convincing and the essay is a good model for those who would wed "traditional" skills (philology, manuscript study, etc.) with "new" critical paradigms (though I would not call Foucault's author function a "new" concept anymore).
A. N. Doane's essay "'Beowulf' and Scribal Performance" (62-75) follows Szarmach's in the collection and takes the diminution of the author and the elevation of the scribe to a new height. "Back to the manuscripts" went forth the bracing call from Fred Robinson in 1980; since then, strong and learned voices in the field have raised scribes to co-producers of textual meaning.[[3]] As a result, the story now runs something like this: in the old days, we thought of scribes (if indeed we thought of them at all) as little more than mindless copy machines, albeit some as sleek new models producing elegant products quickly and easily, some as the ponderous old battleships, heaving out copies with discernable effort and not a small amount of mechanical wheezing and operator anxiety. But now, in our more enlightened era, we recognize the creativity of those scribes; we have emancipated them and now cherish their foibles, every minim error and eye skip. And so in his essay Doane wishes us to speak not of scribal "copying," or scribal "errors," but rather vernacular scribal writing as a "performance"; thus, he has little patience for authors, functional or no:
"To attempt to locate the 'authorial' text beyond the parchment is already to move into an ahistorical space that a medieval reader could hardly have conceived and could never have experienced, as he and she struggled with the hard surfaces that met the eyes, removed as they were from previous and parallel versions. Even the author, if there was one, and if he could have and did write the first copy himself, would have been 'only a scribe' in his writing performance." (63; emphasis mine)
This seems a bit much. One need not hold fanatically to a Romantic notion of authorship to posit the common-sense idea that a medieval reader could assume some sort of foundational human intention standing behind a work of vernacular composition. Cynewulf did sign his work with runic signatures, after all; presumably this is evidence that the idea of a fundamental human author was at least conceivable to a medieval reader. Turning to Beowulf, Doane essentially argues that Scribe B was more "orally inclined" (68) than Scribe A, and that Cotton Vitellius A.xv is ultimately more like a musical score or theatrical promptbook, than a "book" written by an "author," waiting to be "read."
John Miles Foley's long essay "How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse" (76-108) works along the oral tradition side of the field animating Doane's essay. Foley's essay examines intertextual borrowings in Old English verse by recasting the relationship among vernacular texts as an "ecology," "treating the identity of traditional verse not as an unordered hodgepodge of forms or a well-ordered group of airtight categories, but as an ecology of genres" (78; emphasis his). The weight of this biological metaphor gets somewhat ponderous: in a "tradition's biology" works have "genetic codes," they engage in "cross-species fertilization" within their "ecosystem," possibly creating the occasional "brilliant hybrid" (78-79). To my ear, this biological metaphor jars with the "leak" of the essay's title and elsewhere, with its connotations of boats and faucets. In his accustomed fashion, Foley then proceeds through ancient Greek, South Slavic and finally Old English examples (his most sustained analysis concerns "The Seafarer") in a comparative study of the fluidity of genres within these oral traditions. He finds that when compared to these other two poetic traditions, Old English poetry is particularly "leaky." One must always admire Foley's grasp of the comparative traditions at work here, but I think the essay does not add much that would surprise students of orality and medieval poetry. The piece would function well as a general introduction to the subject of oral poetry for undergraduates or graduates.
Donald Scragg's short contribution, "A Reading of Brunanburh" (109-122) analyzes the four surviving versions of the Old English "Battle of Brunanburh" in their Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscript contexts, rectifying previous criticism that tended to read the poem in isolation. Arguing for a link with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle poem "The Capture of the Five Boroughs," (indeed, asserting that they were authored by the same poet) he concludes that "Brunanburh" was composed for inclusion in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, rather than composed independently and then inserted into the manuscript tradition through happy accident. Scragg traces the "political consciousness" in both poems, but only briefly; he sees the poem as part of a rhetoric of legitimizing the royal house of Wessex (116) and thus the poem is fully woven into the texture and ideological aims of the prose entries that surround it. Sarah Larratt Keefer's essay, "'Ic' and 'We' in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse" (123-146), finishes the literary/critical section of Unlocking the Wordhord. It is an examination of the first-person voice in what she terms the "canon of Old English liturgical poetry" (142, note 20). She sees this corpus of poetry as part of a meditative tradition, enacting a personal exploration of selfhood within a liturgical genre that is built on communal experience. She classifies these ten poems according to three different types of first-person speaking voices.
The "Meditative voice" uses the first-person singular pronoun and is "a genuine expression of the individual experience, with the 'I' of the speaker truly meaning the discrete and specific person attempting to articulate the meditations of the heart" (128). The "Devotional voice" follows: "Although the Devotional voice employs a singular pronoun which might seem to indicate individual expression, this use derives from synactic Latin originals in which that singular pronoun is also the norm. Thus while the Latin piece behind the poem might have been recited communally or silently by the eleventh century at its inception it is demonstrably an expression of synactic communal thought: it says 'I' but means 'we'" (129). And finally the ""Liturgical voice" "purports to speak from within a synactically driven mode," using the first person plural pronoun 'we'." Larratt Keefer feels that though this final voice appears to be a straightforward rendering of the liturgical, communal original, it is "deceptively straightforward" (130); from what I can tell, she feels that really a first-person singular voice, or expectation of a first-person singular voice, is in there somewhere.
This is all an elaborate edifice to build upon a relatively small number of poetic lines: the "canon of Old English liturgical verse" consists of about ten short poems. When she thus finds "three specific kinds of voice" in this small body of material and then further tells us that one of the poems in the corpus (the Junius Lord's Prayer or Lord's Prayer III) cannot fit under any of her categories (140), one is left to question the entire project of this over-elaborate scheme. The essay is difficult to follow and poorly organized. (And what is the point of citing one's own conference papers on the subject from as far back as 1996?) From what I can gather, sometimes she wants to see an "I" where the text reads "we" (135); and other times she wants to see a "we" where the text says "I." Or both, or neither.
Also, there are problems of argumentation. For example, she advances the notion that any Old English change/variance in these poems from their (putative) Latin originals can thus be read as a "persona" intervention and thus, really implies an "I" (even if the text says "we"). So any departure, of any sort, from a Latin original (a case change for example, or a re-ordering of words or slight editing of length) automatically makes the poem an individual "I" meditation? There is a great deal of speculation as to what "went on" in the minds of particular Anglo-Saxons when reading/composing these poems: "For the Anglo-Saxon monk or nun thus engaged in meditation, the mouth articulates common (Latin) words with the community, while the heart preserves individual (English) thoughts from the soul. The process of meditation thus enables the flowers and fruit of hymns or poetry to spring from the communal root-stocks of liturgical, scriptural, and patristic inspiration. Latin gives rise to vernacular, so that we sing a new song unto the Lord in our own mother tongue" (127). (Who is the "we" here?)
In the next group of essays, the contributions are textual/editorial in nature; as Amodio and O'Brien O'Keeffe put it, "literary scholars are continuing to unpack [Anglo-Saxon culture's] rich textual milieu....as they work to understand the intra-and intertextuality of the manuscript records" (8). In an important piece, "Cynewulf and the Passio S. Iulianae" (147-171), Michael Lapidge argues "that a manuscript copy of the Passio S. Iulianae very similar to, and possibly identical with, the exemplar used by Cynewulf [in his poem Juliana] is extant in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 10861" (147). He makes this point convincingly and includes an edited version of this new Latin text, "with the intention of providing students of Cynewulf with a secure base from which to study the poet's handling of the legend" (155). As an aid to comparison with the Old English text, Lapidge prints those sections of the Latin text in boldface which Cynewulf chose to translate/adapt in his Old English poem, along with corresponding line numbers of the Old English. This is an exciting find that will send any student of Juliana to this volume.
"King Cnut's Grant of Sandwich to Christ Church, Canterbury: A New Reading of a Damaged Annal in Two Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" (172-190), the contribution by Timothy Graham, is similarly textual in nature, and self-explanatory. He provides a new edition of the annal for 1031 in MS A of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; this annal "is among those entered into the manuscript in the late eleventh or early twelfth century" and "records King Cnut's grant to Christ Church of rights over the port of Sandwich" (172). Graham's grant thus replaces the entry as it was edited in MS A of the Chronicle by Janet Bately (1986); through new technology, Graham was able to recover more of this damaged annal than Bately and Ray Page had been able to read in the early 1980s. He also presents an edition of the annal's other witness, from MS F of the Chronicle, a bilingual Latin and Old English production of the late eleventh/early twelfth century.
Gail Ivy Berlin's "The Fables of the Bayeux Tapestry: An Anglo-Saxon Perspective" (191-216), which fits only very loosely under the rubric of textuality/manuscripts/editing, subjects the marginal fables depicted in the Bayeux tapestry to an ideological, historicist reading: "I should like to argue that the images from Aesop's Fables in the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry must be understood within the historical circumstances of their production. The English artisans who received the commission to produce the tapestry embroidered these images as a counterpoint to the images of the main narrative, and in doing so they produced a covert Anglo-Saxon commentary upon the events leading to their subjugation" (191). It can be difficult to "prove" a historical allegory such as this; without particular kinds of evidence, there are few ways to advance proof beyond a certain point. However, the argument is interesting and the author musters a good deal of circumstantial evidence to prove her point. She discusses the following fables: "The Fox and the Crow" "the Wolf and the Lamb" "the pregnant Bitch" "The Owl and the Crane" "The Wolf Reigning" "The Mouse, the Frog, and the Kite" "The Goat and the Wolf" "The Lion's Share.
Robert E. Bjork's essay, "N. F. S. Grundtvig's 1840 Edition of the Old English Phoenix: A Vision of A Vision of Paradise" (217-239), is a scholarly contribution to the growing body of work tracking the history of Anglo-Saxon studies as a subject in its own right. He examines the 1840 edition (including Danish translation and dedicatory poems by the editor) of the Old English poem The Phoenix by the scholar N.F. S. Grundtvig (1783-1872). In Bjork's words, "Grundtvig's edition of The Phoenix is more than just scholarship: it is an intricate blending of Grundtvig's nationalistic, aesthetic, religious, and scholarly interests, and in many ways, it is a tour de force" (219). In a fascinating study, he tracks the "Grundtvigian polemic about the nature and importance of figurative language and its resurrection in the nineteenth century" (220). He also offers a sensitive critical appraisal of the Danish poetic translation.
The final section of the collection consists of lexical studies, which the editors note are "especially timely, given the renewed interest in specific study of Old English language initiated by the recent decision of the editors of the Dictionary of Old English to mount it online and on CD rom" (10). The four essays divide into two essays on Beowulf and two more general lexical investigations. Jane Roberts' "Hrothgar's 'admirable courage'" (240-251) is a short essay prefaced by a warm tribute to Irving's work; she engages the poem that was arguably his main focus throughout his career. She argues for a rereading of lines 646b-51a of the poem, asserting that the phrase "þæm ahlæcan" (646b) refers to Beowulf rather than Grendel (the usual reading). The lines in question describe the scene at Heorot when night draws on and Hrothgar makes his way to bed, entrusting the hall to Beowulf in his imminent contest with Grendel. Roberts would thus translate the lines in the following way:
"He [Hrothgar] knew that battle at that high hall was assigned to this awesome combatant [i.e. Beowulf himself, "þæm ahlæcan"] after they could see the light of the sun or after darkening, black beneath the sky, the shapes of shadowy clouds would come stalking all over the night." (245)
The usual understanding of these lines takes "þæm ahlæcan" as referring to Grendel:
"He [i.e., Hrothgar] knew of the battle in the high hall that had been plotted by the monster ["þæm ahlæcan"], plotted from the time that they might see the light of the sun until the night, growing dark over all things, the shadowy shapes of darkness, should come gliding, black under the clouds." [[4]]
Through this rereading she extends her essay to a comparison of the characters of Hrothgar and Beowulf. The essay presents a good summary and concise discussion of the scholarship over the meaning of the noun aglæca ("fierce combatant, adversary," as now defined by the Dictionary of Old English). Judged by subject matter and connection to Irving's work, this essay is perhaps the best direct tribute to him in the collection.
Janet Bately examines "Bravery and the Vocabulary of Bravery in Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon" (274-301) in her essay. She notes that the words "brave," "bravery," "courage," etc. all entered the English language long after the Anglo-Saxon period, and thus asks us how well does "brave" render a word like OE cene (Maldon line 215; 274)? She argues convincingly that Maldon relates bravery in a negative fashion, in the context of defensive action, while Beowulf describes it in a positive, offensive fashion. As she states, "Indeed in Maldon, what bravery words there are in that part of the poem that has come down to us are linked to the hope/expectation/intention of brave behaviour (or braveness of mind), rather than to specific actions of boldness or bravery. Not what people are, but what they need to be" (294). In Beowulf, the poet concentrates, generally speaking, on the hero's fierceness and strength; bravery words, when they appear, are in the context of retainers: "What we today call bravery is in this poem the hallmark not of the hero, but of his loyal retainer, fighting, like the men in Maldon after the death of Byrhtnoth, against seemingly hopeless odds, but willing/prepared to die with his lord" (294-295).
In "Questions of Fairness: Fair, Not Fair, and Foul" (252-273) Antonette diPaolo Healey offers a scrupulously researched, impeccably written exploration of the word fæger ("fair") in Old English, with space also devoted to synonyms, pre- and post- history of the word and related forms. It is a wonderful case study of how words accrue different meanings through time. There are any number of interesting, thought-provoking philological nuggets here: the DOE editors found only one instance (out of hundreds) where Old English fæger meant "fair-haired" or fair-complexioned" (257); "no instances where the adjective "fair" meant "unbiased, impartial" when applied to people. Although it existed from the mid-fourteenth century when applied to conduct, actions, and arguments ...this sense was not transferred to people until almost the seventeenth century" (258). Fæger means primarily "beautiful" rather than unbiased or fair-haired/complexioned; the secondary sense is "favourable or benign influence" (262) (e.g. "fair weather"). In a few instances, mostly having to deal with language, fair can also mean "not fair" (e.g. the "fair words" of the serpent, Genesis A, 899; 263).
In a typically witty essay, "Sex in the Dictionary of Old English" (302-312), Roberta Frank discusses the lexical domain for words and phrases denoting sexual activity. The essay has some very funny moments: I had to read the sentence about Richard Gere and the gerbils several times before I caught the paronomasia indicated by the author (don't ask--just read the essay for yourself). Although the essay is accessible enough for a non-academic friend simply interested in good writing, it also has some concise valuable information for students of gender and sexuality in the period, as Frank organizes and surveys the words and euphemisms for sexual activity.
Frank shifts gears at the very end of her essay, concluding her discussion of the sexual wordhord, and ends with a short, moving coda that deserves reprinting here. Nothing I could write, especially only having encountered Ted Irving briefly twice at conferences when I was a graduate student, could function as a more eloquent tribute to the man and his life's work: [[5]]
The scholar to whose memory this piece is dedicated was, like the Anglo-Saxon poets he wrote about, a lover of words. He was a vital and encouraging presence at the conference that established the Toronto Dictionary of Old English (21-2 March 1969). And he had a gift for friendship. One of his last essays talks about a manuscript reading that he first defended more than forty yeas ago: [[6]]
Wop wæs wide, worulddreama lyt, wæron hleahtorsmiþum handa belocene, alyfed laþsiþ leode gretan, folc ferende; freond wæs bereafod [Exodus 42-5] Weeping was widespread, little joy in the world, the hands of the laughter-makers were locked, a hated journey was permitted to greet the people, the nation travelling; the lover was bereaved.
Editors usually emend freond to feond 'enemy': 'The feond is Pharaoh, who is, allegorically, the devil ....[[7]] Typically, Ted heard not doctrine but emotion in this passage, the 'massing of formulas of loss and grief: weeping, loss of joy and laughter, a hated journey to death ...and a bereaved lover... That the lover was Egyptian is less important than that he was heartbroken.'[[8]] For the generosity of spirit so evident in his scholarship, and for so much more, the community of Anglo-Saxonists is in his debt (310).
NOTES:
[[1]] The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of Their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London, 1959); Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985); Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin and Edward B. Irving, Jr. (Toronto, 1974); Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature: Essays in Honour of Stanley B. Greenfield, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, Fred C. Robinson (Toronto, 1986). Many more could be added. [[2]] I only noticed one typographical slip: page 245, line 1, "Bowulf" > "Beowulf." [[3]] Fred C. Robinson, "Old English Literature in Its Most Immediate Context," in Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays, ed. John D. Niles (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), 11-29; reprinted Fred C. Robinson, The Editing of Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 3-24; also reprinted Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, ed. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (New York and London, Garland, 1994), 3-29. [[4]] This is E. T. Donaldson's translation (1966). Mitchell and Robinson's Beowulf: An Edition (Oxford, 1998) takes it as referring to Grendel, as does Klaeber, Chickering, Heaney, Garmonsway, S. A. J. Bradley, and others. [[5]] I have edited Frank's notes here. [[6]] Edward B. Irving, Jr., "Editing Old English Verse: The Ideal," in New Approaches to Editing Old English Verse, ed. Sarah Larratt Keefer and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 11-20, at 19-20. [[7]] P. J. Lucas, ed. Exodus (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994), 81. [[8]] Irving, "Editing," 19-20.