Renée Trilling's monograph, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia, is a theoretically astute, meticulously edited, and impeccably researched consideration of Anglo-Saxon historical consciousness. Trilling argues persuasively for the simultaneous presence in Anglo-Saxon literary culture of two distinct historiographical modalities: the one, vernacular, heroic, and dialectical, the other, Christian, orthodox, and teleological. For Trilling, the heroic form and nostalgic desires of Old English poetry provide an aestheticizing lens through which culturally and chronologically remote texts can be made meaningful for a contemporaneous audience while contemporaneous events can be comprehended in terms of a legendary, illustrious Germanic-heroic past. An indeterminate interaction between present and past in vernacular verse historiography urges interpretive participation in the generation of historical sense. By contrast, according to the providential trajectory of Latin historiography (e.g. Bede's Historia ecclesiastica), the present and the past are significant only in light of a predetermined future.
Though Old English poetry has always been considered in some way "nostalgic," Trilling gives this concept an analytical edge by appealing judiciously to modern critical theory in her Introduction. Following Fredric Jameson's Marxist interrogation of the collaboration between ideology and historicity within the logic of postmodernism, Trilling understands nostalgia as "in a dialectical relationship to history: as it attempts to reconstruct the lost past in the present moment, its manipulation of material events into aesthetic objects turns the present into history, thereby reifying the separation between present and past" (5). And yet, for Trilling, the logic of aesthetic mediation in Anglo-Saxon vernacular poetry is not only ideological in its functioning, especially as it enables a ligne de fuite from orthodox Christian historiography. Trilling thus promotes the utility of Walter Benjamin's historical materialism and an approach to Old English poetry that takes into account its recuperative, redemptive powers: "the formal aesthetic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which works through accretion, parallelism, and the balance of opposing elements" generates a dialectic that "in Benjamin's terms, 'redeems' the past by locating and recognizing fragments of it within the present" (23). Vernacular poetry encourages its readers to create "thematic links between people and events of the past and those of the present, resulting in a view of history as a constitutive element of the present rather than as a prelude to it" (23). In this way, the dialectical movement of poetic nostalgia works against the linear teleology of Latin historical writing, which relies on a model of unidirectional progress defined by its end-point.
The dichotomy between teleological and dialectical historiography is lucidly formulated although, staying within the Introduction, one may quibble about its application to Beowulf. Trilling reads the invocation of Heremod and the recital of the Lay of Sigemund after the hero's defeat of Grendel as representing an historical dialectic that "raises questions about the transience of fame: will Beowulf ultimately earn the lasting renown of a Sigemund, or will he share in Heremod's ignominious fate?" (11). This is a somewhat dated interpretation of the passage and, arguably, there exists considerable ambiguity in this representation of Sigemund.[1] No doubt for the pagan warriors assembled at Heorot, comparison to this great Germanic hero would do Beowulf credit; a Christian audience, however, would perhaps be more attentive to Sigemund's fæhðe ond fyrena (line 879a) and the hint of incest that may accompany mention of Fitela. Understanding the passage in this way lends weight to Fred Robinson's argument for the poem's Christian reconciliation with the heroic pagan past via acknowledgement of the latter's shortcomings. Trilling, of course, must resist (8-10) Robinson's "appositive" reading because its teleological form conflicts with her claim for dialectical historiography in Beowulf. As the Sigemund-Heremod digression provides the first example of this paradigm and is repeatedly referred to, Trilling's failure to note the counter-argument is a (rare) misstep.
Confidence in Trilling's argument, nevertheless, swiftly returns with Chapter One, where the redemptive character of Benjamin's historical materialism is carefully expounded and its critical viability demonstrated in readings of Deor, The Ruin, and Widsith. Trilling sensitively elucidates how "Anglo-Saxon historical poetry...posits its Anglo-Saxon audience as inhabiting the continuing presence of the past, not as succeeding or supplanting it" (60). Thus, "Deor redeems past suffering in an attempt at consolation for present sufferers, and The Ruin redeems a long-dead civilization whose remnants continue to have meaning" (58). Likewise, Widsith "is an example of how the aesthetic apprehension of the past operates at a collective level, of how an entire society can position itself vis-à-vis a cultural heritage drawn from various and sundry times and places" (61).
Chapter Two turns to Cædmon's Hymn and the biblical poetry of the Junius manuscript and, while there has never been any question that these poems are "hybrid" cultural products, Trilling again draws effectively on contemporary theory to revitalize an old concept. Postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, is enlisted in order to think vernacular literature as subversive of colonizing Christian-Latin authority: "the process of linguistic translation (which is simultaneously cultural translation) destabilizes the language of authority and disrupts the hierarchy on which that authority is grounded" (67). As opposed to an orthodox Anglo-Saxon author such as Ælfric, who insists on a linear temporality that clearly distinguishes the Old Dispensation from its fulfillment in the New, the Junius poems subvert "the strictures of historical time through aesthetic experience, bringing various historical events together through narrative juxtaposition and placing them all before the reader, who participates both intellectually and affectively in the affirmation of a Christian faith for which past, present, and future all bear equal significance for the story of human salvation" (78).
Notwithstanding the excellence of many of the readings in this chapter, the opposition Trilling establishes between vernacular/poetic and typological/teleological historiography seems at times too schematic, preventing a robust engagement with recent scholarly accounts of formal patterning in the verse of Junius. Phyllis Portnoy's analysis of ring composition in Exodus, for instance, is briefly mentioned (104) but its consequences for Trilling's argument are not considered. Portnoy argues that the vernacular compositional techniques that structure the poem's infamous "patriarchal digression" could have educated a relatively unlearned audience to read typologically, suggesting an alliance precisely where Trilling sees potential for subversion: "allegorical reading pulls readers in quite a different direction from the one in which the patriarchal digression pulls them" (115). It is a little disappointing also that no section of this chapter is dedicated to Daniel, a poem the artistry of which too rarely is given its due. More to the point of Trilling's argument, the Daniel-poet seems to have an idiosyncratic historiographical agenda: what survives of his text focuses not on Daniel's prophecies (accorded primary importance in medieval commentaries because of the influence of Jerome's Commentarii in Danielem), but on artfully juxtaposing narratives dealing with the pride, exile, and redemption of Nebuchadnezzar and the Israelites, and the destruction of the arrogant Baltassar.
The third chapter moves from the legendary and biblical past of the Anglo-Saxons to the grim military realities of the turn of the millennium, considering the ideological agenda of literary responses to the depredations of the Vikings. In an elegantly charted and impressively contextualized argument, Trilling contrasts the providential and teleological historiography of Wulfstan's Sermo lupi with the dialectical model adopted by the Battle of Maldon. Wulfstan, she observes, follows a long tradition of Christian historical writing in the way he makes sense of contemporary calamity: "Because history reveals God's hand working on earth, tribulations such as warfare, famine, and plague can quite easily be understood as God's punishment of a people in need of correction if they are to achieve ultimate salvation" (134). For Wulfstan, then, "the presence of foreign invaders indicates that the English have strayed from their path to salvation, and they must return to it in order for history to resume its progress" (143). While Wulfstan makes sense of the Viking attacks by appealing to the future and threatened salvation, the Maldon-poet makes sense of a calamitous current event by appealing nostalgically to the Germanic-heroic past: "Locating a warrior ethos in the men who died at Maldon paradoxically suggests that the heroic spirit lives on, and that the England serving as the setting of Maldon is a land of heroes, though perhaps not as many as it needs" (169). Both Wulfstan and the Maldon-poet seek to unite the English in the face of disaster, the former as a community of Christians, the latter as a community of warriors.
Chapters Four and Five ably examine the form, political, and historical investments of the earlier, canonical and later, irregular verse of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Considering the Chronicle as a species of prosimetrum, Trilling argues that the verse temporarily arrests the forward thrust of history, offering space for the nostalgic reconstruction of contemporary events. Along with Thomas Bredehoft, David Dumville, and others, Trilling associates the classical Old English verse of the Chronicle with the promotion of West Saxon hegemony and argues further that: "the canonical Chronicle poems memorialize the scions of the Alfredian House of Wessex in much the same way that The Battle of Maldon commemorated the fallen heroes of Byrhtnoth's heorðwerod, by deploying the aesthetics of nostalgia to historicize contemporary (or near-contemporary) events as the stuff of legend" (179). However, as Chapter Five demonstrates, the disintegration of West Saxon sovereignty and the arrival of Norman rule have formal and historiographical consequences for Old English Chronicle verse: "In place of historical poetry reminiscent of Beowulf, the later Chronicle suggests the homiletic discourse of Wulfstan and Ælfric...in place of a constellation of historical fragments, it offers a distinctly providential narrative" (215).
Trilling's monograph perhaps could have benefited from a broader consideration of historical representation in religious vernacular verse as her analysis is heavily weighted toward secular-heroic material, where establishing a providential trajectory would seem to be less of a priority. But what sort of historiographical agenda is present in, say, the versified saints' lives of the Cynewulfian corpus? Do the Christ-poems of the Exeter Book manifest the same dialectical subversion of providential historiography that Trilling perceives in the verse of the Junius manuscript? Does the "heroic" treatment of Christ in The Dream of the Rood argue for a heterodox treatment of the Incarnation's historicity? These queries derive from Trilling's provocative argument: it is certainly the case that she has provided medievalists with an excellent analysis of the coupling of form and function in Old English poetry and an elegant demonstration of the potential relevance of modern philosophical thought to the reading of Anglo-Saxon texts.
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1. See Mark Griffith, "Some difficulties in Beowulf, lines 874-902: Sigemund reconsidered," ASE 24 (1995): 11-41; Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 109-13.