Signs that sing : hybrid poetics in Old English verse

SIGNS THAT SING o

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

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SIGNS THAT SING o

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o HYBRID POETICS IN OLD ENGLISH VERSE

Heather Maring

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2017 by Heather Maring All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book may be available in an electronic edition. 22 21 20 19 18 17

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A record of cataloging-in-publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8130-5446-9 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://upress.ufl.edu

For Brad and Kai

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CONTENTS



Acknowledgments ix



Notes on Citations xi



Introduction 1



1. Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse 8

2. Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme 34

3. A Lord-Retainer Theme 50



4. Refiguring Hybrid Oral-Literate Signs 71



5. Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Poet-Patron Theme 93



6. A Sea Voyage in The Dream of the Rood 113



7. Signifying the Coming of Christ in The Advent Lyrics 128



Afterword: Signs That Sing 155



Notes 161



Bibliography 195



Index 217

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is an homage to the rhetorical sophistication of Old English poetry. Because of their metrical and formulaic consistency, Old English poems can be deceptively simple while doing something very complex: mixing expressions and modes of signification from written, oral, and ritual traditions. The synthesis of these traditions represents an extraordinary development. I am deeply indebted to the late John Miles Foley for his guidance and wisdom. I am also indebted to Emily Thornbury and the anonyomous readers for their incisive and profoundly helpful feedback. Others deserving thanks for their suggestions and support for this book at its various stages include Mark Amodio, Tiffany Beechy, Robert Bjork, Anne Bramley, Martin Camargo, Markus Cruse, Elizabeth Detwiler, Joseph Fruscione, Lori Garner, William H. Green, Joseph Harris, Richard A. Hocks, Ian James, Michelle Karnes, Alice Keefe, Emma Lipton, Dhira Mahoney, Shannon McCarthy, John McKinnell, Britt Mize, Joseph Nagy, Roy Rukkila, Brad Ryner, Catherine Saucier, Robert Sturges, and John Zemke. The support of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), through the ACMRS Faculty Fellowship, and the Arizona State University Department of English, through Junior Faculty Leave, enabled the writing of this book. An earlier version of chapter 5 appears under the title “Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Convention,” in Studies in Philology 108 (2011):

x · Acknowledgments

299–319, reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as “Two Ships Crossing: Hybrid Poetics in The Dream of the Rood” in English Studies 91 (2010): 241–55, reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis, Ltd. The historiated initial (London, British Library, Arundel 16 f.2) was reproduced with the permission of the © British Library Board. Cover design by Paul Maring.

NOTES ON CITATIONS

Unless noted otherwise, all quotations of Old English verse follow George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, vols. 1–3, New York: Columbia University Press and London: Routledge, 1931–36. The numeration of riddles also follows the ASPR. Exceptions are the following: Quotations of Beowulf come from R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds., Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, 4th ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. I use Swanton’s edition of The Dream of the Rood. Michael Swanton, ed., The Dream of the Rood, 3rd rev. ed., Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996. The attribution of numbers to individual lyrics in The Advent Lyrics (called Christ I in Krapp and Dobbie, ed.) derives from their treatment in Campbell, ed., The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book; Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf: A Poem in Three Parts; Burgert, The Dependence of Part I of Cynewulf’s Christ Upon the Antiphonary; and Burlin, The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary.

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Introduction mongum reordum, wrencum singe (with many voices, with stratagems, I sing)

In an allegory, J.R.R. Tolkien describes a tower’s beauty and integrity, overlooked by critics who lift away its every stone, searching for origins and what they expect (Monsters 7–8). Their methodology leads them to miss that the man who built the tower “had been able to look out upon the sea” (7). Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” presaged a broader movement in the humanities that privileged attention and empathy over judgment shaped by prior expectations. A methodology that vests objects of study with authority inspired such scholarly approaches as ethnopoetics in Native American studies, thick description in anthropology, and the study of oral traditions in classical studies and literature. Critics using these approaches sought to enter and inhabit the tower, a process made better when accompanied by informants with an insider’s perspective. Yet, even Tolkien’s criticism, whose expansive perspective gave new life to Beowulf studies, reflected a prevalent division in Anglo-Saxon scholarship between writing deemed either Christian or non-Christian. In praise of Beowulf, he writes that it inhabits “the pregnant moment of poise” that extricates it from “the old dogma” of Germanic paganism, while protecting it from full-blown Christianity: “He [the Beowulf-poet] was still dealing with the great temporal tragedy, and not yet with writing an allegorical

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homily in verse” (23). Because his poetry does not serve the ideological agendas of either pagan or Christian eras, Tolkien suggests, the Beowulfpoet creates living, breathing monsters and heroes in fitting poetic style.1 The long poems Andreas and Guthlac (both saints’ lives) possess “wellwrought language, weighty words, lofty sentiment,” but such style is incongruous to all but Beowulf (14). By reserving heroic diction for Beowulf, Tolkien reifies a separation between “pagan” and Christian material that had already been imposed by earlier critics. This separation of heterodox from orthodox content has dogged Anglo-Saxon scholarship until at least the end of the twentieth century, fueling an analogous division between those who study oral tradition and those who work with the Latin Christian tradition, a division still in the process of healing. Such categorization has obscured a rich rhetorical tradition in Old English poems of any genre. I propose a way of interpreting the poetic style of Old English poems that regards their many features—Christianity, Germanic paganism, oral tradition, literate tradition, and so on—as simultaneously functional, beautiful, and congruous. Signs That Sing argues that hybrid oral, written, and liturgical ways of speaking form a fundamental poetic strategy in Old English verse. Like the tower created from diverse stones in Tolkien’s allegory, Old English poems comprise various materials from these three, sometimes overlapping, traditions, all crafted in the classical meter and diction of Old English poetry. Authors and their audiences (who could have included lay and monastic people) would have encountered many kinds of verbal art: works deriving from deeply literate traditions, such as Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy; biblical and apocryphal narratives from the mouths of preachers; oral-traditional compositions by local or traveling bards; and the sacred stories, both overt and implicit, evoked by ritual Christian practices, from baptism and the Eucharist to the daily and annual practices of monastics. Written, oral, and ritual traditions, I contend, all provided creative resources for Anglo-Saxon authors writing in the vernacular poetic style. Furthermore, Old English poems—both those obviously written in the service of religion and those whose function appears to be more secular—were aesthetic, performative events. In one example of hybridity, Anglo-Saxon authors used oral idioms for their strongly metonymic associations and repurposed them, in a literary manner, as metaphors. For example, the well-known trope, the exile theme,

Introduction · 3

occurs in the story of the fall of the angels at the beginning of Genesis A, where it functions in a typically oral-traditional manner to characterize the expulsion of Satan and his followers from the true dryht or communitas of heaven. In the saint’s life Juliana, however, the exile theme connotes “fallenness” and “damnation” rather than explicit banishment from a social group. Exile imagery and morpho-syntactic half-lines recur across the poem, linking the suitor Heliseus, his companions, and the devil who tries to tempt Juliana.2 Although we do not see these figures literally cast out, they represent various exiles from heaven, as framed metaphorically and spiritually by the theme. The line between typical and metaphorical usage of an oral-connected theme or typescene can seem fuzzy in some cases and clear in others. I take up a definitively metaphorical use of a typescene in chapter 6, where I discuss how a sea-voyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as a heroic journey, rather than literally representing Christ crossing a body of water aboard the Holy Cross. Anglo-Saxon poets also employed liturgical speech, symbols, and acts in a manner that evokes metonymic associations with specific liturgical moments. Ritual signifiers operate in a manner similar to oral-traditional themes because their recurrent features (experienced over time by the audience in performance and reperformance) evoke extratextual associations. The talking Cross in The Dream of the Rood strongly suggests monumental preaching crosses (especially the Ruthwell Cross, whose inscriptions overlap with the Vercelli poem). This association would bring the preaching cross, supplicants, and their experiences of light (in relationship to the cross) into the poem’s imaginary world, making both physical and spiritual sense of the Dreamer’s progression from fear and awe in the night to hope and desire toward dawn.3 Chapter 7 focuses on the metonymic significance of liturgical associations in The Advent Lyrics. In the following pages I explore the hybridity of oral-traditional, written, and liturgical signification to argue that Anglo-Saxon authors preferred a pastiche of styles that displayed their verbal agility and communicated layers of meaning in a single sentence or extended scene or across an entire poem. This book surveys a cross-section of rhetorical gestures, ranging from the well-known phenomenon of written oral-connected idioms (such as traditional phraseology, themes, and typescenes) to oral idioms

4 · Signs that Sing

that have been reframed according to a literate hermeneutics to written ritual signs.4 The songbird in Riddle 8 sings with many stratagems, not with a single tune. Likewise, I contend, Old English poems resound with oral, literate, and ritual expressive strategies. The layering of these expressive strategies is what I call “hybrid poetics,” which calls for a method of interpretation that attends to each of these layers and how they interact. *

*

*

In chapter 1 I explain the rationale and methodology for interpreting oral, written, and ritual traditions as equal contributors to the hybrid poetics of Old English poems. The first section questions an often presumed dichotomy between oral tradition as an “old” medium and writing as a “new” medium of communication. In the main body of the chapter, I describe differences and similarities in the expressive strategies of oral, written, and ritual traditions. In order to explain how these expressions may operate simultaneously in a written text, I draw on the concept of tertium quid as it has been presented by John D. Niles and on the theory of immanent art developed by John Miles Foley. The chapter concludes by exploring hybrid poetic expressions in Exeter Book Riddle 30a/b. Chapter 2, “Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme,” discusses the process whereby “written oral-connected idioms” metonymically refer to their ongoing usage in an oral-traditional corpus. As the theory of immanent art states, poems (whether written or oral) make use of the metonymic referentiality of oral-traditional signs for expressive purposes that encompass both the utilitarian and the aesthetic. This discussion of “traditional phraseology” frames my analysis of the collocation grædig ond gifre (greedy and devouring), which interacts with a theme that I introduce here: “devouring-the-dead.” This theme portrays the destruction of a corpse by agents such as fire, birds, worms, and water. I chart the recurrent motifs of this theme, which sometimes arise in conjunction with the phraseological half-line system grædig ond gifre, and explore its implications in Beowulf and the Soul and Body poems (Soul and Body I and Soul and Body II). Chapter 3, “A Lord-Retainer Theme,” discusses an oral-connected idiom whose recurrent motifs rely on clusters of concepts rather than specific morphemes or phraseological patterns. Although specialists of oral

Introduction · 5

traditions have said that the motifs of themes are primarily conceptual and do not necessarily have to be tied to morpho-syntactic units, scholars have given preference to themes with recurrent verbal forms (such as those found in the exile and beasts of battle themes).5 By calling the lordretainer convention a “theme” in the oral-traditional sense, this chapter highlights a range of storytelling devices that have metonymic referentiality. The poems discussed use the motifs of the lord-retainer theme to frame the relationship between lords and retainers in different ways. In Battle of Maldon and Beowulf the lord-retainer theme represents the social contract between mortal lords and their retainers, while in Andreas and Genesis A it describes a spiritual contract between Christ and his followers. Old English oral-connected themes served as a rich resource for framing narrative subjects. The next three chapters argue that some oralconnected themes benefit from metaphorical interpretation, a strategy consonant with the reading practices of medieval Christian textual communities. In chapter 4, “Refiguring Hybrid Oral-Literate Signs,” I describe how the devouring-the-dead theme in The Phoenix and Riddle 47 and the lord-retainer theme in The Advent Lyrics (also known as Christ I) retain their recognizable motifs. Yet, by being transplanted to unusual narrative contexts, they profit from literate modes of interpretation. Used allegorically and metaphorically, the devouring-the-dead theme describes the fate of the soul during the Apocalypse, in hell, and in heaven. The lord-retainer theme in The Advent Lyrics creates a metaphor for humanity’s renewed covenant with God. These metaphorical uses of oral-connected themes constitute a rhetorical category made possible by hybrid poetics. They exemplify how Anglo-Saxon poets fused oral-traditional and literate modes of signification. Chapter 5, “Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Poet-Patron Theme,” uses the same parameters for the definition of an Old English theme as those described in chapter 3, while tracing how representations of the poet-patron relationship have both metonymic and metaphorical roles. In Widsith and Deor the theme, operating metonymically, portrays poets and patrons as characters who exemplify the symbiosis of appropriate sociopolitical deeds and words of praise. In The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, and “Alms-Giving,” the theme constructs a metaphor for the interrelationship between God’s generosity and human praise. The use of the

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theme in these poems represents a range of hybridity, from the written oral-connected idiom to the oral-connected idiom influenced by a literate hermeneutics. Chapter 6, “A Sea Voyage in The Dream of the Rood,” focuses on a typescene rather than a theme. The sea voyage typescene arises in purely metaphoric capacity in The Dream of the Rood, where the typescene’s motifs overlap with descriptions of Christ’s crucifixion. Carl Berkhout has already argued that the poem depicts the Cross as a ship in his examination of the word holmwudu (sea-wood or ship) at line 91. Like Berkhout, I relate the image of the Cross as ship to the patristic navis crucis concept, but I call attention to an embedded sea-voyage typescene, whose presence supports and elaborates upon this concept. The poem fuses the metonymic implications of the sea-voyage typescene with the navis crucis metaphor, making the oral-connected typescene a hybrid figure. By understanding how hybrid poetics can embed typescenes and themes in “unusual” scenarios, we can perceive strains of signification that would otherwise seem silent. In chapter 7, “Signifying the Coming of Christ in The Advent Lyrics,” I show that Old English verse uses an expressive feature that complements the oral-literate hybridity of the written oral-connected idiom and versions of these idioms that benefit from metaphorical analysis. Past attempts at theorizing the relationship between ritual and literature have largely been impressionistic or have assumed that works of verbal art employ a mode of allusion typical of literate practices. By expanding the theory of immanent art to the arena of ritual, it is possible to create a methodology for tracing ritual signification in works that have strong ties to oral traditions. I suggest that just as hybrid, oral-related texts may resound for their audiences with the extratextual traditional associations created by oral metonyms, likewise such texts may resound with liturgical associations triggered by ritual metonyms. With this exploration of oral and ritual modes of signification I describe a hermeneutics for reading liturgical symbols in Old English verse that takes account of ritual modes of expression and suggests that some early medieval audiences were alert to multiple modes of verbal expression because they encountered them regularly. An aesthetic complexity that is not apparent when solely using traditional modes of literary analysis becomes apparent when applying the lenses of oral and ritual theory. Chapter 7 explores the aesthetic and expressive significance of ritual signs in The Advent Lyrics by comparing and contrasting the Latin

Introduction · 7

antiphons for Advent with their Old English translations, a process that exposes the productive interplay of literate, oral, and ritual modes of signification in The Advent Lyrics. Thus, in Signs That Sing I present a spectrum of hybrid modes of expression. These expressions range from written oral-traditional idioms (chapters 2 and 3) to oral-connected idioms that have been reframed by a literate hermeneutics (chapters 4, 5, and 6) to ritual idioms (chapter 7). These hybrid signifiers deepen the complexity and the stylistic texture of Old English poems. Ultimately, I argue, hybrid poetics plays a central role in the artistry and meaning of Old English poems.

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Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse

Beyond an Old/New Dichotomy How we imagine the poetics of the Old English literary tradition will either limit or expand the range of interpretive possibilities. In one imagined scenario the formulaic systems, themes, and typescenes of oral tradition persist in Old English poems because they suit nostalgic or antiquarian interests or because appreciation for homegrown traditions supports their ongoing use, even though they sometimes seem, to use Tolkien’s word, “incongruent.” In another scenario—the one that I explore in this book— authors writing in Old English create a rich interweaving of oral, written, and ritual traditions, which showcases their skill and pleases and informs their audiences. A purposeful mingling of the signifying strategies of these traditions creates imaginatively complex works of verbal art. How we imagine the poets and audiences of the past can profoundly shape how we interpret their work. I thus want to resist a developmental model that ascribes “newness” to literacy and “oldness” to oral tradition. An oral tradition’s expressive features should not be treated as signs of transitional development toward a fully fledged written tradition, but rather as dynamic components of multilayered, hybrid poems. The characterization of orality as a definitively older (but ongoing) mode of composition can be traced to Francis P. Magoun Jr.’s case for the influence of oral tradition on Old English poetry, where he characterizes Christian stories as “novel,”

Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse · 9

compound phrases for the Christian God as “young,” and the act of writing as something new and relatively tangential to oral composition in performance.1 To one degree or another, subsequent scholarship associated oral tradition with Germanic and heroic poetry in contrast to the written biblical and allegorical verse (which adapted oral-traditional formulas and themes to Christian subject matter). In the past few decades the biases that generated these categories have been deconstructed, yet even a scholar as sensitive as Andy Orchard resurrects them (just as many others do).2 Orchard, who has written extensively on oral-formulaic and acoustic devices in Old English poetry, states in the collection Anglo-Saxon Styles that Cynewulf ’s verse is a “combination of old and new,” the former being “the native, secular, vernacular, and ultimately oral tradition,” the latter being the “imported, Christian, Latinate” tradition (“Both Style” 271).3 He mentions the intersection of two cultures (Latinate and Germanic), two ideational systems (Christian and heroic), two poetic styles (for example, literate allusion within a textual community and oral-traditional phraseology), and two time periods (new and old). The naturalization of these homologies within scholarly interpretation deserves interrogation. One danger in stressing a dichotomy between oral and literate traditions is that notions of “old” and “new” accrue to each tradition and, thereby, legitimate interpreting the presence of oral-traditional style as something that has been largely assimilated, perhaps nostalgically, to literacy as a practice and to written text as a product. More generally, phrases such as “residual oral features” and “transitional orality” suggest that instead of oral and written communication intersecting productively, the oral necessarily gives way to the written.4 Walter Ong uses “transitional orality” to describe an early phase of writing within a culture, where writing remains marginal and functions only to support oral-traditional practices (or “primary orality”).5 Although “transitional orality” aptly represents the role of writing in certain cultural contexts, it is easily overgeneralized. The terms “residual” and “transitional” also run the danger of depicting oral-traditional features as the dying embers of an outmoded cultural practice. “Transitional” writing indicates a developmental stage in a teleological progression toward writing that is less oral and more literate. Although, it has not always been used in this manner, “oral-derived” can signify a deracination of oral-traditional expressive features from the contexts in which they derive their meaning.6 Such terms

10 · Signs that Sing

can obscure the likelihood that, for the Anglo-Saxons, the verbal arts of oral and written traditions were communicative resources on more or less equal footing. I take the position that oral traditions—in such forms as the narration of inherited and new stories, proverbs, lyric songs, medicinal and cooking recipes, healing incantations, riddles, and jokes—continued unabated, although continuously changing, until at least the mid-nineteenth century in all corners of the British Isles. ( Jack Goody notes that “near-universal literacy was achieved in Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century” [Myth 43].) Depending on the period, these traditions resounded in Irish, Welsh, Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, modern English, Scottish, Old French, Anglo-French, and probably Latin. Their audiences, tradition bearers, and genres varied across regions and time, and they were influenced by each other and by written traditions.7 Some scholars have deemed the textual evidence for an oral tradition, such as recurrent phraseology and themes, to be the echoes of an ancient but increasingly marginalized practice that writing supplanted during the Anglo-Saxon period.8 The reader does not need to agree with one viewpoint or another about the prevalence of living oral traditions, specifically an Old English tradition in Anglo-Saxon England, to profit from an analysis of hybrid poetics in Old English texts. Such a reader may still hear “echoes” of an oral tradition in written texts, but the echoes will necessarily be fainter if one presumes that Anglo-Saxon audiences no longer had a point of comparison: memories of traditional verbal art being created and recreated by a tradition bearer.9 In The Aesthetics of Nostalgia, Renée Trilling offers an alternative approach to thinking about Old English poetics, using the image of the constellation as it has been developed by Walter Benjamin to describe the links made between notions of the past and present: “[C]oncepts, rather than stars, appear to the critic in such a way that their relative arrangement is suddenly perceived as meaningful and becomes an image, or an idea” (31).10 She explains that this critical mode, which she perceives at work in Old English poems, “skirts binaries” (31) and allows the past to resonate in the present. Attributing the stylistic characteristic of polyvalence to an “aesthetics of nostalgia,” Trilling builds upon and revises Fred Robinson’s discussion of the polysemy of heroic diction, which he says points simultaneously to a heroic past and Christian present (8–10). For Trilling, the

Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse · 11

formal features of Old English verse conjure “a dialectical notion of history that ultimately resists the totalization of a single perspective, whether Christian or pagan” (9). Such resistance warrants using nostalgia (in the Benjaminian sense) as a heuristic device for investigating how Old English verse moves between the poles of Christian teleology and a vernacular dialectic. Although Trilling does not apply this approach directly to the notion of oral tradition in relationship to a written tradition (see, for example, 37n18), she also does not characterize the “traditional” features of Old English poetry as signs of the past. By implementing the image of the “constellation” as an interpretive tool, she frames stylistic features associated with both the oral-derived (her term) and the written as aspects of a “vernacular historiography” that relates past events to the present moment (23). We can apply the image of the constellation to the rhetorical practices of oral, written, and ritual traditions by seeing these as resources for poets that have little association with old versus new and pagan versus Christian. Instead, I argue that writers conceived of these resources as a communicative (and interpretive) inheritance, verbal riches with which they could craft their poems. These riches include: heroic diction and idioms with metonymic signification from oral tradition; the practice of allegorization and finding metaphors in literal description from written, literate tradition; and—in parallel with oral-traditional metonymy—metonymic signification of words, gestures, bodily postures, images, and concepts from ritual tradition. Poets played with written, oral, and ritual expressive strategies to enrich the craft of their poems and appeal to a sensibility that values the positional interleaving of rhetorical gestures, images, structures, and ideas, rather than symmetry, hierarchies of value, the illusion of effortlessness, and other traits admired in the ancient classical system.11 Anglo-Saxon poems could appeal not only to the eyes and the ears of Anglo-Saxon audiences but also to diverse notions of what constitutes a signifier and how such signs “sing” with multilayered meaning. To provide a foundation for the discussions in subsequent chapters of specific oral-traditional, literate, and ritual expressive strategies, I present an overview of terminology and concepts related to each of these strategies. As we will see, not all verbal expressions engage their audiences in the same manner.

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Expressive Strategies of Oral, Written, and Ritual Traditions Expressions in oral and literate traditions can differ because their modes of creation, presentation, and reception differ. Generally speaking, written communication in a primarily literate paradigm requires text-based clues that guide readers in the act of interpretation, from punctuation and spacing to clarifications and examples. In contrast, the audience of an oral account uses, among other things, the performance context and vocal delivery as a guide. An oral-aural audience may be able to interrupt the speaker for clarification, but usually the mode of presentation, taking place over a specific duration of time, follows a linear path. In contrast, solitary readers have the luxury of self-pacing, rereading, cross-referencing, and reflection.12 Thus, literacy can support practices that are less common when oral tradition is the primary mode of communication. In early medieval textual communities, literate monastics became acquainted with a tradition of biblical commentary that attuned them to such notions as intertextuality, authoritative writings, textual sourcing, and typological connections within Old and New Testament narratives.13 Monastics were trained to engage in multiple levels of interpretation, such as those described and practiced by St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Bede.14 For example, Augustine explains in book 3 of De doctrina christiana that the reader of scripture should search for “an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity” (3.15.23): a literal interpretation may suffice, but more obscure passages of the Bible require figurative interpretation. The influence of Augustine upon the interpretive practices of early Christian writers, including Bede, reinforced the treatment by Anglo-Saxons of narratives in both biblical and extra-biblical stories as rich ground for the creation of analogies and metaphors. At the same time, authors or scribes composing in classical poetic meter of the Old English vernacular continued to use oral-traditional expressions, such as one finds even in the simple “The Lord’s Prayer I” (also titled Exeter Lord’s Prayer), with its somewhat unconventional meter.15 Here one finds, for example, the verse folca waldend (10b), an apparent product of the common formulaic system “[x]-(in the genitive plural) waldend” (ruler of [x]-plural), which occurs at least seventy-seven other times in the verse corpus.16 The variable term [x] bears the alliteration in the line, making this type of verse system flexible enough to suit many contexts. In this

Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse · 13

case, the word folca (of the people) alliterates with freodom (freedom) in the previous half-line, metrically linking humanity to the Christian God’s gift of spiritual freedom. Recurrent but flexible phraseology forms the verbal fabric of oraltraditional communication. It requires far less contextualization than written expressions, because idiomatic meanings are tacitly understood in relationship to the tradition. For this reason, John Miles Foley in his “immanent art” theory describes traditional phraseology (including formulaic verses, collocations, and echoic lexemes), themes, typescenes, and ring structures as “metonyms”; they refer for their greater meaning to the “tradition,” or what I prefer to imagine as the experiential knowledge of the tradition’s participants.17 In a similar manner, liturgical gestures and verbalizations receive little explanation in the context of their enactment because participants know that every aspect of the liturgy is “heavy” with significance in relationship to Christian textual and ritual traditions, as well as the participants’ personal experiences. Oral Tradition Interpretation of Old English poetry has long benefitted from knowledge about general principles of poiesis in oral traditions. Scholarship on oral poetics since Magoun’s 1953 article, “Oral-Formulaic Character of AngloSaxon Narrative Poetry,” has illuminated the oral-connected phraseology, themes, and typescenes that permeate Old English literature18 and the scribal practices that presumably resulted in written oral-traditional verse.19 Oral-formulaic studies have extended the comparative research of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on South Slavic and Ancient Greek verse to Old and Middle English literature, while enlarging the scope of the discussion. Questions about the role of phraseological systems, themes, type­scenes, and other structured/structuring devices have moved beyond Lord and Parry’s query “how is it possible to create lengthy epics on the spot?” to ask “how do these devices bring aesthetic significance to a poem?” Without a doubt, the exploration of the “how” of oral poetry in the written medieval manuscript has enabled my own discussions of hybrid forms. What distinguishes oral-traditional verse so profoundly from written verse is the simultaneity of composition, dissemination, and reception.20 The poetic register of oral verse reflects the mnemonic needs of

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poets creating lines of verse in the same moment as their presentation to an audience.21 Therefore, the register is striking in its degree of acoustic, metrical, syntactic, and ideational patterning. Poets creating within an oral tradition that spans generations employ recurring phraseology, themes, typescenes, story patterns, and other devices, that constitute “a habitual mode of thought” (Niles, “Formula” 410–11; see also Lord, Singer of Tales 35–36). A tradition-specific register (versus a universal, cross-cultural one) aids the poet composing rapidly in situ for a present audience. A thorough examination of these practices by Lord in The Singer of Tales has enabled several generations of Old English scholars, beginning with Magoun, to discover similar types of patterned speech (such as “[x]-(in the genitive plural) waldend” above) and narratives in ancient and medieval texts. In response to charges that oral-formulaic theory denied the hypothetical poet of creative agency, Foley developed an oral-traditional aesthetic theory called immanent art. In Traditional Oral Epic, The Singer of Tales in Performance, and especially Immanent Art, Foley explored how recurring phraseology, typescenes, and story patterns “make immanent” the oral tradition by conveying “a wealth of ‘additional’ implications” beyond the literal denotations of specific words (How to Read 133). Foley recounts how audiences of living oral traditions join poets in a shared understanding of the specialized register, the products of which may appear to outsiders as abbreviated or in violation of literary rules (for example, unified structure, clear sequencing, plot coherence, generic integrity, and originality). For tradition bearers, these concerns do not arise in the same way because the oral tradition serves as the referent for their verbalizations. A shared body of knowledge, largely congruent from audience to audience, fills out the sense of a poetic utterance.22 Due to their knowledge of the tradition— a tradition presumably inherited and co-created by audiences over the course of hundreds, even thousands, of performances in a lifetime—audiences interpret utterances metonymically in relationship to their traditional context, even if the only obviously recurring feature of a phrase is its metrical form. “Metonymy” can refer to a poeticism (such as ecg [edge] for “sword”) or a form of shorthand (“seat” for “chair”). More broadly, it describes a common mode of signification that has aesthetic ramifications, since well-known expressive units may be manipulated to signify more about a particular character, action, or narrative than the “literal” words appear to express.23

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The theory of immanent art relates recurrent structural units of oralconnected verse (in all its native specificity) to the need to learn how to interpret those units. The aesthetic possibilities of an Old English oralconnected idiom grow clearer when we examine its instantiations across the corpus, bearing in mind metonymic signification. Such an aesthetic approach arises in Elizabeth Tyler’s Old English Poetics, where she analyzes both the corpus-wide and poem-specific meanings of conventions for depicting treasure.24 She describes the stylistic variances between individual poems on the basis of how each employs these conventional figures. The use of collocations (word [word] and hord [hoard] occurring in the same line of verse), formulas (beorhte frætwe [with bright treasure], a recurring half-line), and verbal repetitions (fourteen instances of frætwe chiming over the course of the poem The Phoenix) can be correlated to a poem’s global style. While pursuing a similar path in regard to studies of specific formulas and conventions, I emphasize the metonymic power of oral-connected signs because Old English poems, as processes, invoked a multiplicity of signs that established their connection to Germanic, classical, oral, Latinate, literate, and liturgical traditions, thereby sustaining a heterogeneous mix of expressive styles. Metonymic referentiality supplies Old English poems (and their composers) with a tool for incorporating both oral-traditional and ritual idioms. This kind of referentiality, when blended with literary allusion and other rhetorical devices, creates an elaborate rhetorical texture whose interpretation asks its audience to inhabit multiple frames of reference. With regard to the oral-traditional frame of reference, we can return to “The Lord’s Prayer I” for an example of a line that echoes a common phraseological system while suggesting something new. The a-verse of line 4, Cyme þin rice wide (May your kingdom come, far and wide), echoes the a-verse system com [x] (Came[x]), where “x” is either a nominative, accusative, or prepositional phrase, whose stressed word alliterates with the b-verse.25 In “The Lord’s Prayer I” the stressed x-term rice (realm or kingdom) alliterates with rædfæst (judicious), uniting the line. Additionally, because of the metonymic referentiality of recurrent phraseology, the com [x] system hovers as a phrase echoed and modified. The word cyme transforms the past indicative verb com, which intimates both arrival and closure, with a subjunctive, hortatory mood and with a tense that can represent both present and future, creating a moment of outward- and inward-looking prayer:

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outward because the petitioner’s words can refer to domesdæg ( Judgment Day) and inward because in the moment of prayer God’s kingdom may be intuited—or yearned for—in the heart. Such evocative potential occurs, in part, because a more common half-line serves as foil to the one in “The Lord’s Prayer I.” Why is the form of referentiality in an oral tradition metonymic? The dynamic of performance—creating verse live before an audience—provides the most compelling answer. In The Singer of Tales in Performance, Foley developed the theory of immanent art to include the principles of Dell Hymes and Richard Bauman’s “ethnography of speaking,” which focuses on how sociocultural context (time, place, circumstance, ritual activity, the identity of the speaker, and so on) provides an interpretive frame for what is said.26 Although sociocultural context frames any mode of communication, oral-traditional poetry differs because the interpretive frame for its performance creates a space for intensely streamlined verbalization that has been disassociated from discursive, everyday speech. Foley describes how the performance event—what he calls the “performance arena”—enables each instantiation of an oral-traditional poem to function metonymically.27 Oral performance within the “defined and defining” space of the performance arena creates and sustains precise metonymic verbal expressions “because both performer and reader/audience enter the same arena and have recourse strictly to the dedicated language and presentational mode of the speech act that they are undertaking”; thus, “signals are decoded and gaps are bridged with extraordinary fluency, that is, economy” (Singer of Tales in Performance 53). In contrast, everyday discursive speech—although threaded with such formulaic statements as greetings and goodbyes—tends to be diffuse in its expressive power because each person has recourse to an idiolect with which he or she may negotiate a relationship to various social identities, express goals, or communicate emotional states. According to Foley, oralconnected metonyms carry an intensified expressive power because of the performance arena’s limitations and its “dedicated” register of speech. Based on interviews with oral poets, Foley describes the idioms of an oraltraditional register, no matter their size (from half-line systems to themes to story patterns) as “words” that wordsmiths continually manipulate.28 Here, I use these premises about the registers of oral-traditional verse to explore the various aesthetic possibilities of oral-connected and oral-

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written idioms within specific poems. Even if specific contexts have helped to shape the oral-traditional register of speech, the scholar studying codices has few avenues for comprehending these live performances. But traces of performance appear in manuscripts, according to O’Brien O’Keeffe, who expands upon Foley’s notion of the performance arena by describing the medieval manuscript as a place in which composer-scribes could and did engage in the specialized register of oral-traditional language on the page for deferred audiences (“Performing Body”). Subsequent scholarship has represented the pages of the codex as a virtual performance arena where scribe-composers have re-created the classical meter of Old English verse along with its associated oral-traditional poetic features.29 The page as site for performance has represented an equivocal solution, since written oral-connected verse is necessarily removed from the actual performance arenas in which the in situ composition of verse would have had social and political ramifications that can only be imagined, like the “jewelled crowns that kings have hurled / in shadowy pools”: sensed, missed, and easily romanticized.30 Texts and images from the Anglo-Saxon period have been scoured for clues about poets, audiences, and their gatherings: from the idealized harpists of poetry, who perform for nobility—in Heorot or, like Widsith, in the courts of northern Europe;31 to Bede’s story of Cædmon with the implication that members of minsters often amused themselves by passing the harp around the table;32 to the directions in charms to chant sanative verse over the bodies of the sick, herbal medicines, and squares of sod.33 The most persuasive recuperations of poems’ social contexts consider both their writtenness and orality (for example, Niles, Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts) or bring them into relationship with the author (for example, Overing and Osborn, Landscape of Desire). Exploration of social context and purpose has enabled readings that are themselves reperformances of Old English verse, in that such contextualized readings re-create performance arenas.34 Yet, the analysis of the relationship between Old English texts and their performance aloud, as well as their relationship to a tradition of orally created poetry, has been left behind in recent years, perhaps in response to concerns about the historical reality of Anglo-Saxon bards and arguments for treating the oral poet and oral address as a fiction.35 In “Re(si)sting the Singer,” Mark C. Amodio says that the written Anglo-Saxon poem

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should be decoupled from the issue of oral composition-in-performance, preserving the significance of oral metonyms while downplaying the idea of performance. Britt Mize similarly finds warrant for the metonymic signification of classical Old English verse, but, lacking positive evidence, he sets aside an ongoing relationship with oral tradition and performance in favor of treating metonymy as a process of signification that works just as well in written texts.36 Mize demonstrates that Alison Wray’s linguistic studies provide theoretical and evidentiary support for both the word-like and holistic functioning of formulas and formulaic systems.37 In Wray’s analysis of formulaic language lies a challenge to Foley’s theory of metonymic referentiality as a special feature of oral poetics. Densely formulaic language can be discovered in a variety of specialized registers including legal language whose “conventional forms of expression may defeat diligent attempts at full comprehension, but for those with appropriate experience . . . those same structures amount to highly efficient packages of communication, a significant part of which takes place above and around denotative meaning” (Mize, Traditional Subjectivities 103).38 That legalese and Old English poetry both rely on highly metonymic language, for Mize, proves that the characterization of Old English poetry as “oral” or “oral-connected” is unnecessary (although not necessarily untrue). Removing the issue of performance has the benefit of focusing greater attention on what can be observed and interpreted: the written formulaic systems, themes, and typescenes. Yet, without the “performance arena,” the pressure to engage in an economical mode of expression—the potent metonyms of an oral-traditional register—decreases. If we posit a monastic and aristocratic literary culture disconnected from oral tradition, where writing is accessible to only an elite audience, then, it seems unlikely that densely metonymic expressions with an oral origin could be maintained for eight or more generations. Lawyers not only have recourse to law books: they also learn their trade in highly regulated institutions where they experience a state of immersion in the language of the law—via the written word and in oral exchanges with professors (what Ong calls an agonistic educational model). After passing the bar exam, lawyers regularly use the metonymic, formulaic register of legal language in their interactions with the machinery of the legal

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system (the “performance arenas” of legal documents, negotiations, trials, and so on). Legal training (and much legal practice) also incorporates an important oral component, which in some ways parallels the highly valued oral/aural exchanges and giving voice to the written word that we find in medieval culture. The most persuasive support for the continued practice of solely written classical verse comes from scholars who would not themselves make the case for a written-only vernacular poetry: Michael D. C. Drout (who analyzes the memetic transmission of literary styles) and Elizabeth Tyler (who describes an Anglo-Saxon aesthetics of familiarity). Although tradition and aesthetics would help preserve poetic metonyms, they could not suffice without external support from a living oral tradition.39 For their maintenance, densely metonymic communicative systems require greater interaction with and re-creation of their lexical and grammatical components than do weakly metonymic systems of communication that the uninitiated can interpret with few contextual details. For knowledge of classical Old English verse to be fostered in multiple monastic settings over half a millennium, an entire subset of Anglo-Saxon culture likely supported its maintenance. The alternative is that monks, nuns, and members of the priesthood, already dedicating much of their time to prayer and chores, sequestered time to study a specialized register of vernacular poetry found solely in manuscripts. The experiential knowledge of each individual audience makes possible the ongoing creation, maintenance, and occasional transformation of metonymic meaning in relationship to specific register(s) of communication, in this case the heroic, formulaic verse of Old English. If we hazard that from childhood to old age, members of Anglo-Saxon culture were familiar with verse, proverbs, and riddles in classical meter, then skilled AngloSaxon authors would “come equipped” with a shared, culturally valued poetic resource and the knowledge that their compositions could reach a broad audience when read aloud. From paintings and narratives, we know that medieval manuscripts were read aloud to audiences (including to the reader him- or herself). Therefore, poetic written compositions ought to be explored as verbal art designed for vocality and for their resonance with verse composed in performance by oral poets.40 Authors probably imagined their written compositions entering the medium of the voice in a

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variety of (re)performances that did not require word-for-word reproduction, as one might expect during later eras in the wake of mass-produced printed text.41 From a theoretical perspective, Mize’s arguments against linking Old English poetry with oral tradition do not undercut the viability of this relationship. In a footnote Mize says that Foley, in his discussion of poetic register, overidentifies “field of discourse” (oral performance) with “mode of discourse” (poetry created in performance) because the conflation of field and mode make sense for studies of living oral traditions. For Mize, the register’s mode—classical Old English verse—arises in written documents and therefore cannot be traced to oral compositionin-performance. Where Mize sees a separation between oral and written traditions, I see overlapping fields. The value that comes from taking this stance grows apparent when we analyze verse for hybrid poetic strategies and discover rich, multilayered forms of communication. Thus, in this book I assume the vocalization of written medieval texts, which could elicit associations with oral tradition. Voiced written texts, coexisting with oral tradition as a valued mode of poetic composition, enable hybrid oral-written modes of composition and reception. In Paul Zumthor’s Introduction à la poésie orale, La poésie et la voix dans la civilisation médiévale, and La lettre et la voix, he addresses the physical experiences of reading aloud, reciting, and listening. Zumthor writes that the “performance” or reading aloud of a medieval text is constitutive of its form and meaning: “La transmission de bouche à oreille opère littéralement le texte; elle l’effectue. C’est la performance qui, d’une communication orale, fait un objet poétique, lui conférant l’identité sociale en vertu de quoi on le perçoit et le déclare tel. La performance est par là constitutive de la forme” (Zumthor, La poésie et la voix 38). The transmission from mouth to ear literally brings about the text; it realizes it. It is the performance, which, from oral communication, creates a poetic object, endowing it with social identity in accordance with what one perceives in it and declares it to be. The performance is in that way constitutive of the form.) Aurality and vocality confer upon medieval poetry extra- or paralinguistic meaning, even if the tradition-specific variables elude comprehension.42 The process of making, via vocalization, and the social meaning of a voiced medieval text will necessarily be elusive. Nonetheless, the theory of immanent art offers a way to find approximate meanings for oral-connected idioms.43 The phe-

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nomenology of the performance of medieval texts, explored in depth by Zumthor, and the rhetorically loaded idioms of verse, explored by Foley, describe a continuum of oral-traditional ways of producing meaning that are less available to “purely” literary texts. Furthermore, in the revocalization of written texts audiences may discover, aided by auditory sense memories, oral and ritual expressions mingled with literate ones. I employ terms from the theory of immanent art—“metonym,” “expressive economy,” and “performance arena”—to describe oral-traditional poetics because they explain how oral idioms resonate with extratextual significance. Textual Tradition Both Eric Havelock and Walter Ong have argued that the interpretive practices associated with reading and writing should be distinguished from those in strictly oral-traditional communities.44 Because the processes of composition, dissemination, and reception may occur in distinct times and places, verbal art in written form has sometimes been deemed a literature of absence, rather than presence, and of alienation, rather than community.45 Such homologies overstate the differences between oral and written technologies of verbal art and obscure the active textual communities, to use Brian Stock’s term, that turn an absent writer’s voice into the present voices of the lector and the reciter. According to Stock: The text did not have to be written: oral record, memory, and reperformance sufficed. Nor did the public have to be fully lettered. Often, in fact, only the interpres had a direct contact with literate culture, and, like the twelfth-century heretic Valdes, memorized and communicated his gospel by word of mouth. (“Medieval Literacy” 18) The mode of reception in both oral traditions and early medieval textual communities was aurality. In both cases, the human voice is a “material entity” whose use changes the phenomenological experience of verbal expression, whether that verbal expression was originally composed within an oral or a written medium (Zumthor, “Text and the Voice” 74). Because of (1) fluidity between textualization and re-oralization and (2) early medieval textual communities’ orientation around shared manuscripts and master narratives (what Martin Irvine calls “an unquestioned

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knowledge base for every literate person” [88]), medieval verse radically differed from verbal expressions in today’s print and digital media, with regard to composition, dissemination, and reception. Overtly Christian Old English verse makes reference to texts that its authors could have known by ear or by eye. Framing devices (for example, the third-person narrative description of Widsith’s address) and tropes (for example, the talking book or the Andreas-poet’s self-interruption)46 serve not only the fiction of oral address but also the need for ready-made rhetorical tools that could be oralized for a listening audience—a practice that continued until at least the fifteenth century.47 Ong notes that “in manuscript culture texts were somewhat more like proclamations,” which incorporated addresses to readers, conversational asides, and the rhetorical devices of academic orality (“Orality, Literacy” 2, 1–3). With regard to the production of written vernacular text and its reception, Old English verse depended upon well-known oral conventions, for, as O’Brien O’Keeffe has shown, it notably incorporates very few visual markers that would indicate poetic meter.48 Whether we deem the lack of visual cues to be evidence of transitional orality or simply an aesthetically productive phase for authors and audiences who were aware of both oral and literate noetics, written Old English verse suited the ear as well as the eye.49 Vocal presentations of the text would have been augmented by memorial practices enabling impressive oral recall of master narrative(s), which Irvine states were linked intertextually to other written and oralized stories.50 In chirographic culture, written texts’ mode of signification nevertheless shifts away from the metonymic style of many oral traditions to one that is more metaphoric and allusive. Differentiation in mode of signification has been linked to how manuscript technology and the practice of writing change the ways that authors (and readers) approach verbal expression. Ong writes that “In such (literate) cultures, writing provides new resources for thought—unlimited verbatim permanency, ‘backward scanning’ with the resulting opportunities for reflective revision, detailed sequential analysis, and so forth” (“Orality, Literacy” 5). Stock links the “sequential ordering of the text, the series verborum or narrationis” with interpretive strategies that emphasize “mimetic imitation, redemptive typology, and the correct reading of anterior models” (“Medieval Literacy” 19).

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The training of the Anglo-Saxon litteratus in grammatica, according to Seth Lerer, emphasized such hermeneutical practices (9). The very material medium of the manuscript as an object (which may be removed from and outlive the author or composer-scribe) means that writers of texts, especially those working outside of an oral-traditional framework, cannot assume that their audiences share a specialized poetic register distinct from more prosaic registers of a language. Written texts are dissociated from such variables of face-to-face communication as paralinguistic signifiers (tone, volume, speed, cadence) and the guidance provided by audience reaction. Their relative indeterminacy creates the conditions for qualitatively different verbalization. Written texts thrive on allusions to identifiable, authoritative sources (hence the impetus toward making pseudo affiliations) rather than on a poetic register that references a body of traditional meanings. According to Stock, textualization fosters a capacity for intertextual referencing and, to use Paul Ricoeur’s model, a spectrum of medieval hermeneutical practices that extends from proclamation (or kerygma, which Stock identifies as contiguous with oral tradition) to demystification (which Stock associates with typology and allegory [“Medieval Literacy” 19–20]). “Literacy” during the medieval period cannot be reduced to the mere ability to read, since some cognitive habits informed by literacy can be conveyed to those who listen to written texts read aloud.51 In the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of this book, I examine these distinctions while discussing poems that use oral-connected idioms metaphorically and metonymically. In Christian vernacular poems that paraphrase Latin texts, Old English authors took unusual liberties with themes and typescenes, liberties that accord with a literate, medieval hermeneutics prioritizing “back-scanning” (re-reading) and multilayered interpretation. Ritual Tradition Ritual is the third medium critical to a discussion of hybrid modes of expression in Old English poetry. Scholarship connecting specific Old English poems and Anglo-Saxon ritual practices has revealed how vernacular poetry and ritual could be interlaced.52 I analyze The Dream of the Rood and The Advent Lyrics for instances of ritual idioms that refer metonymically to liturgical practices. This approach demonstrates that the imaginative work

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of reading (not just these medieval poems, but similar ones steeped in a tradition of hybrid poetics) benefits from hearing ritual idioms as invocations of audiences’ experiences and knowledge. Rather than imagine that the vessel of poetry has been partly filled with ritual content, I approach these poems as works of verbal art that actively deploy hybrid signs for specific effects, such as the hope, joy, and sensory experiences associated with hearing or chanting the Advent antiphons. Because I am primarily concerned with the incorporation of expressive strategies of the liturgical practices of Christian Anglo-Saxons in Old English verse, I use “ritual” to signify sanctioned performances of religious activities, which relate to a cumulative tradition that makes the signs and symbols of these activities “heavy” with semantic import for ritual participants. As religiously sanctioned activities in reference to sacred agencies, rituals create and re-create a religion. This description of ritual is informed by Jack Goody’s analysis in Myth, Ritual, and the Oral, which draws upon his fieldwork on the oral and written traditions of the LoDagaa myth of the Bagre, and by the more recent work of ritual theorists Catherine Bell and Roy Rappaport.53 According to Bell, the primary characteristics shared to varying degrees by rituals, including rites of the Western Church, are formalism, traditionalism, invariance, rule-governance, sacral symbolism, and performance (Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions). In chapter 7 I will revisit these characteristics while considering their meaningfulness for an evaluation of the relationship between oral and ritual modes of signification. “Ritual” has also been applied to any recurrent, culturally meaningful activity including foodways and how homes are built. By limiting my discussion of ritual signifiers to the liturgy (with a few minor exceptions), I benefit from patristic commentaries and sermons that describe the meaning of these activities. The scribes and writers who wrote down Old English poems were aware of the cross-referencing of liturgical and textual traditions, and they were potentially ritual agents who engaged regularly in Christian liturgies. Early Christian acts of worship were informed by the written word, whose study and reproduction strongly influenced monastic culture. Points of intersection between liturgical and literate practices were common during the Anglo-Saxon period.54 The most basic textuality of monastic and episcopal Christian culture was largely oriented around the ritualized recurrence of sacred narratives; the primary goal of literacy was

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“the proper performance of the liturgy” (Foot 226). The master narratives of Christian history, cosmology, and theology that served as points of reference in a textual community found their performative enactment in liturgical rites in which texts were integral. The mapping of these rites across days, weeks, seasons, and years ensured that the temporal experience of ritual participants was charged with recurring references to (and presentations of) Christian Logos. Being contiguous with the word or Logos of Christ, the deeds of ritual performance made (and make) known “the mystery of the eternally present Christ” (Augé 321).55 Rather than inserting distance between thought and action, writing and reading were wedded to ritual processes that celebrated the intersections of linear and circular time and eternity. The practices of monastic textual communities, to which the majority of literate Anglo-Saxons belonged, demonstrate the invalidity of Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that writing necessarily “tears practice and discourse out of the flow of time” (156).56 For textual communities oriented around ritual practice, reading and writing could be united with “the incoherent coherence” of liturgical signification (158).57 The manner of signification in rituals, however, shares more with oraltraditional than literate communication because rituals also employ metonymic idioms in a specialized expressive register that developed in the “performance arena” of liturgical space and time. Liturgical rites often have fixed utterances, gestures, and actions, leaving less room for improvisation than one finds in many genres of oral-traditional expression, yet ritual expressions acquire (and even require) polysemous symbolism with strongly determined meanings. Rappaport distinguishes between broadly applicable cultural codes (for constructing and interpreting messages) and the finer-tuned modes of communication in ritual orders (liturgies): “But a liturgy is not a code in this wide and semantically unspecifying sense. It is more or less a fixed sequence of stereotyped actions and utterances and as such what can be expressed in it is narrowly circumscribed” (127). As with the restricted lexical, syntactic, and metrical domains of oral-traditional verse, the limitations on expressions in medieval Christian liturgies afforded them greater semantic weight. Rappaport explains, from the perspective of speech-act theory, that the “heaviness” of ritual signs derives from their bringing to bear perlocutionary force upon performatives, increasing their efficacy (115–17). From the

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perspective of speech-act theory, such perlocutionary speech persuades or convinces, calling attention to the act of doing so (see Austin 101–7). Rituals rely on a tautology carried out in a performance arena: “Performatives, and most unambiguous factives, are self-fulfilling: they make themselves true in the sense of standing in a relationship of conformity to the state of affairs with which they are concerned” (Rappaport 117). In light of the connections that early medieval liturgy had with textual Anglo-Saxon communities and presumably with oral-traditional modes of expression, I suggest in the seventh chapter that these media were permeable, at least from liturgy to oral-connected written verse. For ritual participants, the symbolic utterances and representations of liturgy that appear in Old English verse must have retained greater perlocutionary force than has been previously understood. Hybrid Poetics in Riddle 30a/b The interpretation of hybrid formal features profits from understanding how oral, literate, and ritual media function in their respective expressive and interpretive economies. A poetic and religiously inflected intersemiotic translation is at work in Old English poems. Semaphore flags provide a classic example of intersemiotic translation, as explained by Eugene Nida, since effective interpretation of semaphore flags requires knowledge of both maritime orders and semaphores (Nida 4; see also Jakobson 233). The translation of semaphore flags—like the translation of silent signals between baseball catcher and pitcher—can entail a fairly simple interpretive act in which each visual sign has a one-to-one relationship with a verbal message. Textualization of oral tradition follows a twisty and potentially more creative path, one that in Old English poetry grew into a sophisticated interweaving of various communicative modes. Elizabeth Fine calls such textualization a “hermeneutic act of translation” (Niles’s tertium quid).58 Yet, rather than being systems of complicated and secret codes, hybrid texts of the Anglo-Saxon period incorporated modes of communication that would have been well known to diverse populations. When I use the descriptors “oral,” “literate,” and “ritual,” I refer to neither homogenous nor unchanging media. During the Anglo-Saxon pe-

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riod, each medium of expression easily mingled with the other: the oral presumably inscribed in manuscripts, such as extant medical charms, historical verse, or legal documents, the written retuned in oral performances, such as extemporaneous sermons and legal proceedings.59 Patrick Conner’s nuanced depiction of religious Old English verse captures the reciprocity that occurred between these ever-changing traditions. He states that the discursive, generic, and ceremonial features of religion “enlarg[e] the symbolic inventory of a traditional poetic” and conversely “the system of symbols supposed to represent a residual pre-Christianity is completely manipulated by the dominant ideology of the poet” (257, 258).60 Contemporary readers may develop competency in the intersemiotic translation of Old English literature by attending to the styles of communication in oral tradition, written medieval texts, and early Western Christian liturgy. These range from the metonymic mode of signification common to oral traditions and rituals to the metaphoric and multilayered modes of signification more common to written traditions. The oral-traditional, written, and ritual signifiers form a constellation whose relative arrangement engages the reader in a search for meaning. Consider, for example, Exeter Riddle 30a, which has attracted numerous solutions,61 including, when treated as two separate poems, the constellations Lyra (30a) and Cygnus (30b). The solution “constellation” is based in Gwendolyn Morgan and Brian McAllister’s interpretation of the compound legbysig/ligbysig as “star” (1a; literally, fire-busy). Their rendering of this compound, then makes sense of line 4 as follows: bearu blowende, byrnende gled means “‘grove’ of stars, each of them a ‘burning ember,’ which makes up a constellation” (70). This enchanting image works as a metaphor for the hybrid signification in Old English poems, whose signs, like groves of stars, make shining messages. More to the point, Riddle 30a furnishes us with a constellation of the three types of signs mentioned in the previous sections: the written oral-connected idiom, metaphorical use of an oral-connected idiom that presumably demonstrates the influence of a literate hermeneutics, and ritual signification.62 The preferred solution for Riddle 30 (30a and 30b) is “tree,” since F. A. Blackburn proposed an beam, which may also signify other wooden objects, such as “log,” “ship,” “harp,” “cup,” and “cross.” Craig Williamson says that the riddle’s first half “treats the various aspects and uses of a tree,”

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while the second half focuses on “wood fashioned by art” (Old English Riddles 231). In the discussion that follows, I emphasize the tree’s transformation into a cross or crucifix. Ic eom legbysig,  lace mid winde, bewunden mid wuldre,  wedre gesomnad, fus forðweges,  fyre gebysgad, bearu blowende,  byrnende gled. Ful oft mec gesiþas  sendað æfter hondum, þæt mec weras ond wif  wlonce cyssað. Þonne ic mec onhæbbe,  ond hi onhnigaþ to me monige mid miltse,  þær ic monnum sceal ycan upcyme  eadignesse. Fire-busy, I vie with the wind, encircled with glory, united with the wind, ready for the way-forth, troubled by fire: a grove, blooming; burning, an ember. Very often retainers send me from hand to hand, so that proud men and women kiss me. When I raise myself up, and many bow to me with humility, there I ought to increase for all people the upspringing of blessedness.63 As Williamson contends, lines 1 to 4 appear to portray a tree in a variety of natural states: attacked by wind, lit up by lightning, and bewunden mid wuldre (flush with the glory) of all its blossoms.64 Other clues describe a range of happy and hateful states that may occur during the tree’s natural lifespan: bearu blowende, byrnende gled (a grove, blooming; burning, an ember). One half-line in particular stands out because it less easily fits the image of a stationary tree: fus forðweges. This verse, which recurs in the corpus as an oral-connected idiom, can mean more than the literal translation “eager for the journey.” The phrase resonates with other instances of a half-line system that collocates fus with forð- (most commonly forðweg, but also forðsiþ). Seven half-lines in the corpus begin an a-verse (by necessity, due to the double alliteration) with fus* and conclude with forðweg*.65 Another three half-lines use the more general collocation pattern of the root morpheme fus with forð.66 Despite some grammatical, syntactical, and metrical variance, these lines represent a shared idea: a desire to hasten forth, risking and embracing death. In Exodus and Battle of Maldon, the half-line describes armies

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or individuals keen for battle. In Guthlac A/B, Menologium (describing the death of Andreas), and The Dream of the Rood, the protagonist gladly faces death, treating it as a preliminary to joining God in heaven. In the context of Riddle 30a/b, the idiomatic significance of fus forðweges underscores the tree’s courage and its potential to represent the Christian Cross as it faces spiritual battle on earth or bears souls toward heaven. In lines 5–9, the tree becomes cross, crucifix, or cup.67 The riddle represents three ritual acts in which any of these objects could figure: men passing the “tree” from hand to hand, touching the “tree” to their lips, and bowing before it. The mead-cup and cross unite companions in ceremonial displays that entail kissing (touching the cup with the lips when drinking; venerating the cross)68 and raising the object (perhaps to begin a speech; in worship). The depiction of these acts could have resonated with AngloSaxon audiences familiar with Germanic drinking ceremonies, the Veneration of the Cross, and celebrating the Eucharist at Mass. Both “cup” and “cross” may act as bearers of upcyme (up-springing or growth) with its connotations of an interior blossoming (intoxication?) and spiritual fertility. In these overlapping references the riddle suggests that the mead cup, like the crucifix, played a central role in a communal ritual. The image of the mead cup shades into the Eucharist chalice. These lines thus resonate with emblems of the crucifixion and the Eucharist simultaneously—much like Anglo-Saxon cross iconography in which the beams are wound about with grape vines, symbolizing that the fruit of Christ’s sacrifice could be intuited by each individual when witnessing or learning about the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at Mass.69 Lastly, these associations with a transformative ritual that celebrates the Christian God’s immanence in the world are corroborated by the riddle’s manipulation of a trope rooted in a vernacular poetics: the representation of a naturally occurring object undergoing a transformation into a crafted one. Riddle 30a reenvisions this trope’s significance consistent with a literate hermeneutics. A first encounter with Riddle 30a would elicit an interpretation consistent with the uses of the oral-connected trope in other riddles, such as Riddle 12 (“ox”), Riddle 14 (“horn”), Riddle 26 (“Bible”), and, of relevance, the Cross’s riddling words at the beginning of its speech in The Dream of the Rood. In Riddle 30a/b, a living tree becomes a crafted object (or series of objects). Associations with the crucifixion and the Eucharist could, however, prompt a return to the first half of the poem

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in search of a “redemptive typology, and the correct reading of anterior models” (Stock, “Medieval Literacy” 19). The practice of redemptive typology spurred men trained in this mode of thinking to find Christ’s life foreshadowed in ancient Hebrew texts that had been adopted by Christians. As Stock notes, this practice expanded to include other valued narratives. The oral-connected trope can be used in service of a revisionist interpretation or “a correct reading of anterior models.” It prompts audiences to expect a specific type of transformation, from natural to crafted. Rereading (or rehearing), however, highlights how early images in the poem contain their own potential for spiritual transformation. In the lines that describe the “natural” tree, we can find the spiritual tree. Thus, the oral-connected idiom can be extended in a manner consistent with a Christian, literate hermeneutics. For example, while in its natural state the tree carries the seeds of its more holy form, it carries the potential to become fixed in the likeness of the holiest of trees, bewunden mid wuldre, encircled by both worldly and spiritual splendor. Apocalyptic associations in the first four lines underscore this interpretation. Fire imagery (legbysig [1a; fire-busy], fyre gebysgad [3a; troubled by fire], and byrnende gled [4; burning ember]) recalls the apocalyptic flames out of which the Cross will rise on the Day of Judgment.70 When the word gemylted (melted, refined, appearing only in 30b) occurs in Elene (1308b–14), it refers to the purifying process of the Apocalypse. In the Old English charm “For a Sudden Stitch” (18–19), it is linked with pre-Christian healing or purification.71 By revisiting lines 1–4 in search of the tree’s multilayered potential for transformation, we can also descry in the fire-busy branches of a burning grove the image of a radiant cross in the night sky. Archeological evidence attests to Anglo-Saxon familiarity with the image of the Ravennate cross glowing amid the stars, a cross that simultaneously spans the four corners of the earth and quarters “the cosmic round” (Swanton 44). Along the same lines, an Anglo-Saxon coin, probably from the reign of Ecgfrith, “bears a cross surrounded by rays of light and the inscription + LUX” (Swanton 45). As Morgan and McAllister have argued, legbysig means star. Although stars burn in this riddle, they shine in the realm of iconography. The first half of the riddle, like the second, flickers between two states. The solver may discover a tree on the way to becoming a cross (and cup/

Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse · 31

chalice), or the solver may be reminded of cross icons: those that flower (as the cross does in Elene 1224–26), those that radiate light, and those ringed by flaming stars.72 The mystery of sacred indwelling pervades the opening lines of the riddle, whose images present a natural tree and sacred rood simultaneously. For those familiar with images of the cross, then, the riddle may be cast in a numinous light; after depicting a tree in its natural state that becomes shaped into a rood or cup, the opening of the riddle presents the revered object in all its legendary and iconographic glory. In Riddle 30a I have explored a constellation of hybrid signifiers that profit from a mode of interpretation that considers these on an equal plane, so that the written does not subsume the oral, nor the oral the written, and so on. By attending to the hybrid poetics of Old English poems, we can approach oral-connected idioms as active, operative features of written verse, which productively and playfully enmesh heroic and Christian ideas.73 As an interpretive process, a hybrid poetics focuses on the simultaneity of two or more modes, with their sometimes competing, sometimes concordant styles of expression and ways of approaching the composition and reception of verbal art. A hybrid poetics attends to the development of new modes of expression that take advantage of the fluencies, as it were, of authors and audiences in oral-traditional, written, and ritual modes of expression; and it asks what these hybrid modes of signification mean for individual poems. Alongside the stylistic characteristics that have long been associated with Old English aesthetics (such as variation, ambiguity, and polysemy), the comingling of various media constitutes an important aesthetic feature of Old English verse. Such media are simultaneously old—in the poems under discussion they have been in use for at least a generation—and new, being contemporary, vivified in the moment by fresh use and adaptation to present circumstances. Tyler’s analysis in Old English Poetics of the received conventions of Old English verse often exemplifies such a constellative approach when she describes how the poets of Battle of Maldon, The Phoenix, and The Paris Psalter manipulate common verbal repetitions for aesthetic effects. She concludes that an Anglo-Saxon traditional poetics remained remarkably consistent over the course of five centuries because it made the new familiar, while providing a stable platform for critiquing both the past and the present. She states: “The very stability of the

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Old English poetic style, in the face of the enormous social and political changes which marked the long Anglo-Saxon period, both called forth and required that awareness of tradition” (172).74 I share with Tyler an interest in the flexibility of this tradition, which is largely consistent in respect to its metrical forms and recurring idioms. From my perspective, however, poets brought to bear traditional oralconnected and ritual idioms, mingling and sometimes transforming them with literate hermeneutics. These idioms play across Old English poems (poems as events performed and reperformed for the ear versus fixed documents), engaging their audiences in the delight of making conceptual, associative, and sensory connections across a variety of oral, textual, and liturgical traditions. Therefore, an Anglo-Saxon oral tradition, to whatever degree it existed, and its written representatives (borne out by heroic diction, recurring storytelling devices, echo words, oral-traditional genres, networks of interlinked Germanic stories, classical meter, envelope patterns, and so on) should not be understood necessarily as old or other relative to Christianity and the tools of literacy for the practical reason that tradition bearers create and re-create, in the moment, any verbal art deemed important to a culture. Oral traditions are notable for their adaptability in the face of cultural changes, including the introduction of complementary verbal technologies (for example, early medieval literacy) and of new ideologies (for example, those who attend religious conversion).75 In these pages, I intend to move past the untenable homologies of oral-old versus literatenew, and instead strive to understand the expressive possibilities that arise when Old English poems use oral-connected idioms, literate reinventions of the oral that draw on a hermeneutical mode of interpretation, and ritual signifiers. I mentioned above that the hybrid poetics of Old English poems can be compared to the eald æfensceop (5a; old evening-poet) of Riddle 8, who says “Ic þurh muþ sprece mongum reordum, / wrencum singe, wrixle geneahhe / heafodwoþe, hlude cirme, / healde mine wisan, hleoþre ne miþe” (1–4; I speak though my mouth with many voices, sing with stratagems, often change my head-sound, loudly cry, keep to my way, I do not conceal song). An interpretive approach that attends to such hybrid poetics reveals sophisticated “songs” that interlace the expressive strategies of oral tradition, literacy (particularly an early medieval literate hermeneutics),

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and liturgical ritual. Like a riddle, these strategies may lie “in plain sight” for those who recognize their recurrences, or they may tease with their sceawendwisan (9b; jesting song) and with their seemingly unascribable echoes and imitations. Yet upon exploration, hybrid modes of expression, in the forms of written oral-traditional idioms, oral-literate idioms, and ritual signs, often serve two goals in Anglo-Saxon verse: representing ideal relationships between Christ and Christians and gesturing toward Christ’s immanent presence. Their hybrid rhetorical gestures express delight in the workmanship of praise and paraphrase.

2 o

Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme

Two arguments inform the organization of Signs That Sing. First, when employing a hybrid poetics, Old English poems draw upon a range of idioms from oral tradition, written tradition, and ritual, whose modes of signification influence what a poem says. This chapter examines one end of a spectrum of hybrid expressions: the written oral-connected idiom. Subsequent chapters address other points along the spectrum, such as heroic conventions with little to no formularity, recontextualized oral idioms that reflect a literate interest in complex analogies, and lastly, ritual idioms. Here, in response to arguments that repetitions and patterns are simply stylistic features of Old English poetry, I set forth a justification for interpreting recurrent phraseology as an oral-connected strategy that bears a semantic weight specific to oral-traditional signification.1 The second argument moving through Signs That Sing is that hybrid idioms have aesthetic and semantic associations that suit each poem’s genre and narrative flow or diegesis.2 A more author-centered way of saying this is that poets composing in Old English threaded their verbal art with idiomatic expressions that varied in their referentiality. They employed the metonymic referentiality of oral-traditional and liturgical registers and the metaphoric referentiality of literary, intertextual traditions in which Christian narratives and teachings reside. Section two of this chapter begins by exploring the recurring terms gifre and grædig (devouring, greedy), which

Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme · 35

appear in a range of recurrent phrases, from a formulaic half-line system to collocations across lines. These terms also arise in a theme that I introduce here: “devouring-the-dead,” which describes the postmortem destruction of the human body by hungry flames or worms. Collectively, these oral-connected expressions demonstrate that authors could use interconnected written-oral idioms that fulfilled functional and aesthetic roles. Each instantiation of these interrelated expressions bears examination because none is purely utilitarian. Rather, each phrase and theme brings meaningful and sometimes complex dimensions to the diegesis, whether a funeral pyre in Beowulf or an earthen grave in the Soul and Body poems. The Metonymy of Old English Oral-Connected Idioms Guided by Albert Lord’s groundbreaking analysis of oral-traditional multiforms in The Singer of Tales, early oral-formulaic scholarship on Old English poetry focused on identifying specific structural units, such as formulaic systems—the recurrent half-lines that have word-placement restrictions (for example, “þæt wæs [x] cyning” where [x] is an adjective describing a king)—and common themes, along with their constituent motifs (such as the common phrases and narrative features of the exile theme).3 Scholarship on the role of oral poetics in Old English verse has developed in several directions: for example, focusing on the role of an oral-traditional narrative or genre in specific Anglo-Saxon social contexts, on the relevance of memetics (the study of the reproduction of cultural knowledge) to oral-formulaic studies, or on the relationship between oral poetic features of written texts and broader aesthetic questions.4 Lord’s mentor Milman Parry theorized that recurrent oral-traditional expressions fulfill an entirely utilitarian rather than an aesthetic role, but Lord questioned this approach.5 Parry’s position, perhaps influenced by his focus on how tradition bearers construct their stories, does not accord with the experiences of all traditional singers/speakers and their audiences. Indeed, highly patterned speech is not just memorable for verbal artists but also capable of eliciting pleasure and appreciation from audiences due to a song or speech’s skill and presentation, which can appeal to a specific range of expectations. For example, some Tibetan audiences value the skill with which a Gesar singer can embellish characters’ speeches with lavish metaphors that fit a song’s metrical structure.6 In Navajo oral poetry, units of four—such as

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directions, mountains, stages of life, or types of stone—resonate with the Navajo notion of hózhó, or beauty and wholeness.7 In traditional verbal art, metonymic idioms play both functional and aesthetic roles. Thus, when I investigate structural devices in the following pages, I intend to describe not only recurring patterns in Old English poetry but also how these patterns could be meaningful to poems, beyond being mute building blocks that merely construct a plot. This chapter addresses what constitutes the devouring-the-dead theme, as well as how this theme engages its immediate poetic contexts. As I explained in the first chapter, the figure of metonymy helpfully describes the relationship between traditional structures and meaning. According to John Miles Foley, metonymy in oral poetics means that recurrent expressions refer to much more than the denotations of individual words; they refer pars pro toto (part for the whole) to a poetic tradition in which the expression has accrued a rich set of associations. The “whole” of which Foley writes is neither a static, monolithic entity nor a Platonic ideal—instead, the significance created and re-created by such verbal units depends on their recurring, conventional usage within the narrow, dedicated register of the oral tradition.8 In the following pages I clarify how attention to metonymy or metonymic traditional referentiality can enrich our interpretations of Old English poetry, since metonymic referentiality forms an important part of a rich fabric of hybrid expressions that Anglo-Saxon authors have created. The aesthetic potential of oral-connected idioms may not, however, be immediately evident. When Foley claims that oral-traditional poets use conventional structures with conventional connotations, it may seem counterintuitive that the metonymy of oral-traditional idioms “remains a cornerstone of what may be seen as aesthetic creativity” (Immanent Art 9).9 Tradition bearers have the agency to manipulate the inherited structures of their tradition, as a means to tell a tale or produce a certain genre of verse and for aesthetic effect. One obstacle to understanding the aesthetic potential of recurrent phraseology with inherited meaning can be that this mode of signification does not appeal to modern audiences. In regard to Anglo-Saxon versus modern aesthetics, Elizabeth Tyler’s description of an “aesthetics of familiarity” helpfully illuminates the pleasures of metonymic, inherited meaning.10 She contrasts the aesthetic values of modern and Old English verse: “Old English poets chose to maintain an aesthetics

Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme · 37

which took pleasure in seeking out the familiar,” including formulaic halflines, collocations, and other devices that involve repetition. Tyler urges readers to inhabit an aesthetic perspective at odds with “our contemporary suspicion of the cliché and our wider unease with the formulaicity of language” (122). Using Peter Rabinowitz’s “rules of notice” (which she renames “expectations”), Tyler explores which kinds of repetition would have been most meaningful for both authors and their audiences. For example, repetition occurring in close proximity in a passage of verse, envelope patterns, or “a string of words that repeat through a poem” would rise above the burble of sounds, causing an audience to take notice (133). Her analysis emphasizes the agency of authorship, where individual stylistic choices accord with an Anglo-Saxon aesthetics of familiarity.11 Metonymy, likewise, does not diminish the agency and creativity of authorship, the intelligence of audiences, and the aesthetic richness of works of Old English verse. Metonymic oral-connected phraseology instead belongs to a range of expressions and modes of signification that authors employed to inform and delight their audiences. An inheritance of conventions with perceived “inherent” meaning provided authors with a mode of expression that was densely idiomatic and could “enrich the momentary with timelessness, the situational with the all-pervasive, the story-specific with the traditional” (Foley, Immanent Art 10). In Old English verse that employs a hybrid poetics, authors could rely on oral-connected idioms to convey the relationship between newer narratives and well-known ones. Even noninsular styles, such as rhyming and macaronic verse, could be married into an aesthetics of the familiar. The half-line hæleð higerofe (strong-hearted heroes or stout warriors), with its alliterative bond, nicely embodies the aesthetics of metonymy. It arises six times in the extant corpus: twice in Genesis A, once in Christ II, twice in Andreas, and once in Judith.12 Occupying the a-verse due to its double alliteration, this phrase characterizes the valor of the men being described. Rather than being a desiccated cliché, the phrase exemplifies an oral-traditional “word” that powerfully expresses the bravery of men, who in every instance stand for Anglo-Saxon Christians on the right side of the narrative: on the side of their Christian God.13 In Genesis A this epithet twice describes sons in the lineage of Noah: Sem, Cham, and Iafeth [Shem, Ham, and Japheth]; then, Abraham and Aaron [Haran]. The epi-

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thet arises each time a punishment from God has concluded (the flood, the Tower of Babel), allowing Noah’s descendants to establish homes and bear children. In Christ II the disciples are called hæleð higerofe as they return to Jerusalem to carry out Christ’s instructions (given at his Ascension). The epithet is used for Apostle Matthew and for Andrew and his men as they battle (in spirit and in flesh) the cannibalistic Mermedonians in Andreas, and for the Hebrews as they drove off the siege of Holofernes and the Assyrians in Judith. In each instance hæleð higerofe describes men with just cause and, with the possible exceptions of Genesis A and Christ II, those who engage in sanctioned violence in service to God. Further implications cannot be assessed, but the phrase may underscore the connection between strength of heart (as in bon courage) and proper allegiance. The half-line hæleð higerofe is connected to the phrasal system hæleð hige-x, where “x” stands for an adjective. Variants include hæleð higegleawe (“The Death of Edgar”) and hæleð hygegeomre (Elene and Guthlac A/B). Each variant potentially summons the “inherited” significance of the more common phrase hæleð higerofe, the valiant heroes (whose allegiance to God strengthens their courage)—while shifting its meaning to suit the diegesis. Variations on convention appeal especially to a modern aesthetic desire for originality, so the likelihood should be kept in mind that the phrase’s traditionality plays an equal role. The first variant, hæleð higegleawe, appears in “The Death of Edgar”: “And þa wearð ætywed uppe on roderum / steorra on staðole, þone stiðferhþe, / hæleð higegleawe, hatað wide / cometa be naman, cræftgleawe men, / wise ” (29–33b; And then a star was revealed up in the heavens in the firmament, which valiant, heart-wise heroes widely called by name cometa, expertly skilled men, wise ). From a metonymic perspective, this phrase embodies a tradition-sanctioned heroism, along with the implication that these prophets or “song-bearers” acted in accordance with God. Thus, when the word gleawe replaces rofe in the second part of the compound hige-x, it draws attention to their wisdom. These are men whose skill at the interpretation of signs—in accordance with God’s law—raises them to the status of heroes. Likewise, the variant hæleð higegeomre highlights the second element in the compound, -geomre (mournful or wretched). The negative mental state denoted by this adjective indicates an inversion of the convention. As one might expect, in Elene it describes the fate of sinners at the Apoc-

Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme · 39

alypse: “Synfulle beoð, / mane gemengde, in ðam midle þread, / hæleð higegeomre, in hatne wylm, / þrosme beþehte” (1295b–98a; The sinful, being mingled with crime, will be in the middle region; the heart-wretched “heroes” in the hot surge, will be concealed by smoke). In Guthlac A/B the men described with this epithet seek out Saint Guthlac to be cured body and soul: “ac se halga wer / ælda gehwylces þurh þa æþelan meaht, / þe hine seoslige sohtun on ðearfe, / hæleð hygegeomre, hælde bu tu / lic ond sawle” (925b–29a; but the holy man through the noble one’s power healed both body and soul of all the heart-wretched heroes, who being afflicted sought him in need). Because God acts through him, Guthlac can reverse the spiritually precarious status that hæleð hygegeomre appears to designate. In both instances, hæleð hygegeomre describes men whose suffering presumably has been caused by turning away from God. The metonymy of hæleð higerofe allows Old English poems to play with its traditional significance, whose idiomatic meaning reaches beyond the literal description in these lines. Here I adopt the perspective that oral-connected idioms in Old English verse refer to oral tradition for extratextual meaning, so that a single instance of a recurrent idiom (or “word” in Foley’s sense) resonates with many previous performances or readings. In works of modern literature, originality is valued and therefore an author’s development of “conferred” meaning permeates style, premise, characterization, and other storytelling devices. In Old English verbal art, an “aesthetics of familiarity” creates preference for style, premise, characterization, and other devices that rely upon recurrent structures. These structures, which presumably bear the idiomatic weight of “tradition,” range from the alliterative line to semiformulaic half-lines that follow word-placement rules, collocations, echoic words in multiple lines, themes, typescenes, character types, and possibly story patterns. When Tiffany Beechy, in The Poetics of Old English, asks regarding oral-traditional signification, “how is this system of ‘traditional’ meaning different from any other semiotic system?” (17), one response should be that while all semiotic systems have specialized idioms, they differ in how much they use conferred versus inherited meaning.14 As I discuss in chapter 1, such variation in semiotic systems arises due to differences in verbal technologies and their social contexts, which participate in shaping how communication occurs. Since oral traditions involve the ongoing

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recreation of traditional culture—from one tradition bearer to the next, from one audience to the next, from one moment to the next—they favor idiomatic structures whose fixity of meaning creates relatively stable expressions. Furthermore, no single tradition bearer recreates or composes “the entire story” during one consecutive telling or even over the course of a lifetime. (This is especially evident in the Gesar tradition, where gifted singers have performed hundreds of hours of “cantos” without exhausting their repertoires.)15 Instead, every composition refers, pars pro toto, to a broader and deeper field of shared experiential knowledge. Even in the case of oral-connected idioms that engage a metonymic form of oral-traditional referentiality, these expressions exhibit a certain degree of hybridity, simply because they have been written down. As we shall see briefly here and more fully in subsequent chapters, authors of accretive Old English compositions imposed on their subject matter stylistic choices informed by the literate, hermeneutical practices of the early medieval period. Greedy and Ravenous The half-line grædige and gifre (greedy and ravenous) recurs eight times in the poetic corpus if we count the variants gifrost ond grædgost (Riddle 84, 30)16 and grædum gifre (Guthlac A/B, 738). The idiomatic force of this phrase, which far outweighs its denotation, interacts with the devouringthe-dead theme, as I will discuss later. The phrase grædige and gifre acts as a free agent, arising both as part of the theme and independently. The formula and theme consistently share the lexeme gifre (ravenous), a word whose idiomatic associations color every instantiation.17 Let us begin at the proverbial beginning with Genesis A/B when Adam asks Eve, “Gesyhst þu nu þa sweartan helle / grædige and gifre?” (792b–93a, italics mine; Do you now see that black hell, greedy and ravenous?). His question, which recalls medieval iconography of the zoomorphic mouth of hell, implicitly condemns Eve’s greed for knowledge, which caused her to succumb to temptation and bite the forbidden apple. Adam’s question highlights the parallel relationship between the greed of the body and its fate after death. The poem Christ and Satan uses the same half-line, gredige and gifre (32a) to describe the flaming hell that God established

Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme · 41

deep under the cliffs (31a; niðær under nessas). In addition, hell’s denizens themselves are gifre and grædige—the lexemes in this half-line follow an inverted order but are no less menacing or potent (Christ and Satan 192a). The terms conflate mental greed with physical hunger, uniting them in a state of manifest sin. Yet, all instances of the half-line do not refer to hell. We can consider its usage in Riddle 84 of the Exeter Book. Riddle 84 asks who “gifrost ond grædgost grundbedd trideþ?” (30; most covetous and greedy treads the ground). Most interpreters of the riddle answer “water.” Thus, in the superlative or not, the half-line descriptor gifre and grædige evokes many nonhuman forces of destruction, including water, fire, hell, judgment day, and the progeny of Cain. Some early medieval authors, in consideration of the biblical claim that “the root of all evils is avarice” (1 Tm 6:10), treated greed as the basis for subsequent vices. Their analyses of greed dovetail with the usage of gifre and grædige in Anglo-Saxon poems. For example, according to Richard Newhauser, Ambrosius Autpertus writes that “cupiditas and avaritia are almost wholly synonymous. . . . Both are designations for the narrowest sense of the sin, the love of money and property, as well as for the vice in its widest contours, the Augustinian avaritia generalis” (115).18 The association of grædige and gifre in Genesis with the mouth of hell concords with the broader understanding of avarice described by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram. Linking greed and pride, Augustine describes avaritia generalis “qua quisque appetit aliquid amplius quam oportet, propter excellentiam suam, et quemdam propriae rei amorem” (as what goads people to go for anything more greedily than is right because of their superiority and a kind of love for their very own property).19 Eve’s taste of the forbidden fruit is just such a reaching “for anything more greedily than is right,” an act that opens the portals of hell to human souls. Augustine also clarifies the relationship between the devil, hell, and greed just a few sentences later: Hac enim et diabolus cecidit, qui utique non amavit pecuniam, sed propriam potestatem. Proinde perversus sui amor privat sancta societate turgidum spiritum, eumque coarctat miseria jam per iniquitatem satiari cupientem. (De Genesi ad litteram 11.15.19) It was through this also that the devil fell—not of course that he loved money but his own personal power. Accordingly his twisted

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love of self deprives that swollen, puffed-up spirit of holy companions, and confines him, so eager to sate himself through wickedness, in an ever hungry wretchedness.20 For Augustine, the phenomenology of greed is a desire to be sated; it leads to further sins, encompassing the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual continuum of perverse desire. In Old English poetry the half-line grædige and gifre, which links the disobedience of hell’s denizens with Eve, reflects Augustine’s interpretation of avaritia generalis. In other half-lines and collocations, the idiomatic force of gifre and grædig more strongly connotes physical hunger, without necessarily losing the association with spiritual excess. Grendel’s mother is gifre ond galgmod (1277a; ravenous and gloomy, literally ravenous and gallows-minded) when she sets out to avenge her son’s death. The gifre half of this phrase both points to the slaughter that she will wreak on Heorot and reminds an audience of her connections to a hellish mere and a lineage of hell-bound, Cain-linked creatures. Like Cain, this monster-race visits murder on their brethren. Grendel, being grim ond grædig (121a; grim and greedy), bore the wrath of God; perhaps Grendel’s mother, also described as grim ond grædig (1499a), carries a similar wrath. In the passage in which we hear the quasi-epithet grim ond grædig clothe Grendel’s mother with its gory connotations, we also encounter heorogifre (1498a; fiercely ravenous). It seems that gifre and grædig cannot get enough of each other, these alliterating cousins, who, if not hanging out in the same half-line, peer at each other across a verse or two. Their pairing evokes a greedy, obliterating hunger. The passage in question begins: “Sona þæt onfunde se ðe floda begong / heorogifre beheold hund missera, / grim ond grædig” (1497–99a, italics mine; Immediately she discovered, she who sword-ravenous ruled the expanse of floods for a hundred half-years, grim and greedy). The poem deploys these words when Grendel’s mother discerns Beowulf diving into her mere. An audience must be impressed at this point in the narrative by Beowulf ’s sheer prowess; not every hero can tear a limb from a seemingly invincible predator. For dramatic tension to rise, he must face an even more difficult task, figured in the horrors of the mere (which harts would rather shun than the teeth of hounds) and in Grendel’s dam. She is swiftly sketched in these lines as a bearer of that devouring force that is associated

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in other parts of the corpus with hell, and, as we will see presently, with funeral pyres and even the Apocalypse. How should we conceive of the relationship between the idiomatic grædige and gifre and the devouring-the-dead theme, in which gifre plays an important role? Is each a species of the genus *gifr-? Perhaps such categorization is too limiting with regard to how traditional phraseology behaves in the Old English corpus because it assumes an abstract genealogical relationship that implicitly includes words such as heorogifre, while treating grim ond grædig as an outlier, a relative by marriage as it were. We should imagine, instead of a genealogical model, a colloquium of phrases at which grædige and gifre is the keynote speaker. Invited to the forum are grim ond grædig, heorogifre, and other collocations between the lexemes gifre and grædig beyond those in Genesis, Christ and Satan, and Beowulf. For instance, their concatenation across an entire line occurs in description of the fires of Domesdæg in The Phoenix when “lig eal þigeð / eorðan æhtgestreon, æpplede gold / gifre forgripeð, grædig swelgeð / londes frætwe” (505b–508a, italics mine; Flame utterly consumes the treasure of the earth, æpplede gold, ravenous it devours, greedy it swallows the ornaments of the land).21 Because of its usage in the corpus, gifre both means “ravenous” and has a much more potent idiomatic significance. Even though scholars generally concur that Old English entexted poems bear the rhetorical stamp of oral-traditional modes of composition, this knowledge does not often lead to different interpretive practices. One step in this direction, Foley advises (How to Read 134–36), is the creation of a lexicon of oral-traditional idioms, from the smallest morphemes to the largest themes, typescenes, and story patterns, so that scholarship can account for their extratextual meanings and avoid treating instances of such idioms as if they were the products of literary authorship, divested of traditional significance. Gifre and grædig, as collocating entities, deserve their own entry in this traditional lexicon. A normal dictionary predicated necessarily upon the practice of literacy treats words as units demarcated by blank space; thus the Bosworth and Toller dictionary defines gifre as “greedy, covetous, voracious, eager, desirous” and grædig as “greedy, covetous” (475, 486). The University of Toronto’s Dictionary of Old English provides a mouth-wateringly precise

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catalogue of these words’ denotations, citing in conjunction with the halfline gifre ond grædig: “of animals/birds: greedy, ravenous, voracious” (gifre 1.b), “of destructive things: fire / water / hell / also of a cauldron: greedy, voracious, devouring” (gifre 1.d.i), “eager for wealth / gain, avariciousness, covetous” (gifre 3), “figurative, of fire / water / the mouth of hell: greedy, voracious, devouring” (grædig 1.d; the half-line not in header, but apparent in examples), “eager for wealth / gain, avaricious, covetous” (grædig 3), and “full of desire / longing, eager, keen, avid” (grædig 4). The precision of these definitions is both admirable and necessary for the practice of lexicography predicated upon a literate approach to words. Yet, from the perspective of oral-traditional poetics, these specific instantiations of a traditional phraseological system should also be united under their own heading.22 In an oral-traditional lexicon, when these two words accompany each other in verse they describe an obliterating, destructive force with the potential to tear apart the body. Gifre can also be a solo act, it seems, one in which grædig waits in the wings of the imagination. Without grædig present, gifre describes the “red-hot coals” (gleda) that did not burn the [martyrs] in Azarius (188) and, in the compound heorogifre, the molten ore in Juliana (586a) that should have destroyed her body, but from which she was spared by God. In Christ III the term describes the fires of the Apocalypse three times (two of those times in the compound heorogifre). In Judith the hungry raven whose presence, along with other beasts of battle, portends slaughter on the battlefield, is the wælgifre fugel (207a; corpse-ravenous bird). The case of gifre’s usage in Judith is especially provocative, where it has been enlisted by the beasts of battle theme to underscore the violence perpetrated by the raven and its companions upon the bodies of the dead.23 The calamitous dismemberment of the body finds its fullest representation in an oral-related theme that stars the word gifre. This theme, devouring-the-dead, also deserves a place in the traditional lexicon. With this theme, a poem may create a scene of dismemberment in which the members of the body are figured as they are simultaneously disfigured: in Beowulf the body becomes smoke; in the Soul and Body poems, it enters the maws of worms. Beowulf uses the devouring-the-dead theme in its typical narrative-building sense when Hildeburh witnesses the bodies of her brother and son burning on a funeral pyre:

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Het ða Hildeburh  æt Hnæfes ade hire selfre sunu  sweoloðe befæstan, banfatu bærnan  ond on bæl don eame on eaxle.  Ides gnornode, geomrode giddum.  Guðrinc astah, wand to wolcnum;  wælfyra mæst hlynode for hlawe.  Hafelan multon, bengeato burston  ðonne blod ætspranc, laðbite lices;  lig ealle forswealg, gæsta gifrost,  þara ðe þær guð fornam bega folces.  Wæs hira blæd scacen. (1114–24; at 1118b the 4th edition of Klaeber’s Beowulf has the emendation guðrec, but earlier editions preserve the manuscript’s guðrinc.) Hildeburh then ordered her own son to be committed to Hnæf ’s funeral pile, to burn the bone-vessel and place him on the pyre at his uncle’s shoulder. The woman grieved, wailed songs. The battlewarrior mounted. The greatest of corpse-fires circled to the skies, dinned before the burial mound; heads melted. The gates of wounds, hateful-bites upon the body burst open; then, blood sprang out. Flame, most greedy of spirits, swallowed all of those taken in battle, both peoples; their life force had hastened away. Comparison with the Soul and Body poems reveals a shared pattern of motifs: (1) the lexeme gifre, here in the superlative as gifrost; (2) a bearer of greedy destruction, here the wælfyra mæst (greatest of corpse-fires); (3) a list of body parts or features (hafelan, bengeato, blod; heads, wound-gates, and blood); and (4) an optional tag describing what has passed out of this world (wæs hira blæd scacen; their life-force had hastened away). The bearer of destruction does not carry out its duties abstractly. Instead, it devours (lig ealle forswealg; fire utterly consumed or swallowed down) and chomps upon its victim (laðbite lices; hateful-bites upon the body). The catalogue of disintegrating body parts unfolds according to semantic and syntactic rules, rules that the poem may obey or stretch (within limits): one body part per half-line, each half-line employing a noun-plus-verb structure, where the noun is in the nominative or accusative case and the verb form is the past indicative or the past participle (“hafelan multon,

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/ bengeato burston, ðonne blod ætspranc”; Heads melted. The gates of wounds, hateful-bites upon the body burst open. Then blood sprang out). In both of the Soul and Body poems, the poet uses the oral-connected theme to underscore the transience of human life and the rift between body and soul. These two poems appear in different manuscripts, Soul and Body I in the Vercelli Book and Soul and Body II in the Exeter Book. Where they overlap, their content follows largely the same course: they both depict a doomed soul visiting his body as it rots in the grave. The soul castigates the body for its inordinate desires during life, blaming it for the soul’s damnation. The longer of these two poems, Soul and Body I, presents the relationship between soul and body as a diptych: after a damned soul lambasts its body, a saved soul, visiting from heaven, praises the buried body for its asceticism during life. In the parts of the poems that overlap, much of the phrasing is nearly identical. The following passage from Soul and Body I features its own version of the devouring-the-dead theme that meets the needs of didactic Christian verse. Fyrnað þus þæt flæschord,  sceall þonne feran onweg, secan hellegrund,  nallæs heofondreamas, dædum gedrefed.  Ligeð dust þær hit wæs, ne mæg him ondsware  ænige gehatan, geomrum gaste,  geoce oððe frofre. Bið þæt heafod tohliden,  handa toliðode, geaglas toginene,  goman toslitene, sina beoð asocene,  swyra becowen, fingras tohrorene. Rib reafiað  reðe wyrmas, beoð hira tungan totogenne  on tyn healfa hungregum to frofre;  forþan hie ne magon huxlicum wordum wrixlian  wið þone werian gast. Gifer hatte se wyrm,  þe þa eaglas beoð nædle scearpran.  Se genydde to ærest eallra  on þam eorðscræfe, þæt he þa tungan totyhð  ond þa teð þurhsmyhð ond þa eagan þurheteð  ufan on þæt heafod ond to ætwelan  oðrum gerymeð, wyrmum to wiste,  þonne þæt werie

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lic acolod bið  þæt he lange ær werede mid wædum.  Bið þonne wyrma gifel, æt on eorþan.  Þæt mæg æghwylcum men to gemynde,  modsnotra gehwam! (103–26) Thus [the soul] reviles the flesh-hoard, troubled by its deeds, is compelled to depart, to seek hell’s depths, not the communal joys of heaven. The dust lies where it was, nor may it promise any answer to the sorrowing spirit, neither aid nor comfort. The head is split asunder, hands divided, jaws made to gape, palate wounded by bites, sinews sucked, the neck gnawed, fingers falling to pieces, fierce worms plunder the rib cage, the tongue is split into ten pieces as a comfort to the hungry. Therefore, being unseemly, they cannot exchange words with the weary spirit. “Gifer” is called the worm whose teeth are sharper than needles. He pressed before all others into the earth-grave to rend the tongue, and bore through the teeth to eat through the eyes upon that head and make space for others at the feast, for worms at the meal, when that weary body is cooled, the body that long ago clothed the soul in garments. It is food for worms, meat in the earth. May that be memorable for each of men, the ones who are wise. Most striking, this passage transforms the lexeme gifre—our base morpheme for the theme—into a nominal adjective that names the chief worm. In both instances of the theme, something destroys the dead—fire in Beowulf, worms in the Soul and Body poems. Rather than being a quality that describes the agent of destruction, gifre-personified as Gifer masticates the body of the person that behaved badly during life. Furthermore, the poem’s audience is assaulted by an extensive catalogue of body parts whose list purposefully focuses on those regions of the body associated with feeding, chewing, taste, and digestion: hands, head, jaws, palate, tongue, and the rib cage. Gifer and his band of greedy worms devour the devourer, representing punishment in kind (Ex 21:23–25), a divine justice visited upon the material body. What is more, the doomed soul witnesses his body, which during life developed a taste for sin, become food for sin personified as worms. Fittingly, the poem exclaims at the end of this list, “Þæt mæg æghwylcum / men to gemynde, modsnotra gehwam!” (May that be memorable for each

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of men, the ones who are wise), since divine retribution visits both body and soul. Finally, the tag concerning departure from this world occurs at the beginning of the quoted passage, “Fyrnað þus þæt flæschord, sceall þonne feran onweg, / secan hellegrund, nallæs heofondreamas, / dædum gedrefed” (So [the soul] will revile that flesh-hoard, when it must journey onward, seek the depths of Hell, not at all the communal joys of Heaven, [and be] tormented by its deeds).24 The compound flæschord speaks to a metaphorical association between the body and the treasure trove.25 In the poetic corpus, only bad kings and dragons take treasure out of circulation by trapping it in their hoard.26 The flæschord connotes generally the pleasures hoarded in the body, and specifically the body as a hoard of meat, itself a container of treasures to be plundered by Gifer. The devouring-the-dead themes in Beowulf and the Soul and Body poems contrast strongly. In Beowulf, the theme adds a lyrical dimension to the funeral scene’s gore and emphasizes the work of flame as it transforms the bodies of Hildeburh’s son and brother to smoke and ash. The theme also advances the narrative of a funeral, perhaps leading an audience to note the non-Christian implications of the departure motif. The souls of the dead do not progress to hell (as Grendel does) or heaven (as Beowulf does if suggestive phrases are interpreted as signs of his salvation).27 Instead, blæd (vitality, presence, or grace) withdraws from the world as the smoke of the “greatest of corpse fires” disappears in the sky. In Soul and Body I and II Gifer the worm eats the sinful man’s body because the poem stages the heterodox Christian belief that the bodies of the sinful undergo mutilation, while those of the righteous do not suffer so profoundly. Both bodies must be eaten by worms; they gifre gretaþ (136a; greedily approach) the buried body of the good soul and treat it as a wiste (154; feast). Yet, in place of the graphic depiction of the good body’s disintegration, the poem gives us the good soul’s encouraging words to the body regarding events at the second coming of Christ: “Moton wyt þonne ætsomne syþan brucan / ond unc on heofonum heahþungene beon” (158–59; Afterward we two, then together, will be permitted to enjoy the use of [each other] and in heaven there will be high services for us).28 The theme’s flexibility suggests the influence of a literate ethos that readily treats imagistic and narrative idioms as symbolic or even allegorical structures, hence the personification of Gifer.

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The image of Gifer the devourer also conflates the iconography of the hell-mouth with the mundane work of worms. In the Soul and Body poems the traditional idiom acts as a didactic vehicle for Christian ideology, stressing the destruction of the body via natural forces (worms) that mete out punishment for greed. In contrast, the saved soul in Soul and Body I visits a buried corpse that, although a meal for worms, suffers neither the rebuke of its own soul nor the graphic dismemberment that the theme can conjure. Gifer, as if repelled by the body’s history of abstinence, does not show up. Although the devouring-the-dead themes in Beowulf and the Soul and Body poems are distant ideologically, both themes at the level of narrative portray the dismemberment of the body and departure of the soul upon death. They stress the human body’s impermanence and stage-like progression from substantiality to piecemeal degradation. Yet, the hunger of flames and worms makes way for the soul’s departure, acting in service of bodily mortality and the soul’s need for release. These two instances of the theme can be labeled as written oral-traditional expressions because their motifs, which recur similarly in both poems, give structure and meaning to two passages about funeral rites that deliver the unliving body to fire or earth. In chapter 4, I return to examples of this theme in The Phoenix and Riddle 47, where their presence in nonfunereal scenes elicits metaphorical interpretation. In these cases, the already hybrid written oral-traditional idiom serves the (usually literate) goals of allegory and polysemy.

3 o

A Lord-Retainer Theme

The iconic image of a martial lord exchanging wealth for a retainer’s loyalty unto death has been canonized in scholarly companions to Old English literature, where it is treated as a common convention of heroic verse.1 It was already commonplace at the beginning of the twentieth century. For instance, R. K. Gordon writes, “No virtue is more insisted on in the [heroic] poems than the loyalty a warrior owes his liege lord,” and “the poems are full of praise for the lord who knows how to give freely” (vi). Fred C. Robinson observes that in The Fight at Finnsburg (and elsewhere) readers find “a classic expression of the motif of warriors repaying their lord’s generosity with courage on the field of battle” (“Secular Poetry” 285). Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe links the asymmetrical exchanges between lord and retainer to the construction of fame: The touchstone of that life—as represented in Old English literature at least—is the vital relationship between retainer and lord, whose binding virtue is loyalty. Continuing loyalty is ensured in the lord’s giving of treasure. Through gifts of worth, a lord enhances his own reputation and that of his retainer, and he lays upon his man the obligation of future service. (“Heroic Values” 107–8) John Hill offers the complementary perspective of a social historian. His study of such terms as cyning, hlaford, and eorl has shown how the roles of king, lord, and nobleman shifted during the Anglo-Saxon period due to broad social changes. While such semantic distinctions are invaluable for

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the reconstruction of social history and its representations, they do not wholly consider the resilience of the conventions of verbal art, which may be preserved for centuries by the conservatism of poetic meter and genre.2 Unlike previous scholarship, this chapter treats the lord-retainer relationship as an oral-connected theme with common motifs, which enables us to explore the connection between structural elements and their aesthetic and narrative significance. The lord-retainer theme supplies us with another example of the written oral-connected idiom, this time at work in martial narratives that do not neatly comply with modern notions of “legendary” versus “historical,” whether they describe an Anglo-Saxon battle or Christian cosmology. The most likely reason that the lord-retainer convention has not been studied as a theme per se is that its occurrence has not been correlated with repeating lexemes and half-line morpho-syntactic metrical systems. Yet it is widely known that oral-connected themes and typescenes in Old English verse have comparatively few repeating morphs and formulaic lines when contrasted with oral-traditional South Slavic and Ancient Greek poetry. The oral poetry of the Upper Altay in east central Asia could serve as a better comparand. Lauri Harvilahti in “Substrates and Registers” notes that many poetic themes in Altay heroic songs cannot be mapped by searching for repeating lexemes or morpho-syntactic metrical systems; rather they emerge from a “substrate” of traditional conventions whose recurring features are ideational rather than specific lines of verse. His The Holy Mountain: Studies on Upper Altay Oral Poetry describes the occurrence of pairs of shamanistic animals in the epic Maaday-Kara, which he has found in the form of two black eagles, two guardian dogs, two streams of milk from the breast of the hero’s mother, and two ears like scissors on a magnificent steed (93–94). Powerful shamanistic pairs regularly appear in the performed epic, but the exact form is not dictated by metrical, lexical, or syntactic conventions (what Harvilahti more broadly terms “the ethnopoetic substrate”). Instead, hints in the flow of verse create a moment of recognition for the listener, due to shared cultural memories (“Substrates” 70). Depending on the tradition and the genre, these hints may be conceptual and/or specific lexical items.3 Old English poetry, like Altaic oral poetry, can express thematic material with conceptual motifs, yet such themes will pass unobserved if we expect them to use specific lexemes or other aural patterns.

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Thematic material thus refers metonymically to the body of oral tradition for its meaning, and the manner of construction in verse is meaningful for Altaic audiences using the Gorno-Altai language. The narratological contours of important substrates set up generic expectations, much in the same way that the Old English lord-retainer theme does. Here I explore how the lord-retainer convention is a replicable oral-connected theme in the repertoire of Anglo-Saxon poets, thereby reframing what is generally understood as a topos of the heroic genre as a theme that employs and is constituted by regular motifs. There are several benefits of such an approach: variations from poem to poem in the theme’s motifs communicate important information about the characters and the narratives in which these themes are embedded. Understanding the subtler dimensions of a theme illuminates its connotations in myriad poems. In the next chapter I explain how approaching the lord-retainer convention as a theme enables one to recognize the theme when it is employed metaphorically, in a manner consistent with a literate hermeneutics. Old English themes demonstrate a great degree of flexibility with regard to their formal characteristics and duration; such flexibility may be responsible for our overlooking the motifs of the lord-retainer theme, their metonymic significance in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf, and their variations in the lord-retainer theme in Andreas and Genesis A. These variations prove its pliability and the continuing value of an oral poetic approach to the interpretation of themes. My analysis draws on the theory of immanent art to explore how verbal and conceptual structures that recur in the Old English written tradition have aesthetic implications for the poems in which they arise (see chapter 1). The motifs of the lord-retainer theme are poetic devices whose expressivity is manipulated to suit the poem’s diegetic and social context, not simply residual curiosities from a distant oral tradition. Sequence, Form, Duration, and the Lord-Retainer Theme in Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon Since Old English scholarship largely replicates—at the level of terminology—the designations for oral idioms that arise in scholarship on South Slavic and Ancient Greek verse, it is useful to revisit common descriptions of Old English themes and typescenes. Although some scholars have con-

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flated theme and typescene, I advocate differentiating them on the basis of their ties to temporal sequencing.4 At least some of the motifs of typescenes, such as the sea voyage, arise in a specific order whose disruption would be meaningful. John Miles Foley has argued that the omission of a key motif in the sea voyage sequence, when the Beowulf-poet uses it to portray Scyld Scefing’s death, underscores the mystery of Scyld’s implied “arrival” on far, unknown shores.5 Poets can manipulate expected sequencing of motifs for dramatic and meaningful effect. When a poet employs a theme, however, the sequence of motifs does not have a particularly meaningful relationship. The motifs in the “joy in the hall” theme (music, shared pleasure, laughter, and so on) do not need to follow a chronology; thus the order of their presentation has less bearing on audience interpretation.6 In this discussion, I differentiate between typescenes, whose motifs follow a chronological sequence, and themes, whose motifs concatenate. Stanley B. Greenfield’s analysis of the exile theme, one of the most commonly employed idioms in Old English verse, demonstrates how a theme’s identity can depend upon a cluster of motifs and recurring phrases and lexemes: (1) exile status; (2) deprivation; (3) wretched state of mind; and (4) movement into exile (“Formulaic Expression”). Greenfield finds that some of the motifs in the exile theme are represented by formulaic systems with a set of lexemes (allo-lexemes, as it were) at its core: the first motif often occurs as either wineleas x, where x = the exile figure, or x an-haga, where x is an adjective meaning “wretched” (usually earm) or a nominal phrase lacking the adjective (201). The second motif may be discerned in phrases that represent similar concepts and follow similar metrical and grammatical patterns but do not always share the same lexeme (202). For example, the motif for deprivation, communicated in a half-line, has taken the following forms: dreame bedæled (Beowulf 1275a), eðle bescyrede (Advent Lyrics 32b), eorlum bedroren (Genesis A/B 2099a), hama bereafod (“The Death of Edgar” 28b), and wuldre benemed (Christ and Satan 120b). The half-line fulfills a specific syntactic and grammatical pattern that also complies with Sievers verse type A (and sometimes E), but it is not bound to specific lexemes (202). The third motif, state of mind, demonstrates even greater variability. It is tied to no particular verse form or lexemes, although adjectives such as earm, geomor, and -cearig are often used (203). The fourth motif, movement into exile, breaks into several sub-motifs with one sufficing to indicate its presence. Some sub-motifs follow metrical and

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grammatical rules—and thus appear formulaic—while others revolve around somewhat consistent lexemes (wræc and last). Greenfield explains that each may be recognized by a different set of metrical, morphological, and semantic features. We can see that not all of the constitutive motifs of the exile theme display lexical, syntactical, formulaic, or metrical fixity. Furthermore, these motifs do not need to arise in a linear order; therefore, they do not aid overtly in the narration of a sequential event. Another way of approaching Old English themes and typescenes is to imagine three different continuums that may have influenced composition and reception. There is a continuum from the typescene’s strict temporal sequencing to the theme’s unsequenced motifs. There is another continuum for a fairly high density of replicable formal properties (as with the recurring metrical and morpho-syntactic patterns of traditional phraseology) to a low density of formal recurrence.7 Themes and typescenes can also fall along a third continuum, from short-duration idioms that span only five or so lines (as with many instances of the joy in the hall theme) to those with the flexibility to unfold over either few or many lines (as with the sea voyage typescene). One can imagine that possessing a range of idioms that use different degrees of sequencing, formality, and duration would benefit tradition-bearers as they craft poems and would ensure the survival of a variety of oral-traditional concepts, as well as their hybrid metamorphoses. The lord-retainer theme possesses a loose and lyrical set of motifs that follows no chronology; its motifs lack formal structure, and they may be recounted in few or many lines. Unlike the majority of themes that have been discussed by scholars, the lord-retainer theme has the accordion-like ability to take shape over very short and very long durations.8 Thus, in the spectrum of oral-connected idioms, it requires neither chronological sequencing nor specific phraseology or morphs, and it is multi-durational. Because of its loose structure, a reader unfamiliar with the oral-poetic conventions of many oral traditions (generally) and with those of Old English verse (specifically) could easily overlook this theme’s motifs and related implications. The generic centrality and simplicity of the theme’s motifs preserve its metonymic force, even though its motifs are unsequenced, conceptual rather than formal, and highly flexible in duration. The commonality of narratives in Old English that describe relationships between lords and

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their followers extends from battle narratives (The Battle of Maldon) and commemorations of known or legendary rulers (Beowulf, “The Death of Edgar,” Widsith) to Christian tales in which figures such as Andreas and Elene adopt the dual role of leader of people and servant to God. Because of the lord-retainer theme’s usefulness in a variety of narrative contexts that describe idealized hierarchical relationships, it could easily be remembered and preserved. Furthermore, the motifs of the lord-retainer theme have so few characteristics that their conceptual simplicity compensates for their lack of formal characteristics and enables them to maintain a sense of definition from one instantiation to the next. Thus, displaying remarkable flexibility, themes in Old English verse vary from those that usually employ recognizable formal traits often within the space of a few lines (such as the beasts of battle and hero on the beach)9 to those whose traditional, metonymic referentiality depends upon the employment of a few key concepts or motifs, which may be dispersed across three to fifty lines or more (such as talking wood and lord-retainer).10 Perhaps one of the more remarkable characteristics of Old English verse is the degree of heterogeneity one finds with respect to sequencing, formality, and duration. This adaptability is similar to what Harvilahti has witnessed in the Upper Altay. He counsels that lexical repetition may only apply to two or three of the many poetic themes in the Altay tradition and that creating “rigidly defined criteria . . . might in fact act merely as an impediment to analysis” (“Substrates” 73). Old English oral-related themes can unfold in a few or many lines; they generally comprise unsequenced motifs that are recognizable on the basis of verbal signals (what Harvilahti calls hints that allude to the ethnopoetic substrate) following either formal or ideational contours. Well-known passages dramatizing the lord and retainer relationship in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf employ three regular motifs. Both poems represent heroic figures facing a dire enemy who eventually slays the hero: the Vikings in The Battle of Maldon and the dragon in Beowulf. Such a narrative context rigorously tries the strength of the bond between lord and thane. A scenario that asks whether in the face of mortal threat it will hold or disintegrate exposes the theme’s basic architecture: (1) the retainer’s loyalty, which may be tested by a choice; (2) a heightened form of discourse, usually in the form of a vow; and (3) the lord’s generosity or giftgiving practices.11 These three motifs constitute the core of the lord-re-

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tainer theme, although further positively valued characteristics may (and often do) accrue to either figure—the lord’s protection or the retainer’s valor, for instance. When these motifs arrive in the evolving flow of verse, they create a field of immanent associations for their audiences. The recurring structural and ideological features of these motifs key the audience to the presence of the theme and its concomitant generic associations. With the first motif—loyalty of the retainer to his lord—The Battle of Maldon glorifies the retainers’ proper behavior in battle before, during, and after Byrhtnoth’s death. At the onset of battle, Byrhtnoth places himself amidst the most loyal thanes (versus, say, the most skillful, noble or wise): “þa he hæfde þæt folc fægere getrymmed, / he lihte þa mid leodon þær him leofost wæs, / þær he his heorðwerod holdost wiste” (22–24; When [Byrhtnoth] had nobly encouraged that folk, he dismounted amid that people where he knew his hearth-host to be most loyal). As Byrhtnoth dies, the men who fall beside him become frozen in a deathly tableau: “Ælfnoð and Wulfmær begen lagon, / ða onemn hyra frean feorh gesealdon” (183–84; Ælfnoth and Wulfmær both lay dead, who gave their lives beside their lord). As a consequence of Byrhtnoth’s death, Dunhere urges vengeance with the proverbial statement: “Ne mæg na wandian se þe wrecan þenceð / frean on folce, ne for feore murnan” (258–59; He cannot flinch who intends to avenge his lord on this people, nor mourn for [the loss of his own] life). The retainer’s loyalty is often expressed in language that either announces or recalls the verbal contract between lord and thane, the second motif. In The Battle of Maldon each retainer faces the choice between loyal bravery, in which vow and act align, and cowardly self-regard, in which words, acts, and heroic identity splinter. The poem as a traditional vehicle of honor and shame immortalizes both types of men. Those warriors whose deeds fit their vows have the occasion to speak (unlike Godric, Godwine, and Godwig, who took flight). Raðe wearð æt hilde  Offa forheawen; he hæfde ðeah geforþod  þæt he his frean gehet, swa he beotode ær  wið his beahgifan þæt hi sceoldon begen  on burh ridan, hale to hame,  oððe on here crincgan,

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on wælstowe  wundum sweltan; he læg ðegenlice  ðeodne gehende. (Maldon 288–94) Offa was swiftly hewn down in battle; yet he had carried out what he promised his lord, as he previously vowed in the presence of his ring-giver, that they both should ride into the fortress, hale to home, or fall in battle, perish from wounds on the field of slaughter. He lay as a retainer next to his lord. The poem links Offa’s ðegenlice (thane-like) behavior alliteratively to his ðeodne (lord), creating an imagistic and metrical bond that honors their intertwined heroism. The passage represents choices: either flee or face the enemy; either go home together or die together. As with ðegenlice Offa, the poem’s “wlance þegenas, / unearge men” (205b–6a; proud thanes, fearless men) have only one option when their lord has been slain, an option with two possible outcomes: “hi woldon þa ealle oðer twega, / lif forlætan oððe leofne gewrecan” (207–8; then they all wished one of two things, to lose life or to avenge the dear one). Flight is out of the question for the retainer who upholds the lord-retainer contract. Wiglaf gives voice to similar values of loyalty and bravery in his speech to Beowulf ’s retainers. He frames their reticence to join the fight with the dragon as an either/or scenario—either assist Beowulf, risking death, or fall into discord with the lord-retainer ideal:    “God wat on mec þæt me is micle leofre  þæt minne lichaman mid minne goldgyfan  gled fæðmie. Ne þynceð me gerysne  þæt we rondas beren eft to earde,  nemne we æror mægen fane gefyllan,  feorh ealgian Wedra ðeodnes.  Ic wat geare, þæt næron ealdgewyrht,  þæt he ana scyle Geata duguðe  gnorn þrowian, gesigan æt sæcce;  urum sceal sweord ond helm, byrne ond beaduscrud  bam gemæne.” (Beowulf 2650b–60) “It is far preferable to me, God knows, that fire consume my body alongside the body of my gold-giver. It does not seem fitting that

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we bear shields home again, unless we first destroy the foe, defend the life of the prince of the Weders. I well know that his past deeds do not merit that he, alone of the experienced warriors of the Geats, ought to endure pain, to fall in battle. Sword and helm, byrnie and battle-garment, ought to be shared in common.” Like Dunhere, Ælfwine, Byrhtwold, and other retainers in The Battle of Maldon, Wiglaf urges his fellows to embrace the expected qualities of loyalty and bravery. Where the loyalty and vowing motifs intersect, there appears to be the choice between loyal and disloyal behavior that is dramatized in both Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon with inverted outcomes.12 In Beowulf only Wiglaf adheres to the ideal, one to which Beowulf himself does not hold his retainers because he does not expect them to face such an extraordinary foe. The Battle of Maldon, on the other hand, commemorates the majority for their valor when facing human foes and certain death. Thanes either bear witness to past oaths or performatively re-create an oath in the present. For example: “Eadweard se langa, / gearo and geornful, gylpwordum spræc” (Maldon 273b–74; Edward the tall, ready and eager, spoke promise-words). Wiglaf refers to the verbal contract (“þonne we geheton ussum hlaforde”; 2634, when we promised to our lord) made in the past and, then, concludes with a reperformance of a thane’s beot: “urum sceal sweord ond helm, / byrne ond beaduscrud bam gemæne” (2659b–60).13 Despite Beowulf ’s expressed intention to face the dragon alone, Wiglaf insists upon their symbiotic relationship whose material rewards (sweord ond helm) lead to an immaterial goal: dom (2666; judgment or fame). Wiglaf ’s vow is a performative utterance that binds lord and retainer and requires that each fulfill his prescribed role. John Searle would call such an oath not just a “commissive,” which promises a certain action, but an “assertive” because the performance of the words creates the heroic contract and prescribes only two possible paths.14 To fail to realize the terms of the contract is to be out of accord with oneself and with one’s social world. Most of the lexemes involved in this example of the oath (gylpword, beot, beotode, and gehat) may broadly signify the verbal contracts that one encounters in Anglo-Saxon verse.15 Lordship does not seem as fraught as thaneship in these two narratives, unless audiences decry Beowulf for engaging in a nearly impossible fight. His role as gift-giver appears unimpeachable in this passage. Beowulf and

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The Battle of Maldon use two devices to signal a lord’s ritualized generosity: exhortations by the narrator or from one retainer to another and poetic epithets for lordship. The narrator comments that the three cowardly brothers in The Battle of Maldon and those who followed them would not have fled “gyf hi þa geearnunga ealle gemundon / þe he him to duguþe gedon hæfde” (196–97; if they remembered at all the favors that he had given as a benefit to them). When Wiglaf attempts to shame his fellow retainers into aiding their lord, he presents the details of Beowulf ’s generosity: “þonne we geheton ussum hlaforde / in biorsele, ðe us ðas beagas geaf, / þæt we him ða guðgetawa gyldan woldon / gif him þyslicu þearf gelumpe, / helmas ond heard sweord” (2634–38a; when we in the beerhall promised our lord who gave us rings that we wished to repay him for the battle-gear if such need would arise, for the helmets and hard swords). In addition to pointing out that Beowulf ’s gifts had been exchanged for the retainers’ loyalty on the battlefield, Wiglaf employs the epithet goldgyfan (2652a; gold-giver), and the narrator uses the term goldwine (2584a; goldfriend or gold-lord) for Beowulf at his first moment of need, just a handful of lines before the reader is first told that Beowulf ’s men, rather than join him, have retreated into the woods.16 The Battle of Maldon employs sincgyfan (278a; treasure-giver) and beahgifan (290b; ring-giver) for Byrhtnoth. The role of gift-giver has been crystallized in the form of epithets. As I discussed in chapters 1 and 2, the relative consistency of a theme throughout the poetic corpus allows for highly efficient communication— what Foley has termed the “communicative economy” of oral traditions.17 When poets employ hybrid strategies by incorporating oral-connected themes (such as lord-retainer) in Christian narratives, they summon the themes’ connotations for aesthetic and narrative effects, such as demonstrating how much individuals uphold the idealized contract between lord and retainer or illustrating the desired relationship between words and deeds. Poets presumably continue writing with the “expressive economy” of oral idioms because of their function and pleasure (Elizabeth Tyler’s “aesthetics of familiarity”), and also because the relative stability of Old English poetics—including metrical forms, verbal collocations, formulaic systems, and echoic word usage—supported an unusual degree of homeostasis.18 The highly consistent expressive economy of oral-related idioms in no way effaces the creative differences of individual poems. In the next two examples, the lord-retainer theme underscores important features of

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Christian theology and mythology. In Andreas the theme links the human “lord” Andreas with Christ as lord in a relationship of imitatio Christi. In Genesis A, the theme’s inversion dramatizes Lucifer’s rebellion, a contractual breach of cosmic proportions. Gif ðu ðegn sie: A Double Multiform in Andreas The motifs of a thane’s loyalty, marked speech, and a lord’s generosity all arise in Andreas, where the eponymous hero is lord to his own men and retainer to Christ. In the cosmic hierarchy, Christ is the lord of lords, beorna breogo (305a; chief of warriors) and Andreas one of Christ’s servants, þegn þeodenhold (384a; lord-loyal thane, an epithet that may allude, punningly, to Andreas’s double status). The poem presents at least two loyalty tests that underscore how Andreas’s actions and experiences mirror the tests that Christ faced. Perhaps as a result of his initial reluctance to undertake a journey to Mermedonia or Mermidonia (the island of cannibals), Andreas unwittingly endures a loyalty test. Christ, who has instructed Andreas to embark immediately for Mermedonia, reappears disguised as a ship’s captain and asks Andreas to pay for passage upon his vessel. Andreas’s response, that he has nothing with which to pay the fare, pleases Christ because his poverty is a direct result of obedience to Christ’s command that he leave immediately without gathering wealth or provisions. The language of Andreas’s rationale for his journey stresses the lord-retainer relationship: “We his þegnas synd / gecoren to cempum. He is cyning on riht” (323b–24; We are his thanes, chosen soldiers. He is the rightful king). Andreas’s public demonstration of loyalty in both deeds and words invokes the motif of the retainer’s loyalty and results in the provision of gifts: a place for Andreas and his followers upon the disembarking ship and sustenance: Æfre ic ne hyrde þon cymlicor  ceol gehladenne heahgestreonum.  Hæleð in sæton, þeodnas þrymfulle,  þegnas wlitige. Ða reordode  rice þeoden, ece ælmihtig,  heht his engel gan,

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mærne maguþegn,  ond mete syllan, frefran feasceafte  ofer flodes wylm, þæt hie þe eað mihton  ofer yða geþring drohtaþ adreogan. (360b–69a) I never heard of a lovelier ship laden with high treasures. The warriors sat within, mighty princes, splendid thanes. Then the powerful prince, the eternal almighty, ordered his angel, the pure kin-servant, to go and give food to comfort the wretched upon the surge of the sea so that they could more easily endure their circumstances upon the clash of waves. The narration describes how the food arrives by divine fiat, although Andreas believes that his supposedly mortal host is the source. Over the course of the voyage, Christ provides further gifts—including calming the seas and instilling the company with much needed bravery—thus exhibiting the motif of the lord’s generosity. During the voyage Andreas and his men encounter a savage storm that leads them to fear for their lives. This time the disguised Christ presents Andreas’s men, rather than Andreas, with a loyalty test. In response to Andreas’s statement that “duguð is geswenced, / modigra mægen myclum gebysgod” (394b–95; the host of tested retainers is afflicted, / the strength of the mighty ones greatly overcome), Christ suggests that these men return to shore while they have the chance. In one voice, they respond that such an action would fracture the lord-retainer contract and warrant the contempt of all proper retainers (410a; the ellenrofe), whose wealth demonstrates their loyalty to their lord despite the hardship: We bioð laðe  on landa gehwam, folcum fracoðe,  þonne fira bearn, ellenrofe,  æhte besittaþ, hwylc hira selost  symle gelæste hlaforde æt hilde,  þonne hand ond rond on beaduwange  billum forgrunden æt niðplegan  nearu þrowedon. (408–14) We will be loathsome in every land, despised by all peoples, when the sons of men, the valor-brave, decide in counsel who best among

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them stood by their lord at battle, when hand and shield, ground down by swords, at hostile-play endured hardship on the battlefield. Their allegiance to Andreas serves as a proxy for obedience to the Christian God. The hardship that Andreas’s men face for the sake of the lord-retainer relationship aligns them with Christ’s commandments to Andreas, symbolizing an ideal apostolic relationship whereby the gifts of God are communicated. A punning half-line in this speech underscores how a thane’s loyalty (or lack thereof) has a spiritual dimension in this context. Their speech, and the lord-retainer relationship itself, has both the literal and metaphorical dimensions that align with overtly metaphorical, oral-connected idioms (see chapter 4). Andreas’s modigra mægen state that leaving Andreas on board while they went to shore would be tantamount to turning themselves into exiles: “Hwider hweorfað we hlafordlease, / geomormode, gode orfeorme, / synnum wunde, gif we swicað þe?” (405–7; Whither would we turn, being lordless and grief-filled, destitute of good things, wounded by crimes, if we desert you?). The exile state is telegraphed by the descriptors hlafordlease and geomormode. Their question underscores a retainer’s need for a lord lest he become an exile and has obvious spiritual connotations, given the choice phrase synnum wunde, which may also mean “wounded by sins.”19 If the focus of the passage is worldly exile, then synnum wunde must be figurative (unless we are to imagine that breaking one’s vow would result in physical punishment). In a spiritual interpretation, disembarking means abandoning the path of obedience to Christ, and, like God’s enemies, body and soul suffer the wounds of sin. The most playful half-line, however, is gode orfeorme. It uses the near homophony of gōd (benefits, goodness, bounty) and God to signal that the loss of one (God) means the loss of another (gōd). The motif of vowing speech takes on a new dimension in this passage. Andreas’s men have renewed their verbal contract, satisfying expectations regarding the lord-retainer theme, while recasting the beot (oath) in a different light. As is typical of the poem’s doubling of the theme, by focusing on the relationship between lord Andreas and his men and between servant Andreas and Christ, the narration represents another type of “marked speech,” this time performed by Andreas. Still in disguise, Christ, the wær-

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fæst cining (416a, oath-keeping king), advises Andreas rece þa gerynu (419a; recount those mysteries): Þa reordade  rice þeoden, wærfæst cining,  word stunde ahof: “Gif ðu þegn sie  þrymsittendes, wuldorcyninges,  swa ðu worde becwist, rece þa gerynu,  hu he reordberend lærde under lyfte.  Lang is þes siðfæt ofer fealuwne flod;  frefra þine mæcgas on mode . . . . God eaðe mæg heaðoliðendum  helpe gefremman.” (415–22a; 425b–26) Then the powerful prince called out, the oath-keeping king, loudly raised up words: “If you are a thane of the one dwelling in majesty, of the wondrous king, as you assert in speech, recount these mysteries, what he taught speech-bearers beneath the sky. Long is this expedition over the dusky sea; comfort the minds of your men . . . . God easily is able to provide help to war-sailors.” This passage exemplifies the tight-knit relationship between special discourse and the thane’s performance of loyal bravery, but it calibrates that discourse to a Christian context. The heavenly lord, who holds fast to his covenant, instructs Andreas how to behave like a proper lord: as one who dispenses gerynu, instructing and comforting his followers. Andreas ought to model his actions on Christ’s, rece þa gerynu, hu he reordberend / lærde under lyfte (419–20a; recount these mysteries, what [or “how”] he taught speech-bearers beneath the sky). The words of the disguised Christ direct Andreas to occupy a pivotal position as both thane and leader, because being a spiritual thane to Christ obligates him to model his behavior on Christ’s. Most remarkably, in addition to the theme’s incorporation of the patristic concept of imitatio, its traditional implications are manipulated to highlight the dual roles of the servant of God. Just as Christ himself knits together humanity and deity, a human being aligned with Christ may combine the heroic qualities of lordship and thanehood, both generosity

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to others and obedience to God. The incorporation of the theme’s motifs characterizes such behavior as heroic. The metonymic associations of the conventional theme take on the character of Christian ideology. When a heroic lord displays his generosity, he dispenses worldly wealth. In the Andreas passages presented here, Christ’s generosity at first appears to be heahgestreonum (362a; valuable treasure), but what he actually dispenses is mete (366b; food). In turn, Andreas provides his thanes with the spiritual nourishment of þa gerynu (mysteries), which comfort the storm-tossed men. These words of spiritual wisdom (þa gerynu) also express the motif of vowing words. The contractual vow that passes between retainer and lord has been reimagined as the act of giving spiritual instruction. The trajectory of such a speech is unidirectional and hierarchical, passing from the Lord Christ to the mortal lord who serves by imitation. (Thus, the apostle serves as a model for bishophood, specifically, and the priesthood, more generally.) Nevertheless the implications of the heroic beot have not disappeared. In Andreas’s exhortation to his men, he reminds them of their chosen loyalty and describes the reward: “Ge þæt gehogodon,  þa ge on holm stigon, þæt ge on fara folc  feorh gelæddon, ond for dryhtnes lufan  deað þrowodon, on Ælmyrcna  eðelrice sawle gesealdon.  Ic þæt sylfa wat, þæt us gescyldeð  scyppend engla, weoruda dryhten . . .” (429–35a) “You decided, when you embarked upon the sea, that you would ferry your life to a hostile people, and for the love of the lord suffer death, in the homeland of the Ethiopians sacrifice your souls. I myself know that the creator of angels, the lord of hosts will shield us . . .” Andreas’s words modify the either/or of the hero’s conditional contract (either success in battle or death) by asserting his certainty that God will protect his servants regardless of life and death. One benefit of reading with the metonymy of the lord-retainer theme in mind arises in this series of specific contrasts between the descriptions of lord, retainer, and con-

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tractual speech in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf and their Christianized revision in Andreas. Inversion in Genesis A The first 111 lines of Genesis A (also known as the exordium) precede its vernacular translation of Genesis [1:1 to 22:13] and attest to how the poet freely enfolds apocryphal material and poetic elaboration. These lines describe the revolt and fall of Satan, sometimes called the Fall of the Angels (225).20 A. N. Doane notes in his revised edition of Genesis A that the topics of the exordium correspond with exegetical material “traditionally considered an integral part of the literal meaning of Genesis and suggests such established topics as the nature of the Godhead, time and eternity, sin and free will” (287). Doane points out that because the poet of Genesis A must adhere to “accuracy and doctrinal soundness” in translating a sacred text, he or she is not free to embroider the narrative with allusions to heroic (non-Christian) figures or to make digressions into legendary material. Where I disagree with him is in his assertion that “the unexpected demands of an unyielding text” sap the communicative efficiency of traditional idioms and limit “the traditional poetic” to “curious” and “halting” instances of elaboration (95). Instead, I suggest that the poet of Genesis A fuses oral-connected idioms with exegetical material and paraphrases of liturgical Latin, lending further support to the poem’s doctrinal and narrative concerns.21 The portrayal of the hexameral material in these opening lines uses a series of traditional oral-connected themes: joy in the hall, exile, poet-patron, and the lord-retainer theme. The themes in the exordium mutually reinforce the expressive economy of each subsequent theme, creating a tapestry of traditional idioms relating the story of the Fall of the Angels.22 The theme of “joy in the hall” encircles the other themes in a ring pattern that begins just after the poem has represented God’s celestial kingship (as wuldorcining; 2a; glory-king) over a place of heofenstolas (8a; heaven-thrones) given to the gasta weardum (12a; guardians of souls—in other words, angels).23 Line 12b, Hæfdon gleam and dream (they had revelry and communal joy) communicates the shared joy of the comitatus (the warband united around their lord). The angels’ communal pleasure is

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further accentuated with the appositive phrase beorhte blisse (14a; bright bliss) and the brief, emphatic statement, Wæs heora blæd micel! (14b; Their glory [or perhaps “the blooming of their creative vigor”] was great!). The poem does not allude to laughter or ritually passed mead in this version of the joy in the hall theme because, like a chameleon, it matches the sobriety of the poem’s spiritual context. The exordium circles back to the joy in the hall theme in lines 78–81, where sibb (kinship or peace) and þrymmas (majesties), following upon the heels of conflict, dominate the tone of the angels’ communal celebration with God. Thus, via a ring pattern, the joy in the hall theme arises, then dissipates at the onset of conflict, and then arises again when the violence has passed.24 Joy in the hall encloses the story of Lucifer’s gedwilde (in dative singular, 23a; error or wandering), æfst and oferhygd (29a; envy and arrogance [oferhygd is literally, over-courage or over-mind]), which lead to his revolt and expulsion from heaven. Renée Trilling has shown how the exordium’s extrabiblical story dramatizes the onset of historical time in a dichotomous eruption of conflict that contrasts with the unitary eternity of heaven and precipitates the need for narrative (86). By circling back to the joy in the hall theme, the poem underscores the uninterrupted, eternal delight that the angelic hosts take in their God. In Genesis A, the theme of joy in the hall encloses three other themes: poet-patron, exile, and lord-retainer.25 The first of these three themes is a metaphorical version of the poet-patron theme, which I will explore in chapter 5. The praise of the angelic hosts in lines 15–18a evokes the poetpatron theme and its metaphorical relationship to the angelic choirs singing their eternal praise of God, a common subject in manuscript illuminations, frescoes, paintings, etchings, and so on.26 Using the traditional referentiality of the poet-patron theme, the poet of Genesis A could imply that the angels’ praise resounded far and wide and that it was linked in an inexhaustible cycle with God’s generosity. The ring pattern of joy in the hall also encloses the exile theme, whose presence in later sections of Genesis A and B Stanley Greenfield has explored.27 As described earlier the motifs of status, deprivation, “state of mind,” and “movement in or into exile” have either a corresponding formulaic system or an associated concept that can be conveyed by various lexemes (“Formulaic Expression” 201). Greenfield does not, however, mention that the exile theme frames the downfall of Satan and his hosts:

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Sceof þa and scyrede  scyppend ure oferhidig cyn  engla of heofnum, wærleas werod.  Waldend sende laðwendne here  on langne sið, geomre gastas;  wæs him gylp forod, beot forborsten,  and forbiged þrym, wlite gewemmed.  Heo on wrace syððan seomodon swearte,  siðe ne þorfton hlude hlihhan,  ac heo helltregum werige wunodon  and wean cuðon, sar and sorge,  susl þrowedon þystrum beþeahte,  þearl æfterlean þæs þe heo ongunnon  wið gode winnan. (65–77) Our maker then shoved and sheared the over-courageous race of angels from the heavens, the covenant-less host. The ruler sent the hate-turned army on a long journey, the troubled spirits; for them the claim was broken, the verbal contract utterly sundered, glory abased, beauty stained. Afterward, they darkly remained in suffering, and did not need to laugh loudly over the journey, for they wearily endured hellish tortures and knew woes, pain, and sorrow; enveloped in darkness they suffered torment, that severe reward, because they had begun to struggle against God. The passage describes their exile status (wærleas werod; covenant-less host), deprivation (wæs him gylp forod, / beot forborsten, and forbiged þrym, / wlite gewemmed; for them the claim was broken, the verbal contract utterly sundered, glory abased, beauty stained), low state of mind (geomre gastas; troubled spirits), and movement into exile (Waldend sende / laðwendne here on langne sið . . . siðe ne þorfton / hlude hlihhan; The ruler sent the hate-turned army on a long journey . . . they did not need to laugh loudly over the journey). There is a subtle pun on the Old English word for exile, wræc, in 71b–72a: Heo on wrace syððan / seomodon swearte. The literal interpretation is “afterward, they darkly remained in suffering.” The punning sense, which semantically chimes with the literal one, would be “afterward, they darkly remained in exile.” The exile of Satan and his hosts from heaven sharply contrasts with peace in heaven, expressed with the recurring joy in the hall theme (lines 78–81).

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The lord-retainer theme, enmeshed with these other themes, underscores the stark difference between the loyal and disloyal retainers (followers) of God. Genesis A begins to cue the lord-retainer theme via lexemes that emphasize the Christian God’s lordliness—weard (1b; ruler), wuldorcining (2a; glory-king), drihtnes (7a; of lord)—and his generosity, which is evident in the statement that God “sweglbosmas heold, / þa wæron gesette wide and side / þurh geweald godes wuldres bearnum, / gasta weardum” (9b–12a; He held celestial-spaces, which were placed far and wide through the power of God for the children of glory, the guardians of spirits). This alone would not, however, be sufficient to fully key the theme. One needs loyal retainers and reference to a vow. These arise in inverted form during the narration of Lucifer’s uprising. There are a handful of direct and indirect references to a formal vow: gielp micel (25b; great boast), werlogan (36b; covenant-breaker), wærleas werod (67a; covenant-less host), gylp forod (69b; broken boast), and beot forborsten (70a; failed oath). The gielp and beot, which have a positive connotation in The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf, contrast with the tacit wær (covenant) that should exist between God and his angelic hosts. Thus, Lucifer is a werloga (a covenant-breaker), and his followers are a wærleas werod (a host lacking in covenant). His oath stems from oferhygde (too much pride/valor). Instead of the gielp that precedes acts of courage and loyalty, the disloyal angel invokes an anti-gielp by vowing to take over the northern portion of heaven so that he and God may rule side by side. For his efforts, God presents Satan with his own realm: a place of exile, misery, and torture. Then, the joy in the hall theme returns, formally imprisoning the threat posed by the inverted lordretainer theme and the misery that follows exile. The transgression of the lord-retainer contract is formally and narratively enclosed, and its threat ameliorated, by the joy theme’s ring structure. Thus, Genesis A invokes the motifs of the lord-retainer theme, weaving it into a tapestry of themes (joy in the hall, exile, and poet-patron). The poem uses an inversion of the lord-retainer theme to characterize Satan and his hosts as the ultimate oath-breakers, whose threat to the cosmic-social order has been contained geographically in hell and poetically within a ring pattern that emphasizes the continual delight of the angelic hosts in their Lord. In her discussion of the first 111 lines of Genesis A, Trilling examines the characterization of God as a Lord and his angels as a loyal war band, describing such characterization as “a Germanicized understand-

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ing of Genesis . . . that enhances and personalizes the moral dimension of the events. As a result, the reader of Genesis A is prepared to understand biblical history as the story of individuals’ relationships with God” (89). More specifically, the lord-retainer theme gives shape and substance to the ideal relationship that an individual may undertake with the Christian God, presenting loyalty (obedience) as the optimal choice. The dynamic between God and his loyal angelic hosts presents a model for human beings to emulate that draws powerfully upon the immanent associations with the lord-retainer contract. Because this contract marries words and deeds, it symbolizes prelapsarian unification between body and soul. Genesis A has also created a site of cultural and interpretive liaison between oral-traditional and literate modes of representation by folding the lordretainer theme into its narration of the Fall of the Angels. Images of loyal retainers may seem so conventional in verse with heroic themes that they no longer warrant much attention. Here I have argued just the opposite, by illustrating the recurrence of three motifs: the vow (beot) or similarly marked speech, the thane loyal unto death, and the magnanimous lord. As we have seen, the simplicity of the key motifs of the lord-retainer theme allows them to conjoin in a variety of patterns that serve the ideals of the militaristic comitatus and of Christian obedience to God. In The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf the retainers’ vows are either remembered or reenacted in the heat of battle. In Andreas in the midst of a trying storm, the expected vow is replaced with the speech of Christian revelation (gerynu), by which Andreas, mirroring Christ, makes known Christ’s mysteries to his men. Although risking one’s own life as an act of martyrdom is still valued in Andreas, the reward Christ offers far surpasses the protection of a mortal lord, since Christ’s aegis persists into the afterlife. In Genesis A going against one’s word means going against the Word, and therefore being at cross-purposes with one’s ontology. Unlike the cowards of The Battle of Maldon, whom the narrator heaps with scorn, these vow-breakers require enclosure, both literally in hell and narratively in the ring composition that uses the joy in the hall theme. By including under the rubric of oral “theme” those conventions that display recurrent motifs, we have access to a valuable interpretive tool. The structure of the lord-retainer theme is important to understand because, from the perspective of Foley’s theory of immanent art, its motifs bear a host of associations larger than their literal, word-for-word exposition. In

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addition, the rich significance of oral-connected idioms self-referentially evokes the authority of tradition and continues to recreate it. When framing Christ as the lord in this dynamic, he is represented instantly as a figure to whom loyalty and service are due, while being a source of generosity, protection, and livelihood. The marshaling of such expectations then informs what the theme connotes in Andreas and Genesis A. In the next chapter we move further along the continuum of hybrid oral-literate signs by exploring the lord-retainer theme in the Advent Lyrics, where it simultaneously elicits its typical, metonymic associations and also plays a resolutely metaphorical role.

4 o

Refiguring Hybrid Oral-Literate Signs

As we saw previously, oral-connected idioms bear a metonymic referentiality grounded in a community’s ongoing usage of an oral-traditional register of speech. What may not be obvious is that oral-traditional phrases, themes, and typescenes arise in narratively consistent contexts. In book 3 of The Kalevala, a collection of oral songs that its author-compiler, Elias Lönnrot, stitched together to create the Finnish national epic, the narrator states, “Istuiksen ilokivelle, laulupaaelle paneikse” (3.471–72; He sits on the rock of joy / on the song boulder he settles).1 The same lines also arise in book 41 (5–6). This couplet signifies “little more than ‘he starts singing’” (669), according to translator Keith Bosley, who presumably wants to prevent readers from assuming that Väinämöinen—an ancient and powerful hero or god of songs—has perched on a rock. Instead, he sings a song that frees his youthful challenger, Joukahainen, from the slime that Väinämöinen had sung into being. As a recurring couplet and written oral-connected idiom whose meaning derives from Finnish oral tradition, “He sits on the rock of joy / on the song boulder he settles” always signifies “he starts singing.” This couplet is clearly a metaphor and possibly an allusion to the incantatory, reality-creating power of song that Väinämöinen possesses. Yet, it does not occur unless the narrative needs to depict the onset of singing. In Old English verse, the theme called “joy in the hall” describes the communal joy of the comitatus in a space associated with rule of the realm.2 Its inversion, as in The Seafarer (lines 19b–22, 44–47), denotes the

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loss of communal joy, home, and a lord’s protection. Other oral-traditional and oral-connected idioms may serve a more “lyrical” function by setting the mood or a “performative” function by fulfilling the expectations of a medical incantation or keying the beginning or end of a song. Nevertheless, an important difference between the typical and the metaphorical oral idiom is this: the former arises in narratively consistent contexts, while the latter (like metaphors and similes) has a much greater range of applicability. In the previous example from The Kalevala, the imagery of the couplet was figurative, yet I do not call this a metaphorical oral-connected idiom. Similarly, the Old English beasts of battle (wolf, raven, eagle, and hawk) have an iconic relationship to the death of warring men.3 Although these birds and beasts could actually scavenge the corpses, their representation in Old English literature, as singular characters whose shared words and laughter haunt scenes of violence, crosses into the territory of symbolism. Even so, when “beasts of battle” appear on or near battlefields, the usage of this oral-connected idiom remains “typical” rather than “metaphorical” because it has not been juxtaposed with or embedded within an unusual context. The beasts are neither allegories nor characterizations of human beings in sacred narrative. The theme does not describe an immaterial or ideational scenario in which wolf, raven, eagle, and hawk must be metaphors, as would be the case if the theme were explicitly used to describe vices ravaging the souls of the damned.4 On the spectrum of hybrid oralliterate practices, I label the typical instances of a theme “written oral-connected idioms.” In this chapter, I argue that Old English poems repurpose oral-connected idioms metaphorically and allegorically, exemplifying an even greater fusion of oral and literate expressive strategies. In the previous two chapters, I examined features of the devouring-the-dead theme and reframed the relationship between lord and retainer, a common topos of heroic verse, as an oral-connected theme. Here I propose that these two themes play metaphorical roles in The Advent Lyrics, The Phoenix, and Exeter Book Riddle 47. The lord-retainer theme in The Advent Lyrics and the devouring-the-dead theme in The Phoenix and Riddle 47 typify hybrid poetics by blending the hermeneutical practices that arose in literate Christian culture with the metonymic referentiality of oral-connected themes.

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The next two sections explore how anonymous Anglo-Saxon poets have transformed these themes for the sake of their metaphorical and metonymic implications. The poet of The Advent Lyrics uses the lord-retainer theme figuratively to describe Christian penitence and the transcendence of time. The lord-retainer theme becomes a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and Christians. The devouring-the-dead theme, which typically narrates the body’s decomposition after death (see Beowulf and the Soul and Body poems), has an allegorical significance in The Phoenix. In The Phoenix, the devouring-the-dead theme characterizes both the dying body of the phoenix and Christ’s victory over death. The book moth (or bookworm) of Riddle 47 likewise is framed by the devouring-the-dead theme to enhance the riddle’s implications. Here, the theme helps admonish inattentive readers. These analyses reveal several points of comparison: between metaphorical uses of two different themes in all three poems, and between the metaphorical uses of the same theme in The Phoenix and Riddle 47. These comparisons show how the application of hybrid poetic strategies, such as making oral idioms into metaphors, is unprogrammatic and versatile. By attending to metaphorical employment of oral-connected idioms, interpreters of Old English verse may discover a subtlety of representation that draws on oral-traditional metonymic referentiality, while creating an additional figuration that is reminiscent of multilayered allegories and the exegetical practices modeled by Origen, Augustine in De doctrina christiana, and Bede in De schematibus et tropis. Brian Stock’s investigation of early medieval literacy concludes that orality and literacy were not associated with popular culture and learned, high culture, respectively. These modes of communication merged in productive and creative hybrid modes of signification, dissemination, and reception. The merging of orality and literacy in Old English verse, thus, includes and extends beyond the oral-connected idioms that have been written down, vox intexta, to the metaphorical re-signification of oral-connected idioms. As such, the aesthetic richness and pliability of oral-connected idioms can be drawn into the representational genres of typology and allegory, common in literate, Christian writings. Conferring signs with additional metaphorical meaning accords with a literate hermeneutics, which Jack Goody describes: “the construction of the text, which in any case is something other than the transcription of discourse,

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can lead to contemplation, to the development of thought about thoughts, to a metaphysic that may require its own metalanguage” (Logic of Writing 38). Literate Anglo-Saxons treated scripture as a fixed set of sayings whose wisdom can be parsed in reference to further writings (typology) and concepts (allegory). These, in turn, influenced how poets manipulated oral-connected idioms in Old English poetry. We know that oral expressions in written poems “resonate” or bear “extraliteral” meaning in reference to oral tradition. The way oral-connected signs communicate requires a different kind of interpretive practice on the part of present-day readers in which corpus-wide instantiations of a recurrent idiom must be read against each other before we can estimate their idiomatic meanings. Hence, scholars such as Mark Amodio have traced the “affective dynamics” of multiforms through both Old English and Middle English verse to illuminate the expressive power of various phrases and scenes. My examination of the metaphorical oral-connected idiom demonstrates a radically hybrid poetics, in that an oral-connected sign has not only been written down but also made literary. That is, its metonymic referentiality has been supplemented with metaphorical meaning. As oralconnected idioms, the devouring-the-dead and lord-retainer themes bear the associative meaning that accrues to multiforms in living oral traditions. As metaphors, these associative meanings are applied to abstract concepts not typically linked to these themes. The Lord-Retainer Metaphor in The Advent Lyrics In contrast to the versions of the lord-retainer theme in Beowulf, Battle of Maldon, Andreas, and Genesis A, the theme in The Advent Lyrics (also called Christ I) represents the heroic relationship between lord and retainer and simultaneously symbolizes an ideal heroic contract between Christians and their God. The title of The Advent Lyrics refers to a collection of poems at the beginning of the Exeter Book. Because of damage to the manuscript, the first lyric is acephalous. Most lyrics begin with or are clearly associated with an invocation linking it to a specific liturgical antiphon.5 In The Advent Lyrics, the lord-retainer theme metonymically invokes the values that we observed in other poems—hierarchy, loyalty, the fit between words and deeds, and generosity. Here, though, the theme-as-metaphor participates in a theological message about penitence by intersecting with the

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poem’s representation of exile and with its nearly obsessive manipulation of historical and liturgical time.6 In the lord-retainer theme, the Christian concept of obedience to the dominus dovetails with the requirement of loyalty to the death. As we saw, such a notion was operative in Andreas and also arises in The Dream of the Rood. The relationship between the Cross and Christ in The Dream of the Rood exemplifies the productive merging of so-called heroic and Christian ideals that can arise when an oral-related theme is treated as a metaphor. When Christ approaches the Cross for the crucifixion, it emphasizes its obedience to Christ—“Þær ic þa ne dorste ofer Dryhtnes word / bugan oððe berstan” (35–36a; There I then did not dare against the lord’s word to bend or break)—alongside its martial courage—eaðmod elne mycle (60a; humble with great courage).7 The Cross tells the dreamer the question that Christ will ask each of the dead on the Day of Judgment, the kind of question that a lord may ask when he searches for those who pledge their service: “Frineð he for þære mænige hwær se man sie, / se ðe for Dryhtnes naman deaðes wolde / biteres onbyrigan” (112–14a; He will ask before the multitude where the man may be who for the lord’s name wished to taste the bitterness of death). Only the clause that ends the sentence casts this question in an overtly Christian mold: “swa he ær on ðam beame dyde” (114b; as he did before on that tree). The poem asks, will you suffer for your Lord, just as he suffered for you? The reward for doing so elicits the speaker’s longing, who describes an image of communal bliss shared by lord and servants: “þær is blis mycel, / dream on heofonum” (139b–40b; where there is great bliss, communal joy in the heavens). Because the poem frames first the dreamer and then any auditor as a potential thane of Christ, it deracinates the retainer’s role from local, historically identifiable war bands that engage in battle and makes it potentially accessible to anyone loyal to the Christian God, including craftspeople, laborers, merchants, and women—in other words, the non-noble and non-warrior classes of Anglo-Saxons. Such abstraction typifies the theme turned metaphor, which asks interpreters of oral-connected idioms to shift from narrative (or otherwise contextual situations) to a figurative hermeneutics. Instances of the lord-retainer theme in the corpus thus converge with overtly Christian subject matter and demonstrate varying degrees of metaphorical usage. A hybrid lord-retainer theme in The Advent Lyrics moves beyond the narrative boundaries (intrinsic to the examples that were ex-

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amined previously) to imagine an immanent Christ in relationship with Christian audiences in need of penitence. The lyrics paraphrase and expand upon their seasonal antiphons, refer obliquely to narratives (the stories of Christ’s birth, his Harrowing of Hell, and the Day of Judgment) and depict the first-known literary instance of the trope of the doubting Joseph (Lyric VII). More important, the set of lyrics actively disrupts the boundaries of a single temporal frame. The poem (itself a linear progression of phrases) represents interlinked moments in historical time: the birth of Christ, the recurring celebration of Advent at the beginning (or end) of the liturgical year, and the day of Christ’s second coming when he will sit in judgment of all souls. The eternity of God’s existence clarifies these temporal moments, which the poem references according to the logic of typology rather than linear sequence. The lord-retainer theme presents a model for how the mortal servants of Christ may obey a God who exists both outside time and with human beings on their historical trajectory. In a similar manner, the lord-retainer theme aligns with, yet transcends, historical narratives. Its usage exceeds the typical diegetic boundaries of the lord-retainer theme when employed metaphorically.8 The motifs that key the lord-retainer theme in The Advent Lyrics arise repeatedly in the poem, gesturing toward the creation of a bond that spans the human and the divine. Advent is not only about the birth of Christ but also, from a Christian perspective, the birth of the potential for human beings to enter into a sacred contract that unites them directly as individuals with the godhead and as a community with each other in shared purpose. The focus upon Christ’s lordliness remains a constant throughout the poem. Christ is called by many epithets that characterize him as a ruler: se cyning, liffrea, se waldend, heofena dryhten, hæleþa cyning, and dryhtna dryhten (12b, 15b, 46b, 348b, 372, 405a; king, life-lord, the ruler, chief of the heavens, king of men or warriors, and chieftain of chieftains), which cumulatively intertwine divinity—in the references to heaven and being the ruler of life—and humanity—in the names for lordship: cyning, -frea, waldend, and so on. Some epithets derive from Advent antiphons (earendel for Oriens; sibsuma / ealra cyninga cyning for Rex pacifice). They also originate in scripture: for instance, Crist nergende (157b; Christ the savior), nergend (261b and 398b in the dative; savior), folca nergend (426b; savior of peoples),

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and nergend God (324b; also nergende God at 361b; God the savior), translate “Jesus,” Heb. Joshua, “the lord saves” (Mt 1:21).9 Of greatest interest to us are the characterizations of Christ as a lord (dominus) and king (rex), which dovetail with ancient depictions of Christ as a warrior king who brings ultimate peace to the faithful (militus Christus, Rex pacifice). In Old English verse these Latin terms are translated as dryhten, cyning, weard, and so on—words signifying the conjunction of both powerful authority and heroic behavior. The majority of The Advent Lyrics’s epithets for Christ occupy this semantic domain: wuldres ealdor (8b; prince of glory), se cyning sylfa (12b; the king himself), liffrea (15b, 27a; lord of life), and so on.10 Epithets for Christ in The Advent Lyrics obey the poetic strictures of Old English meter, mapping syntactic units onto half-lines and merging with classical poetic phraseology. A significant proportion occupies the b-verse as either whole units or parts of prepositional phrases. Thus, they tend to complete the line, taking up a position where they are the least constrained by the necessity of alliteration. The first half of the duplex usually links alliteratively to the a-verse, fulfilling metrical conditions and granting the second half the freedom to be any word suitable to the context. Given the lexical freedom at the fourth ictus in the line, where the poem regularly opts for a noun that represents Christ, the epithets in The Advent Lyrics do more than provide “metrical filler”; they consistently call attention to Christ’s authority, power, heroism, and regal glory by linking him to human roles that most embody these qualities. If Christ as lord in the theme occupies an eternity beyond time, the human figures as thanes still exist in the bounded time of narrative. Over the course of the poem, the story of a hero coming to rescue his captive people slowly unfurls, a story that represents Christ as lord and those who petition him as thanes or would-be thanes. The Advent Lyrics focus specifically upon the reciprocal exchange of a lord’s protection for the retainer’s loyalty. In The Advent Lyrics the “retainers” of Christ begin as captives, who divide into two groups: first, the patriarchs confined to hell who, having lived before Christ had no choice but to descend there at the time of death, and, second, the Christians who, like the dreamer in The Dream of the Rood, express the desire to be rescued from this mortal coil and transported to a life of eternal bliss. Each group belongs to one of the temporal planes of The Advent Lyrics, the first to the historical advent of Christ and the second to the liturgical present. The poem uses the traditional heroic depiction of

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a lord’s relationship to his retainers—with all of the immanent expectations that such a relationship engenders—to portray both the Harrowing of Hell and a dawning recognition of human obligation to the Creator. The emerging relationship may be traced in the characterization of Christ as Lord, as we just saw, and of the petitioners as potential retainers.11 The first two lyrics emphasize Christ’s role as rescuer, the one who sceal . . . ahreddan (15b–16; is obligated to rescue) the wergan heap (16a; accursed [or] battle-weary host) and the frumcyn fira (35a; original-kin group of men). The verb ahredde (34a) lexically and semantically links Lyrics I and II and counterpoints the patriarchs’ lament: “we in carcerne / sittað sorgende” (25b–26a; we in prison sit sorrowing). The second lyric uses another verbal echo, lif ontyneð (19b; he opens life) and leoht ontyne (27b; may open light), to emphasize Christ’s role as spiritual hero who may break open the dark and deathly enclosure, what is referred to as þis enge lond (32a; this narrow land), which restricts the captive souls of the patriarchs. From hell they invoke a wholly spiritual lord-retainer relationship, pleading “weorðe ussum mode to mundboran” (28; become a protector to our minds). Beowulf asks Hrothgar to be a mundbora (1480) to his men should he perish when he faces Grendel’s mother in battle and the same term describes kings in versions A, C, D, and E of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The depiction of Christ as both rescuer and protector complements that of the patriarchs and prophets as troubled captives in need of rescue. Subsequent phrases underscore the petitioners’ captivity: bidon in bendum (VI.147a; they await in chains), on hæft (VIII.260b; in bondage), gebunden bealorapum (X.365a; bound by noxious ropes), and the lines “þæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær, / þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her, / sæton sinneahtes; synnum bifealdne / deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan” (V.115–18; that you light from within [enlighten] those who long before, covered with mist and in darkness, here have sat in continual night; with sins enfolded/veiled we had to endure the dark shadow of death).12 Robert Burlin in his typological study of The Advent Lyrics observes about the petitioning voices of the prophets and patriarchs, “the manner of presentation is highly suggestive and relates the historic situation to the present, existential condition of the Christian, participating in the liturgical expression of the Advent” (76). Burlin explains that the Harrowing of Hell, for which hell’s prisoners cry out, prefigures “the operation of redemptive

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grace within the individual soul” (77). The petitioning voices of the prophets and patriarchs evoke their typological referent, the diegetic Christians celebrating Christ’s Advent.13 The image of captivity concatenates with images of exile, a state that describes the loss of a lord’s protection and the disruption of the contract through which one may achieve heroic status. In Lyric II the exile theme’s most salient features characterize the Old Testament patriarchs as exiles from heaven: sorrowing, they inhabit their prison cut off from the sun (pun intended). They recount the moment they had to travel into exile, wretched and deprived of their homeland.14 Huru we for þearfe  þas word sprecað, ond m[y]ndgiað  þone þe mon gescop þæt he ne læte  to lose weorðan cearfulra þing,  þe we in carcerne sittað sorgende,  sunnan wenað, [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] þa we heanlice  hweorfan sceoldan to þis enge lond,  eðle bescyrede. (II.22–26, 31–32) Indeed, we speak these words in need and remind the one who created men so that He may not allow the cause of the care-worn, who sit sorrowing in prison, hoping for the sun, to be lost . . . when we wretchedly had to turn to this narrow land, deprived of homeland. The exile theme is echoed via the lexical repetition of eþel and eðle, juxtaposing engla eþelstol (III.52a; the native throne of angels) of heavenly Jerusalem to exiles, eðle bescyrede (II.32b; deprived of homeland). At the conclusion of Lyric III, the inhabitants of the earthly Jerusalem are like the prisoners in Lyric II, awaiting rescue by the hero. They plead that Christ benda onlyseð (68b; release [them] from bonds) an image echoed in Lyric VI, by the half-line bidon in bendum (147a; they await in bonds). Lyric VIII, while invoking similar images of deprivation, pain, and darkness, differentiates between temporary exiles and the true figure of loss, the accursed devil:15 Hafað se awyrgda  wulf tostenced, deor dædscua,  dryhten, þin eowde, wide towrecene.  Þæt ðu, waldend, ær

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blode gebohtes,  þæt se bealofulla hyneð heardlice,  ond him on hæft nimeð ofer usse nioda lust. (VIII.256–61a) Lord, the accursed wolf, beast of shadow-deeds, has scattered your flock, widely exiled those who you, ruler, once bought with blood; the one full of enmity fiercely oppresses, and leads [us] into captivity despite the desire of our yearning. Here the captives again pray that the nergend (the savior), will free the wergum wreccan (damned or wretched exiles) from on hæft (imprisonment). The final lines of Lyric VIII then emphasize how Christ’s arrival will deliver them from exile, using the verb ahreddan (to free), for the third time so far in the lyrics.16 While the exile theme dramatizes, via traditional referentiality, the patriarchs’ great dejection and deprivation, it belongs to a broader characterization of the heroic relationship between the Christian God and his followers. As participants in a heroic contract, the Christian followers of God come to a realization in Lyric X that dissociates them from the patriarchs (whose release from hell has already occurred). We þe, hælend Crist, þurh eaðmedu  ealle biddað þæt þu gehyre  hæfta stefne, þinra niedþiowa,  nergende god, hu we sind geswencte  þurh ure sylfra gewill. Habbað wræcmæcgas  wergan gæstas, hetlen helsceaþa,  hearde genyrwad, gebunden bealorapum. (X.358b–65a) We all pray to you, Christ the healer, in our humility, that you hear the voice of captives, of your servants, God the savior, how we are afflicted through our own will. Exiled men have weary spirits, pressed fiercely by the hate of hell-scathers, bound by harmful ropes. These petitioning hæfta stefne (voices of captives), niedþiowa (slaves or servants), and wræcmæcgas (exiles), who hwearfiað heanlice (372a; wretchedly stray) and are gebunden bealorapum (bound by constraints), blame themselves for the breach of the lord-retainer contract, for wrong acts commit-

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ted þurh ure sylfra gewill (through our own will [or desire]). They admit to a feud with God, þeah we fæhþo wið þec (368b; although we [have engaged in] feud against you), and plead for forgiveness before asking a final time that God us ahredde (374a; rescue us). The verb ahreddan reappears at a decisive moment, again characterizing Christ as a heroic savior figure, the nergende God (361b; saving God) who releases captives. What differentiates these exile-captives is the recognition of fault. They see that they have turned away from their ece dryhten (366b; eternal lord) and they pray: Ara nu onbehtum (370a; Be merciful to your thanes). They have wandered from their lord into spiritual states of exile and captivity, and they are now asking for forgiveness. The poem closes by underscoring that the Lord’s gift to his people is his forgifnesse (427a), a term that may mean “remission,” “indulgence,” and “release.” This is clearly the desire of the straying thanes of Lyric X. Much like The Dream of the Rood, the poem’s final gesture is to imagine what amounts to the supreme potential of the Christian penitent: the petitioner’s release from bondage and arrival in heaven, an exile no longer: “þæt is wrætlic wrixl in wera life” (416; that is a wondrous change in the life of men). In The Advent Lyrics the contract between lord and retainer undergoes a renegotiation in light of Christ’s advent. Christians are not invited to imagine that the relationship between lord and retainer can be redefined on the basis of changing social circumstances. Instead, an audience is asked to imagine the reversal of exile, perhaps even its transcendence, which depends wholly upon the retainer figures’ recognition of culpability and the granting of forgifnesse by the deity as the Lord of all lords. Furthermore, the lord-retainer theme, when applied to the lives of the poem’s Christian audiences, invites them to identify with the retainer’s position and thereby encourages loyalty, praise, and the achievement of a quasi-heroic identity through penitence. Because The Advent Lyrics paraphrase and expand the voiced antiphons of Advent, they suggestively announce their own voicing.17 The lyrics inhabit what Paul Zumthor has described as vocalité. Not only would they have been voiced when read, but they would also represent and allude to idiomatically powerful vocalizations. By interpreting these lyrics as performed speech, we may hear not just a depiction of a lord-retainer relationship that progresses from images of exile to ones of eulogy in Lyric XI, but a prayer for the enactment of this process. Just as Christ’s birth unites the

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human and the sacred, so the lyrics may enact, paraliturgically, the rebirth of the Christian communitas, brought out of exile and captivity by their own recognition of fault and by their lord’s heroic advent and forgifnesse. Additionally, the lyrics’ embedded antiphons and prayers represent a form of marked speech, integral to the lord-retainer contract, adopted by the very speakers and audiences of The Advent Lyrics. The Advent Lyrics, like Andreas and Genesis A, represent Christ or the Christian God as the lord in a heroic contract. The narrative poems, Andreas and Genesis A, embed the lord-retainer theme within the stories of Christ testing Andreas for his loyalty and Lucifer’s disobedience to God. In The Advent Lyrics, which interweave praise, description, and petitions, the lord-retainer and exile themes intertwine, inviting both “literal” and metaphorical interpretation. The representation of Christ as heroic lord accords with the patristic concepts of Christus miles—the divine and militant liberator of Isaiah 42.13—and miles Christi—warrior of Christ—and extends its implications using the oral-connected lord-retainer theme metaphorically.18 The representation of Christ as a heroic lord in Old English verse had the potential to engage any Christian auditor, imaginatively, in the lord-retainer theme, especially when a poem such as The Advent Lyrics invites the speaker or reader to adopt the petitioner’s position. The expansion of the theme’s field of signification, from diegetic instantiations as in Andreas and Genesis A to a broader analogy for a spiritual relationship with Christ, can be explained by its extended use as a metaphor. By invoking the theme’s motifs, a poem summons its oral-traditional implications. By simultaneously removing the theme from its typical narrative context and giving it a more general and cosmological framework, a poem invites a mode of interpretation grounded in a Christian fascination with multilayered interpretations of scripture. Devouring-the-Dead as a Metaphor in The Phoenix and Riddle 47 This section examines two further examples of the metaphorical usage of an oral-connected theme to give the reader a few points of comparison—first, how two poems have incorporated two different themes metaphorically and, second, how two poems have used the same theme metaphorically. Poets who make oral-connected themes into metaphors do not follow a single programmatic course. In The Advent Lyrics, the lord-retainer

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theme becomes generalized; it no longer brings metonymic associations to bear on a specific narrative moment. This is not the case in The Phoenix and Riddle 47, where the devouring-the-dead theme frames moments of deterioration but, unlike the Soul and Body poems, clearly acts metaphorically and metonymically. The theme’s use in The Phoenix and Riddle 47 also reflects the genres of each poem. In The Phoenix the devouring-the-dead theme is harnessed to an allegory for the rebirth of Christ and, analogically, for good Christians on the Day of Judgment. The theme as it appears in The Phoenix portrays both the destruction of the postmortem or dying body and its resurrection. In Riddle 47, the genre of enigma encourages interpreters to shift from one category to another; in this case, from one type of body (bookmoth and book) to another (reader and knowledge). Although potentially as generalizing as the theme-as-metaphor in The Advent Lyrics, the devouring-the-dead theme in Riddle 47 evolves into the playful chastisement of an inattentive scholar (perhaps the reader him- or herself). The section of The Phoenix that narrates the bird’s self-immolation, while incorporating the devouring-the-dead theme, freely translates the Carmen de ave phoenice by Lactantius. In his introduction to his edition of The Phoenix, N. F. Blake describes how the poet’s translation has modified the Latin source text in accordance with Old English classical poetics by adding a heroic invocation at the opening and by positioning the sun’s ascent over the sea (the threshold to heroic adventures). He writes that the incorporation of heroic epithets that anthropomorphize the phoenix as a warrior—such as heaþorof (famed for excellence in battle) and heorodreorges (bloody with sword-wounds or gory)—connects the symbol of the phoenix to what it symbolizes: Christ (29).19 The phoenix’s transformation symbolizes the transformative power of Christ’s death and resurrection for humanity. Additionally, the fire that engulfs the bird symbolizes the purification by fire of good souls on the Day of Judgment (28). The allegorical symbolism of the phoenix’s story, thus, refers to both Christ and humanity. In this duality, it summons hope for spiritual salvation, which humanity may attain because Christ, while being divine, became human—an embodied being capable of death. Blake’s observations reveal how the translator’s changes have augmented the poem’s meaning, dramatizing the phoenix’s story and explicating the allegory. Thus, the poem modifies its description of the phoenix’s

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death, making it consistent with the devouring-the-dead theme by stressing the hunger and ferocity of the flames and describing the soul’s journey. The following lines of the Carmen de ave phoenice do not treat the burning of the phoenix with the trope of hunger and the process of eating. Instead, the focus appears to be on the act of creation within destruction, the funeral rite (anointing the body), and the control that the phoenix wields over its own immolation. Protinus instructo corpus mutabile nido Vitalique toro membra vieta locat. Ore dehinc sucos membris circumque supraque Incit, exequiis inmoritura suis. Tunc inter varios animam commendat odores, Depositi tanti nec timet illa fidem. Interea corpus genitali morte peremptum Aestuat, et flammam parturit ipse calor, Aetherioque procul de lumine concipit ignem: Flagrat, et ambustum solvitur in cineres. (Carmen 89–98) Straightaway she lays her mutable body in the nest she has built; on the life-giving bier she lays her quiet limbs. With her beak she sprinkles juices around and over her wings; she will die [performing] her own exequies. Among the various perfumes she then commends her soul, and is not afraid to entrust this precious deposit [to death]. Her body meanwhile is destroyed in a creative death: it grows warm, and the heat gives birth to flame. Taking fire from the sky’s distant light, the body blazes up, is consumed and dissolved into ashes.20 The translation uses the phrase “is consumed,” but flagrat does not connote digestion. It means “to burn or blaze,” and can symbolize the ardor of passion. In contrast, the Old English translation associates the behavior of fire with verbs for the process of eating: feormað (to foster, maintain, sustain with food, feed)21 and þigeð (to take food, medicine, poison, etc., to eat or drink, consume—often within the context of heroic feasting).22 Therefore, I translate feormað as “nourishes itself ” and þigeð as “dines upon.” In the Old English vernacular translation, the phoenix’s death involves the familiar motifs of the devouring-the-dead theme: a hungry bearer of

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destruction, a list of the physical forms in the process of dismemberment, and a remark about the departure of the soul. Siteð siþes fus.  Þonne swegles gim on sumeres tid,  sunne hatost, ofer sceadu scineð  ond gesceapu dreogeð, woruld geondwliteð,  þonne weorðeð his hus onhæted  þurh hador swegl. Wyrta wearmiað,  willsele stymeð swetum swæccum,  þonne on swole byrneð þurh fyres feng  fugel mid neste. Bæl bið onæled.  Þonne brond þeceð heorodreorges hus,  hreoh onetteð, fealo lig feormað  ond fenix byrneð, fyrngearum frod.  Þonne fyr þigeð lænne lichoman;  lif bið on siðe, fæges feorhhord,  þonne flæsc ond ban adleg æleð. (The Phoenix 208–22a) [He] sits eager for the journey. When the gem of heaven, the hottest sun in the time of summer shines over shadows and fulfills its purpose, gazes throughout the world, then his house [nest] will grow hot due to the cloudless sky. Twigs grow warm, the pleasant hall emits a sweet scent, then in heat burns, through the grip of fire, bird within its nest. The pyre is kindled. Then the firebrand thatches [covers] the house of the one destined to die,23 speeds savagely; pale red flame nourishes itself and burns the phoenix, wise in years. Then fire dines upon the transient body; life is on a journey, the life-treasure of the one fated to die, when flame incinerates flesh and bone. Consistent with the theme’s other motifs, flame nourishes itself and dines upon (feormað, þigeð) aspects of the phoenix’s form, enumerated as the corporeal covering or, possibly, trunk (lichoman), flesh, and bone (flæsc

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ond ban). In this sequence the body becomes a crumbling parentheses around the bird’s lif (life) and its appositive term feorhhord (life-hoard or life-treasure), which is on siðe (on a journey) during the immolation of flesh. The devouring-the-dead theme describes the dismemberment and destruction of a mortal body (thereby emphasizing the bird’s shared mortality via traditional referentiality). Yet, by providing such a brief catalogue of the demolished body, the poet-translator defers and transforms the theme. The motif of the body in pieces returns in a new context—rebirth: Hwæþre him eft cymeð æfter fyrstmearce  feorh edniwe, siþþan þa yslan  eft onginnað æfter ligþræce  lucan togædre, geclungne to cleowenne.  Þonne clæne bið beorhtast nesta,  bæle forgrunden heaþorofes hof;  hra bið acolad, banfæt gebrocen,  ond se bryne sweþrað. Þonne of þam ade  æples gelicnes on þære ascan bið  eft gemeted, of þam weaxeð wyrm,  wundrum fæger, swylce he of ægerum  ut alæde, scir of scylle.  Þonne on sceade weaxeð, þæt he ærest bið  swylce earnes brid, fæger fugeltimber;  ðonne furþor gin wridað on wynnum,  þæt he bið wæstmum gelic ealdum earne,  and æfter þon feþrum gefrætwad,  swylc he æt frymðe wæs, beorht geblowen. (The Phoenix 222b–40a) Yet, after an interval life returns to him, renewed, When again the ashes begin, After the fire-hostility, to fasten together, clumped as a ball of thread. Then the brightest nest Is pure, the home of the battle-brave one Having been consumed in the pyre. The corpse cools, The broken bone-vessel, and the burning subsides.

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Then from the bier in the likeness of an apple In the ashes he is again discovered, From which grows a worm, wondrously fair, As if he emerged from egg, Bright from shell. Then in shadow grows What formerly was, like an eagle, Beautiful bird-material [fledgling]; then it emerges Further in joy, so that in growth it is like A mature eagle, and thereafter Adorned with feathers, just as it was in the beginning, Blown bright. In contrast to the Latin Carmen de ave phoenice, these lines multiply the phases of the bird’s resurrection. In the Carmen, we hear that the phoenix is a seed, worm, egg, and fledgling. The Carmen punctuates its description of these stages with an epic simile, comparing the egg to a chrysalis. It also devotes attention to the dew upon which the fledgling feeds. In contrast, the stages in the Old English Phoenix follow a swift, list-like progression that adds the images of the ball of thread, the “broken bone-vessel,” the likeness of an apple, and description of the bird as full-grown specimen, feþrum gefrætwad (adorned with feathers) and beorht geblowen (blown bright). The devouring-the-dead theme usually adumbrates a list of the body parts that are consumed by the agent of dismemberment and destruction. Instead, inchoate parts emerge from the cinders, slowly taking on form, inevitably re-membering the body of the phoenix. For good measure— perhaps to ensure the continued cuing of the theme—the list includes a half-line typical of the theme’s catalogue: banfæt gebrocen (bone-vessel broken). Out of the broken bone-vessel, an image that can stand for both the former body of the phoenix and the scylle (shell) of eggs, emerges the phoenix. The bird swiftly passes through the life-stages that lead, backward and forward, to the beginning: swylc he æt frymðe wæs (just as he was at the beginning). The frisson for audiences cognizant of the theme lies in this metamorphosis of its structure in the much fuller account of the phoenix’s body as it rises from the ash. For the sake of clarity, I distinguish the typical multiform from its metaphorical counterpart by reviewing how the devouring-the-dead theme

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arises in The Phoenix. In some ways the theme behaves here like a typical multiform. In the context of a story of a mythological bird immolated by the sun at its meridian, the theme simply supports the narration of the body’s destruction by flames. Even the re-imagining of the theme, whereby the list motif describes the phoenix’s body as it is recreated from ash, does not stray far from an oral poetics in which inversions of multiforms are common. Inversion explains why Beowulf ’s disarming before his encounter with Grendel still amounts to an arming scene—but one in which the hero’s superior prowess is showcased by his ability to exceed the rules of the game, as it were.24 In The Phoenix, the bird’s reanimated body similarly exceeds the dictates of the devouring-the-dead theme (as well as our general experience with dead birds). By turning the list of disintegrating body parts into a list about reintegration, the poem’s manipulation of the theme reverses both ordinary experience and the generic expectations cued by the devouring-the-dead theme. The theme manifests as a metaphor in The Phoenix because the genre of allegory frames the theme as a metaphor. The phoenix’s rebirth signifies Christ’s resurrection and, at the Apocalypse, the purification and return of the bodies of the just, bodies that in the wake of cleansing fires will rise whole from grit and ash. In relationship to these notions, the theme’s usual depiction of the material destruction of specific human bodies becomes inverted and abstracted so that it represents Christ’s mastery over death and the materiality (fire, worms, and so on) that enforces the destruction of bodies. In The Phoenix when the motif of destroyed body parts transforms into a catalogue of the body passing through phases of renewal after its fiery purification, the devouring-the-dead theme emphasizes the defeat of death by Christ. Death is figured by the poet as wiga wælgifre (486a; the slaughter-ravenous warrior) who sends soul-deprived bodies into the embrace of the earth. Christ counters this form of gifernes on the Day of Judgment by destroying the world with a superior force of disintegration: the fires of the Apocalypse “gifre forgripeð, grædig swelgeð / londes frætwe” (507–8a; ravenous and greedy, will seize and swallow the treasure of land). Because of their metonymic referentiality, the collocation of gifre and grædig enables these terms to mean more than “ravenous and greedy”: their regular association with an obliterating force dramatizes the superior power of the Apocalypse.

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In this context the traditional phraseology bears no negative implications, since it is this same fire that burns the sins from the souls that rise with flames to heaven: “Ðær þa lichoman, leahtra clæne, / gongað glædmode, gæstas hweorfað / in banfatu, þonne bryne stigeð / heah to heofon­um” (518–21a; There the bodies, cleansed of crimes, will go glad in spirit, souls move about in bone-vessels [that is, “bodies”], when the burning climbs high toward the heavens). The story of the phoenix converges figuratively with the story of the souls of the blessed ascending, once again in their own bodies, to heaven on the Day of Judgment. The allegory of the resurrecting phoenix is explained as: Swa bið anra gehwylc flæsce bifongen  fira cynnes, ænlic ond edgeong,  se þe his agnum her willum gewyrceð  þæt him wuldorcyning meahtig æt þam mæþle  milde geweorþeð (534b–38) Likewise, each of human kind will be enclosed by flesh, incomparable and young again, he who on his own accord accomplished [good deeds] here so that the glory-king, mighty at that site of judgment, will mercifully honor him. Christ reunites rejuvenated bodies with good souls. The believer who has behaved of his own accord in harmony with the will of God does not need to fear that slaughter-ravenous warrior, death. The devouring-the-dead theme amplifies this message by demonstrating with the phoenix’s body that physical death need not be interpreted as a finality. The poem’s application of the theme simultaneously draws attention to the reanimated body and teaches a foundational Christian myth concerning the eschatology of the cosmos and the renewal of the body (and spirit) through Christ. The devouring-the-dead theme undergoes a transformation that parallels that of the resurrecting body, from unemblematic and narrative-driven versions of the theme that we witnessed in chapter 2 to a figurative theme in service of allegory. It “remembers” its form by using notable motifs that take on a new significance in the context of an allegory or a Christian story. Refigured bodies play an important role in the materiality of writing: the ash-scrubbed vellum, in ink perhaps pigmented with bone-ash.

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The devouring-the-dead theme is likewise re-formed by the heuristics of literacy. The theme’s transformation from a description of a funeral rite to the allegorizing of the resurrection of Christ and of humanity (particularly the bodies of the just) on Judgment Day demonstrates that poetry from this period thrived on a multilayered aesthetic sensibility that hybridized both oral-traditional and literary modes of signification. Like The Phoenix, the 6-line poem called Riddle 47, one of the most wellknown riddles in the Old English corpus, alludes to devouring, describes an agent of destruction, and provides a list of what is consumed. It also uses the implications of the devouring-the-dead theme metaphorically.25 Moððe word fræt.  Me þæt þuhte wrætlicu wyrd,  þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn, þæt se wyrm forswealg  wera gied sumes, þeof in þystro,  þrymfæstne cwide ond þæs strangan staþol.  Stælgiest ne wæs wihte þy gleawra,  þe he þam wordum swealg. A moth devoured speech/words. That seemed to me a strange fate, when I learned about that wonder, that the worm, a thief in darkness, utterly swallowed the song of a certain man, the glory-fast saying and the strong foundation [or “foundation of the strong”]. The stealingguest was not a whit the wiser, when he swallowed these words. The “moth,” “bookworm,” or “bookmoth,”26 like Gifer in the Soul and Body poems, eats in darkness. Gifer is an outlaw; the worm is a thief. The devouring-the-dead theme subtly inhabits Riddle 47 via its most common motifs: devouring as an act of obliteration (see the verbs fraet and forswealg); the worm/thief as an agent of destruction; and a list of what is destroyed: speech, song, saying, and, presumably, the vellum on which these have been strongly established. The riddle’s answer seems transparent, but as Martin Foys has shown, the poem hints at more complex interpretations. Like other Old English riddles, Riddle 47 asks the reader to think about the links and contrasts between categories: here, an image of a worm or bookmoth who is none the wiser for swallowing words conflates reading and book-gnawing, readers and worms.27 The riddle is designed to suggest novel associations. Its theme implies that not only can a solid, tangible book be ephemeral and

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subject to obliteration by other material forces (a bookmoth), but on a symbolic level a body of knowledge, encountered through reading, can be destroyed through inattention. The riddle suggests that readers ought to be careful and circumspect, rather than voracious. A hungry reader is like a thief whose encounter with the book destroys its foundations and results in little wisdom. The insect who assaults the literal body of the book is a metaphor for the greedy speed-reader whose obtuseness obliterates a body of knowledge. Metaphorically, a greedy reader renders spine, page, and word senseless. The traditional referentiality of the devouring-thedead theme, which often includes an optional tag regarding the departure of the soul, could prompt the solver to ask, “Where, then, does knowledge go?” *

*

*

Each poem that I have discussed enacts a hybrid poetics that transforms a context-driven theme into a metaphor for Christian and literate ideals. These poems circle the issue of transformation. In The Advent Lyrics the lord-retainer theme, in conjunction with the exile theme, symbolizes a heroic contract between human beings and Christ. In a series of juxtapositions of historical time (before Christ, at his Advent, at Judgment Day) and the liturgical present, The Advent Lyrics represent the transformation of a telos ending in exile and death. In its adaptation of the lord-retainer contract, the poem represents a transformation whereby individual Christians may choose to recognize fault (penitence) and pray for forgiveness. The voicing of prayer rescripts the heroic and mortal verbal contract as relationship available to all human beings who seek protection and relief from spiritual exile. The Phoenix employs the devouring-the-dead theme to depict the mastery over death that Christ wields through his resurrection. This poem also represents a renewal of the oral-connected theme, transforming it from a representation, ostensibly, of pagan funeral rites, to an allegory for good souls on the Day of Judgment. In contrast, in Riddle 47 the devouring-the-dead theme becomes a metaphor for the greedy, stupid, or inattentive reader whose careless reading obliterates knowledge. The riddle hints that greed constitutes an utterly destructive force. The studious reader, however, participates in creating a body of knowledge that transcends vellum and ink. In each of these instances an oral-connected idiom has been lifted from

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its typical narrative context and reshaped for the purpose of metaphorical signification. I have suggested that such metaphorical employment reflects a literate medieval hermeneutics, whose users delight in recursive reading, polysemy, and multiple levels of symbolism. Because we have usually noticed only the typical forms of oral-connected idioms, the metaphorical oral-connected idiom has important consequences for how we interpret Old English poems. Reading with metaphorical oral idioms in mind enables us to recognize poetic expressions. This will deepen our understanding of Old English poems and contribute to our growing knowledge of the creative choices made by Old English writers when they translated and recomposed Christian narratives and Latin texts.

5 o

Bright Voice of Praise An Old English Poet-Patron Theme

Readers usually remember Widsith for its representation of the eponymous poet, who boastingly describes himself as a professional eulogizer of chieftains, kings, and queens. In his travels to famous courts (as well as to uncertain kingdoms and tribes), Widsith has apparently meandered inordinately through time and space. Some scholarship has explained the Old English poem Widsith, and to a lesser extent Deor, by invoking the conventions of the “begging poem,” the purpose of which is said to be opening the patron’s coffers to the poet. W. H. French, seconded by Norman Eliason, describes the “appeal for patronage” as Widsith’s central trope.1 Other scholars believe that the category of begging poem does not suitably explain the inclusion of three catalogues in Widsith (for example, Kemp Malone). Ray Brown asks how the catalogues would have appealed to an aristocratic audience: “the Widsith poet seems a very incompetent beggar . . . for putting mnemonic lists into a poem scarcely seems a good begging strategy however smoothly they are worked in” (284).2 John D. Niles has since made a strong case for the value of these lists to AngloSaxon aristocracy, which I will return to later (“Widsith, the Goths, and the Anthropology of the Past”). Interpreting Widsith as a begging poem depends upon how much it appears to fit conventions imported from either later medieval Icelandic works (French cites Egil’s Saga) or Middle English verse (Eliason alludes to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Complaint to His

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Purse”). Combining an understanding of both oral-traditional and medieval hermeneutical modes of composition and reception, hybrid poetics re-envisions the discussion by considering the poet-patron relationship as both unbound by the expectations of the begging poem and partaking in an Old English vernacular trope with oral-traditional roots.3 From the perspective of oral-traditional poetics, we can reframe the begging poem by treating the theme’s basic features as a concatenation of motifs that may be inflected, like a word, for various aesthetic and expressive purposes. I thus explore the poet-patron relationship as a verbal convention that arises on several occasions in the Old English corpus, as both a “typical” written oral-connected idiom and as hybrid idiom rendered metaphorical. Like the lord-retainer theme discussed in chapter 4, the poet-patron theme enables swift characterization and elicits a range of metonymic associations. Reading with a poet-patron theme in mind, I show that, in addition to performing an appeal for patronage, the theme allows the composer of a poem to treat such subjects as generosity, fame, hierarchical relationships, and the power of speech (whether grounded in an oral tradition, literary tradition, Christian ritual, or some combination thereof). Used metaphorically, the poet-patron theme resounds in verse with overtly Christian topics in which the poet per se fades into the background, but the same structural relationship and associated issues recur. Thus, I suggest that the theme structures and provides meaning to Widsith and Deor. Additionally, it appears in new forms, some strongly modulated, others not, in The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, “Alms-Giving,” and “Thureth,” all of which exemplify how their poet-authors synthesized literate and oral-traditional poetics according to their own lights. Beowulf remains the poetic source for the nearly iconic images of the Anglo-Saxon oral poet that have circulated in both popular culture and critical discussions, but Widsith and Deor present descriptions of the Old English scop (poet) that differ structurally from those in Beowulf.4 Instead of using third-person narration that keeps the scop nested in a tableau of retainers, heroes, and kings, Widsith and Deor depict the scop “close up” by providing the bard’s perspective in the first-person singular. Unlike the scop(s) of Beowulf, whose relationship to Hrothgar appears to be designated solely with the epithet cyninges þegn (867b; the king’s retainer), the speakers in Widsith and Deor explain that they personally have benefited from their lords’ generosity. Widsith says, for instance, “Forþon ic mæg singan

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ond secgan spell, / mænan fore mengo in meoduhealle / hu me cynegode cystum dohten” (54–56; Therefore I am able to sing and tell a story, recount before many in the mead-hall, how noble ones were good to me in acts of generosity).5 The poet Deor, speaking of his displacement by another scop, indicates that he, too, once performed in exchange for a valuable gift—the rights to a piece of land: “Ahte ic fela wintra folgað tilne, / holdne hlaford, oþþæt Heorrenda nu, / leoðcræftig monn londryht geþah, / þæt me eorla hleo ær gesealde” (38–41; For many winters I kept a good position, a loyal lord, until now [when] Heorrenda, the song-skilled man, received the land-right that the protector of noblemen previously gave to me). In Beowulf Hrothgar may be called a munificent king, a beaga brytt­an (352a; giver of rings), but he never presents Healgamen with a gift.6 Neither patronage of the poet nor praise of his lord characterizes those moments when a scop appears in Beowulf. Basic structural differences between descriptions of the scop(s) in Beowulf, on the one hand, and of those in Widsith and Deor, on the other, grow clear when tokens of exchange are considered. Fundamentally, the poet-patron theme consists of the exchange between a lord who behaves generously and a bard who composes a poem commemorating the lord. The representations of the scop in Widsith and Deor may share with Beowulf the heroic setting of the powerful chieftain’s hall, but the latter does not emphasize the act of trading the poet’s song for the noble patron’s gift.7 By understanding the scops of Widsith and Deor as conventional figures, I view these depictions of scops as the outcome of generic choices, rather than a reflection of actual cultural practices. The theme’s specific parameters differentiate it from the broader category of eulogistic verse. Thus, the Sigemund and Heremod passage in Beowulf, which Jeff Opland designates “a eulogy in praise of Beowulf” is not considered here (“From Horseback to Monastic Cell” 32). J. A. Burrow, in addition to Opland, has argued that most Old English poems “share a similar auxetic inheritance” (31). A poet-patron theme, however, may be distinguished from a more general encomiastic function, because a theme behaves like a specific kind of word in the poet’s repertoire that may be inflected to fit the generic or narrative context and to suggest variations on its typical significance. As mentioned previously, the beasts of battle theme—featuring the greedy hawk, the white-tailed eagle, the black raven, and the grey wolf—accompanies battle scenes and grimly anticipates the slaying of men. The theme

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also appears in The Advent Lyrics, a seemingly unlikely context, where the wolf becomes a figure for Satan.8 Likewise, by treating the poet-patron relationship as a theme with a set of common features, I explore how versions of it appear in verse not usually deemed “Germanic” or “legendary.” Features of the poet-patron theme also appear in The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, “Thureth,” and “Alms-Giving,” suggesting that an Old English poet-patron theme belonged to a shared koine that contributed to legendary and Christian verse alike. Indeed, the metaphorical use of the theme in these latter three poems reflects how much poets explored hybrid poetic strategies.9 In Widsith a fairly simple outline of the poet-patron relationship emerges, which upon further examination grows more complex. The poem depicts an oral poet with considerable memorial skill recounting the names of personages and tribes who warrant mention. From a modern perspective, they seem a strange parade of peoples plucked from myriad centuries and regions. Representations of the relationships between the poet Widsith and his noble patrons imply that the poem itself intends to elicit patronage from a fame-seeking ruler who would like to hear his name added to the poem’s catalogue. The introductory passage in Widsith paints the poet’s value to a patron in two quick brushstrokes. For instance, lines 2–3a introduce the impressive peripatetic wanderings of the bard named Distant Journey (that is, “Wid-siþ”): “se þe monna mæst mægþa ofer eorþan, / folca geondferde” (he who traveled most among kinsmen of the peoples upon earth).10 Widsith implies that one who journeys far exhibits more skill at spreading the news about a particular ruler’s exceptional status than one who stays put. To use a memetic analogy, these opening lines claim that Widsith’s “songmemes” sport pervasiveness and—as the catalogue spanning centuries will show in the poem’s coming lines—durability.11 What fame-seeking king would not want his name included in a long-lived and prestigious catalogue that reaches a broad audience? The second indicator of Widsith’s stature as a poet is the multitude of gifts bestowed upon him: “oft he on flette geþah / mynelicne maþþum” (3b–4a; often in the hall he received desirable treasure). The poet’s many gifts corroborate his value as a type of knowledge-worker who helps a ruler achieve enduring fame by creating and managing information. No matter the distance of the poet-patron complex from actual social practices in tenth-century England, the power

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that the bard Widsith holds should be interpreted with regard to the importance of tradition-bearers in a primarily oral culture, where oral poetry and storytelling archive verbalized cultural knowledge. As Widsith demonstrates, it behooves those in positions of power to keep a poet in their service since poets act as gatekeepers to this virtual library. The coda further testifies to a conventional poet-patron relationship by naturalizing the symbiotic relationship between oral poet and munificent ruler: Swa scriþende  gesceapum hweorfað gleomen gumena  geond grunda fela, þearfe secgað,  þoncword sprecaþ, simle suð oþþe norð  sumne gemetað gydda gleawne,  geofum unhneawne, se þe fore duguþe wile  dom aræran, eorlscipe æfnan,  oþþæt eal scæceð, leoht ond lif somod;  lof se gewyrceð, hafað under heofonum  heahfæstne dom. (135–43) So, roaming, the bards of men turn as they must through many realms, speak as needed, say words of thanks; always south or north, they meet one who is wise with regard to songs, unstinting with gifts, who wishes to augment his reputation before the company of retainers, to achieve princely status, until all departs, light and life together; he who makes praise [or “he who merits praise”], has lofty and lasting fame under the heavens. At the beginning of this passage the wandering poets seek a patron who is “gydda gleawne, geofum unhneawne” (139; wise with regard to songs, unstinting with gifts). This line, which due to internal rhyme verges on the proverbial, depicts the ideal patron: one who wisely appreciates the value of songs by generously compensating the poet with geofum. The coda then turns to the fulfillment of the patron’s desire for dom (fame or the judgment of the tradition) and eorlscipe (princely status), which will increase due to the gleoman’s words.12 A translation of fore duguþe as “before the company of retainers,” rather than as “due to nobility” (which is also possible), matches this passage’s insistence on the naturalized link between poetry and fame. Despite one’s princely deeds, dom will swiftly disappear

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without an audience to heed the poetic lof (praise). The half-lines “oþþæt eal scæceð, / leoht ond lif somod” also contribute to the idea that enduring fame depends upon the oral poet’s lofsong: while the patron’s leoht ond lif may end, his praise—as captured in the enduring mnemonic medium of oral poetry—will last under heofonum. Most assume the unspecified referent in lof se gewyrceð to describe the lord who gewyrceð (merits) praise, but the ambiguous composition of these lines leaves the referent open. Lof, in addition to meaning “praise,” may also mean a “praise song,” leading to the possibility that lof se gewyrceð denotes “he makes the praise song” or even “the praise-song makes.” Thus, Widsith’s conclusion syntactically and lexically unites the symbiotic pair, poet and patron. Each “works praise,” and as a result each has an exceptional reputation on earth—for the name of the poet-figure Widsith, too, appears in verse. Poet and patron are two sides of the same coin that purchases a heahfæst (lofty and lasting) eulogy. The figure of Widsith presents a þoncword (a speech of gratitude or pleasing words) that sustains the glory of kings. In the context of the poem’s oral performance—conjured by such phrases as “Widsið maðolade, wordhord onleac” and “ongon þa worn sprecan” (1, 9b; Widsith made a formal speech, unlocked the word-hoard; he then began to recount a great number [of things])—one may imagine that Widsith’s list would have been recomposed in performance by skilled poets of the tradition, thereby memorializing rulers and peoples upon each iteration. In addition to cataloguing the powerful, the song of Widsith implies that the economic exchange between poet and patron is integral to long-lasting fame. Widsith gives special attention to those who were very generous to him: “ond mid Burgendum, þær ic beag geþah; / me þær Guðhere forgeaf glædlicne maþþum / songes to leane. Næs þæt sæne cyning!” (65–67; and [I was] with the Burgundians, where I received a ring; there Guthhere gave me shining treasure as a reward for song. That was not a slack [or “miserly”] king!). The words Næs þæt sæne cyning! idiomatically single out Guthhere as an especially valuable king, since the traditional phrase þæt wæs [x] cyning and such variations as næs þæt [x] cyning (where “x” modifies cyning) enact a cultural imprimatur.13 Others receive passing mention. Tribes are named, but not their chieftains—“Ic wæs mid Hunum ond mid Hreðgotum, / mid Sweom ond mid Geatum ond mid Suþdenum” (57–58; I was with Huns and with Hrethgoths, with Swedes and with Geats and

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with South Danes). The honorable mention goes, perhaps, to those without munificent rulers. The song of Widsith further demonstrates how the transmission of fame in verse depends, at least in part, upon generosity. The one who bestows the most precious gift receives the lengthiest tribute in the poet’s quasi-historical catalogue, no matter the stained reputation of the donor. Twelve lines of verse are devoted to Offa; five to Hrothwulf and Hrothgar; three to Guthhere; four to Hræda; seven to Wudga and Hama; and a formidable twenty-eight to Eormanric and his queen Ealhild. The combined generosity of Eormanric and Ealhild is rewarded with twenty-four lines of verse in the þoncword of Widsith and another four lines of verse in the prologue. The poem acknowledges Eormanric’s poor character (apparently, a popular topos) with the verse wraþes wærlogan (9a; violent oath-breaker), but this epithet is consigned to the prologue. The “oral” praise song of the figure Widsith does not devolve into criticism, focusing instead on Eormanric’s impressive gift to the poet: Ond ic wæs mid Eormanrice  ealle þrage, þær me Gotena cyning  gode dohte; se me beag forgeaf,  burgwarena fruma, on þam siex hund wæs  smætes goldes, gescyred sceatta  scillingrime. (88–92) And I was with Eormanric all the time that the king of the Goths was good to me; he gave me a ring, the leader of city dwellers, worth, in shilling count, 600 pieces of refined gold.14 Queen Ealhild’s gift, which Widsith likens to Eormanric’s circlet, further underscores how a ruler’s treasure rewards a fame-bearing song. As with the passage bearing directly upon Eormanric, both the audience of Widsith and an assumed audience of the praise song hear of Ealhild’s noble comportment: Hyre lof lengde  geond londa fela, þonne ic be songe  secgan sceolde hwær ic under swegle  selast wisse goldhrodene cwen  giefe bryttian. Ðonne wit Scilling  sciran reorde for uncrum sigedryhtne  song ahofan,

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hlude bi hearpan  hleoþor swinsade, þonne monige men,  modum wlonce, wordum sprecan,  þa þe wel cuþan, þæt hi næfre song  sellan ne hyrdon. (99–108) Praise of her extended throughout many lands when I in song had to say where beneath the sky I knew [to be] the best gold-adorned queen, distributing gifts. When I and Scilling,15 with bright speech, before our victory-lord raised up song—loud by the lyre the voice made melody, then many proud-minded men said in words, those who knew well, that they never heard a better song. These lines, like the coda, stress the symbiosis of poet and patron, for the queen’s praiseworthy qualities—“selast . . . goldhrodene cwen giefe bryttian” (best gold-adorned queen, distributing gifts)—which serve as the ingredients of Widsith’s praise-song, incite admiration of the song itself: “hi næfre song sellan ne hyrdon” (they never heard a better song). The poet-patron theme depicts commemoration as intimately linked to the exceptional character of both the poet who skillfully composes verse and the patron whose power, deeds, and munificence appear to afford him or her a few lines of verse in the oral tradition. In Widsith, syntax joins patron and poet in a symbiotic whole that embodies the poetic celebration of regal generosity. Deor provides an example of how a scop hopes that his lord will not behave in a poet-patron relationship. Deor’s lamentation of the loss of his lord’s patronage concludes a series of stanzas that presumably invoke the tribulations of figures of Germanic legend.16 Like Widsith, the poem integrates the bard’s first-person perspective into a survey of figures from Germanic legend, including the kings Theodric (Theoderich) and Eormanric, who are each the subject of a stanza. Deor, too, emerges as the subject of a stanza, a device that frames him as both a living being (speaking in the first person) and one who ranks among the legendary. Like Widsith, Deor tells of a lord’s patronage, but from the perspective of loss, bemoaning the transfer of his land grant to Heorrenda. The final stanza offers a play on words that fits Deor’s state of woe. The name Deor can mean “animal” or “brave one,” but, as Anne L. Klinck has suggested, it sounds very close to deore, meaning “precious one” or “dear one” (167).17 The pun comes alive

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in the line “dryhtne dyre. Me wæs Deor noma” (37; dear to my chieftain; my name was Deor). In the positive inflection of the poet-patron theme these words would betoken the poet’s value to his lord; instead Deor’s name becomes the locus of loss because his patron, lord of the Heodenings, has withdrawn his gift, sending the message that Deor is not dear. It should, however, be clear that Deor has exacted, as Edward Condren puts it, “a subtle note of revenge” (75). In exchange for the lost gift (and for making Deor not himself), the bard has omitted his lord’s name. The poem has painstakingly mentioned the names of the subjects of every stanza, including the names of Deor and Heorrenda, while leaving his own lord’s unspoken. If Deor is modeled loosely upon the skaldic drápa, praise poems that also employ stanzas and refrains, then the poem leaves the lord’s name unmentioned in the one place it would most likely arise—the refrain.18 Instead, “þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg” (that was overcome, so may this be), calls into question at the conclusion of each stanza the identities invoked by its ambiguous demonstratives. In the context of a theme that deems oral verse as the primary means of maintaining knowledge within and between communities, erasure of identity in poetry amounts to erasure from cultural memory. Unlike Deor, however, Widsith frames the poet’s speech with commentary: nine lines at the beginning and nine at the end. The framing device draws attention to Widsith as a fictive character and to the craft of poetry. The frames set the content of his speech at one remove, making performance and the mode of performance more visible. This move allows for greater complexity in implementing the poet-patron theme. In Widsith this theme resonates on two levels: diegetically in the lexical content of the poem and metadiegetically in the (probable) performance of Widsith, frames and all. “Performativity” here describes the poem as it is endowed with meaning by the vehicle of performance. Performance—whether carried by voice or implied by silent letters—depends upon the relationship between the work and its intended audience, whoever that may be in Widsith. In “Widsith, the Goths, and the Anthropology of the Past,” Niles makes the case, on the basis of the poem’s restructuring of dynastic relationships, that the audience would have been Anglo-Saxon nobility.19 Niles’s argument focuses on the political expedience of the list of ancient kings and

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queen whom Widsith chooses to describe in detail, a roll call of names previously deemed relevant by scholars for how the connection to positions of power and to Germanic legend behoove the bard Widsith. According to Niles, Widsith legitimates the authority of English aristocracy by using a fictional genealogy that connects Anglo-Saxon bloodlines with two esteemed centers of power in late antiquity: the Gothic empire and the Lombardic conquerors of Rome. Thus, the bard’s unlikely contact with rulers from various eras and locations turns the past into “a single plane” in which “the poet is able to configure tribes into a relationship that mirrors, in prehistory, the desired situation of his own day.”20 Niles adds that the representation of this information as the work of an oral poet is similarly expedient, for it frames the genealogical myth in a respected metrical genre associated with inherited cultural wisdom: a spell, sang, or giedd.21 The oral bard appears to be a facade manipulated by a literate author for the sake of performing the gilded genealogy of Anglo-Saxon kings and queens. By keeping Niles’s interpretation in mind, it is possible to see that both Widsith’s song and Widsith are variations on the þoncword that passes from poet to patron. At the level of content, Widsith’s spell (54b) largely comprises the enumeration of those rulers and peoples deserving recognition for their power and deeds or for their patronage of the oral poet. Thus, guided by the coda, Robert Creed writes of Widsith’s type of song: “Gleemen still encounter in their wide wanderings those who desire to buy the ‘doom,’ the judgment of the tradition, they can offer” (“Widsith’s Journey” 386). Niles’s approach, however, indirectly demonstrates that Widsith not only represents praise poetry but also enacts praise by fabricating cultural memories that position aristocratic Anglian and Saxon auditors as the descendants of Europe’s elite. The structure of the poet-patron theme suggests that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy ought to respond with generous patronage. In Widsith I find a snapshot of two isomorphic structures of exchange: the more personal, face-to-face system of transactions between poet and ruler anchored in the figure of the bard Widsith and the increasingly abstract transactions whereby, as Niles might put it, gewritu (writings) accord praise to the collective Angelþeod (English nation or English people; “Widsith, the Goths” 77–78). Widsith, however, self-reflexively points to the medium in which praise has been constructed, the lof se gewyrceð (praise one makes) in the penultimate line.22 Without the poem,

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no praise remains. Dom (140b) and dom (143b) the conclusion tolls, further reminding the poem’s audiences what is at stake for the patron. The examples of the poet-patron theme in Widsith and Deor demonstrate this trope’s consistency and flexibility. At the level of content, the exchange of a gift for verbal tribute, whether such exchange is promised or fulfilled, remains constant, as do the poet and patron figures. Deor, however, inverts the theme to signify the singer’s displacement from the ideal, while Widsith not only represents the theme diegetically but also enacts it by implicitly praising an Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and wooing their patronage. Even without access to the in situ performance that may have transformed Widsith from written text to oral verse, the figures of a specific poet (such as Widsith’s author), a specific patron (an aristocrat), and the patron’s gift are nonetheless metonymically implicit.23 As we saw in chapter 4, poets composing in Old English actively reshaped their inherited traditions—both oral-traditional and literate— into hybrid verbal art forms. The concept of hybrid poetics highlights the structural features of oral-connected idioms in terms of their metonymic referentiality (a treasury of expressive and aesthetic possibilities) and, simultaneously, recognizes variants of these themes that have metaphorical implications. The metaphorical use of the poet-patron theme reveals that a traditional poetic idiom can be adapted to a literate mode of interpretation and still be recognized by its audience so that, as Foley phrases it, “under the aegis of tradition” the audience may “respond faithfully to the signals encoded in the text and . . . assist in fashioning an aesthetically coherent work” (Immanent Art 47). When a poet uses an oral-traditional idiom metaphorically, he or she abstracts it from its typical diegetic context. Overtly Christian poems modify the poet-patron theme’s heroic personae, turning “poet” and “patron” into metaphors for relationships between those closely linked by a power differential: God and angels, God and human beings, or rich men and poor. These relationships memorialize the exemplary, whether the generous man or the Christian deity. Of course, Christian tradition offers its own examples of praise poets. King David, composer of Psalms, played an important role in Anglo-Saxon verse and iconography, from the vernacular translation of the Book of Psalms undertaken by Alfredian translators to his image adorning the Vespasian Psalter, where he plays an Anglo-Saxon hearpe (lyre).24 In fact, the image of the Vespasian David offers an illuminating analogy: just as this

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illustration incorporates such native imagery as the hearpe, imagery that echoes Christian symbolism, Old English Christian verse may incorporate a convention from the “heroic” Old English koine that echoes levels of symbolism and allusion. Reading the traces of an Old English poetpatron theme in The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, “Alms-Giving,” and “Thureth,” therefore, may complement interpretations that position these works within early medieval Christian tradition. Verbal conventions hailing from different paradigms may work in concert. In this case, an oralconnected theme profits from both the “immanent” meanings brought to bear by the metonymic relationship between sign and oral tradition and the primarily literate practice of treating narrative content as an occasion for multilayered figuration and interpretation. The Advent Lyrics present several instances of the metaphorical poetpatron theme.25 Certain basic features concatenate: a lord (or lord-like figure), a poet (or poet-like figure), praise, and generosity. Lyric II first intimates that the singing of praise to the Lord yields a gift: . . . se þe reorda gehwæs  ryne gemiclað ðara þe geneahhe  noman scyppendes þurh horscne had  hergan willað. (II.47–49) [God] magnifies the course of each of the voices of those who frequently desire to praise in a fitting manner the Shaper’s name.26 In short, the Christian Lord magnifies the voices of those who praise his name. Perhaps praise is implicit in hymnic verse. Here, however, The Advent Lyrics call attention to the reward for praise. The encomium of the Trinity in Lyric XI finds ideal representation in the Seraphim who cluster about the throne of God. The Seraphim are reminiscent of singing scops: “a bremende, / unaþreotendum þrymmum singað / ful healice hludan stefne, / fægre feor ond neah” (387b–90a; always extolling, they sing with unwearying strength / full loftily with a loud voice, / beautifully far and near). As I discussed in chapter 3, in some bodies of verse (such as Ancient Greek and South Slavic), only replication of the same terms demonstrates the presence of a shared poetic idiom belonging to an oral tradition, but in Old English verse open sets of synonymous words may act as

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metonymic triggers for a particular oral-related theme.27 Such flexibility of terminology presents a great advantage to poets who need alliterating lexemes in every line of verse. Thus, the images that describe the voices of traditional poets typically represent them as clear or bright, loud, and beautiful without requiring a single unvarying lexeme for each concept or even the presence of all three descriptors. These terms in association may describe an ideal clarity associated with a particular vocal timbre or the ability to enunciate both audibly and understandably. Widsith’s voice is both sciran (103b; clear or bright) and hlude (105a; loud). The singing of the scop(s) in Beowulf is swutol (90a; clear) and hador (497a; bright or clear). In the Alfredian prose translation of Orosius the words sweotole and sweotolicost—“clear” and “clearest”—describe the poet’s speech. Thus in Lyric XI of The Advent Lyrics, the fægre and hludan—“beautiful” and “loud” or “sonorous”—Seraphim’s voices partake in imagery associated with the vocalization of a scop. Given other structural similarities, their voices may metonymically invoke the poet-patron theme. The Seraphim render God the highest service: eternal praise. In Lyric XI the angels laud God with a vernacular paraphrase of the “Sanctus,” which concludes the Preface to the Mass (Cook 111). The Preface is chiefly a formal display of gratitude toward God and other figures of the Church. The Sanctus inhabits a special place in the Preface’s prayers, not only because it signals the transition to the next step of the rite but also because it echoes the words of angels (Is 6:1–4). In effect, the celebrant, and perhaps the choir or the whole community, joins voices with the Seraphim to praise God.28 “Halig eart þu, halig,  heahengla brego, soð sigores frea,  simle þu bist halig, dryhtna dryhten!  A þin dom wunað eorðlic mid ældum  in ælce tid wide geweorþad.  Þu eart weoroda god, forþon þu gefyldest  foldan ond rodoras, wigendra hleo,  wuldres þines, helm alwihta.  Sie þe in heannessum ece hælo,  ond in eorþan lof, beorht mid beornum.  Þu gebletsad leofa,

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þe in dryhtnes noman  dugeþum cwome heanum to hroþre.  Þe in heahþum sie a butan ende  ece herenis.” (XI.403–15) “Holy are you, holy, Chief of high angels, true Lord of victory! You are ever holy, Lord of lords! Always your fame dwells on earth among men in each era, widely honored. You are God of hosts, for you filled the earth and skies, Protector of warriors, with your glory, Helm of all creatures. To you in the highest may there be eternal hosanna and on earth praise, bright amid men. May you live blessed, who in the Lord’s name came to the duguth [community of men] as a solace to the abject. May there be for you on high always without end eternal praise.” The Seraphim’s hymn focuses upon the widely honored dom of the Christian God, which elicits their spontaneous praise-song. The angels are careful to specify that God’s glorification thrives both in the heavens (“þe in heahþum sie / a butan ende ece herenis”) and on earth (“ond in eorþan lof ”), allowing for human beings to copy their actions by praising the Christian God. Whether the individual songs of The Advent Lyrics were composed for oral performance is uncertain, but evidence exists for their relationship to chant. Susan Rankin has convincingly established that the twelve lyrics are patterned upon the liturgical year and all sections except Lyric XI correspond to antiphon texts (334 and 326–37). The first ten lyrics relate to O Antiphons of the Advent season; the eleventh recalls one or more of the Trinity antiphons (Cook 108; Rankin 326n51) and the Gloria in excelsis Deo (Rankin 335) sung by angels to frightened shepherds at Christmas; and Lyric XII alludes to the O admirable commercium antiphon at Lauds, a week after Christmas (Moore 226–27). Advent Lyric XII, which completes the series, depicts the common features of the poet-patron theme—poetfigure, patron-figure, commemoration, and generosity—while exhorting every person to step into the role of the singer of praise: Forþon we hine domhwate  dædum ond wordum hergen holdlice.  Þæt is healic ræd monna gehwylcum  þe gemynd hafað,

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þæt he symle oftost  ond inlocast ond geornlicost  god weorþige. He him þære lisse  lean forgildeð. . . . (XII.429–34) Therefore, loyally, eager for glory, we may praise him with deeds and words.29 That is high counsel for each man who has recollection, that he always most often and most deeply and most earnestly honors God. He fully yields the reward of favor to him. The quoted passage brings to fulfillment the collection of lyrics, which amount to an elaborate praise-poem. Greenfield has suggested that the þoncword, an act of speaking in gratitude and praise, recurs thematically in The Advent Lyrics, specifically in Lyric II when petitioners give thanks for their salvation and in Lyric V when the speaker says: “We þæs þonc magon / secgan sigedryhtne” (127b–28a; for this we can say thanks to the victorylord).30 I would add that the Seraphim in Lyric XI sing a þoncword and that Lyric XII expands upon the Seraphim’s song, linking the function of the þoncword to The Advent Lyrics themselves. By enunciating these verses, one may participate in the act of praise (or pleasing speech), imperfectly echoing the Seraphim. The lean (reward or loan) for God’s praise is his favor. The lyrics also advise an expansion of the demographics of those who may enact a þoncword for God: “þæt is healic ræd / monna gehwylcum þe gemynd hafað” (that [praising God] is high counsel for each man who has recollection). By using the poet-patron theme as a metaphor for the ideal relationship between God and Christians, the poem modifies the premise that only a skilled poet may perform a þoncword worthy of reward. One does not need to be a poet or a singer to participate in the Christianized version of the poet-patron theme; rather, all may follow the healic ræd (high counsel) by praising God in the heart. The collective act of praise invokes the community of Christians, who in voicing these lines participate in a desirable reciprocity.31 As in The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men suggests that performance of its lines is similar to inhabiting the role of the praising poet: “Sum cræft hafað circnytta fela, / mæg on lofsongum lifes waldend / hlude hergan, hafað healice / beorhte stefne” (91–94a; One has skill in many church services, is able to extol loudly the Lord of life in praise songs, loftily possesses a bright

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voice). The phrases on lofsongum (in praise songs), hlude hergan (to extol loudly), and beorhte stefne (clear voice) recall passages with synonymous phrases that depict a scop in Widsith and Beowulf: sciran reorde (Widsith 103b; clear voice) and “dream gehyrde / hludne in healle. Þær wæs hearpan sweg, / swutol sang scopes” (Beowulf 88b–90a; [He] heard communal joy, loud in the hall, where there was the sound of the lyre, the clear song of the poet). Notably, the adjectives beorht, hador, and scir denote “clear” while also connoting “bright” or “luminous,” creating a synesthesia apropos to an audience’s experience of listening to a singer or reader’s voice and imagining its narrative. The accumulation of these terms, along with sweotol and hlud, in the context of a poem focused upon the gifts of God metonymically refers to the poet-patron complex. Indeed, the conclusion makes the poem’s role as þoncword more explicit: “Swa weorðlice wide tosaweð / dryhten his duguþe. A þæs dom age, / leohtbære lof, se us þis lif giefeð / ond his milde mod monnum cyþeð” (110–13; So worthily the Lord sows far and wide his goodness. Always for this may he have fame, brilliant praise, he who gives us this life and reveals his generous mind to men). A modified poet-patron theme survives here, presenting the implied singer of The Gifts of Men lifting leohtbære lof to the deity who distributes gifts. The clear voice or beorht stefen is a gift returning to its bestower. As in the secular version of the poet-patron theme, the relationship between the two figures is naturalized. By depicting praise as an inevitable act of a righteous soul, the logic of their exchange—gift(s) for memorialization—has become even more circular, indeed, nearly selfreferential, while emphasizing the incommensurability between gift and praise. In The Gifts of Men, those who praise God recognize that he is the source of all gifts; recognition turns to praise, which memorializes God’s bounty. In “Alms-Giving” and “Thureth,” the agents of praise (poet) and generosity (patron) act in relationship to God, but they belong to this mutable middangeard (middle place or world). The act of praise has been appropriated by the poem’s voice, which acts as a surrogate for Christian ethos and God’s perspective: Wel bið þam eorle  þe him on innan hafað, reþehygdig wer,  rume heortan;

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þæt him biþ for worulde  weorðmynda mæst, ond for ussum dryhtne  doma selast. Efne swa he mid wætre  þone weallendan leg adwæsce,  þæt he leng ne mæg blac byrnende  burgum sceððan, swa he mid ælmessan  ealle toscufeð synna wunde,  sawla lacnað. (“Alms-Giving”) Well it is for the nobleman, the fierce-minded man, who possesses within himself a generous heart. That is the greatest honor for him before the world and the best reputation before our Lord. Just as he [= a man] may quench with water the surging flame, so that, burning bright, it may no longer harm cities; so he [= a man] with almsgiving removes all the wounds of sins, heals (the wounds) of souls. “Alms-Giving” expands upon a proverb in Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus 3:30: “Water will quench a flaming fire, and almsgiving make atonement for sin,” which early English homilists employed in the vernacular.32 To paraphrase: from the generous heart flows the desire to give alms, and this deed heals the wounds of the heart just as water douses flames that burn a city. Thus, even as the heart burns (being reþe or “fierce”), from it may issue the generosity that quenches its pain. So much in “AlmsGiving” depends on being rume, meaning “generous” and, rather literally, “spacious.” The heart of the almsgiver must be open (both spacious and generous) to give alms and to receive healing. Because God is the source of all good deeds, a man’s charitable acts augment the connection between his soul and God: goodness flows into the open heart and into the deeds of the man. A man’s charity and God’s healing seem nearly simultaneous. The lines that link gift-giving to recognition foreground the poet-patron theme: “þæt him biþ for worulde weorðmynda mæst, / ond for ussum dryhtne doma selast” (3–4; that is the greatest honor for him before the world and the best reputation before our Lord). For magnanimity to the poor comes recognition of the almsgiver’s good behavior, recognition in both worldly and spiritual realms. Christian ideology in “Alms-Giving” urges listeners to believe that payment for generosity with the desirable heahfæstne dom (Widsith 143b; long-lasting judgment or enduring fame)

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occurs on earth and in heaven, not, as it did for Widsith’s patron, solely under heofenum (143a; under the heavens). Furthermore, when God recognizes generosity, the human-patron benefits from the sweetest of words: not eulogy, but logos. In “Alms-Giving” the eorl (nobleman) acts as patron to the poor, receiving worldly and heavenly recognition. The poem, as voice of the praisepoet, urges almsgiving and implies in biblical verse that the ultimate praise for these deeds comes from God. “Thureth” suggests that when Christians occupy the poet and patron positions of this theme, they can do so in mimicry of God and in a Möbius-strip form of exchange with the deity. “Thureth” precedes the “Claudius Pontifical I,” a composite pontifical and Benedictional of either York or Worcester provenance (Cotton Claudius A iii, 31v) for which it “adopts the persona of the book” (Ronalds 360). The personified halgungboc (holy-book or benedictional) praises its benefactor, Thureth, who commissioned the book in praise of God. Ic eom halgungboc;  healde hine dryhten þe me fægere þus  frætewum belegde. Þureð to þance  þus het me wyrcean, to loue and to wurðe,  þam þe leoht gesceop. Gemyndi is he  mihta gehwylcre þæs þe he on foldan  gefremian mæg, and him geþancie  þeoda waldend þæs þe he on gemynde  madma manega wyle gemearcian  metode to lace; and he sceal æce lean  ealle findan þæs þe he on foldan  fremaþ to ryhte. (“Thureth”) I am a benedictional; may the Lord protect him who thus decorated me beautifully with ornaments. Thureth in thanks ordered me to be made thus, in praise and in honor of him who created light. He [=Thureth] commemorates all the mighty works which He [=God] is able to bring about on earth, and the ruler of nations shall reward him, because, mindful of many treasures, he [=Thureth] wishes to designate [me] as an offering to the Lord.

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And he shall fully obtain eternal reward, because he acts properly here on earth.33 At lines 3–4 the holy book describes Thureth in the poet’s role, crafting an object full of words to honor mihta gehwylcre (each of the mighty works) of God, for which he will receive a gift that only God could grant, æce lean (eternal reward). Other phrases present Thureth as the giver of gifts: “Þureð to þance þus het me wyrcean” (Thureth in thanks ordered me to be made in this way) and “gemynde madma manega / wyle gemearcian metode to lace” (mindful of many treasures, he wishes to designate [me] as an offering to the Lord). Although “Thureth” at the level of verse-composition may lack elegance, it represents at the level of thematics the variability of the poet-patron roles in a Christian context.34 In mirroring God’s power as maker and giver, the human patron and praiser reaps the best of the poet-patron scenario: fame and reward. Reading “Alms-Giving” and “Thureth” with the poet-patron theme in mind highlights a relationship of exchange, predicated on heavenly reward, that encourages generosity to the poor and patronage of those involved in the making of a halgungboc: bookmakers, scribes, artists, and poets. One mark of hybrid poetics in Old English literature is a poet’s ability to transform an oral-connected theme that was once situation-dependent into a metaphor for markedly Christian relationships. In poems such as “Alms-Giving” and “Thureth,” Anglo-Saxon poets have modified the poetpatron theme so that it exemplifies a profound dynamic between human beings and God. Like the encomiastic poet in the theme, Anglo-Saxons should sing God’s praises and seek heavenly reward. The almsgiver, occupying the patron’s place, will find his good acts witnessed most clearly by God, who will potentially grant reward for reward. Encomium itself lies only in the words of the narrated poem, which does not draw attention to a specific identity. Yet, patrons’ identities, especially those who donate money toward the creation of holy books, paintings, and other religious art objects, can benefit from the duality of a poet-patron relationship, one patterned on God’s creative and benefactory powers. The Thureth of the preceding poem has his name honored in the very holy book or benedictional that he had decorated in praise of God. Depending on how we think through the hierarchical relationships between God, Thureth, and the

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book itself, Thureth is either the poet-figure seeking reward or the patronfigure whose name resounds through time in the praise poem adorning the very book that he had decorated. Indeed, such recursive parallels lie at the heart of religious ethical systems. Here the theme enables a concise representation of these parallels. One advantage of tracing a poet-patron theme in verse with Christian subject matter is that such an interpretive process concurs with the growing evidence that poets and authors employed a hybrid of oral and literary approaches to composition. These approaches subsume both native and Latinate genres, rhetorical devices, and a host of other features anchored in poetics.35 Because an oral-traditional poetics often works via metonyms that in “short hand” elicit a host of tacit meanings, it is productive to trace the echoes of a vernacular convention in Christian poems, whether these be typical themes and typescenes, which arise most often in verse labeled “legendary” or “Germanic,” or their metaphorical versions that reverberate in such poems as The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, “Alms-Giving,” “Thureth,” The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, and other Old English poems that encompass Christian subjects. Treating the poet’s commemorative abilities and the patron’s generosity as a traditional relationship of exchange allows readers to recognize the pattern in less obvious contexts. The existence of a poet-patron theme also responds to concerns raised by Roberta Frank, John D. Niles, and Mark C. Amodio regarding the use of poetic representation of the poets Widsith and Deor as ethnographic data.36 By framing their representation as a verbal idiom, readers may interpret how the idiom is wielded within a particular poetic context; doing so does not, however, preclude the chance that poets once composed aristocratic praise songs in the halls of Anglo-Saxon kings and queens.

6 o

A Sea Voyage in The Dream of the Rood

The proposition that a version of the sea-voyage typescene occurs in The Dream of the Rood seems unconventional at first. Where are the watery expanses and a curve-prowed ship speeding across the waves? Furthermore, how could previous scholars, cognizant of oral theory, have missed the presence of a common typescene? No one would expect an oral-connected typescene for a hero’s sea-crossing in a narrative lacking sea voyages. Yet, in The Dream of the Rood this typescene represents another example of Anglo-Saxon hybrid poetics, which manifests here in an oral-connected idiom whose presence elicits both metonymic (oral-traditional) and metaphorical (literate) interpretation.1 The chapter’s journey begins with a much emended word, holmwudu (sea-wood or ship) and then explores the broader vistas afforded by an analysis of a metaphorical version of the sea-voyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood. As a typescene, rather than a theme, the oral-traditional sea-voyage follows a chronological sequence. The same can be said of the metaphorical sea voyage explored here. Holmwudu and Lignum Maris The compound word holmwudu (sea-wood or ship) here has been seen as a crux in The Dream of the Rood: Hwæt, me þa geweorðode  wuldres Ealdor ofer holmwudu,  heofonrices Weard,

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swylce swa he his modor eac,  Marian sylfe, ælmihtig God,  for ealle menn geweorðode  ofer eall wifa cynn. (90–94) Listen, the Lord of glory, the Guardian of heaven’s realm, then honored me above sea-wood, just as he, the almighty God, also honored before all people his mother, Mary herself, above all women-kind.2 Because the term holmwudu seems unorthodox, it has often been emended with holtwudu (forest-wood). Holtwudu casts the Cross as a species of tree, rather than a type of vessel.3 Carl Berkhout’s 1974 article “The Problem of Holmwudu” demonstrated that it was both theologically appropriate and aesthetically meaningful to translate holmwudu as “sea-wood” or “ship,”4 and some subsequent publications of the poem have returned to holmwudu.5 Berkhout calls the implication that the Holy Cross is a navis a “fresh, sudden image, but repeatedly implied throughout the poem, which helps to focus the eschatological meaning of the way of the Cross for both the dreamer and the reader” (433). Despite the evidence Berkhout draws from patristic sources and the poem, holtwudu still appears in many present-day editions and Old English language manuals.6 Because holmwudu resonates with patristic imagery—particularly Augustine of Hippo’s lignum maris (wood of the sea) concept—it should not be emended. I argue, furthermore, that the epithet “sea-wood” reflects the poem’s use of the sea-voyage typescene. The lignum maris concept and the sea-voyage typescene complement each other, both supporting the idea that the Holy Cross transports its hero (or Hero) and his followers from mortality to immortal life. Berkhout presents compelling evidence for the presence of the lignum maris concept in The Dream of the Rood. He observes that holmwudu alludes to the patristic lignum maris (or navis crucis) topos, which depicts the Cross as a ship or the mast of a ship that guides Christian believers to salvation.7 It is a patristic commonplace that a mast may symbolize the Holy Cross of the Church, but evidence survives in Anglo-Saxon culture for the ship itself representing the Cross. The image is linked to Noah’s ark, which was understood to typologically precede the Cross, both being wooden “vehicles” chosen by the Christian deity to save humankind. Berkhout cites Augustine’s comparison of the Holy Cross with a ship (In Iohannis Evangelium tractatus 2.i.2–4) and a similar image in one of his ser-

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mons (Sermo 75; see Patrologia Latina).8 Sandra McEntire has also shown that the association of the Ark and the Cross appealed to Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical culture. She finds the lignum maris concept in Genesis A, as well as the iconography of the Armagh Cross and the broken cross at Kells and the illustration of a ship with the crucified Christ at its helm (rather than mast) in an eighth-century manuscript illumination.9 The sea-vessel metaphor also resonates with the “journey to the eternal homeland” imagery in the latter half of The Dream of the Rood. According to Berkhout (431–32), the representation of the Cross as spiritual convoy, which one finds in Augustine’s description of the via ad patriam, recurs: in the lifes weg passage (87–89; way of life); in the rood’s final words to the dreamer, where it states that æghwylc sawl (any soul) may reach heaven ðurh ða rode (119–21; through the rood); and in the dreamer’s impassioned plea that the Holy Cross transport him þær is blis mycel (124b–48a; where bliss is great). Another depiction of the Cross as a lignum maris occurs when the dreamer speaks of his hopes that the rood will fetige (fetch) him when he dies. In this passage, the verb asettan describes the act of conveyance, which may denote the action of traversing a sea:10 Ond ic wene me daga gehwylce  hwænne me Dryhtnes rod, þe ic her on eorðan  ær sceawode, on þysson lænan  life gefetige ond me þonne gebringe  þær is blis mycel, dream on heofonum,  þær is Dryhtnes folc geseted to symle,  þær is singal blis; ond me þonne asette  þær ic syþþan mot wunian on wuldre,  well mid þam halgum dreames brucan. (135b–44a, italics mine) And I hope each and every day that the Rood of the Lord, which I here on earth earlier examined, in this fleeting life will collect me and then bring me where there is great bliss, communal joy in the heavens, where the Lord’s people are placed at a feast, where there is bliss everlasting; and then it will convey me, where afterwards I will be allowed to dwell in glory, amid those holy ones, to partake fully of communal joy.

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With mesodiplosis (the repetition of a word within successive lines of verse), the dreamer’s prayer rhetorically dramatizes his desire to move from here (on þysson lænan life) to there (on heofonum): the recurring internal phrase þær is culminates in þær ic. Similar recurrent phraseology arises in another genre that places value on language’s performative properties—the Old English charm. In the charms, as in The Dream of the Rood, the Cross possesses apotropaic and sanative properties that influence the material world.11 The Dream of the Rood, however, focuses upon the Cross’s ability to serve as a spiritual vehicle between mortal and eternal life that will potentially bring the dreamer þær is singal blis. Berkhout traces how the navis crucis concept resonates in the few lines that precede the word holmwudu until the final lines of The Dream of the Rood (87–156). Here I suggest that the image of the Cross as a spiritual vehicle arises much earlier in the poem. Even before mentioning holmwudu or the dreamer’s desire to be borne away by the Cross on his journey to heaven, the Rood-poet has already linked Cross and ship by depicting the crucifixion scene as a hero’s journey upon the waves. The Dream of the Rood turns the Cross into a metaphorical ship by employing the seavoyage typescene during Christ’s crucifixion (28–77). Furthermore, the poem creates an extended analogy that depicts not only the rood as a ship but also Christ as hero and treasure via the traditional metonymic implications of the typescene. Sea Voyages The sea-voyage typescene usually appears when a hero in Old English poetry navigates the seas toward or away from a potentially mortal confrontation. Beowulf ’s swift crossing on his “flota famiheals fugle gelicost” (218; foamy-necked ship, most like a bird) fits our expectations for this typescene, as does Elene’s passage over the waters that bear her and her crew to Jerusalem: “brimwudu snyrgan / under swellingum, sæmearh plegean, / wadan wægflotan” (244b–46b; sea-wood [that is, ship] hastening under swollen sails, sea-horse [ship] playing, wave-floater proceeding). Robert Diamond, Lee Ramsey, and John Miles Foley (Traditional Oral Epic 336– 44) have examined the sea voyage as a typescene per se in Old English heroic narrative, noting its consistent, definitive narrative pattern. My addition to the motif sequence, as Foley presents it (338), is italicized. Other

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minor revisions allow the hero to be male or female—changing “Beowulf ” to “the hero” and “his men” to “companions”: (A) The hero leads companions to the ship. (B) The ship waits, moored. (C) Companions board the ship, carrying treasure. (D) Departure, voyage on the sea, arrival. (E) They moor the ship and unload treasure and arms. Ramsey presents a final motif, (F) the hero and retinue approach and enter a fortified city or great hall (55), which I will discuss later. The type­ scene reliably moves a hero from point A to point B. It represents passing a threshold between the mundane and an occasion for winning dom (glory or noble repute) in verse with or without a Christian subject. Using the sea-voyage typescene, Elene depicts its heroine proceeding from the domestic sphere to the challenges that she will face in Jerusalem, where Elene eventually achieves both earthly and spiritual success. The typescene unfolds according to the general principle in oral and oral-related verse of “variation within limits.”12 Foley describes the principle in the following way: traditional phraseology and typical scenes work by “portraying the same actions from instance to instance but shape-shifting to suit the particular environment of the individual situation” (How to Read 111). A typescene, like a theme, consists of motifs that key its presence and engage metonymic referentiality. It differs from the theme in its employment of motifs in a specific sequence, where some motifs reflect chronology and others have more mobility within the sequence. In the sea-voyage typescene, motifs typically follow the same order; however, a poet can add such details as conversation with a shore-guardian, prayer, exchange of gifts, or even the construction of a sepulcher in order to adapt the typescene to a specific poem’s narrative demands (Traditional Oral Epic 337–38). Anglo-Saxon poets have adapted the sea voyage’s motif pattern to circumstances other than hero and company traversing a body of water. Foley discovered one such variant of the stock typescene in Scyld Scefing’s sea burial at the beginning of Beowulf, which replicates the motif pattern of the sea-voyage typescene described above (338–44). Lending its traditional implications to a death rite, the typescene represents the king’s ritualistic passage from life to death as a hero’s voyage. By invoking the typescene

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during Scyld’s sea burial, the Beowulf-poet plays with the audience’s expectation that the scene progress to the ship’s mooring upon the sands of a far shore (motif E). However, the narrator subverts this motif, saying: “Men ne cunnon / secgan to soðe, selerædende, / hæleð under heofenum, hwa þæm hlæste onfeng” (50b–52; Men cannot say in truth, hall-counselors, warriors under the heavens, who received that cargo). Forestalling closure of the typescene, the poem implies the limits of human knowledge when faced with death. While no overt depiction of seafaring occurs in The Dream of the Rood, the narrative of the crucifixion overlaps the progression of motifs in the sea voyage, thereby implying that Christ’s mounting of the Cross is comparable to a hero setting a course across the seas. Metonymy (traditional referentiality) calls into presence the tradition-wide instantiations of the typescene, so that the immanent idiom of the sea voyage shapes and is shaped by the immediate context of the crucifixion narrative. In the hands of a skillful poet, the typescene may be molded to different purposes, as it is for Scyld’s sea-burial and Christ’s crucifixion. We have seen over the course of Signs That Sing that Anglo-Saxon poets, using the signifying strategies of orality and literacy, experimented with metaphorical versions of oral-connected themes. Like the Beowulf-poet, the Rood-poet asks us to imagine the sea-voyage sequence from a different perspective. Instead of the hero approaching a ship, a “ship” (the Cross) perceives its “hero” (Christ) arriving. For more detail, see textbox 6.1. (A) In place of the hero leading his or her companions to the ship, Christ approaches the rood. (B) In place of the ship waiting moored, the rood waits as if moored. (C) In place of the hero boarding the ship with treasure, Christ mounts the rood. (D) In place of the voyage proper, the rood raises Christ up. (E) In place of the hero and his retinue unloading treasure from the moored ship, Christ’s thanes lift the Savior from the rood. In The Dream of the Rood’s inflection of the sea-voyage typescene, the hero Christ mounts the rood-as-ship, and upon this holmwudu Christ transcends the seas of mortality. His journey is both intransitive and transitive: while upon the Cross, he frees mankind in this life; after leaving the Cross, he takes on the heroic task of Harrowing Hell.

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Ramsey notes that “The important similarities between the two seavoyaging scenes are narrative: that is, they are similarities in events and in the sequence of events” (54).13 The idea that the typescene resides in narrative structure is applicable to comparisons between typescenes tradition-wide, rather than just the multiforms of a single poet’s idiolect. While the motif structure remains relatively fixed (admitting “variation within limits”), lexical irregularity predominates. On the subject of the Old English typescene, Foley concludes: [W]e find the “deep structure” of narrative pattern, to use Calvert Watkins’ formulation, imaged in an unbound, non-specialized set of traditional phrases—that is, in a surface structure of diction that can shift widely in its formulaic and morphemic make-up while staying within the theme’s ideational boundaries. (Traditional Oral Epic 357) Because the Old English typescene, like the theme, does not always require the presence of specific lexemes or formulaic phraseology, it possesses a pliability suited to both typical and metaphorical instantiations: the sea voyage may convey a hero over the seas, a king through a death rite, or Christ toward the vanquishing of death. Through a pattern of motifs the sea voyage partially structures how the crucifixion narrative unfolds. The highlighted passages in textbox 6.1 demonstrate how the typescene enfolds the talking rood’s narrative of Christ’s crucifixion. Textbox 6.1 shows that the motifs in the stock typescene and the narrative progression of the talking rood’s story parallel each other. In the first two motifs, the hero Christ approaches the vessel, which we see passively waiting (ic fæste stod). In the next two motifs Christ climbs upon the vessel, which raises him up (Crist wæs on rode). Once the journey is completed, a retinue of hilderincas (battle-warriors) “unloads” the vessel before abandoning it. Although the phraseology of the Old English typescene demonstrates “general correspondence without actual repetition” (Ramsey 56), recurring synonyms reflect the subjects of each motif: boat, sea, hero, retinue, treasure/arms, the desire to hasten to the ship or eagerness for the journey, the stillness of the moored vessel, boarding, movement across the waters, and lyrical images of the voyage. The typescene does not require the appearance of all these subjects, but many arise in every instance. The first sea-voyage typescene in Elene contains the following examples:

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Fearoðhengestas (226b; sea-horses) for “ships”; sunde (228b; sound) for “sea”; wigena þreate (217a; host of warriors) for the hero’s retainers; bordum ond ordum (235a; with shields and spears) for arms; for Elene’s eagerness, “Elene ne wolde / þæs siðfates sæne weorðan” (219b–20; Elene did not wish to be slow with respect to that voyage); for the stillness of the moored vessel, “Fearoðhengestas / ymb geofenes stæð gearwe stodon” (226b–27; sea-horses stood ready upon the shore of the ocean); for passage across the water, “Leton þa ofer fifelwæg famige scriðan / bronte brimþisan” (237– 38a; then they allowed the tall sea-ship to glide foamy upon the path of seamonsters); and for the lyrical images of voyage, an extended description of the impressive ships upon the sea (238b–46a). The cumulative presence of these images cues the presence of the traditional scene and supports its progression of motifs. Both Ramsey and Foley demonstrate that even a single poet’s development of the typescene can result in strong lexical differences from instance to instance.14 Importantly, a set of traditional motifs has recourse to a variety of synonyms for expressing the same idea, whether literal or figurative. In The Dream of the Rood there is a similar concatenation of terms related to the motifs of the sea-voyage typescene. Christ’s epithets represent him as both hero and Christus miles: geong hæleð (39a), ricne Cyning (44b), heofona Hlaford (45a), weruda God (51b), and heofenes Dryhten (64a).15 His followers twice receive the name hilderincas (61b and 72 in the genitive plural, battle-warriors). Arms are referenced obliquely when we hear that Christ ongyrede, disrobed or unarmed himself, before leaping upon the rood (39a). The phrase efstan elne mycle (34a; hastening with great courage) represents the desire of the hero to hasten toward conflict. The Holy Cross—which we know later calls itself a species of holmwudu (91a)—says ic fæste stod, recalling the stillness of a moored sea vessel (38b). For a moment, the illusion of movement is created when shadows traverse the sky above Christ upon the rood: “sceadu forð eode, / wann under wolcnum” (54b–55a; shadows went forth, dark under the clouds).16 These lyrical images resonate with the often fleeting fragments of natural beauty that adorn the hours of voyage in the stock typescene.17 The verb (ge)stigan reflects the affinity between ships and (ge)stigan that arise in Old English poetry and prose. In The Dream of the Rood, (ge)stigan twice depicts Christ leaping upon the navis crucis. Several times in the poetic corpus this verb portrays a hero mounting a waiting vessel

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(see examples one to three below). In each subsequent example (four to eight), (ge)stigan describes embarking upon or disembarking from a ship. In addition, the subject of the verb is a figure or group of heroic dimensions:18 (1) . . . flota wæs on yðum, / bat under beorge. Beornas gearwe / on stefn stigon. Streamas wundon, / sund wið sande. (Beowulf 210b–13a) A floater was on the waves, / a boat under the hill. Men readily / climbed onto the stern; currents twisted, / water moving against sand.19 (2) Scealtu æninga mid ærdæge, / emne to morgene, æt meres ende / ceol gestigan ond on cald wæter / brecan ofer bæðweg. (Andreas 220–23b) Straightaway at dawn, just as morning arrives, you must mount the keel at the sea’s strand and press onto the cold water upon the ocean’s course. (3) Þa in ceol stigon collenfyrhðe, / ellenrofe, æghwylcum wearð / on merefaroðe mod geblissod. (Andreas 349–51) When the bold-spirited, the strong in courage climbed into the ship on the coastal waters, every heart rejoiced. (4) Nu ic, god dryhten, ongiten hæbbe / þæt ðu on faroðstræte feor ne wære, / cyninga wuldur, þa ic on ceol gestah. (Andreas 897–99) I now have realized, Lord God, that you were not distant on the seapath, glory of kings, when I climbed on the boat. (5) Se halga Andreas þa astag on þæt scip mid his discipulum, and he gesæt be þam steorreþran þæs scipes, þæt wæs Drihten Hælend Crist. (“St. Andrew”; Morris 233) The holy Andrew climbed on that ship and he sat before that steersman who was Lord Christ the Healer. (6) Ða cwæð ic to him, Broðor, soðlice næbbe ic nan færeht to syllanne, ac ic wille faran and an þæra scypa astigan. (“Mary of Egypt”; Magennis 396)

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Then I said to him, “Brother, in truth I do not have any passagemoney to give, but I wish to travel and to climb upon that ship.” (7) Ða sona he nydde his leorningcnihtas on scyp stigan. (Gospel of Mark 6:45; Skeat 50) Right away he urged his disciples to climb onto the ship. (8) Ure drihten astah on scip. and him filigdon his leorningcnihtas. (Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series, Third Sunday after Pentecost; Thorpe 378) Our Lord climbed upon the ship and his disciples followed him. The first four examples, from Andreas and Beowulf, are associated with journeys by sea in their respective poetic narratives. Examples five to eight show that the verb is also typical in Christian prose narratives. So strong is the association between (ge)stigan and climbing upon a ship that the verb overrides the lexical boundaries that sometimes exist between poetry and prose and between heroic and Christian narratives. Thus, the first two uses of (ge)stigan in The Dream of the Rood, in concert with a progression of motifs parallel to the stock sea-voyage typescene, invoke motif C: “His or her companions board the ship, carrying treasure.” Of course, the verb (ge)stigan alone does not imply the boarding of a ship. When, however, a progression of motifs cues the typescene in The Dream of the Rood, the concurrent employment of (ge)stigan strengthens the metaphorical relationship between Cross and ship and between Christ’s crucifixion and a threshold to dom. While (ge)stigan implies that a hero mounts a ship—thereby summoning the traditional associations inherent to the sea-voyage typescene— from a theological perspective this verb also precisely links Christ’s crucifixion and his later ascension. The theological implications of (ge)stigan intersect productively with the sea-voyage typescene. Forms of (ge)stigan occur three times in The Dream of the Rood: the uninflected gestigan (34b) when Christ and the rood face each other, before any action has occurred; gestah (40b) when Christ leaps upon the Cross, in the perfective completion of the task before him; and astag (103a) when Christ ascends to heaven. James Marchand has focused upon the first two instances, which

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he argues actively portray the crucifixion as one of the Leaps of Christ. Although (ge)stigan generally means “to climb” or “to mount,” Marchand argues: “Given the commonplace nature of the Leaps of Christ, ‘leap’ seems the best translation. Christ leapt upon the Cross and embraced it, for he wished to save mankind” (86).20 To Marchand’s observations, I would add that the Ascension to heaven is the final Leap that Christ undertakes, which perhaps accounts for the replacement of the perfective prefix gewith the intensive prefix a- in the third and last variant of (ge)stigan. (Ge)stigan in its more general sense may signify both “ascend” and “descend.” This bi-directionality helps represent Christ’s Leaps. George Hardin Brown has discussed how Christ’s Leaps may move upward or downward or in both directions simultaneously (135). We can hear both of these denotations when Christ gestah in line 40b: as Christ ascends the Holy Cross on a trajectory that will eventually culminate in the Ascension, the son of God descends to the most wretched of positions, a tortured figure in the company of thieves. In the same line in which gestah occurs, the epithet gealgan heanne refers to the Cross; the phrase may be translated as either “high gallows” or “base gallows.” The double entendre of gestah he on gealgan heanne throws into relief how the verb (ge)stigan, with its potential for either upward or downward motion, participates in the theology of glory and of humiliation. As the poem unfolds, (ge)stigan aurally links the transitions from Advent to “gallows” (Cross) to heaven.21 The Ascension topos of the theology of glory bears mentioning because of how it interacts with the sea voyage. The Ascension topos includes, among other features, the presence of angelic hosts, the image of Jesus enthroned (Majestas Domini), a challenge at the gates of heaven, and Christ’s bestowal of gifts (see Brown). The final six lines, which portray Christ’s return to heaven amid a great multitude, allude to the Ascension topos. These lines also represent the conclusion of the sea-voyage typescene, which usually culminates in a sixth motif, and dovetails nicely with the Ascension topos: (F) the hero and retinue approach and enter a fortified city or great hall. The presence of this motif is apparent in other versions of the multiform: after his first sea journey, Beowulf and his men proceed to Heorot; on the second occasion they immediately report to Hygelac and Hygd; after Elene and her army traverse the ocean, they enter Jerusalem. The Dream of the Rood defers the final motif to the end of the poem:

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Se Sunu wæs sigorfæst  on þam siðfate, mihtig ond spedig,  þa he mid manigeo com, gasta weorode,  on Godes rice. (150–52) The Son was firm in victory on that journey, powerful and successful, when he came amid a multitude, an army of souls, into God’s kingdom. Christ’s arrival at his heofonlicne ham (148a; heavenly home) with a gasta weorode fulfills on a cosmic scale the expectations engendered by the typescene. The sea-voyage typescene serves the Christian narrative by underscoring the siðfate (150b) or great journey that Christ is undertaking and depicting Christ as both hero and treasure. We are told that at the end of the crucifixion the hands of Christ’s hilderincas reach onto the Cross, where, in terms applicable to unloading a ship, they genamon and ahofon (60b, 61a; took and lifted up or took away) the Lord. The next lines, “Forleton me þa hilderincas / standan steame bedrifenne” (61b–62a; The battle-warriors left me / standing drenched in moisture), reinforce the image of a crossas-ship that upon the completion of its duty is left abandoned upon the marge. Further internal evidence supports the image of the Lord’s retinue receiving from the dripping Cross a great treasure. The poem announces four times that the rood has been adorned with jewels or treasure: “begoten mid golde; gimmas stodon” (7; all covered with gold; gems stood); “gegyred mid golde; gimmas hæfdon” (16; clothed with gold; gems had); “Hwilum mid since gegyrwed” (23b; At times clothed with treasure); and “gyredon me golde ond seolfre” (77; clothed me with gold and silver). The first two phrases strongly echo each other in employing similar lexical choices and syntactical structures, while the last three are linked by their use of the verb gegyrwan. Medieval crosses were often adorned with five gems representing Christ’s five wounds, a notion alluded to early in The Dream of the Rood: þær fife wæron (8b; there were five [jewels]). The rood poem, as a highly wrought work of hybrid poetics, is studded with four references to gems, perhaps leaving an audience to conclude that the fifth (and ultimate) gem is Christ. Christ is linked to three of the four other descriptions of treasure

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by the word gegyrwan in the half-line, Ongyrede hine þa geong hæleð (39a; The young warrior then stripped [or “disarmed”] himself). The inversion of the word (from gyrede to ongyrede, a kind of kenosis) sets Christ far beyond comparison with ordinary treasure. In concert with the implication that Christ is the poem’s fifth jewel, the sea-voyage typescene metonymically implies that Christ is the ship’s treasure. Using the lignum maris concept, the Ascension topos, and the sea-voyage typescene as a metaphor for Christ’s death on the Cross, The Dream of the Rood fuses learned Christian sources and an Anglo-Saxon oral-traditional poetic inheritance. In medieval verse we have come to expect the hybridity of literary and oral-traditional strategies, but judging by the seavoyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood, metaphorical oral-connected idioms deserve further attention. With hybrid compositional strategies, poets interwove metaphor and oral-related metonym: the navis crucis concept and the traditional implications of the sea-voyage typescene, in the case of The Dream of the Rood, where we find a holmwudu that is also the Holy Cross. In Christ’s embrace the rood transforms from ordinary instrument of torture, a precursor to the grave, into the great vehicle—the navis crucis, the hero’s ship, and the sign of the Lord. This chapter’s analysis concludes one argument that moves through Signs That Sing: that Anglo-Saxon poets both wrote down oral-traditional idioms (traditional phraseology, themes, typescenes, and other recurrent patterns) and transformed them using interpretive approaches born of the reading practices of literate, monastic, and semimonastic Anglo-Saxon culture. The metaphorical use of oral-connected typescenes and themes— devouring-the-dead, lord-retainer, and poet-patron—reflects an interest in applying the metonymic referentiality of these themes to Christian narratives and ideology. With the process of metaphorization, poets composing in Old English displayed their skill at interweaving Christian narratives with the rhetorical power of these idioms. The oral-connected sea-voyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood represents how poets could manipulate oral-connected idioms for rhetorical effect, while assuming that their audiences would recognize a repurposed theme. In the next chapter I address another form of hybrid poetics—the verbalized ritual sign—which shares with oral-traditional signs the economy and inherited meanings of traditional metonymic referentiality.

Textbox 6.1

Motif sequence of the Sea Voyage in The Dream of the Rood A. Christ approaches the rood. Geseah ic þa Frean mancynnes efstan elne mycle  þæt he me wolde on gestigan. (33b–34) I saw the Lord of mankind hastening with great courage when he wished to mount me. B. The rood waits as if moored. Þær ic þa ne dorste  ofer Dryhtnes word bugan oððe berstan. . . . Ealle ic mihte feondas gefyllan,  hwæðre ic fæste stod. (35–36a, 37b–38) There I did not dare, against the Lord’s word, to bow or break. . . . I was able to fell the enemies entirely, yet I stood fast. C. Christ mounts the rood. Ongyrede hine þa geong hæleð. . . . . gestah he on gealgan heanne, modig on manigra gesyhðe,  þa he wolde mancyn lysan. (39a, 40b–41) The young hero then disarmed [or “undressed”] himself. . . . He mounted onto the high gallows, mighty in the sight of many, when he wished to free mankind.

D. The rood raises Christ up. Christ is on the rood. Rod wæs ic aræred.  Ahof ic ricne Cyning, heofona Hlaford. . . . . . . . sceadu forð eode, wann under wolcnum. . . . . Crist wæs on rode. (44–45a, 54b–55a, 56b) I, the rood, was raised up. I lifted the powerful King, the Lord of heavens. . . . A shadow went forth, dark under the clouds. . . . Christ was on the rood. E. Christ’s thanes lift him from the rood, leaving it behind. Hwæðere þær fuse  feorran cwoman to þam æðelinge.  Ic þæt eall beheold. Sare ic wæs mid [sorgum] gedrefed,  hnag ic hwæðre þam secgum to handa, eaðmod elne mycle.  Genamon hie þær ælmihtigne God, ahofon hine of ðam hefian wite.  Forleton me þa hilderincas standan steame bedrifenne. (57–62a) Yet there they eagerly came from afar to that prince. I beheld all that. Bitterly, I was stirred up with [sorrows], yet I, humble-minded with great courage, bowed to the hands of men. They took there the almighty God, and raised him off of that heavy punishment. The battle-warriors then left me standing covered with blood.

7 o

Signifying the Coming of Christ in The Advent Lyrics

We return now to the twelve poems of The Advent Lyrics to explore how they collectively merge art and prayer. The Advent Lyrics (also called Christ I) furnish us with the longest example of a poem that incorporates ritual signs in a sustained and meaningful way. The antiphons and prayers of Advent and Christmas seasons ring forth in this poem, metonymically bringing to bear their roles in the liturgy. The ritual signs of The Advent Lyrics represent the third kind of hybrid poetic signifier that I address. The twelve extant poems of The Advent Lyrics translate from Latin to Old English the liturgical antiphons of Advent, Christmas, and the Octave of Christmas. Each poetic translation of an antiphon augments the antiphonal structure: invocation, amplification, and petition (or appeal). The lyrics key the beginning of a paraphrase with the cry eala (translating the Latin “O”), which gives way to reflections upon an event in Christ’s story or the mystery of Christ before concluding with a prayer for salvation. Individual lyrics explore topics stemming from their antiphons, including the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy, Christ’s birth and his immanence in the world, the sacred city of Jerusalem, the Trinity, and various issues related to Christ’s three advents (his historical incarnation, the Day of Judgment, and his visits to the soul in the present moment).1 Because the lyrics are densely woven with biblical, typological, and patristic references, critics tend to read them as occasions for meditation and reflection, espe-

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cially regarding Christ’s past and future advents. By attending to the role of ritual signifiers in The Advent Lyrics, we see how vividly these lyrics tie past and future advents to the audience’s present moment. Using signifying practices that parallel oral-traditional ones, they employ liturgical language and imagery that bear witness to Christ’s advent in the hearts of the faithful. Other scholars have envisioned a mysterious and powerful connection between the antiphons and The Advent Lyrics, and, by extension, between the modes of representation in ritual and poetry.2 A collection of poems so thoroughly invested in the liturgy seems to obey a different set of rules regarding its generic and media boundaries. Patrick Conner suggests that the poet of The Advent Lyrics “tends to create psalms out of antiphons which inspired him” (“Religious Poetry” 265), a notion that changes verse into a sacred, communal act.3 In a similar vein, Roger Lass calls the sequence of twelve poems “more a poetical liturgy than anything else.” He elaborates by connecting The Advent Lyrics to a sacramental mode, in which “a symbol is made both temporally fluid and presently efficacious” (3).4 Dom Edward Burgert focuses on the act of composition, decrying the idea that the poet (whom he believes to be Cynewulf) drew his inspiration from an antiphonary at hand. Instead, he proposes a mode of inspiration that shares features with oral tradition and writing: [T]he sources became for him, as it were, living themes, and he proceeded to paraphrase them as living thoughts of his own inner self, stamped with his own religious views and emotions. The very order in which the paraphrases appear in the poem must then have been a natural one without any forced positions. They must flow, not indeed from a lifeless and cold list contained in any one book, but from the very life which the distinct members of the list receive in their proper liturgical setting. (54) Burgert’s comments usefully connect the poet’s experiences of liturgy with the composition of verse. Extrapolating from Burgert’s interpretation, I describe how the “living themes” of the liturgy can be integrated with other poetic expressions. When paraphrased in writing, the antiphons of Advent can refer metonymically to their enactment in the liturgy—just as oral-traditional expressions resound with meaning when they arise in a poetic register tuned, as it were, to oral performance. Both liturgical and

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oral-traditional signifiers develop within (and create anew) meaningful performances for communities—performances that use both verbal and bodily modes of communication. Like written oral-traditional expressions, the Old English paraphrases of liturgical antiphons and prayers would have been legible to Anglo-Saxon audiences who experienced them and knew their meaning in Latin. These audiences could hear and read a poem that resonates with liturgical significance, moving beyond the literal wording of the paraphrased antiphons and their associated exegetical commentary. The yearly process of singing or hearing the antiphons would transform how Anglo-Saxons—familiar with metonymy in Old English classical verse—hear and interpret a poem that reenacts them. In the next section I address how ritual can resound in verse by focusing on the similarity of idiomatic signs in oral traditions and rituals. In subsequent sections, I explore the aesthetic ramifications of ritual signs written in verse, by examining (a) the vernacular paraphrases of recurring liturgical words—the exclamation eala, the imperative cum, the adverb nu—and (b) the imagery of darkness and light, which parallels imagery conveyed in liturgical texts and also participants’ sensory experience in the liturgy. Each of these ritual signs contributes to the aesthetic and expressive power of The Advent Lyrics, while reinforcing a performative mode of reception that complements the contemplative. Invoking Ritual in Written Text On the importance of performance to ritual, Roy Rappaport writes that “In the absence of performance liturgical orders are dead letters inscribed in curious volumes, or insubstantial forms evaporating into the forgotten” (125). Since Victor Turner began to grapple with the process-oriented and dramatic nature of ritual, scholarship on ritual has underscored the importance of rituals’ performativity, which focuses participants upon the ritual unfolding in the present moment, even if it refers to the past or the future.5 With regard to performance, oral traditions and rituals share much common ground. Both engage participants in the creation and re-creation of communal traditions. They have a similar medium (voice, communal space) and mode (metonymic signs), making slippage between these modes of communication more likely.

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According to Catherine Bell, scholars of ritual who use performance theory focus on how performance creates and is created from “the emergent quality of ritual”: its progression in time, how words and gestures come and go, its fleetingness, and periodicity (Bell, Ritual: Perspectives 75).6 Enactment of a ritual literally makes the ritual. For ritual actors, the performance unites special narratives and attention to one’s own embodiment and participation in a collective. One goal of performance theory is “to show that ritual does what it does by virtue of its dynamic, diachronic, and physical characteristics, in contrast to those interpretations that cast ritual performances as the secondary realization or acting out of synchronic structures, tradition, or cognitive maps” (ibid.). This focus on ritual’s performative dimension attempts to rectify the perception that was engendered by earlier anthropological studies by structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss that the performances merely play out cultural codes that exist a priori to ritual (and await discovery by the academic researcher). Building on the insights of ritual theorists Bell and Rappaport, I make a case for performance and metonymy as shared features of ritual and oral-traditional expression. As a result, Old English poetry uses ritual signifiers imaginatively to re-create the “dynamic, diachronic, and physical characteristics” of ritual experience. When liturgical signs are read metonymically, they can direct us to specific, communal multisensory experiences of liturgy, and these experiences make use of the body, physical space, and the present moment. A written poem that refers to the liturgy does not automatically cue the ritual experiences of readers in a systematic way. The best conditions for written ritual signs require written oral-traditional poetry (or another metonymic, performative register of language) and audiences who regularly engage or have engaged in shared rituals. From the perspective of media dynamics, oral tradition bridges the textual (the poem inscribed in the Exeter Book) and the ritualistic (the antiphons that were performed during the liturgy at Advent, Christmas, and the Octave). As we have seen, numerous features suggest that poems of The Advent Lyrics are oral-connected works of verbal art employing the metonymic referentiality of an Old English oral tradition.7 When integrated with oral-connected poems, ritual signifiers can preserve their association with lived, emergent ritual processes. Poems

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composed in the vein of hybrid poetics take advantage of their audiences’ shared experience of an oral-traditional register. This register was developed for and through the crucible of live performance, and of liturgy, with its many-layered symbolic, metonymic, and performance-based expressions. Ritually connected signifiers in the Old English corpus include: paraphrases of psalms, antiphons, and other recurrent forms of verbalization; representations of styles of intonation; positions of the body relative to others in the liturgical rite; times of day or night; sequencing of events; the interiority of the church; and related sensory experiences. Written vernacular text served as a libretto that refers to and draws from the in situ, lived experiences of the performance of both oral Old English verse and of Christian liturgy. The mood associated with the time, place, and manner of the antiphons’ intonation influences The Advent Lyrics. Yet a relative paucity of evidence makes it difficult to claim exactly how, when, or even which of the antiphons were performed in Anglo-Saxon England. Jesse Billet surmises that until at least the late tenth century, the Anglo-Saxons used a “pre-Gregorian,” Roman repertory of Office chants.8 Of all the liturgical seasons in the Roman Church, Advent was the least formalized across all regions.9 During Alcuin of York’s lifetime (ca. 735–804), the AngloSaxons probably celebrated six Sundays of Advent, rather than the four Sundays observed on the Continent (Billet 225). From region to region, the content and order of the antiphons and responsories can slightly differ. Despite variability in the repertoire between Anglo-Saxons and the Continent, Billet reports that “even in the early years” of the late tenthcentury Benedictine reform, Anglo-Saxon monastics and secular clerics both followed the pattern of the secular cursus (227). This implies, for the Anglo-Saxon religious, a greater consistency in shared liturgical experiences. Following the Benedictine Reform, there was greater consistency in liturgical practices from region to region.10 What little can be surmised illuminates the paraphrased antiphons of The Advent Lyrics.11 Assuming that the Anglo-Saxons adhered generally to Roman practices, the O Antiphons and the Additional or Monastic Os were performed before and after the Magnificat at Vespers on the days leading up to Christmas (eight to ten days in advance).12 According to Prosper Guéranger the Antiphons were performed in this way:

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[P]arce que c’est sur le soir du monde, vergente mundi vespere, que le Messi est venue. On les chante à Magnificat, pour marquer que le Saveur que nous attendons nous viendra par Marie. (515) Because it is in the evening of the world, vergente mundi vespere, that the Messiah has arrived. We chant them at the Magnificat in order to mark that the Savior who we await will come to us by Mary.13 How modern scholars interpret Advent’s mood and attendant antiphons depends on which of the three advents constitute the focus of their discussion. Most characterize the anticipation of Christ’s birth (a dramatization of the historical past) and the Day of Judgment as a time of hope and fear. Guéranger emphasizes the intensity of the liturgical “now,” the anticipatory hush of the descending dark followed by liturgical voices thrumming in commemoration. Herbert Thurston refers to the Advent season as “a sort of winter Lent” (616), during which Te deum laudamus was omitted at Matins (Harper 103)—perhaps fostering a pregnant silence, an expectation of the presence and attending praise to come (Thurston 616–31; Harper). M. Bradford Bedingfield expands upon the association between Advent and Lent: “[Advent’s] primary function is parallel to that of Lent, to provide a period of reflection and anticipation before the celebration of Christmas” (217). Thurston, however, emphasizes the uplifted mood of Advent, “we do not find any great insistence on penitential themes. The dominant note is a certain joyful anticipation of the coming of Christ” (617)—a sentiment notably infrequent among literary scholars considering the relationship between The Advent Lyrics and antiphons. I find that in The Advent Lyrics expressions of hope and wonder, in concord with the hopeful anticipation invoked by the antiphons, strongly counterpoint the woe of those lines that reflect upon the sinfulness of humanity, the dark exile that is hell, and the possibility of eternal damnation on Judgment Day. A joyful or anticipatory mood seems especially fitting for the one who awaits Christ’s visitation to the soul.14 While it is not clear from Thurston’s account whether he is speaking of Anglo-Saxon or later medieval (Sarum) practices, his description of the “pomp and circumstance” at Advent underscores the importance that was accorded to the Advent season; this included the ringing of bells, as one

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would on feast days, and the privilege “especially in monasteries” attached to intoning the O Antiphons (627).15 Indeed, Guéranger asserts that the antiphons tied solely to this season “contiennent toute la moelle de la liturgie de l’Avent” (33; contain the marrow of the Advent liturgy). The intoning of antiphons may have been nearer to song than speech. Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote, concerning the dedication of a double minster to the Virgin Mary: “(on this day each year) may antiphons strike the ear with their pleasing harmonies and the singing of psalms reverberate from twin choirs. . . . Brothers, let us praise God in harmonious voice, and let the throngs of nuns also burst forth in continual psalmody!” (Lapidge and Rosier 48–49; see also Foot 191). Although Aldhelm’s directives concern the dedication of a West Saxon church, they describe an ideal performance upon a special occasion in the temporale: harmonious song reverberating with gusto between two choirs. The term “antiphon” fits the twinning and echoing manner of their performance and extends the “sounding against” that occurs in most liturgies when antiphons are paired with psalms and the Magnificat.16 Antiphons may have been sung or intoned more often during the early medieval period than they are now in the Roman Catholic Church. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, before the Council of Trent in 1545, there was greater diversity in the intonation of antiphons: It is said to have originated with Pope Celestine I (432) who ordained that the Psalms of David be sung antiphonally before the beginning of the Mass. The verse serving as the antiphon text would be repeated on an independent melody after every verse of the psalm, which was sung to the end in that manner unless the celebrant gave the signal to the prior chorae to intone the doxology, with which the psalm ended, and after which the litany or Kyrie followed. Later, as the preliminary ceremonies which this elaborate performance was intended to accompany became shorter, the antiphon would be repeated after every second, third, or fourth verse of the psalm, before and after the Gloria Patri and after the Sicut erat.17 Rather than occurring just before and just after the Magnificat, an Advent antiphon intoned in Anglo-Saxon England was probably intertwined with it, returning after each line, both framing and filling the Magnificat. The vernacular translations of the antiphons in The Advent Lyrics behave

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similarly, since they thread through a lyric, arising, then disappearing, and resurfacing. In the hybrid medium of the oral- and ritual-connected manuscript poem, ritual features behave metonymically, just as oral-traditional idioms do.18 John Miles Foley’s theory of immanent art, which describes the metonymic referentiality of oral-traditional signs, helps analyze ritual poetics in medieval verse.19 As we have seen, the theory of immanent art explains how a recurring phrase, theme, or typescene may summon a host of implications immanent to the communal, recurrently experienced tradition of performed verbal art. These implications are informationally denser and more complex than the denotations of everyday speech. Unlike words and phrases deemed aesthetically significant in most forms of literate verse, oral-traditional signs do not derive their import from allusions (intertextuality) nor from resonance within a particular work’s field of semantic and acoustic associations (idiolect). They derive meaning from their recurring usage in a specific tradition of verbal art, just as ritual signs do. When applied to ritual signs, the theory of immanent art would treat ritual as a practice that mobilizes bodies and artifacts to create events laden with meaning.20 For ritual participants, ritualized actions and words (like their oral-traditional kin) are invested with significance that seems more potent than everyday actions and words. Such “potency” is due to the narrow focus of their performance-tailored registers. Rappaport explains with regard to the explicit and tacit requirements that structure how participants engage in ritual: “It follows that the acceptance of an order, because it is in its nature highly restrictive, is therefore more socially consequential and significant than the affirmation of a more or less unrestrictive code” (127).21 Accepting a ritual order means accepting the traditional ramifications that have accrued to it. For instance, kneeling when praying—in a position of servitude, humility, and vulnerability—can indicate the dedication of the body and mind to the object of prayer and to the ritual tradition itself. According to Bell, the ritual process accords symbols with their sacrality, and allows them to index a system or experience “of a greater, higher, or more universalized reality—the group, the nation, humankind, the power of God, or the balance of the cosmos” (Bell, Ritual: Perspectives 159). Like Rappaport, she argues that the expressivity of ritual symbols depends upon ritual practice: “in actuality, ritual-like action effectively creates the sacred

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by explicitly differentiating such a realm from a profane one” (157). The material and verbal characteristics of rituals index not only the traditional, communal practices that give rise to them but also a cosmos suffused by the “sacred.” Rappaport’s explanation of ritual significance dovetails with the theory of immanent art, because he explains that such physical symbols draw their potency from the same sacred or extra-mundane tradition that they performatively create. In addition to the relevance of liturgical and ritual studies to an interpretation of The Advent Lyrics, a focus on ritual signs highlights the important role of the poem’s present moment or the “sacramental now.” In contrast, studies of The Advent Lyrics that focus primarily on scriptural and patristic sources underscore the historical Advent of Christ and his Second Coming, the past and the future (for example, Cook, Christ of Cynewulf, and Burlin, Old English Advent). Their readings trace a web of intertextual relationships. Albert S. Cook, whose 1900 study of the lyrics was one of the first to bring to light their relationship to the Advent antiphons,22 investigates sources and analogues. Cook notes, for instance, that the phrase leoman onlyhte (illumine with light) at line 204 is a reference to Luke 1:35, and has parallels in the Heliand and the Blickling Homilies (Cook 99). Most follow in Cook’s footsteps by regarding the antiphons as an a priori cognitive map that inspired the composition of The Advent Lyrics rather than as signs resonant with the “dynamic, diachronic, and physical characteristics” of The Advent Lyrics, which mediate and shape the poem’s significance.23 Studies of time in the lyrics tend to examine its representation through the lens of textual sources—the patristic and scriptural. The liturgical, including instances of the Advent antiphons themselves, seems to be treated as an expression of the theological. As a result, such studies privilege the biblical past and the future domes dæg over the experiential “now” of liturgical participants and the poem’s audience. By looking at the poem’s relationship to the liturgical antiphons, we will discover how it represents sacred time in the present moment—a present that either belongs at any point within the calendrical year of the audience or, if it is read paraliturgically during Advent or Christmas, a present that corresponds to the liturgical time invoked by the paraphrased antiphons. The liturgical antiphons, whose proper sphere is performance, viva voce, turn attention to the present without eclipsing awareness of past and future advents.

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By referring to the span of sacred history marked by the three advents of Christ, the lyrics represent multiple layers of time in a single typological image or phrase: his impending (historical) birth, his immanence in the present moment, and his eventual return in judgment at domes dæg. Typology, the main subject of Robert B. Burlin’s study, effectively evokes for the cognoscenti symbolically linked sacramental moments in the past, present, and future. Typology has been a means for Christian commentators to appropriate and reframe the books of the Jewish bible, so that the narratives of the Old Testament prefigure Christ’s narrative and invest the Bible with a greater sense of cohesion. Burlin explains the relationship between type and antitype: “When St. Paul refers to Adam as ‘a foreshadowing [typos] of him that was to come’ (Rom. 5:14; ‘forma futuri’ in the Vulgate), he has in mind a ‘pattern or model for Christ.’ The ‘type’ looks toward the incarnate Christ, the ‘Second Adam,’ Who within history reverses the ‘form’ of Adam’s behavior” (7–8). Eve and the Virgin Mary supply us with another example of the type-antitype relationship. Mary is designated via typology to be the “new Eve,” promised by God in Genesis 3:15, whose “seed” would crush Lucifer’s head. Using typology, Burlin explains that the “we” in Lyric II who “sittað sorgende, sunnan wenað, / hwonne us liffrea leoht ontyne” (26–27; sit sorrowing, hoping for the sun, when the Lord of life will open light in [or “for” or “upon”] us) represents “the Patriarchs and the Prophets in limbo, but the manner of presentation is highly suggestive and relates the historic situation to the present, existential condition of the Christian, participating in the liturgical expression of the Advent” (Burlin 76). The Patriarchs and Prophets awaiting the Harrowing of Hell prefigure “elliptically, subtly” Christians hoping for “redemptive grace within the individual soul” (77). Discussions of time in The Advent Lyrics stress the biblical past and the ordained future, illuminating its references to type and antitype, but they take measure of the poem’s references to the present moment in passing. Burlin’s study periodically draws attention to the relationship between biblical antitype and the present-day, living type. The “typological imagination,” as Burlin calls it, may extend beyond the usual pairing of an Old Testament antitype and a New Testament type, and have a moral, tropological application in the present. But the majority of his investigation focuses on a scriptural typology located in the past and projected into the future, for both an Anglo-Saxon and present-day audience, whereas my

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examination of ritual signs demonstrates how the lyrics focus on their audience’s present moment. The antiphonal paraphrases that weave through each of the lyrics tie the advent(s) of Christ to the liturgical now. Susan Rankin has shown how the lyrics progress through the liturgical cycle: from the weeks and days preceding Christ’s nativity to the nativity itself and the Octave of Christmas, which falls a week after Christmas:24 As a cycle, they [The Advent Lyrics] have a rhythm corresponding to that part of the liturgical year which they follow: a long period of waiting (Lyrics I–X), a short time of intense emotional reaction at Christmas (Lyric XI), and, afterwards, a time for comprehension of the Christmas events, before the feast of the Epiphany (Lyric XII). (336)25 The poem connects to a liturgical present using antiphons anchored in liturgical time. See textbox 7.1 at the end of this chapter for the titles of the antiphons associated with the extant twelve lyrics. Thus, via the features of performance and metonymic signification, the oral-connected Advent Lyrics incorporate liturgical language in translation and summon the liturgy’s metonymic associations. Features of the liturgy pass into the oral-traditional register without being wholly transmuted (just as features of oral-traditional composition may be inscribed without losing their “affective dynamics”).26 Ritual signification can also enhance the study of oral traditions, since many draw from and pair with annual, seasonal, or otherwise recurrent rituals. Such rituals typically favor relatively invariant sayings—which must be performed within the context of the ritual to be meaningful—over flexible ones. These sayings, like their oral-traditional cousins, signify metonymically. Additionally, in ritual performances, the participants’ postures and gestures, special settings, music, scents, and other nonverbal signs work metonymically. Next, I examine several ritualistic features of antiphons and their performance that have crossed over from the liturgy to The Advent Lyrics in aesthetically meaningful ways. We will first see how powerful recurring words in the O and Additional antiphons of Advent have been treated in this vernacular poem, including the Old English exclamation eala (lo, alas, or oh), the verb cuman (to come), and its partner nu (now). The poem connects these evocative words with Advent and Christmas liturgies,

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while reordering and magnifying their occurrence in verse. The chapter concludes by connecting imagery of light and dark to their role in Advent and Christmas liturgies. Words and images drawn from Christian liturgy animate the vernacular, creating a hybrid medium that is simultaneously literate, oral-connected, and ritualistic. Eala: Invocation of Performance From lyric to lyric the use of eala, Old English for the Latin word O, occurs with a consistency that is uncommon in a poetic tradition that prizes synonyms and variation. Eala, representing the same mixture of awe and terror as the Latin interjection O, begins every complete lyric and was probably employed in the missing lines of Lyric I. The cry of Eala!, paired with the subject of Advent, immediately signals to a listener well versed in the liturgy that The Advent Lyrics invoke the antiphons of Advent. All of the antiphons of Advent, whether Great Os or Additional “monastic” Os, mark their onset with the cry O. Eala initiates a performative frame for each lyric, what Richard Bauman calls a special key to performance. Eala serves as a strong signal for performativity for two reasons: it paraphrases antiphons that live in liturgical performance (rather than the two-dimensional medium of an antiphonal) and other instances of eala in Old English poetry belong to speech acts. According to a search of the Dictionary of Old English corpus, there are 1,239 occurrences of eala in extant manuscripts (including variants æla, æala, ealla, and ealæ), fifty-nine of which occur in works labeled as verse. These fifty-nine occurrences of eala either begin or stress a unit of self-consciously performed speech, often using a vocative form of address.27 The performative voicing of The Advent Lyrics is also prominent in its many speeches: praise, petitions, the dialogue between Joseph and Mary, and the vernacular Sanctus of Lyric XI.28 The lyrics modulate between invocation, amplification, and petition (or appeal), largely because they are modeled on antiphons, which follow a similar trajectory.29 Beginning each lyric, eala inaugurates a performative matrix, integral to both oral tradition and ritual. Where these constitute distinct categories, eala mediates between them. In the context of The Advent Lyrics, eala enacts a vernacular “O,” extending the awe associated with this term to every lyric, including Lyrics XI and XII, although they have no

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direct ties to O antiphons per se. The parallel structures of the antiphons and the lyrics, likewise, invest the lyrics with sacral associations. Variations on Cuman: A Prayer for Christ’s Presence The employment in The Advent Lyrics of the verb cuman has received far less attention than eala, even though forms of cuman occur in eleven of the twelve lyrics (see textboxes 7.2 and 7.3). The consistency of cuman’s appearance makes theological and aesthetic sense, given the subject of the poem. The key to understanding the repeated use of cuman lies in the antiphons themselves. All of the seven great Os of Advent incorporate the appeal to Christ, veni or “come,” which begins the petition section.30 Rankin explains how the prominence of the veni phrase is supported musically, underscoring its importance in the O antiphons: “An interesting musical characteristic is the pairing of the opening phrase with that beginning veni, thus providing musical reinforcement for the appeal veni, and articulating the whole structure” (330). The veni phrases would have been familiar to an audience who heard the antiphons performed seasonally. The seven “Great Os” form the mainstay of the Advent antiphons: O sapientia, O Adonay, O radix, O clavis, O oriens, O rex gentium, and O Emmanuel, always appear without exception in any series. As they form a distinct and coherent stylistic group, it has been generally assumed (as first implied by Amalarius) that they were composed by one person. (328–29)31 They so consistently occur together in antiphonaries that Burgert, Burlin, and Rankin have supported the proposition that three missing poems, corresponding to the three unparaphrased Great Os, must have headed the currently acephalous Advent Lyrics.32 The additional or so-called monastic Os, which often appended the Great Os in antiphonaries, do not incorporate the veni petition in the imperative with the same consistency. Nevertheless, each additional or monastic advent antiphon, except O uirgo uirginum, contains either a version of the verb venire or its synonym.33 (See textboxes 7.2 and 7.3.) Because some lyrics (such as III) closely translate not only the content of an antiphon but also its grammatical and rhetorical structure, such scholars as Stanley B. Greenfield have searched for degrees of literal pre-

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cision in the translation of every antiphon.34 Where the petitions have been translated via subjunctives in Lyrics I, II, and V, Greenfield labels them “indirect.” Such an approach assumes that the lyrics should be, in part, translations of sources and that their interpretation depends on their degree of adherence to Latin exemplars. This position leads Greenfield to claim that, for example, petitions occur indirectly in lyrics that clearly contain petitions.35 Such convolution can be avoided by interpreting the lyrics as poems that actively express ritual signs, which refer to and express specific liturgical prayers. Thus The Advent Lyrics—as traditional poetic enactments that metonymically cue the antiphons and liturgy of Advent, Christmas, and Octave—do not present word-for-word translations that reflect the exact grammatical structure and semantic content of the Latin antiphons. More interestingly, The Advent Lyrics draw on the audience’s knowledge of the veni plea in the O antiphons to both meet and delay expectations. As is evident by comparing textboxes 7.2, 7.3, and 7.5, the Old English poem uses forms of cuman to express the Latin venire and its synonyms in eleven of the twelve lyrics (all except Lyric VII, whose rhetorical structure—a conversation between Joseph and Mary—has led scholars to label it the “Passus”). Rarely do the grammatical forms of cuman match those of venire. Cuman follows an arc through the twelve poems that delays expectation of the imperative cum. As a reader or an auditor progresses through the lyrics, the forms of cuman shift from the subjunctive and indicative (mostly in the present and implied future) to audible paraphrases of the Advent O antiphons—imperatives set within a plea. These are the three phrases with the imperative form of cuman in the form of petitions to Christ (the verb in bold). “Nu þu sylfa cum, / heofones heahcyning.” (VI.149b–50a) Cum, nu, sigores weard, / meotod moncynnes, (VIII.243b–44a) Cym nu, hæleþa cyning, / ne lata to lange. (X.372b–73a)36 Although other pleas using imperatives arise in The Advent Lyrics (in I, III, and IV), the veni paraphrases do not arrive until Lyrics VI, VIII, and X, which sequentially and narratively represent the culmination of Advent. An audience aware of the antiphonal paraphrases would await their inclusion. The audience’s expectations would be at first frustrated and then fulfilled in a manner that sets hope delayed against hope realized. In do-

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ing so, the poem structurally achieves the strange temporal fragmentation characterizing Advent in the temporale: a time of expectation for an immanence that has already occurred, still occurs, and will occur. Liturgical signifiers—here, the veni phrase—unfold like a traditional theme whose integral motifs create referential links and expectations about the subsequent narrative or spoken text. Nu: The Liturgical Now For an audience familiar with the antiphons, what Burlin calls a “liturgically-sophisticated audience,” the Old English paraphrases would be evident (180). The desire for Christ’s approach intensifies as the lyrics progress because of the repetition of the imperative cum (cym) and the pairing of this plea with nu (now). The affective power of the veni plea, translated as nu cum would reverberate in the lyrics, potentially calling to mind all of the bodily associations of Advent at Vespers: the early dark, the anticipation of light, the voice or voices intoning the chant, and the sacramental space of the church. Moreover, all of these associations are being carried by the performative medium of an oral-connected poetics. How the imperative phrases recur follows the contours of traditional phraseology: the cum phrases are consistently b-verses with the verb in the initial or final position, and in two instances name the subject of the imperative with a genitive plus nominative phrase. The imperatives and nu (now) appear in bold. . . . suslum geslæhte: “Nu þu sylfa cum, / heofones heahcyning.” (VI.149–50a) . . . sweotule geseþan. Cum, nu, sigores weard, / meotod moncynnes, (VIII.243–44a) . . . hwearfiað heanlice. Cym nu, hæleþa cyning, / ne lata to lange. (X.372–73a) Because the nu cum (or cum nu) phrase occurs in the b-verse, it exhibits a certain amount of plasticity that enables the phrase to fit its environment. No instance of cum or nu participates in the stressed alliterating syllables, the metrical mainframe, of each line of verse. Instead, one hears hyper-alliteration that crosses extra-metrically from one line of verse to the next. Cum is linked with the second lexeme in

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compound words: cum and cyning, cum and cynnes, and cym and cyning. In the third instance, nu and ne may be examples of hyper-alliteration. Here the metrically regular alliterating phonemes are italicized; the lexemes belonging to and extra-metrically alliterating with the nu cym plea appear in bold. . . . suslum geslæhte: “Nu þu sylfa cum, / heofones heahcyning.” (VI.149–50a) . . . sweotule geseþan. Cum, nu, sigores weard, / meotod moncynnes, (VIII.243–44a) . . . hwearfiað heanlice. Cym nu, hæleþa cyning, / ne lata to lange. (X.372–73a) Perhaps the whole ritual-traditional phrase includes a b-verse with cum and nu and nonmetrical alliteration with a lexeme in the following verse. If meaning follows form in the first two instances, then the phrases express the desired reunion of cyning and cynn (king and people). The poem does not employ cuman to meet metrical demands; instead the verb phrase serves as acoustic ornamentation, rhetorical flourish, and, most important, ritualistic invocation. These formal features make The Advent Lyrics’ employment of the nu cum/cum nu phrase markedly different from occurrences of this phrase in the rest of the corpus. A search of the Old English Dictionary corpus reveals the nu cum phrase to be relatively common. It appears in the metrical Lord’s Prayer: “Cum nu and mildsa, mihta waldend” and in numerous prose passages from the Bible and various homilies. Both poetic context and links with the Advent antiphons make these statements in The Advent Lyrics iconic, rather than examples of “mere” translation, everyday speech, or phrases that exist only to satisfy the exigencies of Old English meter. The nu cum phrases behave like the verbal units described by Foley as oral-traditional words that tradition bearers may “inflect” with regard to context. These speech units, which are idiomatic to specific traditions of verbal art, may suit the established poetic meter, allow a poet to compose efficiently, and create opportunities for playing with audience expectations. By employing cuman in nearly every lyric, in particular the powerful imperatives of Lyrics VI, VIII, and X, The Advent Lyrics make immanent the petition phrases of the Advent antiphons in the liturgical register while fashioning a poetic idiolect congruent with the traditional phraseology of Old English verse. I am calling

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this congruency—the passage of ritual phraseology into oral-traditional phraseology—specifically “ritual poetics” and more generally an example of the hybrid poetics of Old English poetry. The summoning in oral-connected verse of ritual phrases, even in translated and re-constituted forms, enacts both the orthodox sense of such phrases, as well as the performative, bodily, emotional, and communal experience of ritual that anchors its participants in the present moment. In this case the liturgical present opens up the process of seeking for and receiving the fullness of divine presence. Through the sacramentalization of time in the liturgy, ritual markers such as the verb cum (recalling veni) may invoke a transcendence of time associated with the presence of God. The liturgy of the temporale, to which the Advent antiphons belong, stitches sacred history to the present moment. According to Matias Augé in the Handbook for Liturgical Studies: “The liturgy of the Church, while it celebrates the mystery of the eternally present Christ, historicizes its various moments and recalls them at particular points during the course of the year. . . . Such cosmic elements and phenomena serve as vehicles for the mystery that is celebrated” (321). During Advent, the tension between the desire for Christ’s presence and the mystery of that already immanent presence becomes most dramatized. For Mircea Eliade, Christianity breaks from ancient and polytheistic forms of religion by infusing history (rather than the sacred time of origins) with the sacred, by locating the sacred in specific historical moments: “Christianity radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time, and this is due to the fact that Christianity affirms the historicity of the person of Christ” (72). Nevertheless, from Eliade’s perspective, all sacred rituals create “a break in profane temporal duration” (72) so that sacred time “from one point of view, can be homologized to eternity” (70). In sacred ritual, the eternal may be made present without being reduced to the present tense. By shifting between multiple historical points in sacred history and the future, The Advent Lyrics stress not only typology but also the presence of Christ both in time and transcending time. The antiphon’s ritual poetics as it arises in The Advent Lyrics—in forms of eala, cuman, and also nu—underscores the presence of the Christian God who exists within and beyond time. The prevalence of nu, meaning “now,” in The Advent Lyrics knits together the auditor’s present and what Lass calls “the ‘liturgical present,’

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the eternal ‘now’ of prayer” (7). No other Old English poem repeats nu with the frequency and insistence of The Advent Lyrics. It arises no less than twenty-nine times in the course of 439 lines.37 More than metrical filler, nu grounds the auditor in liturgical time. Sometimes paired with imperative phrases (as with the nu cum phrases above), it focuses the poem’s many references to the past and the future upon a sacramental now. For example: • Lyric I: The speaker implores God, Gesweotula nu þurh searocræft (9a; reveal now through wise-skill). • Lyric III: Jerusalem is addressed with Sioh nu sylfa (59a; look now yourself). • Lyric X: The prayer Ara nu onbehtum (370a; have mercy now on [your] servants) joins the phrase cym nu, hæleþa cyning (372b; come now, king of men). • Lyric IX: Petitions to Mary use parallel syntactic structures: Iowa us nu þa are (VIII.335a; Show us now that grace) and Geþinga us nu (X.342a; Intercede now for us). The petitions to Mary in Lyric IX, which Greenfield calls “invented” because the O mundi Domina does not have a plea (245), take advantage of the poem’s nu + imperative structure. The primary rhetorical difference between the half-line petitions to Christ and the ones to Mary dwells in the replacement of an epithet with the pronoun “us,” perhaps underscoring the role of Mary as intermediary between the divine and human. It seems fitting that nu joins so many of the poem’s imperatives, since the imperative form inhabiting the speaker’s present tense reaches out as prayer toward sacred figures. The Advent Lyrics also stress the present in echoic half-lines: Nu is þæt bearn cymen (III.66b; now that child is come), Nu is rodera weard (VI.134b; now is the guardian of the heavens), and “nu us hælend god / wærfæst onwrah” (XI.383b–84a; now the healing God, covenant-fast, revealed [himself] to us), which momentarily witness the presence of the Christian God. The Dark of Advent and Christmas Sunrise Light imagery surfaces in The Advent Lyrics in the gleaming thread that winds through Lyrics II, IV, VII, and IX, where God is the one who leoht

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ontyne (27b; disclosed light) so that Christ himself could be þa beorhtan lac (292b; the bright gift) of Mary’s womb, conceived of God’s light. Lyrics V and VIII dwell upon the metaphor of the sun for the tripartite God, Lyric V focusing on the O Oriens antiphon and Lyric VIII describing the division of light and dark at Creation. The image of the rising sun grows especially vivid in the lines of Lyric V that paraphrase the beginning of the O Oriens antiphon: Eala earendel,  engla beorhtast, ofer middangeard  monnum sended, ond soðfæsta  sunnan leoma, torht ofer tunglas,  þu tida gehwane of sylfum þe  symle inlihtes! (V.104–8) O, Erendel, brightest of angels, sent to men in the middle-realm, and truth-fast radiance of the sun, bright beyond the stars, you ever illuminate, of yourself, each of eras. J. E. Cross explicates the sun imagery of Lyric V, stating that just as the fires of the sun impart heat and radiance, so God manifests in the forms of the Holy Ghost and Christ. From the perspective of ritual poetics, the poem represents a theological understanding of God, as well as a bodily understanding that arises in the context of liturgical ritual. The darkness in the following lines from Lyric V, which paraphrase the petition of the O Oriens antiphon, could parallel the experience of liturgical participants who intoned or listened to the Advent antiphon after sunset. [S]wa þec nu for þearfum  þin agen geweorc bideð þurh byldo,  þæt þu þa beorhtan us sunnan onsende  ond þe sylf cyme þæt ðu inleohte  þa þe longe ær, þrosme beþeahte  ond in þeostrum her, sæton sinneahtes;  synnum bifealdne deorc deaþes sceadu  dreogan sceoldan. (V.112–18) So now in need, your own work boldly prays that you send the bright sun to us, and come yourself that you may illumine those who long

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before were enveloped by smoke and here in darkness sat for an eternal night; enmeshed in sins, we had to endure dark death’s shadow. The vernacular paraphrase semantically rhymes with the Latin veni et illumina sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis; the image of souls in the dark awaiting Christ’s light chimes with the sensual experience of those in the dark awaiting day. Spiritual state and physical state, liturgical rites and poetic expression, are in concord.38 According to Bedingfield, the Vigil Mass of Christmas Eve emphasizes the coming “light” of God. He quotes the antiphons for Vespers from the Leofric Collectar: Super psalmos [Ant]. Iudea et Heirusalem, nolite timere, cras egrediemini et dominus erit vobiscum. Ant. Orietur sicut sol salvator mundi et descendet in uterum virginis sicut ymber super gramen, alleluia. Ant. Dum ortis fuerit sol de celo, videbitis regem regum procedentum tamquam sponso de thalamo suo. Ant. Gaude et letare, Hierusalem, quia rex tuus venit tibi, de quo prophete praedixerunt, quem angeli semper adorant, cui cherubin et searphin sanctus sanctus sanctus proclamant.39 The Anglo-Saxon Christmas liturgy constitutes “a dramatic liturgical reenactment of the experience of those awaiting and hearing the news of Christ’s birth” (26).40 Bedingfield emphasizes light’s role in the first and second Christmas masses, in particular the return of the Gloria after its absence during Advent and also the coincidence of the second Mass with sunrise: “The Concordia specifies that the second Christmas Mass, the Morrow Mass (In Aurora) must be said in the early dawn, and it suggests ways to rearrange the offices to make sure” (28). Bedingfield traces the importance of a dawn Mass to a similar practice at Easter, arguing “the explicit connection between Christmas and Easter heightens the importance of light at Christmas, marking Christmas sunrise as both the new light given to those who had dwelt in darkness and a precursor of the light of the Risen Christ” (29). A potentially synchronous experience of sunrise and the spiritual advent of Christ in the soul is intimated in Lyric VIII. It develops the meta-

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phor that makes the celestial sun of this mortal, physical world a mere reflection of the spiritual “sun” (Son), dispersing the shadows of sin and death. In Lyric VIII the separation of light from darkness at Creation is a type for the incarnation, which reveals spiritual light to all people. Lyric XI, which as the “Christmas Lyric” portrays the fulfillment of the promise of Advent, celebrates the radiant, sun-like qualities of Christ’s presence in nearly every line. This creates a dazzle of imagery reminiscent of the sunrise in the Christmas liturgy. The angelic Seraphim, who throng about God in heaven, are in leoht (400b; in the light), a phrase that recalls the inlihtes and inleohte of Lyric V.41 The vernacular Sanctus in Lyric XI uses the strategy of elaboration to supplement with phrases that depict God’s sunlike qualities (light and highness): beorht mid bearnum and þe in heahþum sie (412a, 414b; bright among men; to you may be on high). This sequence of lyrics brings to fruition the plea in Lyric V for the shining presence of the sunne/sunu (sun/Son), stating: “Eala seo wlitige . . . nu us hælend god / wærfæst onwrah þæt we hine witan moton” (378a, 383b–84; O radiant one . . . now the healing God, covenant-fast, revealed [himself] to us so that we would be permitted to know him). Lyric XI’s commemoration of Christ’s birth and presence parallels Bedingfield’s description of the performance of the Morrow Mass on Christmas. The repetition of iam (now) in this liturgy evokes a powerful synchronicity between lived sensual experience and recognition of Christ’s eternal immanence: “the repeated Iam, playing on the coincidence with sunrise, and emphasizing the direct participation of the celebrants, such that, seeing the sun rise, they are also seeing Christ coming ‘to illuminate us’” (30). One note that the lyrics chime, alongside all of their numerous references to past and future events, is the desire for and celebration of a sacramental now that is lit from within, as it were, by the immanent Christ. A ritual poetics should be understood to invoke specific experiential aspects of liturgy. The implication for The Advent Lyrics is that the poem does not simply meditate upon the Advent and Christmas liturgies; it invokes the experience of Christ’s immanence, both deferred and present. Conner writes, “the major function of the religious dimension of Old English poetry is to reference the ceremonial and ineffable from the position of the temporal and commonplace” (“Religious Poetry” 256). Vernacular, traditional verse can “mediate between the ceremonial and the ordinary” (ibid. 257).

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Significantly, when Old English verse “references” liturgy, it summons the many experiential (bodily, emotional, cognitive, presumably spiritual, and social) dimensions of Christian liturgy. Such recognizable features of the Advent and Christmas liturgies as paraphrases of antiphons and the Sanctus, recurring use of particularly emblematic terms (eala, cuman, and nu), and imagery of darkness and light that accords with liturgical practice, serve to intensify liturgical associations between The Advent Lyrics and the Advent and birth of Christ. Not least of these liturgical associations is deep attentiveness to the present moment of the sacramental “now.” The lyrics wield all of these ritual signifiers to focus on both anticipation and recognition of the fulfillment of the promise of God’s presence in the world.

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The Liturgical antiphons associated with the twelve extant Lyrics Except when noted, these are the antiphonal pairings first suggested by Albert Cook in The Christ of Cynewulf. There is now a general consensus on all of the antiphonal companions to the lyrics, except number XI. The Great Os or the O Antiphons of Advent appear in bold. Lyric I: O Rex gentium (O King of peoples) Lyric II: O Clavis David (O Key of David) Lyric III: O Ierusalem (O Jerusalem) Lyric IV: O virgo virginum (O virgin of virgins) Lyric V: O Oriens (O Rising Sun / Dayspring) Lyric VI: O Emmanuel (O Emmanuel) Lyric VII: O Ioseph a (O Joseph) Lyric VIII: O Rex pacifice (O peaceful King) Lyric IX: O mundi Domina (O Lady of the world) Lyric X: O celorum Domine b (O Lord of heaven) Lyric XI: O beata et benedicta and Te jure laudant;c Laudemus Dominum;d Christmas Office: “antiphon series: Quem uidistis, Angelus ad pastores, Facta est cum angelo, Pastores dicite or Paruulus filius, and the Benedictus antiphon Gloria in excelsis Deo” e Lyric XII: O admirabile commercium f (O marvelous transaction) Notes Note: Beechy in “Eala Earendel: Extraordinary Poetics in Old English Verse” provides a list of the antiphons and their Old English equivalents (4–5). a. Hill, “Liturgical Source.” b. Tugwell, 34. c. Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf. d. Burgert proposed this (attested) source for Lyric XI. e. Rankin, “The Liturgical Background,” 335. f. Moore, 226–27.

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Lyrics that paraphrase the Great O antiphons, imperative forms of venire in bold Lyric I: O Rex gentium et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis qui facis utraque unum: veni, et salva hominem quem de limo formasti. (O King of the gentiles and the desire thereof, the cornerstone that makes both one: come and save man whom you have made from dust.) Lyric II: O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel, qui aperis et nemo claudit; claudis et nemo aperit: veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis. (O Key of David, and scepter of the house of Israel, who opens and no man shuts; who shuts and no man opens: come and lead the captive from prison, sitting in darkness and the shadow of death.) Lyric V: O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol justitiae: veni et illumina sedentem in tenebris et umbra mortis. (O Rising Sun, you are the splendor of eternal light and the sun of justice: come and illuminate those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.) Lyric VI: O Emmanuel, rex et legifer noster, exspectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Dominus Deus noster. (O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver, the longing of peoples and their savior: come and save us, our Lord God.)

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Lyrics that paraphrase the Additional Os, forms of venire in bold and synonyms underlined Lyric III: O Ierusalem, civitas Dei summi: leva in circuitu oculos tuos, et vide Dominum tuum, quia jam veniet solvere te a vinculis. (O Jerusalem, city of supreme God: lift your eyes round about, and see your Lord, for he comes to free you from chains.) Lyric IV: O virgo virginum, quomodo fiet istud, quia nec primam similem visa es nec habere sequentem? Filiae Jerusalem, quid me admiramini? Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis. (O virgin of virgins, how can this be, that before you there was none like you and after none will be? Daughters of Jerusalem, why do you marvel at me? What you see is a divine mystery.) Lyric VII: O Ioseph, quomodo credidisti quo antea expavisti? Quid enim? In ea natum est de Spiritu Sancto quem Gabriel annuncians Christum esse venturum. (O Joseph, why did you believe what before you feared? Why indeed? Begotten in her by the Holy Spirit is the one whom Gabriel announced would be the coming Christ.) Lyric VIII: O Rex pacifice, tu ante saecula nate, per auream egredere portam: redemptos tuos visita, et eos illuc revoca unde ruerunt per culpam. (O King of peace, born before all ages, depart through the golden gate: visit whom you have redeemed, and [lead] them back to the place they once lost through sin.) Lyric IX: O mundi Domina, regio ex semine orta, ex tuo jam Christus processit alvo, tanquam sponsus de thalamo; hic jacet in praesepio qui et sidera regit. (O Lady of the world, sprung from royal seed, from your womb Christ has come forth, like a bridegroom from his bridal chamber; here in a crib lies the one who rules the stars.) Lyric X: O caelorum Domine, qui cum Patre sempiternus es una cum Sancto Spiritu, audi tuo famulos; veni ad salvandum nos, jam noli tardare. (O Lord of heaven, who with the Father everlasting is one with the Holy Spirit, listen to your servants; come to save us without delay.)

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Lyrics that paraphrase antiphons falling on Christmas and Octave of Christmas Lyric XI (two Trinitarian antiphons and one for the Votive Office of the Angels) O beata et benedicta et gloriosa Trinitas, Pater et Filius et Spiritus sanctus. (O blessed and blessed and glorious Trinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.) Te jure laudant, te adorant, te glorificant omnes creaturae tuae, O beauta Trinitas. (All creatures rightly praise you, adore you, glorify you, O blessed Trinity.) Laudemus Dominum, quem laudant Angeli, quem Cherubim et Seraphim Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus proclamant. (Proposed by Burgert 45; Praise the Lord, whom Angels praise, whom Cherubim and Seraphim proclaim “holy, holy, holy.”) Christmas Office: “antiphon series: Quem vidistis, Angelus ad pastores, Facta est cum angelo, Pastores dicite or Paruulus filius, and the Benedictus antiphon Gloria in excelsis Deo” (Rankin 335). Lyric XII O admirabile commercium, Creator generis humani animatum corpus sumens, de virgine nasci dignatus est, et procedens homo sine semine, largitus est nobis suam deitatem. (O wonderful exchange, the Creator of human kind assuming a living body, deigned to be born of a virgin and without seed, and becoming a man, he gave us his divinity.)

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Cuman in The Advent Lyrics I. cume (12a) II. cwom (46b) III. cymeð and cymen (62b and 66b) IV. cwom (74b) V. cyme (114b) VI. cwome and cum (148a and 149b) VIII. cum (243b) IX. ne cwom (290b, re: Mary) X. cym (372b) XI. cwome (413b) XII. ne cwom (420a and 436b)

o

Afterword Signs That Sing

Poets writing in Old English created hybrid poetic expressions that reflected the range of their verbal resources. They interwove their compositions with written oral idioms, metaphorical versions of oral-connected themes and typescenes, and verbalized ritual signs. Poets employed hybrid poetics in a wide range of genres including heroic narrative, biblical verse translation, lyric, riddle, allegory, gnomic verse, and book inscription. With hybrid expressions, they wove complex layers of signification, no matter the source of their content—whether translating from Latin, relaying poems of traditional genres, creating anew, or a combination of the above. The broad application of hybrid expressions, across genres and in relationship to various sources, reflects an aesthetics that values creative fusions of vernacular and Roman verbal traditions. Such applications also play substantively with the metonymic implications of oral-connected idioms and ritual signs. We have seen that poems using hybrid poetics engage their audiences in a rich interpretive process that rewards reflection and return. The Old English poems that intertwine metonymic referentiality and metaphorical signification probably spoke to audiences, such as monastics and secular clerics, familiar with these types of signification, and for whom hybrid signification brought recognition and enjoyment. For poets, a hybrid poetics of oral, literate, and ritual modes of expression accords with the aesthetic

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principle of intricate design that pervades other Anglo-Saxon cultural productions: from manuscript illuminations to stone engravings, and from jewelry to metalwork. In her exploration of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic aesthetic principles, Emily Thornbury has proposed the “virtue of ornament,” meaning a preference for work that calls attention to its own ingenuity and labor.1 The expressive strategies I have discussed embody such clever labor in several ways: by weaving oral-traditional idioms into written translations and distinctly Christian narratives; by embedding oraltraditional idioms in unusual contexts that prompt audiences to explore various figurative possibilities; and by bringing liturgical language, imagery, and symbols to life in poetry. Poets often employ hybrid expressions to celebrate the relationship between Christians and Christ. With the devouring-the-dead theme, The Phoenix represents a graphic reversal of death and bodily dismemberment. The sea-voyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood depicts Christ as a hero and gift and the Cross as a ship that can bear the dreamer on his heroic passage from mortal to eternal life. Using the lord-retainer and poet-patron themes as analogies for warranted behavior, Andreas, Genesis A/B, The Advent Lyrics, The Gifts of Men, “Thureth,” and “Alms-Giving” invite audiences to identify themselves with the servants and eulogizers of the Christian God. Finally, with ritual signifiers The Advent Lyrics create what Roger Lass calls a “poetic liturgy” that celebrates Christ’s three advents, not least his advent in the present moment. Taken together, written oral-connected idioms, oral idioms refigured by textual hermeneutical practices, and ritual signifiers constitute valuable expressive strategies that make possible complexly crafted representations of Christian devotion. By viewing hybrid expressions as a creative resource of Anglo-Saxon poets, we are in a better position to appreciate their rhetorical complexity. In Signs That Sing I have described two previously undiscussed forms of hybrid signification: the metaphorization of oral-related idioms and the ritual-related sign. Anglo-Saxon poets turned typical themes and typescenes into metaphors. They incorporated ritual signs—via metonymic referentiality—that evoke their liturgical contexts and help shape the poems’ meanings. Other ritualistic scenarios, such as circulating a mead cup or kissing the cross, bring to bear their metonymic significance and associations. In all of these cases, giving voice to words and interacting with an audience contribute to the meaning of Old English poems.

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The decorated initial on the cover of Signs That Sing suggests that hybrid modes of expression were not uncommon during and after the AngloSaxon period. The initial represents the only surviving author portrait of Osbern, an eleventh-century monk and precentor of Christ Church Cathedral Priory at Canterbury (London, British Library, Arundel 16 f.2).2 It celebrates his role as hagiographer of two Anglo-Saxon archbishops of Canterbury. He is seated within a decorated initial “R,” which begins his Vita et miracula Sancti Dunstani. Osbern reports witnessing Dunstan cure a girl of blindness on Saint Bartholomew’s eve and posthumously (at Dunstan’s burial site) cure a disabled girl.3 Another hagiography by Osbern, Vita et translatio Sancti Elphegi, formerly belonged to the same volume.4 In the image, Osbern’s quill hovers over a page of vellum whose size, position, and stiffness resemble a warrior’s shield.5 The green, drawn curtain symbolizes the unveiling of a holy scene: the creation of a vita.6 To Osbern’s right, the figure of a monk censing the manuscript probably alludes to his role as precentor at Canterbury, in charge of the library, scriptorium, music-making, and the celebration of the liturgy.7 To his left, the zoanthropomorphic figure playing a triangle harp recalls Osbern’s prestige as a singer, musician, and musical theorist.8 In Osbern’s hand, the quill writes upon both the figured manuscript page that he raises and the actual manuscript page that has absorbed inks and dyes. Because he is seated within the first letter of his Vita Sancti Dunstani, the image of Osbern writing becomes the actual written text, giving us coextension of image and letter, foreground and background. Such malleability also applies to the relationships among the three figures: scribe, monk, and harpist. As we have seen, these figures bear a relationship to Osbern’s life and suggest a complementary, intermingled relationship between oral song, writing, and ritual. The author portrait of Osbern of Canterbury embodies the three media that I discuss in Signs That Sing. Smoke from the monk’s censer drifts across the page, demonstrating the easy slippage between writing and ritual. Writing performs a sacred revelation; the liturgy enfolds readings from written texts, such as Saint Dunstan’s life. Writing also incorporates liturgical phrases, directives, and symbols. On Osbern’s left, the figure playing a triangle harp emphasizes the voice’s role in verbal art. The animal-headed and -footed man sings while he plays, mouth directed toward heaven to

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indicate the character of his song, and upward for maximum clarity and loudness. Although the triangle harp is not a traditional Anglo-Saxon one, the figure holding it sings and strums, associating him with representations of oral poets and perhaps King David. Parallel to the monk with his censer, the harpist produces sound that plays across Osbern’s inscriptions. We are shown an Anglo-Saxon hagiographer whose writing is infused with song, music, and liturgy.9 Since Exeter Book Riddle 26 also represents different kinds of signification, it complements Osbern’s author portrait. The image for writing in Riddle 26 (“Bible” or “Gospel”) appears at first to represent the triumph of the quill—a bird’s feather—over voice.10 In the quoted passage the firstperson perspective belongs to a sheep that has become vellum. . . . ond mec fugles wyn geond speddropum  spyrede geneahhe, ofer brunne brerd,  beamtelge swealg, streames dæle,  stop eft on mec, siþade sweartlast. (Riddle 26, 7b–11a) The joy of a bird [or “feather”] frequently made tracks across me with useful drops, over the brown shore [page], swallowed tree-dye mixed with water, stepped again on me, made black-prints. This representation of writing joins metonym (a feather for a bird) and metaphor (letters as bird tracks) in a process that shifts foreground and background, past animality and present craftedness. The riddle explains how writing happens in the voice of the page (mec or “me” in the quoted lines), who has testified about its experiences. An Anglo-Saxon reader of the riddle might see (and hear through his or her own voice) the page speaking about itself. Think of Osbern’s page lifted to the viewer, touched by ink, incense, and song. The riddle directs our focus to Osbern’s read (red or golden) quill, which like a bird crisscrosses skies and fields, foregrounds and backgrounds. The color of the quill puns with the verb for reading and interpreting, rædan. Thus, picture, color, sound, and metaphor interlink. Riddle 26 highlights the materiality of the writing process and the violence that bird and sheep undergo to create a manuscript (especially what the skin of the sheep endures, 1–6). Because the reader sees and hears the page speak-

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ing, feels its distress and transformation, and reads “bird track,” the poem yokes materiality, metonymic signification, and metaphor. Where once a bird flew and sang, its inked feathers now bring forth the speeches, prayers, and diverse voices that move through Old English verse. They alight upon the page to leave their sweartlast (black prints). Then, when words are discerned from their letters (the tracks of birds), they take to the air in the voices of their readers.

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NOTES

Introduction Epigraph note: Riddle 8, lines 1b–2a; Krapp and Dobbie, 3:185. Riddle numbers follow the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 1. Tolkien’s words chime with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sentiment in A Defence of Poetry, where, with regard to Christian verse, only the quasi-“heretical” poems of Dante Alighieri and John Milton merit high praise (62–64). 2. For an excellent close reading of the exile theme in Juliana, see Olesiejko, “Treasure and Spiritual Exile in Old English Juliana.” I disagree only with this article’s representation of heroic diction as that which belongs principally to “oral pagan culture” (67). 3. See Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition. The Ruthwell Cross also embodies hybrid oral, written, and ritual signification. Ó Carragáin explains that the panels of the Ruthwell Cross would have been read and contemplated in relationship to the course of the sun and hours of prayer (62, 280–82). For example, the image of “Christ acclaimed by two animals,” was directly illuminated at sunset, as if a reminder of night’s approach. This particular panel refers to Psalms 90–91, chanted in darkness at Compline, which emphasizes the protection that God extends to the faithful. The appearance of the associated panel on the Ruthwell Cross calls attention to the Cross’s apotropaic power (282). Fear and desire for protection aptly characterize The Dream of the Rood’s narrator, having been awakened in the middle of the night by a Cross.

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4. Among Anglo-Saxonists, the written oral-connected idiom has received more scholarly attention than these other forms of signification. Overviews of written oral tradition have been discussed in depth by Renoir, A Key to Old Poems, Foley, Traditional Oral Epic and Immanent Art, and Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition. The aptly named Vox intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Doane and Pasternak, showcases a variety of analyses of oral and literate fusions. Chapter 7 of Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood explores intersections of verse and ritual. 5. For example, Lord writes concerning South Slavic oral tradition, “The theme, even though it be verbal, is not any fixed set of words, but a grouping of ideas” (Singer of Tales 69). Chapter 1. Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse 1. See Magoun, “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” 454 and 460. Of course, a transition period occurred when missionaries introduced writing to Anglo-Saxons. What is problematic is framing writing and Christianity as “new” throughout the Christian Anglo-Saxon period (ca. 590–1066). Oral theorists have also critiqued Magoun’s characterization of Anglo-Saxon poetry as so highly formulaic that it cannot express foreign (i.e., Christian) concepts, but it can produce a substantial number of epithets for rulers, whether earthly or celestial (457). 2. For example, Renoir, A Key to Old Poems, 60–62. In contrast, Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition, 22. 3. In the same collection Sarah Larratt Keefer calls attention to hybrid poetics when describing a general stylistic preference in Old English verse for “letting disparate and discrete strands of ideas lie together in tension” (“Either/And” 180). Yet, like Orchard, she writes that these seemingly “disparate and discrete,” but interwoven ideologies are Christian (i.e., Latinate, written, new) and heroic (i.e., Germanic, oral, old). 4. For example, Ong’s developmental model is reflected in the subtitle of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. 5. See Ong, Orality and Literacy, 11, and “Writing Is a Humanizing Technology.” 6. Foley, in his later scholarship on Ancient Greek and Old English poems, switched from “oral-derived” to “oral-connected.” 7. Amodio in Writing the Oral Tradition addresses the continuities and discontinuities in Old English and Middle English hybrid oral-written traditions. 8. See, for example, Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse. 9. Many have postulated that Anglo-Saxon poets composed verse for audiences, viva voce and in situ, long before and long after the introduction of writ-

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ing, even though ethnographic records that describe the fundamentals of a living oral tradition in Anglo-Saxon England are lacking. These fundamentals include performance styles, how poets learned their tradition, who became poets, who became audiences, in what social settings poets created their works, and which genres were valued and by whom. Assuming the presence of a widespread oral tradition, Opland sketches out such information in Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry on the basis of etymologies, (presumably idealized) accounts of Germanic poets, and comparative evidence from the Xhosa tradition. Frank critiques Opland’s position (as well as others) in “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet.” Niles finds a middle ground between Opland and Frank in “The Myth of the AngloSaxon Oral Poet.” Leaving aside the question of oral poets, about whom little is known, Thornbury in Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England reconstructs the lexical categories of poets and poetry, the status of poets (who she argues did not in themselves constitute a professional class [34–35]), the discrete kinds of verse composed by men first identified as “teachers, scribes, musicians, or courtiers” (4), audiences for verse, and audience expectations. 10. Trilling refers to Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 34. 11. In her paper “The Virtue of Ornament,” presented in the Old English session on Aesthetics and Artisanal Poetry at the 2015 MLA in Vancouver, Thornbury argues that the predominant Anglo-Saxon aesthetic, evident in engravings, metalwork, illuminations, and literature, accorded with a “baroque” rather than “classical” aesthetic system. She argues, via the figure of ornamentation, for a mode of representation that values skillful layering of signs and images, and that puts on display the labor and mental skill of the maker. Stylistic ornamentation, from a baroque perspective, belongs intrinsically to the work that it enriches, rather than extrinsically as sign of added value. I believe that the same “baroque” sensibility is at work in the hybrid poetics of Old English verse and in the “poetic diglossia” of Anglo-Latin formulae. For a general introduction to poetic diglossia in the Anglo-Saxon period, see Orchard, “Old English and Latin Poetic Traditions.” See also Ziolkowski, “Cultural Diglossia and the Nature of Medieval Latin Literature” and “Oral-Formulaic Tradition and the Composition of Latin Poetry from Antiquity through the Twelfth Century.” 12. On the differences between oral-traditional and literate modes of interpretation, see Ong, Orality and Literacy, and Foley, “Contexts and Reading” in How to Read an Oral Poem, 58–78. These issues are examined in greater depth below. 13. See Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture. These ideas are demonstrated more fully below. 14. See Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram, 1:19–20 and 2.9, and his

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treatment of biblical exegesis, De doctrina christiana. See also Bede, De schematibus et tropis. 15. On the meter of “The Lord’s Prayer I,” see Keefer, Old English Liturgical Verse, 45–46. Keefer describes this vernacular translation as the simplest of the Old English Pater Nosters, but “not a verbatim text-to-text translation as we find in the canticle section of an interlinear glossed psalter” (46). Most verse translations in the corpus demonstrate similar omissions and elaborations (often of greater degree). “Cædmon’s Hymn,” which Bede cast in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum as the archetypal fusion of Old English verse and Christianity, provides a more elegant example of traditional phraseology (see Orchard, “The Word Made Flesh,” and O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song chap. 2). 16. A simple search of the verse corpus using the search term *a waldend resulted in seventy-eight instances (including “The Lord’s Prayer I”) of half-lines that used this verse structure (August 24, 2015). 17. On the relationship between the idioms that form the basis for poetic composition and the broader notion of “tradition,” see Lord, The Singer of Tales, 97. Drout examines the concept of tradition in Anglo-Saxon writing through the lens of “memetics” in How Tradition Works (1–45) and “A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory.” 18. For surveys of early work in the field, see Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition, and with regard to Old English, Olsen, “Oral-Formulaic Research in Old English Studies: I” and “Oral-Formulaic Research in Old English Studies: II.” 19. O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song is foundational for studies of the influence of oral tradition on Anglo-Saxon chirographic practices. 20. “Singing, performing, composing are facets of the same act” (Lord, Singer of Tales 13). For those interested in accounts of this process outside of the South Slavic tradition, see, for instance, Reichl on Turkic oral epics, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry and Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Heroic Poetry; Reynolds on Arabic oral epics, Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition; Siikala and Ulyashev on the oral traditions of indigenous peoples of Siberia, Hidden Rituals and Public Performances: Traditions and Belonging Among the Post-Soviet Khanty, Komi, and Udmurts; and multiple authors on the oral traditions of minority cultures in China in Gejin, “Chinese Oral Traditions” (special issue of Oral Tradition). 21. The register of oral verse also reflects the needs of a culture whose verse is the verbal storehouse (or wordhoard) of cultural memory. 22. The signifier’s relationship to the referent is “broadly determining rather than absolutely deterministic” (Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition 14). Arguably, medieval textual culture followed a similar model. Irvine writes, “the array of ref-

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erences and quotations [in ‘early medieval artes’] signify metonymically the literary lexicon and library of texts upon which grammatical culture is based” (107). 23. Some instructive examples of the aesthetic implications of oral-traditional metonymy include (but can hardly be limited to) Foley on the “Battle with the Monster” story pattern (Immanent Art 231–42); Amodio on the term aglæca, whose expressive force resonates well into the Middle English period (Writing the Oral Tradition 135–46); and Jorgensen on the sound of trumpets and the beasts of battle theme in “The Trumpet and the Wolf: Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry.” Beechy questions the validity of the theory of immanent art, arguing that all semiotic systems refer to a shared body of knowledge for their meaning (Poetics of Old English 17–18). Foley uses Receptionalism in Immanent Art (chap. 2) to explain the semiotic differences between primarily literate and primarily oral traditions. 24. Mize’s Traditional Subjectivities accomplishes a similar task. Taking representations of subjectivity as his object of study, he calls attention to how poems suit traditional features to their contexts and ideological interests. By studying translations from Latin to Old English, Mize shows that vernacular poems emphasize individual agency and affective experience with far greater consistency than the source texts. 25. Foley examines this verse in Traditional Oral Epic (209–10), where he states, “From a traditional perspective, then, the most formulaic aspect of com seems to be its placement as a particular word-type at the beginning of the verse” (210). He describes this verse system as “traditional,” but not “formulaic” in exactly the manner defined by Parry because it does not convey the same essential idea at every use. The half-line can convey, in a traditionally evocative manner, the meaning of its recurrent verb, cuman (to come, to arrive), and the finality or closure conveyed by the verb’s mood and tense. 26. On the ethnography of speaking, see Hymes, “In vain I tried to tell you”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics; Bauman and Sherzer, Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking; and Sherzer, Kuna Ways of Speaking: An Ethnographic Perspective. 27. In his words, the locus of performance is “a recurrent forum dedicated to a specific kind of activity, a defined and defining site in which enactment can occur again and again without devolution into a repetitive, solely chronological series” (Foley, Singer of Tales in Performance 47). 28. See “What the Oral Poets Say” and the subsection (or “proverb”) “Oral Poetry Works Like Language, Only More So,” in How to Read an Oral Poem 11–21, 127–28. Foley’s observations about oral-traditional speech bring an important aesthetic dimension to Lord’s comparison of oral formulas to “the classical gram-

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mar of a language, with its paradigms of tenses and declensions” which might falsely “give us the idea that language is a mechanical process” (Singer of Tales in Performance 35). 29. See Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance and Arnovick, Written Reliquaries. Garner discusses how performance-based approaches can illuminate the charms, “allow[ing] us to transcend potentially reductive binaries [living ritual/static text, poetry/science, verbal/nonverbal, ‘pagan’/Christian] and thus enhance our understanding of these complex texts” (“Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance” 20–21). 30. Lines 4–5 of W. B. Yeats’s “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty.” 31. For a reading that considers the social purpose of Widsith for Anglo-Saxons, see Niles, “Widsith, the Goths, and the Anthropology of the Past.” 32. See Thornbury’s analysis of this story in Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England, 7–8. 33. Garner in “Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance” discusses how performance enables Old English charms to fuse categories we often separate: ritual and writing, poetry and science, verbal and nonverbal, and “pagan” and Christian. 34. Comparative studies of oral-traditional cultures have also led to important insights about Anglo-Saxon orality. See, for example, Opland, Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry and “From Horseback to Monastic Cell”; and Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. 35. See Lerer, Literacy and Power 3; Frank, “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet”; and the proposals by Thornbury about literate poets in Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England. 36. See Mize’s elegant discussion of the Old English formula and metonymy, Traditional Subjectivities, 90–100. On a purely linguistic rationale for the metonymy of Old English idioms, see pp. 96–100. Mize writes, “seeing formulaic sequences as quasi-lexical units allows them, like individual words, to exhibit what corpus linguists call ‘semantic prosody,’ ‘a consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates’” (98). 37. See Wray, Formulaic Language and the Lexicon and Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries. 38. By arguing against a special case for orality because densely patterned metonymic language can arise in any mode of communication, Mize’s argument dovetails with Beechy’s in The Poetics of Old English. 39. Drout creates a complex and resilient theory of the transmission of tradition, by analogy with genetic transmission of DNA, that accounts for the continued use of oral-formulaic language in Old English verse. In his theory the Universal Tradition Meme, meaning “because we have always done so,” provides the

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justificatio or justification for a behavior; when a poetic meter and diction become attached to the Universal Tradition Meme, their role in the habitus of a culture’s verbal communication verges on self-perpetuation (in a given cultural climate). From the point-of-view of aesthetics, Tyler makes a compelling case for AngloSaxon desire for the familiar (versus our Romantic and post-Romantic preference for innovation). 40. Leclercq relates that readers in monasteries read aloud to themselves in low voices because doing so created a muscular memory of words: “it is what inscribes, so to speak, the sacred text in the body and in the soul” (72–73). 41. Even at the height of medieval chirographic culture, stories and verse appear to have easily crossed between oral and written formats. On this phenomenon in medieval England, see Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England; in medieval France, see Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance. 42. Zumthor, like Ong, associates oral tradition and writing with questionable stages of cultural development. (For a critique of Ong’s developmental model, see Henigan, Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song 3–14.) Zumthor categorizes relationships between orality and writing according to a model of pure orality, mixed orality, secondary orality, and mediatized orality (Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale chap. 2). The types relevant to medieval poetry are mixed and secondary orality (La poésie et la voix 49). 43. Vitz applies and expands Zumthor’s notion that orality is constitutive of meaning. 44. See Havelock, Preface to Plato and The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences; Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 45. See, for instance, Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy.” 46. For contrasting interpretations of Andreas 1478–80, see Lerer, Literacy and Power, Foley, “Texts that Speak to Readers Who Hear,” and Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition, 22. 47. For more on how these practices continue in the late-medieval period, see Bradbury, Writing Aloud. 48. See O’Brien O’Keeffe’s Visible Song and also Pasternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry. Ong describes Old English as being a less “textualized” language than Latin because of the relative transparency of its dialects and lack of externalized grammar (“Orality, Literacy” 6). 49. Ong in Orality and Literacy employs the term “noetics” to describe typical habits of mind that develop in relationship to the technologies of oral tradition and literacy.

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50. On memorization practices during the medieval period, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 51. The work of Smith, Monaghan, and Huettig addresses differences between illiterate, low literate, and high literate behavior in regard to phonological processing, cognitive efficiency, prediction in language processing, and visual searches (“Literacy Effects on Language and Vision”). 52. See Burgert, The Dependence of Part I of Cynewulf’s Christ Upon the Antiphonary; Gatch, “Old English Literature and the Liturgy: Problems and Potential”; Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context, and “Cross-Referencing Anglo-Saxon Liturgy and Remedies: The Sign of the Cross as Ritual Protection”; and Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood. 53. Goody states in greater depth: “We may take as a point of departure Frazer’s definition of religious acts in terms of the propitiation of supernatural powers. Acts of propitiation directed toward supernatural powers consist of sacrifice (food-offerings and especially blood sacrifice), libation (offerings of drink), gifts of nonconsumable material objects, prayer (verbal offerings), and the ‘payment of respect’ by other forms of gesture. We may say then that religious beliefs are present when non-human agencies are propitiated on the human model. Religious activities include, of course, not only acts of propitiation themselves but all behaviour which has reference to the existence of these agencies” (Myth 34, italics mine). He notes that this essay, although published in 2010, was written “in the early 1960s” (37). As far as I can tell, it does not reflect subsequent developments in the fields of oral and ritual theory. 54. For example, the teachers of grammatica (which afforded successive generations of early medieval Christian communities with “textual competence”) were likened to “priests of a mystery to be taught initiates” (Irvine 88, 102). 55. This phrase from Matias Augé arises in the following passage: “The liturgy of the Church, while it celebrates the mystery of the eternally present Christ, historicizes its various moments and recalls them at particular points during the course of the year. . . . Such cosmic elements and phenomena serve as vehicles for the mystery that is celebrated” (321). 56. Writing here is more specifically the rationalizing processes codified in writing. 57. Latour critiques Bourdieu for treating the social as an abstract category. While the concept of habitus could be useful due to its materiality, it is always orchestrated by a “social rationality.” Critical sociology tends to assume a lack of awareness on the part of practitioners. Latour rejects the dichotomy in critical sociology between knowing critic and unknowing social actant (Reassembling the

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Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory 209; see also Bell, Ritual Theory 78–80). 58. Fine, The Folklore Text, 8. My argument about Old English poetry complements John Niles’s description of the tertium quid: a body of literature that reflects the influences of verbal art but includes neither the fleeting words of oral performance created solely for a present audience, nor the literary styles that arise when texts are penned for educated readers whose daily lives (and the institutions that influence their lives) intersect constantly with the written word. In his introduction to the 2013 special issue of Western Folklore, “From Word to Print—and Beyond,” which focuses on the textualization or Verschriftlichung of speech, Niles explains that the tertium quid embodies an intersemiotic translation from one mode of communication to another. He also explores the tertium quid in “Prizes from the Borderlands” and his chapter on “Orality” in Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship. 59. See, for example, Beechy, “Bind and Loose: Poetics and the Word in Old English Law, Charm, and Riddle,” in The Poetics of Old English, 73–98; Zacher, Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies; and Danet and Bogach, “Orality, Literacy, and Performativity in Anglo-Saxon Wills.” 60. More concretely, Lees has demonstrated that the vernacularization of Latin in the “oral style” was an important cultural bridge that allowed the AngloSaxons to create Christian communities with which they could identify (Tradition and Belief 35). This perspective accords with Schaefer’s point that Christianity in the medieval period was less an abstract ideology than an “inhabited universe” in which the verse of oral tradition presents the founding fictions of a culture (“Receptional Aspects of Old English Poetry”). 61. Because Riddles 30a and 30b are 9-line poems in the Exeter Book that differ only slightly in lines 3, 6, and 8 (and possibly 2, which is partially unreadable), I consider them to be variations on the same poem. Williamson’s solution for this riddle (which he numbers 28) is “tree (wood)” (Old English Riddles of the “Exeter Book”). Other solutions include “rain water” and “snowflake.” See Liuzza, “The Texts of the Old English Riddle 30,” and Doane, “Spacing, Placing, and Effacing: Scribal Textuality and Riddle 30 a/b.” 62. The vernacular riddles integrate a profusion of clues that prompt the solver to consider several frames of reference. 63. To reflect the ambiguity of the poem’s phrasing, I have translated literally. For a beautiful interpretation of Riddle 30, see Alexander’s translation in A History of Old English Literature, 108. It begins: “I am fire-fretted and I flirt with Wind / And my limbs are light-freighted and I am lapped in flame / And I am stormstacked and I strain to fly.”

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64. Williamson further discusses these lines in Feast of Creatures, 182. 65. These are fus forðweg-as/-es (gen. sing.) (Exodus 248a, Riddle 30a 3a, Riddle 30b 3a); fus on forðweg (Exodus 129a, Guthlac A/B 945a, Menologium 218a); and fusne on forðweg (Guthlac A/B 801a). 66. These are afysed on forðwege (Dream of the Rood 125a); forðsiþes fus (Guthlac A/B 1050a); and fus and forðgeorn (Maldon 281a). 67. Of the transition from the first half of the riddle to the second, Williamson writes: “There is a double irony at the heart of the riddle: the living tree (line 1–4) endures the natural threat of fire and storm but succumbs to man—then cut and crafted (lines 5–9) into cup or cross, it is loved and worshiped by hall-thanes” (Feast of Creatures 182). 68. Williamson notes that Blackburn and Ferdinand Holthausen interpret the act of kissing as drinking here: “[c]reatures traditionally kissed in riddles are drinking cups” (Old English Riddles 232, on Riddle 28 [30], lines 5–6). 69. Motifs associated with the crucifixion could symbolize sacred Christian rites, especially the Eucharist. See Raw: “The motif of the chalice relates Christ’s death on the cross to the sacrifice of the mass. The blood and water which flowed from Christ’s side on the cross were traditionally interpreted as symbols of the two major sacraments: the Eucharist and baptism” (119). 70. “It [gled] is used in Psalm 50 with reference to purifying fire and also as the coal placed on the tongue of the prophet Isaiah (B-T Supplement). It also occurs in some of the homilies with reference to coals placed under the living bodies of martyrs” (Williamson, Old English Riddles 27–28). See also Morgan and McAllister, 73. 71. The image of a troubled and mortally endangered tree recalls, as well, the description in Riddle 1 of an apocalyptic wind tearing down trees: “þonne ic wudu hrere, / bearwas bledhwate, beamas fylle” (8b–9; then I shake trees, / quick-growing [fruitful?] groves, fell beams). 72. An Anglo-Saxon nun saw angels lift a visionary rood into the sky, which she reportedly referred to as heofenes tungol (heaven’s star; Swanton 46n1). These words create a double entendre since Old English verse commonly refers to the sun or sunne (i.e., the Son or Sunu) as a tungol. 73. See Foley, “Texts that Speak to Readers Who Hear.” Regarding the continued presence of oral signs in written text, Amodio writes: “the tradition’s homeostatic expressive economy exerts considerable influence over matters of metrical form, verbal collocations, and narrative patterns to produce a corpus whose tectonics remains remarkably stable over the course of several centuries” (Writing the Oral Tradition 30).

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74. Bredehoft in Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse presents a radically different perspective on the use of traditional verse conventions over the course of the period, claiming that by the mid-tenth century, classical meter, formulas, and other verse patterns had become not just literary but also antiquated. 75. Goody writes that the adaptability of oral traditions means that they can more easily adopt new ethical codes than text-centered traditions (Logic of Writing 21). Chapter 2. Metonymy, Gifre, Grædig, and a Devouring-the-Dead Theme 1. “Recurrent phraseology” comprises a flexible poetic diction that includes themes, half-line and whole-line phrases (“formulaic systems” that use wordplacement rules), single words, collocations, clusters, envelope patterns, and other types of wordplay. See Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 235–39. 2. Narratologists differentiate between diegesis (narrated description of a story world) and mimesis (monologue and dialogue). My use of diegesis follows Plato more closely by including all aspects of a narrative “that communicates information keyed to a temporal framework” (or, for that matter, a spatial framework) (Halliwell “1. Definition”; see Plato’s Republic 3.392c–398b). Thus, diegesis includes narrative in the voice of the narrator, narrative by means of mimesis (direct speech), and a combination of these two. For a useful description of diegesis and mimesis in narratology, see “diegesis-mimesis” in Halliwell, The Living Handbook of Narratology. Extradiegetic material in my discussion can include the voice of a narrator with no connection to a poem’s story world (such as the framing that precedes the voice of Widsith) and, more important, audiences implicated by the narrative. 3. Important early analyses of Old English formulas include Fry, “Old English Formulas and Systems” and “Variation and Economy in Beowulf.” On the exile theme, see Greenfield, “The Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” 4. See Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature, “The Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,” and Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts; Drout, How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century and “Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform”; Tyler, Old English Poetics; and Beechy, The Poetics of Old English. 5. According to Parry, any aspect of an oral expression “which is purely for the sake of style” does not count as an oral formula (80). Lord distinguishes between “verse-making” formulas and aesthetically motivated repetitions (“Perspectives” 491–92). Lord does not, however, say that oral formulas represent mechanistic

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speech (Singer of Tales 36). The singer’s facility with formulaic poetic speech indicates his or her skill as a teller of tales (43). 6. Helffer, Les Chants dans l’épopée Tibétaine de Ge-Sar d’après le livre de la course de cheval: Version chantée de Blo-bzan bstan-’jin, 393. Elaborate metaphors belong to a broader category of “Figures de style” (stylistic figures) described on 385–94. 7. On Diné (Navajo) aesthetics, see Webster, Intimate Grammars: An Ethnography of Navajo Poetry, and Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. 8. Foley asks, “How much more resoundingly do Homer’s epithets or the guslar’s themes or the Beowulf-poet’s phraseology echo when we sense the possibility that their fields of meaning are not limited to this text, or a set of extant texts, but resonate against the unspoken tradition which they in part instance?” (“Texts that Speak” 148). 9. Foley asserts in Immanent Art that a literary novelist confers meaning upon his or her linguistic and narrative choices (meaning that is cocreated with readers), while the “tradition bearer” deploys a poetic language with fixed, inherent meaning that is already understood by his or her audiences. Foley writes: “In contrast [to a literary work], a traditional work depends primarily on elements and strategies that were long in place before the execution of the present version or text, long before the present nominal author learned the inherited craft. Because the idiom is metonymic, summoning conventional connotations to conventional structures, we may say that the meaning that it conveys is principally inherent” (8). I refer instead to “inherited” meaning because in modern linguistics no verbal sign bears inherent meaning. Foley calls the “extratextual information” of the tradition “more the audience’s applied inheritance than their original contribution” (Immanent Art 48). “Inherited” (versus “inherent”) more precisely describes from a sociolinguistic perspective how oral-traditional metonyms can be freighted with traditional meaning. 10. The “familiar,” with its connection to “familial,” embodies in a more lyrical manner the meaning of metonymic traditional referentiality. 11. Admittedly, Tyler’s argument does not always include formulaic language. Drawing on Parry and Lord’s claims that the formula per se “‘helps the poet in his verse-making’” (112), she argues that the formula cannot be used for “stylistic or structural effect” (111). Following Lord, Tyler states that if the composer of verse employs a formula for stylistic reasons “it is not a formula but a repetition” (111). Although Tyler later appears to modulate this position, saying “there is a serious condescension involved in imagining that even a strictly oral formula has a solely utilitarian, rather than a complementary aesthetic function” (121), in her fourth

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chapter she continues to distinguish between the supposedly nonstylistic oraltraditional formula and the aesthetically motivated repetition. 12. In no particular order, these six examples present hæleð higerofe in the context of a sentence: (1) “Hæleð hygerofe hatene wæron, / suna Noes Sem and Cham, / Iafeð þridda” (Genesis A 1550–52a; Strong-hearted heroes, sons of Noah, were called Sem [Shem] and Cham [Ham], the third Iafeth [ Japheth]); (2) “hæleð higerofe, hatene wæron / Abraham and Aaron” (Genesis A 1709–10a; The strong-hearted heroes were called Abraham and Aaron [Haran]); (3) “Gewitan him þa gongan to Hierusalem / hæleð hygerofe, in þa halgan burg, / geomormode” (Christ II 533–35a; Then they departed, traveling to Jerusalem, the strong-hearted heroes, into the holy city, heavy hearted); (4) “Geseh he Matheus in þam morðorcofan, / hæleð higerofne under heolstorlocan” (Andreas 1004–5; He saw Matthew in that torment-room [prison], the strong-hearted hero within the dark enclosure); (5) “Swa ða wigend mid him, / hæleð higerofe, halgum stef­num / cempan coste cyning weorðadon” (Andreas 1053b–55a; So the warriors with him, strong-hearted heroes, proven fighters, with holy voices honored the King); and (6) “Hi ða fromlice fagum swyrdum, / hæleð higerofe, herpað worhton / þurh laðra gemong, linde heowon / scildburh scæron” (Judith 301–4a; Then they bravely with stained/decorated swords, the strong-hearted heroes, made a battle-path through the host of enemies, they hewed linden shields, cut through the shield barrier). 13. For Lord, the significance of a multiform is its “essential idea,” rather than its literal denotative components (e.g., “drunken tavern” = “tavern”; 65). Foley addresses the difference between oral multiforms (“metonyms”) and clichés in “Ways of Speaking, Ways of Meaning” in his The Singer of Tales in Performance (29–59). 14. Beechy’s question and answer indicate that she does not accord oral-traditional idioms with a different kind of referentiality, despite their use in a highly specialized mode of communication. Her assessment of oral tradition does not diminish the value of her analysis of acoustic and rhetorical features in Old English literature in The Poetics of Old English. Her work also questions how we differentiate between prose and poetry by describing a shared poetic function at work in the Old English corpus (9). 15. Gyaltsho, “Bab Sgrung: Tibetan Epic Singers,” 281–82. 16. Riddle numeration follows the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. 17. See Mize’s discussion of both this collocation and the traditional referentiality of the simplex gifre in Traditional Subjectivities, 114–24. 18. Alcuin also treats avarice as the source of many wrong acts in Liber de virtutibus et vitiis: “‘Avarice is the excessive greed for acquiring, possessing, or retaining

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wealth and is an insatiable plague. Just like the dropsical person, who, the more he drinks, the more incessant his thirst grows, so it is with avarice: the more it has, the more it desires. And as long as it exhibits no moderation in possessing, it will not show itself otherwise in desiring. Its progeny are acts of envy, thefts, robberies, murders, lies, perjury, acts of rapine, acts of violence, restlessness, unjust judgements, contempt for the truth, forgetfulness of future bliss, and hardheartedness. It exists contrary to mercy and alms for the poor and all pity for those who suffer. It is defeated by the fear of God and by brotherly love and by deeds of mercy and by alms for the poor and by the hope of future bliss, since indeed the false riches of this world are defeated by the true riches of future bliss’” (quoted in Newhauser, 118–19). 19. Translation by Edmund Hill in Rotelle, ed., On Genesis. 20. This translation is also by Edmund Hill. 21. The meaning of æpplede is uncertain. The Dictionary of Old English states: “a colour word of uncertain meaning, used to describe gold (perhaps referring to the colour or sheen of an apple or pomegranate); ‘ring-, coin- or sphere-shaped gold’ have also been suggested.” 22. I am not implying that the Dictionary of Old English should change its entries for gifre and grædig. Instead, I think that the study of Old English verse would benefit from two complementary lexicons: literate and oral-traditional. 23. For the first essay identifying beasts of battle as an oral-formulaic theme, see Magoun, “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” For nuanced analyses of this theme in Old English verse, see particularly Griffith, “Convention and Originality in the Old English ‘Beasts of Battle’ Typescene,” and Jorgensen, “The Trumpet and the Wolf.” 24. For the translation of this gnome, I consulted McBrine, “The Journey Motif in the Poems of the Vercelli Book” in New Readings in the Vercelli Book, ed. Zacher and Orchard, 305. 25. For discussion on the image of the mind as a hoard, see Mize, “The Mental Container.” For a broader analysis of the mind-body relationship in AngloSaxon culture, see Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. 26. Recall the gnomic expression in Old Icelandic, “Sem ormuren elskar gullit, svo elskar hinn agiarne rangfeingit fe” (As the dragon loves gold, so love the greedy ill-gotten goods), which is echoed by the Old English maxim, “draca sceal on hlæwe / frod, frætwum wlanc” (a dragon ought [to be] in the barrow, old, exulting in treasures). For analysis of the Old Icelandic expression, see Evans, “The Heynesbók Dragon: An Old Icelandic Maxim in Its Legal-Historical Context.” 27. “[H]im of hræðre gewat / sawol secean soðfæstra dom” (2819b–20; From

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his breast the soul went to seek judgment/glory of the truth-fast ones) and perhaps Heofon rece swealg (3155; heaven swallowed the smoke). 28. Following Grein (1857), Shippey in Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English suggests in his translation of these two lines that a line was omitted by accident or that the object of brucan (to enjoy the use of) is heahþungene (high services). Chapter 3. A Lord-Retainer Theme 1. Further statements on the lord-retainer dyad can be found in Fulk and Cain’s chapter “Germanic Legend and Heroic Lay”: concerning Old English heroic verse, “Chief of these conventions is the bond between a lord and his retainer” (279); and Greenfield and Calder’s A New Critical History of Old English Literature: “The code of conduct stressed the reciprocal obligations of lord and thegns: protection and generosity on the part of the former, loyalty and service on that of the latter—a mutuality that was the core of the comitatus relationship” (134). 2. See Drout, Michael D. C., How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (chap. 1) and “Variation within Limits: An Evolutionary Approach to Structure and Dynamics of the Multiform.” 3. Harvilahti uses Karl Reichl’s discussion of patterned discourse in Turkic oral poetry—“formulaic diction, parallelism, thematic patterning, ‘runs,’ ‘epic moments’”—as an example of the “art of memory” or “ethnographic substrate” that artists and audiences use for the creation and interpretation of verbal art forms (“Substrates” 68; Reichl, Turkic Oral Epic Poetry 269). Britt Mize’s description of “a poetics of mentality” in Old English poetry could also be termed a theme or traditional characterization that does not depend on specific formulas: “It is pervasive and fluid, emerging from features of diction (which can seem trivial in isolation) and narrative technique (which can seem intangible) as well as concept” (Traditional Subjectivities 89). 4. For a succinct review of early scholarship on the theme and typescene, see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 331–35. See also Olsen, “Oral-Formulaic Research in Old English Studies: I” 577–88. In his analysis of Old English themes in Traditional Oral Epic, Foley uses “theme” and “typescene” interchangeably as part of a larger project that searches for accurate tradition-dependent descriptions of traditional verse. Foley offers a single definition based on his conclusion that what matters most in these larger traditional idioms (whether theme or typescene) are the recurring motifs, which demonstrate “a definite, consistent narrative pattern but little or no verbal correspondence” (357) and yet the Old English metrical system “permits . . . extensive variation around a relatively fixed core of one or more words or morphs” (355). Renoir likewise conflates themes and typescenes in

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A Key to Old Poems. His description of a theme differs little from that of Albert Lord. Discussing the verbal systems that enable oral poets to compose “on the spot poems of various lengths with a controlled structure,” he reports that “themes act as paradigms for all kinds of situations and make it possible to select and organize metrical units into coherent narrative units” (55). 5. Foley, Traditional Oral Epic, 337–38. The sea voyage motifs are as follows: a hero leads men to the ship; the ship waits moored; the hero boards the ship with treasure or arms; the ship crosses the sea; hero and retinue arrive and unload the ship; and, optionally, they advance toward a fortified hall or city. 6. My treatment of “theme” and “typescene” accords largely with the definition proposed by Donald Fry, who said that the typescene should be understood as “a recurring stereotyped presentation of conventional details used to describe a certain narrative event, requiring neither verbatim repetition nor a specific formula content” (“Old English Formulaic Themes” 53). In contrast, the theme for Fry is “a recurring concatenation of details and ideas, not restricted to a specific event, verbatim repetition, or certain formulas, which forms an underlying structure for an action or description” (53, italics removed). See also Crowne, “The Hero on the Beach.” 7. The identity of an oral-related theme in Old English does not depend upon corpus-wide recurrences of both lexical and metrical features. Foley has shown, for instance, that each instance of a theme may share “single morphs, that is, roots of words whose systemic context is metrically (and therefore lexically and syntactically) highly variable” (Traditional Oral Epic 340). What this means in practice is that some oral-connected motifs use a single morph or lexeme (such as scip or belgan[-mod]), which may or may not occupy a specific metrical and syntactic arrangement, while other motifs can be recognized only on the basis of their ideational content (for instance, synonyms for the term hlaford). In contrast, themes in Slavic and Ancient Greek traditions require such recurrences (Lord, “The Theme” in Singer of Tales). 8. See, for example, Clark, “The Traveler Recognizes His Goal”; Robert E. Diamond on the sea voyage, war, comitatus, and cold weather, “Theme as Ornament in Anglo-Saxon Poetry”; and Jeff Opland on joy in the hall, “Beowulf on the Poet.” 9. When the poet employs the beasts of battle theme in Andreas, he or she substitutes the typical wolf, raven, hawk, and/or eagle with creatures living in or from the sea: hornfisc (370b; pike) and græga mæw (371b; grey gull). These substitutions, which occur as Andreas and his followers approach Mermedonia on a ship piloted by Christ, do not weaken the typically ominous implications of the scene. (See Amodio, The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook 378–79.) 10. For discussions of these themes in Old English poetry, see Magoun, “The

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Theme of the Beasts of Battle”; Crowne, “The Hero on the Beach”; Renoir, “Oral Theme and Written Texts”; and Foley, “Beowulf and the Old English Poetic Tradition” in Immanent Art. 11. The retainer’s oath ought to be distinguished from another type of contract associated with conflict—the verbal duel (or flyting) that takes place, for instance, between the Viking messenger and Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon (Parks, Verbal Dueling 68–71). 12. The Battle of Maldon excoriates those who fail to uphold the ideal of contractual loyalty, contrasting the proper deaths of Ælfnoþ and Wulfmær with the three brothers, Godric, Godwine, and Godwig, who flee the scene of battle: “Hi bugon þa fram beaduwe þe þær beon noldon” (185; They fled then from battle, who did not desire to be there). After Beowulf ’s death, the narrator in no uncertain terms calls the men who did not follow Wiglaf hildlatan (2846b; the battleslack or cowards) and treowlogan (2847b; oath-breakers). 13. The pieces of armor, themselves symbols of the lord’s generosity, metonymically stand for the men adorned by them. The armor also effaces the hierarchical difference implicit in the contract, since they—lord and retainer—ought to be together. Perhaps this effacement of social difference presages how they will be joined as near-equals when lying side by side in heroic death. 14. See Austin, How to Do Things with Words; and Searle on commissive and declarative speech acts, “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts.” 15. Other types of performative utterances populate Old English texts. See, for instance, Danet and Bogach on assertives in Anglo-Saxon wills, including curses in wills, land grants, and leases: “curses appear in written wills as part of the effort to transfer performativity to the document” (115) and chap. 2 of Tollerton, Wills and Will-Making in Anglo-Saxon England. On oaths in Anglo-Saxon law codes, see Ammon, “‘Ge mid wedde ge mid aðe’: The Functions of Oath and Pledge in Anglo-Saxon Legal Culture.” On formulas and the relationship between AngloSaxon and late medieval law, see Yeager, From Lawmen to Plowmen: Anglo-Saxon Legal Tradition and the School of Langland. 16. “Nealles him on heape handgesteallan, / æðelinga bearn ymbe gestodon / hildecystum, ac hy on holt bugon, / ealdre burgan” (2596–99a; Not at all did comrades, sons of nobles, stand about him, but they retreated into the forest to protect their lives). 17. On the economy of the oral-traditional register, Foley writes: “Because so much of what a register ‘means’ depends crucially on what is understood of its context as brought into play by the event of performance and the referent of tradition, the individual integers can indeed portray a continuing reality. That is, the world to which they provide access is not simply inaugurated ex nihilo with

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each instance or sounding, but must be understood as ever-present to the always vocable code and therefore present to anyone who can use that code properly. . . . What greater economy of communication could one imagine than that of a medium that depends not on the perishable spatialization of a text but rather on the imperishable reenactment of performance, set in a defined and defining arena, expressed through a register dedicated to the purpose, and as a result communicated with an efficiency unknown to (and inimitable by) conventional texts?” (Singer of Tales in Performance 55–56). 18. Amodio explains that oral idioms still function with communicative or expressive economy in written Old English verse because: “The determinative nature of the register is clearly apparent in Old English poetry, where the tradition’s homeostatic expressive economy exerts considerable influence over matters of metrical form, verbal collocations, and narrative patterns to produce a corpus whose tectonics remains remarkably stable over the course of several centuries” (Writing the Oral Tradition 30). 19. Additionally, the question Hwider hweorfað we could allude to John 6.68: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” 20. Doane reports that “[t]here are nearly three hundred isolable additions of content in Genesis A which extend over more than half a line” (92). Concerning these elaborations, Remley writes that “many recent studies have offered additional suggestions regarding the extrabiblical elements in the early sections of Genesis A, including apparent reflexes of patristic diction, encyclopaedic learning and other sources” (126–27; see also, Remley’s notes 70 and 71). 21. For an examination of the liturgy’s influence on Genesis A, see Laurence Michel’s study on the parallels between lines 1–8 and the preface to the eucharistic mass. 22. For discussion of the poem’s relationship to scriptural and patristic sources, see Remley, 65–94. 23. Bartlett defines the envelope (or ring) pattern as “any logically unified group of verses bound together by repetition at the end of (1) words or (2) ideas or (3) words and ideas which are employed at the beginning” (9). Stévanovitch does not discuss this particular envelope pattern in “Envelope Patterns in Genesis A and B.” 24. The theme is employed in exactly the same manner in Beowulf when it frames the Finnsburh story in lines 1063–70 and 1159b–62a. 25. Niles describes a similarly embedded pattern of ring composition in “Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf.” 26. “Þegnas þrymfæste þeoden heredon, / sægdon lustum lof, heora liffrean / demdon, drihtenes dugeþum wæron / swiðe gesælige” (Genesis A 15–18a; Glory-

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fast thanes eulogized the lord, said praise with pleasure, honored their life-lord; they were greatly blessed by the lord’s magnificence). 27. Greenfield notes the exiles of Cain (1018 ff.), Abraham (2822–23), and Lot (2480–82a) in “Formulaic Expression” 204–5. Chapter 4. Refiguring Hybrid Oral-Literate Signs 1. Numeration follows Keith Bosley. 2. See Opland, “Beowulf on the Poet.” As we saw in the previous chapter, this theme has also been harnessed to describe the Christian heaven in Genesis A. 3. The beasts themselves do not always appear in groups of four. In Andreas they are “beasts” of the sea: the pike and gray gull. See note 9 in chapter 3. 4. Another example. If, hypothetically, a South Slavic poem employed recognizable features of the “readying the horse” theme in order to narrate a conversation within a court or the process of dying in one’s home, then it would function in that instance as a metaphorical multiform (see Bajgorić for Foley’s description of this theme). The presence of the multiform in either of these unusual contexts would render it extradiegetic, in that it would summon the typical meanings of “readying the horse,” one of which is “imminent adventure,” while metaphorically describing the act of conversing or the process of dying. Yet in recorded and written South Slavic poems, the “readying the horse” theme arises only when someone is preparing to ride a horse in order to undertake a heroic or martial cause. 5. The identification of the antiphon related to Lyric XI is the only that remains subject to debate. Because Lyric I is acephalous, its paraphrased antiphon does not appear in verse, but the antiphon can be inferred from the body of the lyric. Chapter 7 discusses the relationship between antiphons and lyrics in greater detail. For antiphonal sources, see Cook, The Christ of Cynewulf; Moore, “The Source of Christ 416 ff.”; Burgert, The Dependence of Part I of Cynewulf’s Christ Upon the Antiphonary; Campbell, ed., The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book; Tugwell, “Advent Lyrics 348–77 (Lyric No. X)”; Hill, “A Liturgical Source for Christ I 164–213 (Advent Lyric VII)”; and Rankin, “The Liturgical Background of the Old English Advent Lyrics: A Reappraisal.” 6. For editions of The Advent Lyrics, see Burlin, The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary and Campbell, The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book. 7. On the representation of the Cross as a Germanic warrior, see Thieme, “GiftGiving as a Vital Element of Salvation in The Dream of the Rood”; Orton, “The Technique of Object-Personification in The Dream of the Rood and a Comparison with the Old English Riddles”; and Wolf, “Christ as Hero in The Dream of the Rood.”

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8. In chapter 7 I describe in greater depth how The Advent Lyrics use ritual signifiers to evoke the sacred “now” of ritual time. 9. See note on Matthew 1:21, Coogan, ed. 10. Other epithets in The Advent Lyrics that characterize Christ as a lord or ruler are these: þu reccend ond þu riht cyning (18b; you ruler and you just king), se waldend (46b; the ruler), heofones cyning (61b; king of heaven), rodera weard (134b; guardian of heavens), ealra cyninga cyning (136a; king of all kings), heofones heahcyning (150a; heaven’s high-king), wuldres æþeling (158a; prince of glory), ealra cyninga cyning, Crist ælmihtig (215; king of all kings, Christ almighty), sigores weard (243b; guardian of victory), heofona heahfrea (253a, 424a; high-lord of heavens), ece dryhten (272b, 366b, 396b [genitive]; eternal chieftain), helm alwihta (274a; protector of all creatures [or ruler of all]), engla þeoden (332b; lord of angels), lifes brytta (334b; leader of life), weoroda god (347b; God of hosts), halga heofona dryhten (348; chieftain of the holy heavens), hæleþa cyning (372b; king of men [or heroes]), sigores agend (420b; possessor of victory), dryhten weoroda (428b; chieftain of hosts), and the opening utterance of the embedded Old English Sanctus, “Halig eart þu, halig, heahengla brego, / soð sigores frea, simle þu bist halig, / dryhtna dryhten!” (403–5a; You are holy, holy, chief of high angels, true lord of victory, always you are holy, lord of lords!). The remaining epithets for Christ emphasize his role as son and creator: se cræftga (12a; the maker), lifes fruman (44b; originator of life), wuldres þrym (83b; majesty of glory), and mære meotudes suna (94a; renowned son of the measurer). 11. Bedingfield comments on the relationship between voice, typology, and eschatology in The Advent Lyrics: “[T]he expectation of the Second Coming gives this sense of anticipation a certain edge, personalizing the voices of the Old Testament models for those who are, in a sense, in the same position, lost in the darkness of the world and awaiting Christ’s judgement” (220). 12. The captive, as Greenfield has shown, is equated with the traditional exile figure of Old English poetry. In “The Theme of Spiritual Exile in Christ I” he sees “the progression of the theme of exile as a unifying and harmonizing element of the poem” (327). 13. By diegetic, I mean the Christians in the narrative, rather than those speaking or reading the lyrics. 14. Lines 23–24 reflect the advancements of the Muir edition, rather than the ASPR. 15. Salvador interprets these lines as a pastoral image alluding to Christ’s role as shepherd to his flock (“Architectural Metaphors” 189). 16. “þæt we, tires wone, / a butan ende sculon ermþu dreogan, / butan þu usic þon ofostlicor, ece dryhten, / æt þam leodsceaþan, lifgende god, / helm alwihta,

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hreddan wille” (VIII.270b–74; so that we, wanting in glory, / always without end, ought to endure hardship / unless you in haste, eternal lord, / from that people’s injurer, living god, /helm of all creatures, wish to save us). 17. I do not mean necessarily that the lyrics were dramatized, although there have been attempts to discern a relationship between early medieval drama, particularly liturgical drama, and Lyric VII. 18. The Anglo-Saxons often apply the warlike qualities of the Old Testament God to their descriptions of Christ. For a succinct discussion of Christus miles in The Dream of the Rood, see Woolf, Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature, 37–38. 19. The translation of heorodreorig at 218a is debatable. Bosworth and Toller show that the most frequent meaning of this word is “bloody with sword-wounds, gory”; as such, I translate it according to its heroic usage. When translating heorodreorig in context, I follow Karl P. Wentersdorf, whose essay on this word is cited by the editors of Klaeber’s Beowulf in their glossary. Wentersdorf demonstrates that the compound in The Phoenix means “doomed to die, death-destined” (38), a description that preserves the heroism of the phoenix’s death. A more common translation of this term in The Phoenix, Wentersdorf notes, has stressed the sadness of the bird, “sad unto death,” thereby removing the heroic connotation of heorodreorig. For example, Blake glosses heorodreorig with “disconsolate, disheartened” (110). Wentersdorf determines that throughout the corpus heoro- when compounded usually means “death,” “deadly,” or “mortal” (33) and dreorig means “tormented by approaching death,” “frightened or terrified by death,” “doomed to die,” “doomed to destruction,” “ill-fated,” and “portending death” (34). Wentersdorf did not have the advantage of the Dictionary of Old English, which clearly demonstrates the emotive coloring of dreorig—with “anguish,” “grief,” “horror,” and so on—in specific cases. Therefore, he overstates his case when saying that the association with its modern reflex, “dreary,” has caused its modern translators to commit an etymological fallacy. Still, nowhere in The Phoenix is the bird’s impending death characterized with fear or grief, which validates Wentersdorf ’s claim that “the compound should not conflict with the clearly established mood of serene confidence, if not joy, in the prospect of a blissful future” (37). Additionally, I imagine that “wounded,” which likewise translates heorodreorig in battle scenes, suffices here. After all, during immolation blood and other fluids leak from the body. 20. Translation by Mary Cletus Fitzpatrick, in Calder and Allen, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry (116). 21. See feormian entries 1, 1.a.i, and 1.a.ii in the Dictionary of Old English (Toronto).

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22. See Bosworth and Toller, entry 2 for þicgan, p. 1058. (www.bosworthtoller. com/031828) 23. On the translation of heorodreorges, see note 18. The Phoenix-poet–translator has extended the meaning of an oral-connected epithet. 24. For Foley, Beowulf ’s disarming invokes the Arming motif that occurs within a larger narrative idiom that he calls Battle with the Monster: “His disarming is structurally Arming, by traditional fiat, so the disparity is even more telling than a merely situational act of bravado could ever be: by both fulfilling and contravening expectation, the poet (and his tradition) make Beowulf ’s action at once traditional and unique” (Immanent Art 234). 25. Riddle 47 (numeration follows ASPR) translates and modifies a 3-line Latin riddle by Symphosius, whose title is Tinea (moth or worm). 26. See Foys’s description of these insects in “The Undoing of Exeter Book Riddle 47, ‘Bookmoth.’” 27. In his reading of Riddle 47, which he has shared in a prepublication draft (https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:10515/), Foys notes that good riddles require that solvers use lexical information (such as moððe and se wyrm) to find the categorical similarities that lead to the poem’s answer: “The heart of a riddle is locked away, hidden from view, waiting for the cægan that undoes the obscuring bands by interpretively snapping their deeper meaning into sudden and elucidating focus” (“The Undoing” 3). Chapter 5. Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Poet-Patron Theme Author’s note: I am grateful to Joseph Falaky Nagy and Joseph Harris for their comments on an early version of this essay, “Dom Aræran: Anglo-Saxon Poets and Patrons,” presented at the UCLA Colloquium for Oral and Popular Culture Studies (COPTS), UCLA, in 2009. A version of this chapter appears under the name, “Bright Voice of Praise: An Old English Poet-Patron Convention” in Studies in Philology. 1. French 624; Eliason 185. Opland says that Widsith may have been composed for “mercenary ends” (Anglo-Saxon Oral Poetry 214). See also Anderson’s discussion of the scop’s remuneration (41–44). 2. Rollman has a similar opinion of the begging poem in “Widsith as an AngloSaxon Defense of Poetry.” 3. For some examples of works that “thematize the economic relationship between patron and poet” in early English, Norse, Icelandic, and Irish traditions, see Biggs. 4. In Beowulf one or more scops sing a creation song in the great hall of the

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Danes (89b–98) and recount the tales of exemplary figures (both positive and negative) when the moment warrants it (867b–915, 1063–160a). 5. For the most authoritative (and encyclopedic) editions of Widsith, see Chambers, Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend, and Malone, Widsith. 6. On “Healgamen” as the name of Hrothgar’s scop, see note for line 1066 in Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, Klaeber’s Beowulf. 7. The proposed theme must be treated hypothetically because, other than Widsith and Deor, no comparand in the Old English corpus exists for a poet who, in the first person, creates a þoncword (Widsith 137b; praise song or speech of gratitude) in exchange for patronage. Of course, similar representations of poets do exist in the larger body of extant literature in Germanic languages. See, for example, Lawrence, “Structure and Interpretation of ‘Widsith,’” espec. 329. 8. Foley describes the beasts of battle theme in The Advent Lyrics in “How Genres Leak,” 94. 9. For more on the expressive dynamics of the metaphorical oral-connected idiom, see chapter 4. 10. In “Widsith’s Journey through Germanic Tradition,” Creed prefers ms. mærþa (2b; of the proclaimed or of the renowned), with its oral-traditional connotation. Most editions, following Kemble, emend mærða to mægða (of kinsmen; see 221–33). 11. For a memetic analysis of Old English texts, see Drout, How Tradition Works. 12. See Bauman, “Performance and Honor in 13th-Century Iceland,” for similar examples of the performance of honor in medieval Icelandic verse. 13. See Foley, Immanent Art, 210–14. In contrast, Eormanric receives censure in Deor with the phrase, þæt wæs grim cyning (23b; that was a grim king). 14. Six hundred shillings signifies an enormously precious gift. On the monetary value of the torque, Chambers cautions: “the sceatt is sometimes a fixed sum: a subdivision of the shilling: but often its meaning is quite vague, ‘a piece of money.’ It is best so taken here, the value of the sceatt then being defined by scillingrime” (Widsith: A Study 217). Malone’s note to these lines draws attention to the ambiguity in the relationship between the gift and gold coins (48). 15. Scilling is probably Widsith’s lyre; see line 105. 16. For example, in Germanic legend Welund (Wayland), the smith, experienced maiming and imprisonment; Beadohilde (Bothvild) mourns her pregnancy and the deaths of her brothers; and the moans of Mæðhilde, whose story may be related to the Magnild and Gauti of nineteenth-century Scandinavian ballads, disturb her lover Geat. Harris rightly describes, however, the slippage between the actual exemplum and the woes associated with these figures, and

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he makes a strong case for questioning the assumption that the refrain signals consolation for trials endured in “‘Deor’ and its Refrain: Preliminaries to an Interpretation.” 17. A simple search of Toronto’s Dictionary of the Old English Corpus (Antonette di Paolo Healey, ed., Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 2004) reveals that deore means “precious” or “valuable” in Genesis A, B, Exodus, Christ and Satan, Guthlac, and many other works. 18. On the drápa, see Thurville-Petre, xxxvii–xxxviii. Biggs writes, “The use of the refrain is also significant to this argument because it is a likely place to include the name of the one praised” (319). He argues, however, that the omission of the lord’s name constitutes a threat: “The implication is that if he [Deor] does not get his job back, the next time Deor recites the poem he will identify which of the Heodenings treated him badly” (309). I suggest that the threat has already been carried out, because omitting the lord’s name enacts cultural erasure. 19. Niles makes the point that Widsith depends on an act of “creative ethnicity” that speaks to “the pride in the English royal family” (“Widsith, the Goths” 95, 99). 20. Niles, “Widsith, the Goths,” 97–98 and 104. Creed, “Widsith’s Journey,” offers the most persuasive interpretation of Widsith’s improbable age. 21. All three names for a “song” or “tale” appear in Widsith. The giedd, which according to Niles may be differentiated from the other terms, always acts as a vehicle for traditional wisdom: “[a giedd] denoted a quasi-ritualistic discursive practice encompassing both verse and prose, both song and speech, both oral communication and writing. Through its associations with inspired speech, a ‘giedd’ was thought to connect ordinary awareness with special sources of wisdom (as in prophecy) and, potentially, with numinous modes of being (as in the magico-medical charms)” (“Widsith, the Goths” 105). See also, Niles, Homo Narrans, 16–19. 22. The phrase lof se gewyrceð clearly also means “he earns praise” (see, for example, the translation of Widsith line 142b by Robert Bjork in Old English Shorter Poems). My translation here calls attention to a secondary meaning. 23. As described in the first chapter, traditional referentiality in an oral-related poem actively substitutes pars pro toto or metonymically; the medium allows the poet to summon with great efficiency an extraordinary amount of information pertaining to narrative structure, characterization, and traditional concepts in a few words or phrases. See Foley, Immanent Art, 38–60, and How to Read, 109–24. 24. See Wright, The Vespasian Psalter: British Museum Cotton Vespasian A.I. 25. For editions of The Advent Lyrics, see Burlin, The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary and Campbell, The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book.

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26. The poem’s use of ryne (the course) works as a near homophone and pun for rȳne (mystery or mysterious saying). 27. Greenfield has shown this to be the case with the Exile theme, where synonymous words for the misery of the exile figure and for the state of deprivation that he endures will engage traditional associations with the theme (“Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’”). 28. Fortescue, “Sanctus.” In “The Seraphim’s Song” Thomas D. Hill has shown that the poet’s elaboration upon the Sanctus emphasizes the triune nature of God. 29. I use the primary definition of domhwæt in the Dictionary of Old English: “eager for glory.” The DOE also lists Bosworth and Toller’s “strenuous in judgment,” which preserves the physicality of hwæt (quick, active, vigorous). The compound, a hapax legomenon, invites a range of interpretations, including Burlin’s “zealously,” Campbell’s “zealous for glory,” and “vigorously seeking judgment.” 30. The þonc in Lyric II depends upon an emendation of line 22b by a later scribe; see Greenfield, “Þancword for John C. Pope,” 167–68. 31. Note the first half-line of Cædmon’s Hymn, Nu scylun hergan (Now we ought to praise). Biggs’s reading of the hymn, which calls attention to the role of gifts, makes the presence of the poet-patron contract more evident than one might think. He argues, “Cædmon’s perception, that both of God’s creations in Genesis 1:1 (heaven as well as earth) are for man, strengthens the link to the genre of praise poetry” (306). 32. Homilists such as Ælfric and Wulfstan, and the author Robert Mannying of Brunne. See Whitbread, “The Old English Poem ‘Alms-Giving,’” 3. See also Trahern, “The Old English Almsgiving.” Berkhout, “Some Notes on the Old English ‘Almsgiving,’” discusses patristic sources on the efficacy of almsgiving, linking almsgiving and Ecclesiasticus, 3:30, with the efficacy of baptism. All three authors interpret the last half-line of the poem, sawla lacnað (heals [wounds of] souls) as a reference to the almsgiver’s own soul. 33. Translation influenced by Ronalds and Clunies Ross, “Thureth: A Neglected Old English Poem and its History in Anglo-Saxon Scholarship,” 360. 34. The awkwardness of “Thureth” is remarked by Ronalds and Clunies Ross, who provide the details of private communication with Stanley on this matter (361). 35. Amodio has addressed the mistaken concept that literacy immediately eclipses oral traditions: “orality and literacy are parts of a subtle, complex, lengthy process of cultural change. . . . Because the transition from an oral to a literate culture is marked by continuity, not rupture, oral habits of mind persist within increasingly literate societies but retain much of their cultural centrality” (Writing the Oral Tradition 22).

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36. Frank, “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet”; Niles, “The Myth of the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet”; and Amodio, “Re(si)sting the Singer.” For the reader who seeks to understand what may be learned about actual Anglo-Saxon poets, see Thornbury’s excellent discussion of Anglo-Latin and Old English historical, literary, and linguistic evidence. Chapter 6. A Sea Voyage in The Dream of the Rood Author’s note: An earlier version of this chapter appears in English Studies 91 (2010): 241–55 under the title, “Two Ships Crossing: Hybrid Poetics in The Dream of the Rood.” 1. Like some instances of the devouring-the-dead, lord-retainer, and poet-patron themes, the sea-voyage typescene in The Dream of the Rood works both metonymically and metaphorically. The metaphorical oral-connected idiom is one of three kinds of hybrid poetical idioms addressed in Signs That Sing. 2. Quotations of The Dream of the Rood are taken from Swanton’s edition. 3. See Berkhout’s survey of critical responses to holmwudu in “The Problem of Holmwudu” (329–31). The many instances of holtwudu in editions and anthologies reflect how broadly this emendation was once accepted. See, for instance, Dickins and Ross (31); Fowler (100); Kaiser (91); Lehnert (72); and Whitelock (157). 4. Although holm may have several meanings, including “land rising from the water,” I focus here on its more common denotation: “wave, ocean, water, sea” (Bosworth and Toller 551 and 550). Swanton notes that if holm-wudu in line 91a means “land rising from the water” or simply an area of raised land, it could portray the image of the Cross on Golgotha (132). In fact, there is no need to choose one interpretation over the other, since both work productively together. In a somewhat different vein, Pickford suggests that holmwudu could be a deliberate pun on helmwudu. 5. For example, Hough and Corbett in Beginning Old English (220) and Swanton (98) preserve the term represented in Vercelli, Cathedral Library, MS CXVII. 6. See, for instance, Pope’s Eight Old English Poems, prepared by Fulk (12); Baker (242); and Mitchell and Robinson (261). Translations in the Norton (ed. Greenblatt), Longman (ed. Damrosch), and Broadview (ed. Black) anthologies also represent the emendation. 7. Kaske 54n33. See also Berkhout 431–32 and McEntire 397. 8. See Berkhout 431–32. The following passage from Augustine’s sermon on Matthew 24 (“But the boat was now in the midst of the sea, distressed by the waves”) clearly equates the Holy Cross with a ship: “Ex ipso autem itinere fluctus tempestatesque patimur: sed opus est vel in navi simus. Nam si in navi pericula

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sunt, sine navi certus interitus. Quantasvis enim vires habeat lacertorum qui natat in pelago, aliquando magnitudine maris victus absorbetur et mergitur. Opus est ergo ut in navi simus, hoc est, ut in ligno portemur, ut mare hoc transire valeamus. Hoc autem lignum, quo infirmitas nostra portatur, crux est Domini, in qua signamur, et ab hujus mundi submersionibus vindicamur” (Sermo 75, 2). In translation, this passage reads: “Now by this very journey we are exposed to waves and tempests; but we must needs be at least in the ship. For if there be perils in the ship, without the ship there is certain destruction. For whatever strength of arm he may have who swims in the open sea, yet in time he is carried away and sunk, mastered by the greatness of its waves. Need then there is that we be in the ship, that is, that we be carried in the wood, that we may be able to cross this sea. Now this Wood in which our weakness is carried is the Cross of the Lord, by which we are signed, and delivered from the dangerous tempests of this world” (Trans. MacMullen, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament by Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo). By creating an analogy between the Cross and a ship, Augustine reworks the well-known comparison between the Cross and a boat’s mast in Hippolytus (De Anticristo 59). Citations from De Anticristo follow Patrologia Latina 38. 9. McEntire 397–98. God closes the door of the ark in the Old English Genesis A by performing the sign of the cross over it (398). See, for example, Noah’s Ark Panel, West Face of the Broken Cross at Kells (http://publish.ucc.ie/doi/tandi/ Kells9-N466). See also Bede’s exegesis of a passage from the Gospels comparing a literal ship to the Cross, noted in Kaske (54–56). 10. One definition of asettan in the Dictionary of Old English (ed. Healey) is “to move, convey oneself,” often in relationship to bodies of water (entry 10). 11. See Jolly, Popular Religion, especially chap. 4, and Liuzza, “Prayers and/or Charms Addressed to the Cross.” 12. For more on oral poetics, see chapter 1. Foley in How to Read an Oral Poem summarizes the principle of “variation within limits” in oral poetry in general (18) and demonstrates that variation is a recognizable feature of textualized ancient and medieval verse forms that employ an oral poetics (48). 13. Ramsey analyzes Beowulf ’s two sea voyages, to and from the land of the Danes. Including Scyld Scefing’s sea burial, the typescene actually occurs three times in Beowulf. 14. Responsion, the repetition of particular lexemes, also may occur within a single typescene (see Foley, Traditional Oral Epic 340–42). For example, in Elene the term hengest (horse) for ship recurs frequently. The verbs (ge)gyrwan and (ge)stigan recur in The Dream of the Rood.

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15. “Young hero,” “powerful King,” “Lord of heavens,” “God of hosts,” and “heaven’s Chieftain.” Readers are familiar with the “heroic sheen” that adorns Christ in this poem. Wolf succinctly analyzes the heroic epithets and actions associated with both Christ and the rood. See also Cherniss, “The Cross as Christ’s Weapon.” 16. X under wolcnum is an instance of traditional phraseology. See Foley, Traditional Oral Epic 220–21. 17. For example, Elene 237–46a; Beowulf 218; and Andreas 369–76a. In Elene and Andreas, the temperament of the sea influences the mood of the ship’s passengers. 18. The examples are drawn from searches in the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, accessed May 1, 2016. 19. This translation takes into consideration Fulk’s analysis of sund in “Afloat in Semantic Space.” 20. The Leaps of Christ, a medieval commonplace, correspond to Christ’s movement into Mary’s womb, his birth, being raised upon the Cross, transition to the sepulcher, the Harrowing of Hell, and Ascension to heaven. Part of Marchand’s argument for translating forms of (ge)stigan in lines 34 and 40 with “leap” depends upon his analysis of the ge- prefix: “The ge-prefix shows that this must be a perfective (or, if one prefers, ‘complexive’) verb. Perhaps ‘mount,’ also used, will work, or ‘ascend,’ the ascendere of Latin hymnology; but I must insist on the aspectual force of the prefix, and the best translation, it seems to me, is ‘leap.’ Christ does not intend to climb the tree, he intends to leap upon it, to embrace it” (85). 21. While (ge)stigan may be employed in other contexts, in the majority of instances it is linked to either travel upon the seas or movement across the skies. Both actions appear in the Old English prose Saint Andrew, where the hero astah on þæt scip (climbed on that ship) and Christ astah on heofonas (climbed unto the heavens) on four different occasions. Not surprisingly, a cursory search within the Dictionary of Old English database demonstrates that the phrase to heofenum (and to a lesser extent on heofenum and of heofenum) paired with a form of (ge)stigan arises with great frequency in the Old English corpus: twenty-one instances of (a)stah and to heofenum and seventeen of (*)stig(*) and to heofenum. There are two of (*)stig(*) and on heofenum. (*)Stigan and of heofenum describe the movement of Christ, the Holy Spirit, or fire from heaven to earth: fourteen instances of (a)stah and of heofenum and three of astig(*)and of heofenum. Chapter 7. Signifying the Coming of Christ in The Advent Lyrics 1. On Advent and the three arrivals of Christ, see Borgehammar, “A Monastic Conception of the Liturgical Year,” 23–27. For editions and book-length studies of The Advent Lyrics, see Cook, Christ of Cynewulf (addressing all three of the Christ

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poems); Burgert, Dependence of Part I; Campbell, The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book; and Burlin, Old English Advent. 2. The first ten of the twelve extant lyrics paraphrase and expand upon Advent antiphons. The last two lyrics paraphrase antiphons and other liturgical material from liturgies that fall on Christmas and the Octave of Christmas. Because the collection is acephalous (the beginning of the first lyric has been lost) and lacks three of the Great O Antiphons, some have posited an original grouping of fifteen lyrics. See Rankin, “The Liturgical Background of the Old English Advent Lyrics.” 3. See also, Hill’s discussion of The Advent Lyrics’ vernacular Sanctus in “The Seraphim’s Song: The ‘Sanctus’ in the Old English ‘Christ I,’ Lines 403–15.” 4. Lass opposes the sacramental and homiletic modes or genres of religious verse in Old English poetry. 5. For example: Turner, Drums of Affliction; The Ritual Process; and The Anthropology of Performance. 6. The varieties of “performance theory” used by ritual theorists developed first in the fields of anthropology and linguistics (versus theater and literary criticism). Bell describes how these fields produced performance theory: “Historically speaking, a number of ideas came together in the mid-1970s to yield a ‘performance approach’ to the study of ritual: Kenneth Burke’s discussions of dramatism, Victor Turner’s descriptions of ritual as ‘social drama,’ Austin’s theory of performative utterances, Erving Goffman’s work on the ritual units that structure the performances of social interaction, and even Bloch’s analysis of the effects of formulaic speech and song” (Bell, Ritual: Perspectives 73). In the fields of folklore studies and anthropology, Bauman’s Verbal Art as Performance has also been influential. 7. Studies of The Advent Lyrics by Greenfield, “The Petitions of the Advent Lyrics and the Question of Unity”; Parks, “Mystery and the Word”; and Garner, Structuring Spaces bear witness to Foley’s remark that The Advent Lyrics “bring a broad cross-section of the generic eco-system [of oral-related Old English verse] into play” (“How Genres Leak” 94). The poet (or poets) of The Advent Lyrics chose to use the exile theme, architectural imagery linked to oral tradition, the riddle genre, the beasts of battle theme, and the two themes explored earlier in Signs That Sing—lord-retainer and poet-patron. 8. See Billet’s analysis of the “Durham Collectar” (Durham, Cathedral Library, A.IV.19) and the “Parker Old English Bede” (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41) in Divine Office in Anglo-Saxon England (220–51). 9. See Fassler, “Sermons, Sacramentaries, and Early Sources for the Office in the Latin West,” 16–17 and 36–39.

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10. Sarum Use would not be instituted until the late eleventh century by Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury. 11. Concerning the pre-Reform liturgies, Foot writes: “Diversity may, as [Catherine] Cubitt has persuasively argued, have been the keynote of the early AngloSaxon liturgy” (195). 12. Guéranger states that according to Cardinal Giuseppe Maria Tomasi (or Tommasi) one begins earlier than the week preceding Christmas—from the feast of St. Nicholas (Dec. 6) to the feast of St. Lucy (Dec. 13) and in the Ordo Romanus of the eleventh century, one chanted the antiphons from the feast of St. Nicholas until the day before Christmas. He surmises that the number of days that the O Antiphons were chanted before Christmas probably accords with the number of antiphons adopted by each particular church and that the number of antiphons was accorded symbolic significance—nine for the nine choirs of angels, twelve for the twelve prophets, and so on (513–14). 13. Amalarius of Metz confirms the use of the O Antiphons at the Magnificat. 14. Borgehammar writes, “Advent is, then, a celebration of the past arrival of Christ and a preparation for the future one. But there is also a third aspect, the present possibility of arrivals, or ‘visits,’ of Christ to the soul. These visits are foretastes of the heavenly glory and should be the constant object of desire of the monk” (“A Monastic Conception of the Liturgical Year” 26). 15. However, at this time the Easter liturgy received more attention. 16. “From the Greek antiphonon, sounding against, responsive sound, singing opposite, alternate chant” (Catholic Encyclopedia s.v. “Antiphons”). 17. Ibid. 18. Niles describes the heightened rhetoric of epic verse as ritualized discourse. His chapter, “Beowulf as Ritualized Discourse,” constitutes an important step toward acknowledging the socially embedded character of early medieval verse. It does not examine ritualized discourse per se (Homo Narrans 120–45). 19. See Foley, Immanent Art. His subsequent books and articles all draw to a greater or lesser degree on the theoretical construct presented in Immanent Art. 20. For another analysis of the relationship between ritual poetics and the theory of immanent art, see my article, “Toward a Ritual Poetics: Dream of the Rood as a Case Study.” This paragraph and the next quote sporadically from my writing on 394–95 and 397–98. 21. In Rappaport’s terminology, “acceptance” does not denote faith or belief; it means participation—ranging from passive attendance to playing a supportive role in a liturgy. 22. Bourauel independently came to the same conclusion in “Zur Quellenund-Verfasserfrage von Andreas Crist und Fata.”

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23. Cook describes the passage of Latin antiphon into Old English paraphrase: “From all that has been said, it is apparent that we must conceive of Cynewulf as so thrilled by the sweet and solemn chanting of the Greater Antiphons of Advent, and so imbued with their spirit through reflection upon their rich devotional and doctrinal contents, that he gladly yielded to the impulse to reproduce them in English under the form of variation” (xlii). 24. According to Rankin, the antiphon chosen for Lyric XII, O admirabile commercium, “remains close to the spirit of Christmas itself, and is not concerned with other events commemorated during this period, such as the Slaying of the Innocents (feast on 28 December), the Circumcision (1 January) or the coming of Epiphany (6 January)” (336). 25. Most early discussions of the antiphon texts that are associated with the lyrics assume a nonexistent Liber responsoralis of St. Gregory, due to the editorial history of the Compiègne Antiphoner (Rankin 318). 26. Amodio uses this term in Writing the Oral Tradition for the way that traditional referentiality (or metonymy) activates meaningful, extratextual associations for audiences. 27. Thirty-three of the fifty-nine matches in the poetic corpus are invocations paired with a vocative epithet. Another occurrence of eala in Lay 4, line 25 of Meters of Boethius addresses God but does not use an epithet. The remaining twentyfive are exclamations of awe or lamentation. See the Dictionary of Old English for greater description of the semantic and syntactic complexity of eala; also Sauer discusses Ælfric’s analysis of Latin interjections in his Grammar (at 170) and the use of eala, as well as other interjections, in the Old English Soliloquies (at 174–77) in “How the Anglo-Saxons Expressed their Emotions with the Help of Interjections.” 28. For more on the relationship between Old English poetics, liturgy, and the Bible in The Advent Lyric’s paraphrase of the Sanctus, see Hill, “Seraphim’s Song” (as mentioned above) and Pope, “What the Seraphim Do in Line 396a of the Old English Advent: A Scribal Cover Uncovered.” 29. Beechy, following the New Catholic Encyclopedia, uses these three terms (invocation, amplification, and appeal) in her discussion of Eala earendel in “Eala Earendel: Extraordinary Poetics in Old English Verse.” 30. This appeal may resonate, not just in the liturgical present but also with the three-fold advent as a whole and with the Harrowing of Hell. The Advent Lyrics show a clear understanding of the manner in which the veni plea may call to mind these associations, making a wide swathe of sacred chronology mysteriously present.

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31. See Rankin, “Liturgical Background,” 329–30, for further description of their shared rhetorical and musical features. 32. Burgert, Dependence of Part I; Burlin, Old English; and Rankin, “Liturgical Background.” 33. According to Rankin, O virgo virginum always “without exception” accompanies the seven Great Os in early antiphonaries (“Liturgical Background” 331). 34. For example, Lyric III paraphrases the O Jerusalem antiphon, an additional O that employs the third-person singular future form of venire: O Ierusalem civitas dei summi, leva in circuitu oculos tuos et vide Dominum [deum] tuum quia iam veniet solvere te a vinculis (O Jereusalem, city of the most high God: lift your eyes round about and see your Lord, for he will come soon to free you from your chains, bold mine) with “Sioh nu sylfa þe geond þas sidan gesceaft, / swylce rodores hrof rume geondwlitan / ymb healfa gehwone, hu þec heofones cyning / siðe geseceð ond sylf cymeð, / nimeð eard in þe” (III.59–63a, bold mine; Now look about this vast creation, and at the roof of sky on each side gaze broadly, [see] how heaven’s king seeks you on his journey and himself comes. He makes his home in you). 35. Campbell labels lines 5–15 the “petition section” of Lyric II. 36. “Now come heaven’s high-king”; “Come now, victory’s guardian, measurer of mankind”; and “Come now, king of men, do not delay too long.” 37. I.9, I.11, I.13, I.15; III.59, III.66; IV.83, IV.100; V.112, V.119, V.122; VI.134, VI.146, VI.149; VII.166, VII.188, VII.206, VII.208; VIII.219, VIII.230, VIII.243, VIII.247; IX.326, IX.335, IX.341, IX.342; X.370, X.372; and XI.383. 38. Interestingly, Beechy describes the phrase eala Earendel, with which the Advent-poet translates O Oriens as probable formula celebrating the rising sun or morning star. Because the phrase has roots in a pre-Christian era, she believes that it may have been repurposed for this Christian context (“Eala Earendel” 16–19). 39. Quoted from Dewick and Frere, The Leofric Collectar 19. Bedingfield translates: “Judea and Jerusalem, do not be afraid, tomorrow you will go forth and the Lord will be with you. / The Saviour of the world will rise like the sun and descend in the womb of the virgin like rain over the grass, alleluia. / When the sun is rising in the sky, you will see the king of kings proceeding like a bridegroom from his marriage-bed. / Rejoice and be glad, Jerusalem, because your king comes to you, about whom the prophets prophesied, whom the angels perpetually adore, to whom the cherubim and seraphim proclaim, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’” (27). 40. For Bedingfield, “dramatic liturgy” deserves to be considered as a distinct and fully realized category, rather than as a nascent form of medieval drama. 41. The lines that describe the Seraphim also introduce the Santus probably as it was introduced during the Preface to the Mass: “Before the prayer comes to the mention of our Lord it always refers to the angels. . . . They are named at great

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length and with much solemnity as those who join with us in praising God. So the description in Isaiah 6:1–4, must have attracted attention very early as expressing this angelic praise of God and as summing up (in v. 3) just the note of the first part of the Anaphora. The Sanctus simply continues the Preface. It is a quotation of what the angels say. We thank God with the angels, who say unceasingly ‘Holy, holy, holy,’ etc. Logically the celebrant could very well himself say or sing the Sanctus” (Catholic Encyclopedia s.v. “Sanctus”). Afterword: Signs That Sing 1. “The Virtue of Ornament.” Paper presented at the 2015 convention of the Modern Language Association in Vancouver, Old English Division. 2. Osbern’s time at Canterbury spans periods of time before and after the Norman Invasion of 1066. The central figure in the “R” initial (London, British Library, Arundel 16 f.2) was formerly identified as Dunstan, but is now recognized to be Osbern of Canterbury. Mildred Budny and Timothy Graham show that the label OSBEARNVS within the “R” uses the same pigments as those in other parts of the initial, appearing in space explicitly created for it. Additionally, the details of the image fit what we know about Osbern’s life. 3. See Osbern’s Miracula Sancti Dunstani in Memorials of Saint Dunstan, edited by Stubbs. Osbern witnessed Dunstan’s miracle when he was a child singing in the choir. Under prior Godric, whose term began in 1023, Osbern became a child oblate. For more on Osbern’s life, see Rubenstein, “Life and Writings,” 27–28. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe describes Osbern’s Miracula S. Dunstani as “a text that seeks to make a community by writing it” (“Writing Community” 203). 4. Under the directive of Archbishop Lanfranc (1070–1089), Osbern wrote his first hagiography about the life and martyrdom of St. Elphege, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1006 to 1012, and the translation of his bones from London to Canterbury. A few years after becoming Archbishop, Lanfranc disciplined Osbern by sending him to Bec, where Anselm befriended him. After Osbern’s return to Christ Church, he exchanged letters with Anselm and, upon Anselm’s election as Archbishop of Canterbury, encouraged him to take up the position (Budny and Graham 83). 5. Budny and Graham describe the writing surface as “both a tablet and a partly unrolled scroll,” 90. 6. “These features may emphasize the sacred character of Osbern’s text and the sanctity of his hagiographical subject” (ibid. 91). 7. His role combined the duties “of cantor with amarius” (ibid. 92). 8. Lanfranc directed Osbern to write a liturgical historia of St. Elphege, now

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lost. William of Malmesbury reports that Osbern took the prize for music (Rubenstein 31). 9. Like Anglo-Saxon poets writing in Old English, Osbern adopted a typical format and expanded it. See O’Brien O’Keeffe’s analysis of Osbern’s favorable representation of disobedience in Dunstan’s vita (Stealing Obedience 55–93). Osbern’s image points to other avenues of research on the hybridity of oral, written, and ritual traditions: Latin texts written by Anglo-Saxons, metrical and alliterative prose, and post-Conquest poems in late Old English and Middle English. 10. On the interplay of letters, voice, and the freeing of bonds, see Dumitrescu’s analysis of litterae solutoriae (releasing letters).

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INDEX

The Advent Lyrics (also “Christ I”), 3; ahreddan in, 78, 80; antiphons associated with, 132–35, 150, 179n5, 189n2, 191nn23,24; cuman in, 138, 140–45, 154; eala in, 128, 138–40, 191n27; eschatology and, 180n11; exile theme and, 79 (see also Exile theme); light and dark imagery in, 139, 145–48; lord-retainer theme and, 74–82 (see also Lord-retainer theme); nu in, 138, 142–45; oral-connected idioms in, 72–73, 180n12, 189n7; petitions in, 78–79, 191n30; poet-patron theme and, 96, 104–7 (see also Poet-patron theme); ritual idioms in, 128–34, 136–54; role of time, 75–77, 91, 144; typology, 76, 137–38, 180n11 Advent season, 132–34, 190n14; Lent and, 133. See also Antiphons of Advent, Christmas, and the Octave of Christmas Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, 122 Aesthetics of nostalgia, 10–11 Aesthetics of the familiar (also “aesthetics of familiarity”), 31–32, 36–37, 39, 59, 167n39, 172n10, 172–73n11 Agency, 168–69n57. See also Poet Aldhelm, 134 Allegory, 23, 49, 73–74, 155; The Phoenix and, 83, 88–89, 91; the tower, 1–3 “Alms-Giving,” 96, 108–10, 185n32 Altay oral poetry, 51, 52, 55 Amodio, Mark. See Metonymy (“metonymic referentiality”); Oral performance

Andreas, 61–65, 121–22, 167n46, 176n9 Anselm of Canterbury, 193n4 Antiphonaries, 140–41, 192n33 Antiphons (early medieval performance of), 134–35, 139–40, 190n16; invocationamplification-petition structure, 139–40; Magnificat and, 134–35 Antiphons of Advent, Christmas, and Octave of Christmas, 106, 190nn12,13; associated with The Advent Lyrics, 76, 128, 132–35, 150, 179n5, 189n2, 191nn23,24; Monastic Os (also “Additional Os”), 132–33, 152–53; O Antiphons (also “Great Os”), 132–33, 140–41, 151; veni phrase in, 140–45, 151–54 Apocalypse. See Day of Judgment Apostalic relationship, 62, 63–64 Armagh Cross, 115 Armor, 177n13 Ascension topos, 123–24, 125 Assertive. See Vow Aurality, 20–22 Avaritia generalis, 41–42, 173–74n18 Azarius, 44 Baroque style, 163n11. See also Virtue of ornament The Battle of Maldon, 55–58, 69, 177nn12,13 Beasts of battle theme, 44, 72, 95–96, 176n9, 179n3 Begging poem, 93–94, 182n1

218 · Index Benedictional, 110 Benjamin, Walter. See Constellation Beowulf, 4, 5, 35, 78, 172n8; collocations of grædige and gifre, 42–44; devouring-thedead typescene, 44–49; inverted arming scene, 88; representations of scop, 94–95, 105, 108, 182–83n4, 183n5; sea voyage typescene, 116–18, 121, 122, 123, 187n13 Body (decomposition of), 35, 40, 44–49, 87–88 Cædmon’s Hymn, 185n31 Carmen de ave phoenice, 83–84, 87 Chalice, 170n69 Charms (Old English), 166nn29,33 Christ I. See The Advent Lyrics Christ III, 44 Christ and Satan, 40–41 Christian communities, 82, 169n60 Christ’s Advents (birth, annual commemoration, and second coming), 76, 128, 137 Christus miles, 82, 181n18 Coal, 170n70 Collocations, 15, 43; word and hord, 15; fus and forð-, 28; grædig and gifr-, 42–44, 88 Communitas, 3, 82 Constellation: as interpretive tool, 10–11, 31 (see also Aesthetics of nostalgia); as solution to Riddle, 30 Cross, Holy, 29–31; apotropaic and sanative power, 116; vision of, 170n72. See also The Dream of the Rood Crucifixion, 122, 170n69 Day of Judgment, 76, 83, 89–90, 128, 133; purifying fire of, 83, 170n70 “The Death of Edgar,” 38 A Defence of Poetry (Percy Bysshe Shelley), 161n1 Deor, 94–95, 100–101, 183–84n16, 184n18 Devouring-the-dead theme, 40, 44–49, 156; catalogue of body parts, 45, 47; dismemberment, 85–86; metaphorical, 72–73, 82–91; motifs, 45, 47–48, 84–87 Dichotomy: Christian versus non-Christian, 1; oral versus written, 9 Diegesis, 34–35, 38, 52, 76, 79, 180n13; defini-

tion of, 171n2; in relationship to audience, 82, 101, 103 Discourse, field of and mode of, 20 Domhwæt, 185n29 The Doubting Joseph, 76 Dramatic liturgy, 192n40. See also Liturgical drama The Dream of the Rood, 3, 75; (ge)stigan, 120–23, 188nn20,21; holmwudu, 113–16, 186nn3,4; sea voyage typescene, 113–27 Drout, Michael. See Memetics Dunstan, Saint, 157, 193nn2,3 Elene, 38–39, 116–17, 119–20, 123 Elphege, Saint. See Vita et translatio Sancti Elphegi Epithets for Christ, 76–77, 120, 180n10, 188n15 Exile theme, 2–3, 53–54, 62, 79–80, 179n27, 180n12, 185n27; motifs, 53 Eucharist. See Mass Eulogy, 81–82 Experiential knowledge, 19 Fall of the Angels, 65–69 Foley, John Miles. See Immanent art theory Formulaic systems: [x] anhaga, 53; beorhte frætwe, 15; com [x], 15, 165n25; eala Earendel, 192n38; fus forðweges, 28; grædig and gifre, 40–49; hæleð hige-[x], 37–39, 173n12; ðæt wæs [x] cyning, 183n13; [x] waldend, 12; wineleas [x], 53; [x] under wolcnum, 188n16 Formula, 43, 166n36, 171n5, 172–73n11; versus cliché, 173n13. See also Idioms; Traditional phraseology Funeral rite (via devouring-the-dead theme), 44–49 Genealogy, 102 Genesis A/B (sometimes Genesis A), 3, 40, 65–70, 115; exordium, 65–70; influence of liturgy on, 178n21 Gesar, 35, 40 (Ge)stigan, 120–23, 188nn20,21 Giedd (as traditional wisdom), 184n21 Gifer, 46–49, 90

Index · 219 “The Gifts of Men,” 96, 107–8 Gnome, 174n26 Goody, Jack. See Orality and literacy Gospel of Mark, 122 Grammatica, 23, 168n54 Greed, 41–42, 173–74n18 Grendel’s mother, 42–43 Guthlac A/B, 39 Habitus, 168n57 Harrowing of Hell, 76, 78–79, 137 Hell-mouth, 49 Hermeneutics, 30, 75, 82, 125, 156 Heroic contract, 74, 80. See also Lordretainer theme Hildeburh, 44–45 Holmwudu, 113–16, 186nn3,4 Hybrid poetics, 143–44, 162n3, 194n9; aesthetic implications of, 26–33; in Britain, 10; as creative resource, 2, 7, 11, 32, 34–35, 155–56; defined, 4; metaphorical use of oral-traditional idiom, 49, 71–74, 91–92, 96, 103–4, 113, 125; mix of expressive styles, 15; as practice, 2–4, 20; written oral-traditional idiom, 34–35, 49, 52, 59–60, 69–72, 95–96, 186n1; ritual idioms in written text, 130, 131–32, 156. See also Virtue of ornament Hybrid textual and ritual traditions, 24–25, 131–32 Idioms, 43–44; metaphorical/figurative application of oral-traditional, 71–92, 103–27, 156, 179n4, 186n1; oral-traditional, 43–44, 171n1; ritual, 128–54, 156; writtenoral (also “written oral-connected”), 34–35, 40, 72, 156 Imitatio Christi, 60, 63–64 Immanent art theory, 13–21, 25, 165n23, 172n9, 190n19; aesthetics and, 37–40, 165–66n28; ritual signs and, 135–36; role of metonymy, 36–40, 172n8, 177–78n17; role of register, 36, 185–86n35. See also Metonymy (“metonymic referentiality”); Performance arena; Oral tradition; Traditional referentiality Initial, decorated, 157–58

Interpretation: hybrid poetic, 94, 103–4, 71–74, 125, 156; oral-traditional, 12–21, 94; textual, 21–23 (see also Hermeneutics); ritual, 25–26, 132 Intersemiotic translation, 26 Joy in the hall theme, 65–66, 71–72 Judith, 44 Juliana, 3, 44 The Kalevala, 71–72 King David, 158. See also Vespasian Psalter Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, 193n4 Leaps of Christ, 122–23, 188n20 Lignum maris (also navis crucis), 113–16, 120, 124–25, 186–87n8, 187n9 Literacy, 168n51; early medieval, 73–74; influence on oral-traditional idioms, 48. See also Orality and literacy Liturgical drama, 181n17. See also Dramatic liturgy Liturgical time, 75, 106, 133, 138 Liturgy (Roman Catholic), 129–30, 190n15; Anglo-Saxon Christian, 24, 168n55, 178n21, 190n10; bodily communication in, 130; features of liturgy in Old English literature, 132, 156; Liber responsoralis, 191n25; Mass, 29; Preface to the Mass, 192–93n41; Sanctus, 105–6, 148, 185n28, 192–93n41 Logos, 25 Lord, Albert. See Oral-formulaic theory “The Lord’s Prayer I,” 12–13, 15–16, 164n15 Lord-retainer theme, 50–51, 54–70, 156, 177n12; in The Advent Lyrics, 74–82; in Andreas, 60–65; defined, 54–56; in Genesis A, 65–70; metaphorical, 72–82; as topos, 50–51, 175n1 Loyalty test, 61–62 Maaday-Kara, 51 Manuscripts: as libretti, 81–82, 177n15; materiality of, 157–59; as not orally composed, 166n38; read aloud, 19–20, 81–82, 167n40; scribal performance of/in, 17; written in oral-traditional register, 170n73, 178n18

220 · Index “Mary of Egypt,” 121 Mass, 29. See also Liturgy (Roman Catholic) Memetics, 164n17, 166–67n39 Memorization, 168n50 Metaphor, 71–74, 87–88, 103–4, 116, 155–56 Metonymy (“metonymic referentiality”), 14–16, 18, 34, 43, 52, 54–55, 59, 69–70, 82, 165n23, 172nn8,9,10, 184n23; aesthetics of, 37–40, 155–56; affective dynamics and, 74; of oral-connected themes, 71–74, 87–88, 103–4, 155–56; of traditional phraseology, 117–19, 125, 166n36; in immanent art theory, 36–40, 177–78n17, 178n18; as interpretive strategy, 64–65. See also Traditional referentiality Mize, Britt. See Traditional subjectivity; Theme (oral-connected, Old English) Navaho (Diné) oral tradition, 35–36 Niles, John D. See Social context; Tertium quid Oath. See Vow O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. See Manuscripts, scribal performance of/in Ong, Walter. See Transitional orality; Oraltraditional and literary cultures Osbern of Canterbury, 157–58, 193nn2,3, 194n9 Oral-formulaic theory, 13–14, 35, 171–72n5, 172–73n11 Orality and literacy, 12; coexistence of, 10, 73–74, 167n41, 170n73, 185–86n35; as dichotomy, 9; introduction of literacy, 162n1. See also Oral-traditional and literary cultures Oralization. See Manuscripts, read aloud Oral performance, 17–19, 22 Oral poet. See Poet Oral poetics, 187n12. See also Immanent art theory; Oral tradition Oral tradition, 13–21; aesthetics and, 14–15, 35–37, 171–72n5, 172–73n11 (see also Immanent art theory); adaptability of, 171n75; as communicative inheritance, 11; as cultural bridge, 169n60; as cultural memory, 164n21; late-medieval, 167n47; as nostalgic (in writing), 8, 19, 171n74;

Old English, 35–40, 162–63n9, 166n38; register of, 16–17, 178n18 Oral-traditional and literary cultures, 73–74; cultural development of, 167n42; noetics of, 167n49, 185–86n35; parallels in, 164–65n22 Orosius, 105 Parry, Milman. See Oral-formulaic theory Pater Noster. See “The Lord’s Prayer I” Penitence, 74–75 Performance (of poetry), 166nn29,33 Performance arena, 16–17, 18, 25, 135–36, 165n27. See also Immanent art theory Performance theory, 130–31, 139, 189n6 Performative speech, 101–3, 177n15, 191n27. See also þoncword; Vow The Phoenix: devouring-the-dead theme in, 82–90; heorodreorig, 181n19; hybrid poetics in, 72–73 Poet: agency of, 168–69n57; literate, 166n35; oral as a fiction, 17–19 Poet-patron theme, 66, 94–112, 156, 183n7 Poetics of mentality, 175n3 Polysemy, 90; of heroic diction, 10 Rappaport, Roy. See Ritual idioms in literature Rebirth (and resurrections), 86–87, 89–90 Register (of Old English poetry), 18. See also Metonymy (“metonymic referentiality”); Oral tradition Re-oralization, 22 Residual orality, 9–10 Responsion, 187n14 Ricoeur, Paul. See Textual tradition (medieval) Riddles (Exeter Book), 169n62, 182n27; Riddle 1 (Storm), 170n71; Riddle 8 (Nightingale), 4, 32–33; Riddle 26 (Gospel Book, Bible), 158–59; Riddle 30a/b (Tree, Cross, Cup, Constellation), 26–31, 169nn61,63, 170n67; Riddle 47 (Book Moth), 72–73, 82–83, 90–91, 182n27; Riddle 84 (Water), 41 Ring composition (or “envelope pattern”), 65–68, 69, 178nn23,24

Index · 221 Ritual idioms in literature (also “written ritual signs”), 24–26, 128–54, 156 190n18 Ritual poetics, 143–44 Rituals: acts, 131, 156, 168n53; light and dark in, 145–48; participation, 190n21; propitiation, 168n53; sacred symbols in, 135; sacred time in, 136 Ritual tradition, 23–26 Robinson, Fred. See Polysemy The Ruthwell Cross, 3, 161n2 “Saint Andrew,” 121 Sceatt, 183n14 Sea voyage typescene, 53, 113, 116–27, 156, 176n5 The Seafarer, 71–72 Semiotic system, 39 Seraphim, 105–7, 148, 192–93n41 Shepherd, Christ as, 180n15 Social actant, 168n57 Social context, 17, 19, 169n60 Soul and Body poems, 40–49, 90 South Slavic “readying the horse” theme, 179n4 Soul’s journey, 85 Stock, Brian. See Textual communities Tertium quid, 26, 169n58 Textual communities, 12, 21 Textual tradition (medieval), 21–23; intertextuality, 23, 136 Textualization, 26, 167n48, 169n58, 178n18 Theme (oral-connected), 51–55; as part of “substrate,” 51–52, 175n3; South Slavic “readying the horse,” 179n4; versus typescene, 53, 54, 175–76n4, 176n6. See also Idioms; Typescene Theme (oral-connected, Old English), 52–55, 176nn7,8; beasts of battle, 44, 72, 95–96, 176n9, 179n3; devouring-the-dead, 40, 44–49, 72–73, 82–91, 156; exile, 2–3, 53–54, 62, 66–67, 79–80, 179n27, 180n12, 185n27; joy in the hall, 53, 65–66, 71–72; lord-retainer, 50–51, 54–70, 72–73, 156, 177n12; natural object becomes crafted, 29–30, 158; poet-patron, 94–112, 156, 183n7; poetics of mentality, 175n3 Theology of glory and humiliation, 123

Theory of immanent art. See Immanent art theory Theory of ritual signification in literature, 129–32, 135–36 Þoncword (speech of gratitude), 98–99, 102, 107–8, 183n7 Thornbury, Emily. See Virtue of ornament “Thureth,” 96, 108, 110–11, 185n34 Tolkien, J.R.R., 1–2 Traditional phraseology, 43, 117–19, 171n1, 188n16; versus cliché, 173n13. See also Formula; Idioms Traditional referentiality, 34, 52, 54–55, 69– 70, 165n23, 172nn8,9,10, 184n23, 191n26; as not necessarily oral, 173n14. See also Metonymy (“metonymic referentiality”) Traditional subjectivity, 165n24, 175n3 Traditional wisdom, 184n21 Transitional orality, 9–10 Translation, 65, 83, 143–44, 178n20, 192nn34,38; intersemiotic, 26 Treasure (and Christ’s five wounds), 124–25 Trilling, Renée. See Aesthetics of nostalgia; Constellation Turkic oral poetry, 175n3 Tyler, Elizabeth. See Aesthetics of the familiar Typescene, 118–19; battle with the monster, 182n24; sea voyage, 53, 113, 116–27, 156, 176n5; sea-voyage motifs, 116–18, 123, 126–27; versus theme, 53, 54, 175–76n4 Typology, 73–74, 76, 137–38; redemptive, 30 Vespasian Psalter, 103–4 Virgin Mary, 128, 146 Virtue of ornament, 156, 163n11 Vita et miracula Sancti Dunstani, 157, 193n2 Vita et translatio Sancti Elphegi, 157, 193n4, 193–94n8 Vocalization. See Manuscripts, read aloud Vocalité, 81–82 Vow (“verbal contract”), 58, 62, 64, 69; versus flyting, 177n11 Widsith, 93–103, 182n1 Zumthor, Paul. See Aurality

Heather Maring is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. She has served as a contributing editor at the Section on Intangible Cultural Heritage, UNESCO, Paris (2006–7). She has published articles in Oral Tradition, The Midwestern Modern Language Association Journal, English Studies, Studies in Philology, and the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl. Her poems have appeared in The Southeast Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review.