A History of Old English Literature

Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain, Robert D. Fulk, Christopher M. Cain

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118441121
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

A HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE

A History of Old English Literature has been significantly revised to provide an unequivocal response to the renewed historicism in medieval studies. Focusing on the production and reception of Old English texts and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture, this new edition covers an exceptionally broad array of genres. These range from riddles and cryptograms to allegory, liturgical texts, and romance, as well as lyric poetry and heroic legend. The authors also integrate discussions of Anglo-Latin texts, crucial to understanding the development of Old English literature.

This second edition incorporates extensive reference to scholarship that has evolved over the past decade, with new chapters on both Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and on incidental and marginal texts. There is expanded treatment throughout, including increased coverage of legal texts and scientific and scholastic texts. The book concludes with a retrospective outline of the reception of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture in subsequent periods.

1

The Chronology and Varieties of Old English Literature

Histories of literary periods can generally rely on simple chronology to organize the material that they cover. There are significant obstacles to such an approach to Old English, the most obvious of which is that in the vernacular, much prose and all but a few lines of verse cannot be dated with any precision. Anglo-Latin works provide a broad framework of ­literary subperiods within the Anglo-Saxon era, since these are much more narrowly datable. Thus, as detailed above, the studied Latinity of the age of Aldhelm, Bede, and Alcuin (roughly the eighth century and the latter part of the seventh) is sharply distinguishable from the ­utilitarian vernacularity of the age of Alfred and his ­immediate ­successors (the end of the ninth century and the first half of the tenth); the latter in turn contrasts with the renewed (though circumscribed) Latinity of the immediately succeeding age of revived Benedictine monasticism (see Lapidge 1991c). Vernacular prose can be fitted roughly to this framework: before the viking age, it is commonly assumed, the normal language of extended prose was Latin; texts of the Alfredian period are mostly identified as such in the works of Asser, William of Malmesbury, and others; and thus nearly all the remaining Old English prose is generally assigned to the tenth and eleventh ­centuries. The ascription of most of the prose to the last hundred years of the period, then, does not ­contribute much to constructing a ­literary history based on ­chronology – though whether this assessment of the age of composition of most anonymous prose is correct is still under discussion.¹

The problems are more severe in regard to the poetry. Although there may be reason to doubt whether Old English was much used for substantial prose compositions before Alfred’s day (see n. 1), the case is plainly otherwise in regard to verse. We have no early poetic codex to prove the recording of substantial poems – such verifiably early scraps of verse as we have are preserved as marginalia or passing quotations in Latin texts – but we know that such existed, in view of Asser’s tale of how Alfred, as a child, memorized such a volume (see chapter 3), and in view of the observation in the Old English Bede (but not the Latin) that Cædmon’s late seventh-century compositions were taken down at dictation (ed. T. Miller 1890–8: 2.346). From canons issued in ­multiple years by councils at Clofeshoh (an unidentified location) ­forbidding the practice, we also may surmise that secular verse was sometimes used paraliturgically before 747 (see Remley 1996: 57), and one would suppose this was written. Thus, it is not inherently implausible that even some of the lengthier surviving poems should be late copies of much earlier works. There is linguistic evidence to support this view.² Anglo-Saxonists – or at least the literary scholars among them – are sharply divided about the dating of most poems, and since it makes a considerable difference whether, for example, Beowulf is viewed in the historical context of Bede’s day or Æthelred the Unready’s, until there is greater consensus about dating, too much conjecture will always attach to describing Old English poetry in ­developmental terms, except in regard to its formal properties (meter, alliteration, diction, and so forth). Certainly, some surviving poems must have been ­composed early, for example Guthlac A, the poet of which asserts more than once that the saint performed his miracles within the memory of many persons still living (see chapter 5; Guthlac died in 714) and some poems, including Beowulf, seem linguistically ­anterior to Guthlac A. Recent developments in Old English ­scholarship in fact suggest that there is in progress a turning away from the extreme skepticism about the dating of poetry that has been common now for some years.³

A further obstacle to describing Old English literature on a chronological basis is the considerable variety of literary types represented, each of which is better compared to similar types, regardless of ­chronology, than to unrelated but coeval texts. Ælfric’s lives of saints do not make an uninteresting comparison to the roughly contemporary Battle of Maldon, but they may be compared more profitably to hagiographies of the age of Bede. For that reason the chapters that follow are organized by ­literary type rather than by period. The one exception is that works of the Alfredian period are discussed in ensemble, for together they shed light on the concerns of Alfred and his court at a particularly interesting ­historical juncture. The literary types around which the remaining ­chapters are organized are not all indisputably categories that the Anglo-Saxons themselves would have ­recognized. Certainly passiones sanctorum (chapter 5) and sermones (chapter 4) formed recognized subgenres, but the distinction between the two is not always definite, since homilies might concern the lives of saints rather than the daily lection from Scripture. Types like “legal literature” (chapter 8) and “biblical ­narrative” (chapter 6) may have no demonstrable historical validity, but the way such material is organized in manuscripts frequently suggests that such concepts do have more than present utility.

The manuscripts also reveal much about the uses of literacy, though to perceive this it is necessary to shed some modern preconceptions about literacy and literature. At a time when literacy was limited almost wholly to ecclesiastics, we should expect it to have served fairly ­limited purposes, preserving only such Church-related matter as was not ­suitable to memorial transmission. Indeed, being illiterate, lay persons would have had little reason to care about writing at all, were it not for the legal functions that writing assumed, particularly in the form of charters proving the right of religious houses and ­individuals to hold land (see chapter 8). Thus, Alfred’s proposal to extend ­literacy to the children of all the aristocracy (see section 5 of the Introduction) must be seen not as an antecedent of Jeffersonian ­idealism about the virtue of universal education but as a calculated effort to fill the ranks of churchmen decimated by the viking invasions. After all, up to Alfred’s day, with rare exceptions like the two ­seventh-century kings Sigeberht of East Anglia and Aldfrith of Northumbria, to think of an educated person was to think of an ecclesiastic: there was no secular scholarship.

Certain modern preconceptions about literature must also be shed, since the Anglo-Saxons naturally did not distinguish literature as art from other literate compositions in quite the way we do. The ­important distinction was not between literature and other ­writings but between prose and verse, the latter marked by its ­elevated diction and artificial conventions, as well as by metrical forms that, in the case of Latin verse, required prolonged study in the monastic schools. The ­privileged nature of verse is the likeliest explanation for the preservation of poems like Beowulf, Deor, and Waldere, which we might not otherwise have expected to be written down at all, since books were precious and ­difficult to produce, and such texts seem to have little to do with the religious and utilitarian purposes to which manuscripts were put. Given the Anglo-Saxons’ own apparent ­attitude toward verse, and given the basis of modern Anglo-American literary studies in British ­aestheticism, it is not ­surprising that studies of Old English literature throughout the last century should have been devoted primarily to verse. Yet for the Anglo-Saxons the ­distinction between prose and verse seems at times one simply of form, for even the unlikeliest material could be ­versified, including a calendar of saints’ feasts (The Menologium), the preface to a rule for canons (Vainglory), and the philosophical ­ruminations on God’s foreknowledge and human free will in Boethius’ Consolatio ­philosophiae. The poetry is thus quite diverse in subject: nearly every literary category treated in the chapters below includes examples of both prose and poetry.

So diverse were the uses to which literacy was put that the succeeding chapters cannot conveniently encompass all the textual types encountered. Indeed, the body of texts preserved in Old English is larger and more diverse than anything encountered elsewhere in Europe before the twelfth century (see Wormald 1991a: 1). Thus, it may be useful briefly to describe here some of the more incidental varieties, especially as they are revealing about the uses of literacy. Perhaps the commonest writing preserved from the period is, in fact, the mass of glosses and glossaries encountered in so many ­manuscripts.⁴ Glosses are closely tied to the Latin curriculum. They naturally were used as aids to the comprehension of texts in Latin – though their function in this capacity could be varied, since, for example, Psalter glosses could be designed for either liturgical or scholarly use⁵ – and their ultimate source was the authority of knowledgeable teachers. Hence, it is not surprising that some glossaries used in England and on the Continent can be traced to the pedagogy of familiar scholars, including Theodore and Hadrian at Canterbury (to whom can be traced the origins of a family of glossaries of which the Leiden Glossary is the oldest surviving example: see Lapidge 1986b and Pheifer 1987) and Æthelwold and his circle at Glastonbury and Winchester (see Gretsch 1999). Glosses are found in both English and Latin (often together, often alternating randomly), in interlinear and marginal form, and in ink and drypoint (i.e. scratched into the parchment, ­commonly with a stylus). Usually they are simple synonyms; longer exegetical insertions are generally classed as scholia. Most commonly one encounters widely separated glosses on individual words ­(“occasional glosses”), though after the early tenth century it is by no means unusual to find interlinear, word-for-word glosses of entire texts (“continuous glosses,” the ­earliest example being the gloss on the Vespasian Psalter). Such continuous glosses are found to Latin psalters, gospels, the Benedictine Rule, the Regularis concordia, the Liber ­scintillarum ‘Book of Sparks’ (an early eighth-century compilation from the Church Fathers by Defensor, a monk of Ligugé near Poitiers), and works by Abbo of St. Germain, Ælfric, Benedict of Aniane, Fulgentius, Isidore of Seville, Gildas, Prosper, Prudentius, and Popes Gregory the Great and Boniface IV.⁶ All the glosses on a text, along with the words that they gloss (called lemmata, sg. lemma, usually Latin, rarely Greek or Hebrew) might then be copied sequentially into another manuscript to form a rudimentary glossary referred to by the term glossae ­collectae. An example is the glossary to the prose and verse texts of Aldhelm’s De virginitate in London, BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra A. iii., fols. 92–117 (ed. Wright and Wülcker 1884: 485–535, also Quinn 1956: 69–219, with corrections by Voss 1989: 130–4; DOE: ClGl 3 (Quinn), beginning with item 320). Because they preserve the original order of the lemmata, it is frequently possible to identify the sources of such collections. That becomes more difficult when the glosses are rearranged alphabetically. Alphabetization was never complete, however: it might be that all words with the same first ­letter are listed together, or the first two letters; never more than three. Alphabetization naturally made glossaries more useful than glossae ­collectae, but alphabetization was not the only useful ­arrangement. As monks, when they spoke at all, were expected to speak only Latin, learners found it convenient to have listed together a variety of words belonging to the same semantic sphere, for ­example household ­implements, buildings and their parts, parts of the body, trees, and various plants. Ælfric’s Glossary (ed. Zupitza 1880; DOE: ÆGl) is an example of such a ­so-called class-glossary. Some of the earliest ­manuscripts that preserve Old English are ­glossaries, including the Épinal and Corpus Glossaries; the former manuscript may have been written as early as ca. 700.⁷ Glossaries thus provide important evidence for the early state of the language. Glosses and glossaries are also our chief witnesses to dialects other than West Saxon.

Catalogues are the sort of form one might expect to find in ­manuscripts devoted to preserving information that resists memorization, and the commonest sort in Old English includes royal genealogies and regnal lists, which tend to be found in manuscripts of laws and chronicles. Lists of kings exist for all the major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The purpose of the genealogies is generally taken to be more propagandistic than ­historical. Certainly the way that the genealogies have been repeatedly extended by the addition of names reaching ever further back into the remote and largely imaginary past, eventually leading to Adam, does suggest an effort to shore up the dignity of Anglo-Saxon dynasties, particularly of the house of Wessex.⁸ Bishops, saints, and their resting places also have their lists, though the manuscript contexts in which these are found vary widely.⁹ Historical works by and large tend to assume the form of lists of an annalistic nature, as with Orosius’ ­history and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and related texts (chapter 3).

Narratives of the historical sort are usually in Latin and concern ­religious history. In addition to Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (see ­section 4 of the Introduction), there is the so-called Laterculus Malalianus of Archbishop Theodore (ed. and trans. J. Stevenson 1995a). The Laterculus (‘List’, the title given it in m...