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Leeds Studies in English New Series XL © Leeds Studies in English 2010 School of English University of Leeds Leeds, England ISSN 0075-8566 Leeds Studies in English New Series XL 2009 Edited by Alaric Hall Leeds Studies in English <www.leeds.ac.uk/lse> School of English University of Leeds 2009 Leeds Studies in English <www.leeds.ac.uk/lse> Leeds Studies in English is an international, refereed journal based in the School of English, University of Leeds. Leeds Studies in English publishes articles on Old and Middle English literature, Old Icelandic language and literature, and the historical study of the English lan- guage. After a two-year embargo, past copies are made available, free access; they can be accessed via <http://www.leeds.ac.uk/lse>. Editorial Board: Catherine Batt, Chairman Alaric Hall, Editor Paul Hammond Cathy Hume, Reviews Editor Ananya Jahanara Kabir Oliver Pickering Mary Swan Clive Upton Notes for Contributors Contributors are requested to follow the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses, 2nd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2008), available at <http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/download.shtml>. Where possible, contributors are encouraged to include the digital object identifiers or, where a com- plete free access text is available, stable URLs of materials cited (see Style Guide §11.2.10.1). The language of publication is English and translations should normally be supplied for quotations in languages other than English. Each contributor will receive a free copy of the journal, and a PDF of their article for distribution. Please email all contributions to <[email protected]>. Reviews Copies of books for review should be sent to the Editor, Leeds Studies in English, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom. Contents The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse in the Poems of 1 the Alliterative Revival Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes University of Bristol Construing Old English in the Thirteenth Century: The Syntax of the 27 Winteney Adaptation of the Benectine Rule Maria Artamonova University of Oxford Supplication and Self-Reformation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 47 Olga Burakov-Mongan University of York An Edition of Three Late Middle English Versions of a 65 Fourteenth-Century Regula Hermitarum Domenico Pezzini University of Verona Demythologising Urban Landscapes in Andreas 105 Michael D. J. Bintley University College London Nítíða saga: A Normalised Icelandic Text and Translation 119 Sheryl McDonald University of Leeds Skelt ‘Hasten’ in Cleanness and St Erkenwald 147 Andrew Breeze The University of Navarra Reviews: Gregg A. Smith, The Function of the Living Dead In Medieval Norse 149 and Celtic Literature: Death and Desire. Lewiston, NY: The Edward Mellen Press, 2007 [Dorian Knight] Janie Steen, Verse and Virtuosity: The Adaptation of Latin Rhetoric in 150 Old English Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008 [Ben Snook] Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević and Judith Weiss, eds, The Exploitations 152 of Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010 [Cathy Hume] Massimiliano Bampi and Fulvio Ferrari, eds, Lärdomber oc skämptan: 153 Medieval Swedish Literature Reconsidered. Uppsala: Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, 2008 [Alaric Hall] Editorial Preface With the fortieth issue of the new series of Leeds Studies in English, we are introducing some changes which will sustain and extend the quality and audience of the journal. LSE has always been published by scholars, for scholars; its purpose is to disseminate high-quality research as widely as possible. We have accordingly chosen to make LSE available online free-access: with the support of Leeds University Library, all volumes of the journal from its inception in 1932 through to 2008 can now be accessed via <www.leeds.ac.uk/lse>; new volumes will be made available in the same way two years after print publication. Print distribution is also being extended, through the services of Abramis Publishing. Alaric Hall, Leeds, August 2010 The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse in the Poems of the Alliterative Revival Noriko Inoue and Myra Stokes Introduction The metre of Middle English alliterative verse is a subject which remained relatively neglected for much of the last century until a new impetus was given to it by the work of, most notably, Hoyt Duggan, whose findings regarding the rules governing the b-verse (the second half of the alliterative line) have provided a persuasive and thought-provoking focus for renewed interest in the subject.1 Since the structure of the a-verse is now attracting attention, the present seems a timely moment in which to open the subject of the caesura: for whether or not the caesura requires to be audibly signalled by a beat at the conclusion of the a-verse is a matter that bears significantly on any theories of the metrical shape of the first half of the line. The existence of such a stress at the caesura has usually been implicitly assumed, though not often explicitly argued, and has never until recently been seriously questioned. The fact of the caesura itself is accepted by metrists of nearly all persuasions — neces- sarily so, since the distinction between the a-verse and the b-verse (which forms the basis of nearly all metrical discussion of alliterative verse) presupposes some perceived division of the line into separable halves. Norman Davis represented the orthodox view when he stated that ‘the long line is divided by a natural pause, or caesura, into two half-lines each of which normally contains two lifts.’2 Duggan’s work also of course rests on the assumption that ‘the alliterative line is made up of two distinct half-lines (verses) divided by a caesura which usually corresponds to a phrasal boundary’; ‘though some recent metrists and editors have expressed doubt about the existence of the caesura and thus of the half-line, manuscript evidence strongly supports the notion that the long line is composed of two cola separated by a metrical caesura’.3 Some editors of Middle English alliterative verse have in fact continued the convention, regularly observed in editions of Old English verse, of presenting the text with 1 For a recent and convenient summary of Duggan’s research, see his ‘Metre, Stanza, Vocabulary and Dialect’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 221–42. 2 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd rev. edn. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 148. 3 ‘Metre, Stanza’, p. 228; the ‘doubt’ is that of generative metrists such as S. J. Keyser, A. Schiller and R. Sapora, who sometimes deny the existence of the caesura (ibid., n. 12). 1 The Caesura and the Rhythmic Shape of the A-Verse a visible gap between the two half-lines, in order to render the caesura as visible to the eye as they implicitly assume it must have been to the ear of its original audience.4 It is indeed plainly critical to a proper appreciation of the metrical structure of the allit- erative line that one should know where the caesura falls. The phrasal or syntactic boundary it coincides with is often quite a minor one. But in most cases the second alliterative beat of the a-verse falls indisputably on the word after which the caesura falls and thus serves to announce it (‘All watz hap vpon heȝe in hallez and chambrez, With lordez and ladies, as leuest him þoȝt’, SG 48–49).5 Most have therefore assumed (rightly, in our view) that the caesura must be so marked, and that the word that precedes it must bear a beat, even where it does not alliterate and/or is preceded by two alliterating words. It is for this reason that many schol- ars have posited the so-called ‘extended’ a-verse, with three (or even more) beats — though, since we do not ourselves believe in constant changes in the time signature of an essentially two-beat a-verse, we view such verses as metrically ‘crowded’ two-beat, rather than ‘extended’ three-beat, ones.6 For instance, Duggan assigns three beats and the following scansion to the a-verse of this line:7 x / / x x / x x /(x) / x And now nar ȝe not fer fro þat note place SG 2092 aax/ax Although Duggan treats a monosyllabic adverb as a closed-class word (which is not normally a candidate for beat), he assigns a beat to the non-alliterating monosyllabic adverb fer as well as to the preceding alliterating words now and nar. We are convinced that his decision to assign a beat to fer is right: fer is in fact probably the most semantically significant word in this particular a-verse; and, equally importantly, it carries phrase-final stress at the pre-caesural position, where the metre requires a beat that makes audible the boundary between the two half-lines. Certainly as concerns open-class words at the caesura in this particular text, it was established some time ago, in a weighty study by Joan Turville-Petre, that, apart from a few instances of verb + adverb, an unstressed but semantically heavy word in that position occurs only with the adjective + noun combination (where the adjective may take alliterating beat and the noun function as its unstressed continuant): ‘Braydez out a bryȝt sworde’ (SG 2319), for 4 See, for example, Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. by Stephanie Trigg, Early English Text Society, o. s., 297 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. by Eugene Kölbing and Mabel Day, Early English Text Society, o.