DOCSLIB.ORG

The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History Periodization and Politics: The Case of the Missing Twelfth Century in English Literary History Linda Georgianna or several years I have been at work on a narrative literary history F of medieval England from the beginnings to 1350. The project, to be published as the first volume of a new Oxford English Literary History, intrigued me in part because it requires the theorizing of a period in which an event as seemingly cataclysmic as the Norman Conquest falls not at the beginning, as in current Middle English studies, nor at the end, as in Anglo-Saxon studies, but in the middle. To me the project was an opportunity to pursue new lines of inquiry, particularly in eleventh- and twelfth-century studies, but to Oxford University Press it was simply the necessary result of a prior decision to figure the years 1350 – 1550 as a period that could borrow some cultural capital from the term early modern. Medievalist Nancy Partner once joked that if we wanted the medieval period to get more respect, we should call it “the Really Early Modern,” and Oxford has done just that with the former Late Middle Ages. But putting the origin of the modern at Chaucer’s birth left six hundred years never considered a period at all. The press invited me to take on the project because I had done work on both sides of the Conquest, having written on Beowulf and on the early-thirteenth- century Ancrene Wisse. Flattered by the invitation, I accepted, but in try- ing to work out a proposal, I realized the great flaw in Oxford’s logic and in mine: I had written on both sides of 1066, but, like most medieval- ists, I had never considered the space in between. Once I did, I saw that a huge job lay ahead and enlisted Anglo-Saxonist Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe to coauthor the volume. We produced a proposal for a book of fourteen chapters, each focusing on five or six key texts, with no Modern Language Quarterly 64:2, June 2003. © 2003 University of Washington. 154 MLQ ❙ June 2003 claim to being encyclopedic. We would choose the texts so as to empha- size the complexities of early England’s multilingual cultures, and we would stress the cultural work that these texts had done in their own time and later in literary history. The questions we would ask of each text were not what is it or who wrote it but what was it for and what did it do. The proposal was sent to five readers, whose responses, while gen- erally favorable, were instructive. Of my plan to write one chapter on nineteenth-century constructions of the Norman Conquest and three on the twelfth century, one reader asked how much there was to say about “the deadest century for English literature of any from the sev- enth to the twentieth,” while another fumed about “all of this tedious and unnecessary theorizing” about the history of our discipline. But by then it was too late. We had come to see that to reconfigure what had never been a period, we had to look at why it had never been one, and that examination revealed that the foundation of our discipline in nineteenth-century nationalist historiography was itself responsible for a literary history in which the Conquest had assumed mythic propor- tions. In the process, “Englishness” had come to be defined in such a way that the twelfth century had to be erased. Thus I began with a chap- ter on the role of the Conquest in English literary history, and I will lay out the chapter’s argument here before turning to a single case study from the project itself.1 The English Middle Ages has long been split into two fields, neatly divided by a single day, 14 October 1066, when King Harold was killed at Hastings and William the Bastard effectively became William rex Anglorum. That few contemporary sources described the event paved the way for the mythic treatment of the battle, especially in the nine- 1 The chapter, “Coming to Terms with the Norman Conquest: Nationalism and English Literary History,” first appeared in Literature and the Nation, ed. Brook Thomas (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 33 – 53. Linda Georgianna is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse(1981) and coauthor, with Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, of the first volume of the new Oxford English Lit- erary History (forthcoming). Georgianna ❙ Periodization and Politics 155 teenth century, when modern medieval studies was born and English national identity seemed to hang in the balance. Earlier constructions of the Battle of Hastings as a great dividing point had centered on the myth of the Norman yoke as depicted by Christopher Hill: “Before 1066, the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants [of England] lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of this liberty and established the tyranny of an alien king and landlords. But the people did not forget the rights they lost [and] fought continuously to recover them.”2 The myth of lost rights cut in various ways in eighteenth-century politics, but in the nineteenth century it was too prone to a radical reading, and by itself it failed to deal with what came to be seen as the fundamental problem, namely, that the Battle of Hastings looked like an English defeat, and, at a time when England’s imperial claims depended on her image as unconquerable, defeat could not be tolerated. Nationalist historians thus developed the “Whig interpretation of history,” which stresses above all the continuity of the British past and its steady progress toward modern liberty and representative institutions. As J. W. Burrow puts it: “In Whig history, there are no irrevocable losses. The long run com- pensates for all.”3 The construction of the long view of British history became the nineteenth-century national project, a massive attempt by historians, churchmen, novelists, and essayists to “reverse the Conquest,” as Clare A. Simmons puts it, to transform an incomprehensible defeat into a providential comedy, what a maiden in a Charlotte Yonge novel calls “that delightful Norman Conquest.”4 In Whig history, the Anglo-Saxon past assumed gigantic propor- tions as the moment in time when the English national identity was formed and fixed. In light of the developing grand narrative that fea- tured Englishness as a specifically Anglo-Saxon identity, reinterpreting 2 Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 57. 3 J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 195. See also Herbert Butterfield’s classic The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell and Sons, 1931). 4 Charlotte Yonge, Abbeychurch; or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit, quoted in Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 60. 156 MLQ ❙ June 2003 the Norman Conquest took on great urgency. The intellectual battle to reverse it was pursued with all of the fervor of the original battle at Has- tings, but this time, fought in print alone and with little opposition, it was a battle England could not lose. The documentary enthusiasm of nineteenth-century scholars has never been matched. At first the province of antiquarian societies, the study of English history, particularly medieval history, came of age as a professional discipline during this period, witnessing the production of hundreds of editions of medieval texts and culminating in the massive Rolls Series, begun by an act of Parliament in 1857 in response to sim- ilar nationalist projects under way abroad.5 While the unprecedented production of primary materials made the medieval past more available than ever before, the interpretation of these texts fed a growing national consciousness crafted by a diverse group of self-described patriots, includ- ing professional scholars such as John Mitchell Kemble and William Stubbs; popular historians, especially Sharon Turner and Edward A. Freeman; and novelists, above all Walter Scott.6 Though widely differ- ing in style and genre, these authors’ works together helped create an apparently seamless narrative of English national destiny in which the dry facts of the Conquest were neutralized by the massive context con- structed for them. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest, for all of its scholarly attention to detail, could only conclude with the ideological premise with which it began, namely, that “William came not to defeat, or to found, but to continue”—to continue, that is, the progressive development of a perfectible, free, Anglo-Saxon nation.7 5 Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On the making of the Rolls Series see David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London: Nelson, 1963), 100 – 134. 6 See John Mitchell Kemble, The Saxons in England: A History of the English Com- monwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849); William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origins and Development, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1873 – 78); Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from Their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Egbert: With a Map of Their Ancient Territory, 3 vols. (London: Cadell, Davies, 1799 – 1805); Edward A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and Its Results, 6 vols.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Norman Conquest: Ten Centuries of Interpretation (1975)
    CARTER, JOHN MARSHALL. The Norman Conquest: Ten Centuries of Interpretation (1975). Directed by: Prof. John H. Beeler. The purpose of this study was to investigate the historical accounts of the Norman Conquest and its results. A select group of historians and works, primarily English, were investigated, beginning with the chronicles of medieval writers and continuing chronologically to the works of twentieth century historians. The majority of the texts that were examined pertained to the major problems of the Norman Conquest: the introduction of English feudalism, whether or not the Norman Conquest was an aristocratic revolution, and, how it affected the English church. However, other important areas such as the Conquest's effects on literature, language, economics, and architecture were observed through the "eyes" of past and present historians. A seconday purpose was to assemble for the student of English medieval history, and particularly the Norman Conquest, a variety of primary and secondary sources. Each new generation writes its own histories, seeking to add to the existing cache of material or to reinterpret the existing material in the light of the present. The future study of history will be significantly advanced by historiographic surveys of all major historical events. Professor Wallace K. Ferguson produced an indispensable work for students of the Italian Renaissance, tracing the development of historical thought from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. V Professor Bryce Lyon performed a similar task,if not on as epic a scale, with his essay on the diversity of thought in regard to the history of the origins of the Middle Ages.
    [Show full text]
  • Richard Wilbur's 'Junk'
    15 Recycling Anglo-Saxon Poetry: Richard Wilbur’s ‘Junk’ and a Self Study Chris Jones University of St Andrews Ever since scraps, both literal and metaphorical, of Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English) verse began to be recovered and edited in more systematic fashion, modern poets have tried to imagine and recreate its sounds in their own work.1 Often the manuscript materials in which Anglo-Saxon poetry survives show signs of having been uncared for and even mistreated; the tenth-century Exeter Book of poetry, for example, which preserves many of the texts now taught in universities as canonical, is scarred with the stains of having had some kind of vessel laid on it, as if it were a drinks mat, with knife-scores, as if it were a chopping board, and with singe marks, as if some red-hot object was temporarily rested on its back (Muir 2000: II, 2). Such treatment is scarce wonder, given that changes in both language and handwriting must have made such manuscripts unintelligible to all but a few until the studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquarians began to render them legible again. But it is salutary to remember that fragments of the past which we hold valuable now have often been the junk of intervening ages, waste materials for which only some alternative function might save them from disposal. Recycled, however, fresh uses may be found for Anglo-Saxon poetry, uses that generate for it new currency, in addition to whatever independent value its stock possesses. This essay sets out to examine some of the generative possibilities of recycling Anglo-Saxon poetry, both from a critic’s perspective and a practitioner’s.
    [Show full text]
  • Dublin, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Tristram and Medieval Nuns in Notebook VI.B.18
    GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 16 (Spring 2016) Dublin, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Tristram and Medieval Nuns in Notebook VI.B.18 Viviana Mirela Braslasu and Geert Lernout Buffalo Notebook VI.B.18 was filled in the spring and early summer of 1927, when Joyce had just started on chapter I.6, while revising and correcting the other chapters of Book I for publication in transition. The sources in this notebook seem to have been mostly historical, but they vary widely. Since the first of the questions to be answered in I.6 was about the “myther rector,” quite a lot of these notes have to do with the city and county of Dublin and the Scandinavian history of the British isles. The first extended set of notes was taken from The History of the City of Dublin: From the Earliest Accounts to the Present by John Warburton, James Whitelaw and Robert Walsh. The two volumes were published on 1818. The clergyman and philantropist James Whitelaw, who had earlier made a census of the Dublin population, collaborated on this history of the city with John Warburton, deputy keeper of records in Dublin Castle and the manuscript was later completed by John Walsh. Although mostly based on earlier studies, the book was widely read. Joyce makes use of the earliest chapters of the first volume and then suddenly stopped after filling no more than three notebook pages. The next source is another older history, this time of the whole county of Dublin, published in 1838 by the Dublin lawyer John D’Alton.
    [Show full text]
  • The Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker This Ebook Is for the Use of Anyone Anywhere at No Cost and with Almost No Restrictions Whatsoever
    Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker 1 Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker Project Gutenberg's The Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Translations of Beowulf A Critical Biography Author: Chauncey Brewster Tinker Release Date: July 1, 2008 [EBook #25942] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRANSLATIONS OF BEOWULF *** Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's Note: This text is intended for users whose text readers cannot use the "real" (unicode/utf-8) version of the file. Translations of Beowulf, by Chauncey Brewster Tinker 2 Characters that could not be fully displayed have been "unpacked" and shown in brackets: [-a] [-e] [-i] [-o] [-u] [-y] [-æ] (vowels with macron or "long" mark) [´æ] (æ with accent) [gh] (yogh) [/þ] [/þ] (thorn with line, typically abbreviating "that") "oe" is written out as two letters, unmarked Most of these letters are rare and occur only in the quotations from Old English. Book sizes such as 8^o (printed with superscript "o") have been changed to 4to, 8vo, 12mo. In a few selections, italics were used to indicate missing words or letters. These have been shown with {braces}. Elsewhere, italics are shown conventionally with lines.
    [Show full text]
  • Creating the Pagan English (Sue Content and Howard Williams)
    This pdf of your paper in Signals of Belief in Early England belongs to the publishers Oxbow Books and it is their copyright. As author you are licenced to make up to 50 offprints from it, but beyond that you may not publish it on the World Wide Web until three years from publication (October 2013), unless the site is a limited access intranet (password protected). If you have queries about this please contact the editorial department at Oxbow Books (editorial@ oxbowbooks.com). An offprint from Signals of Belief in Early England Anglo-Saxon Paganism Revisited edited by Martin Carver, Alex Sanmark and Sarah Semple © Oxbow Books 2010 ISBN 978-1-84217-395-4 Contents Preface .....................................................................................................................................ix List of Contributors ...............................................................................................................xi Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................xii Foreword: Heathen Songs and Devil’s Games (Neil Price) ........................................... xiii Chapter 1: Agency, Intellect and the Archaeological Agenda (Martin Carver) ..............1 Chapter 2: In the Open Air (Sarah Semple) .......................................................................21 Chapter 3: At the Water’s Edge (Julie Lund) .....................................................................49 Chapter 4: At the Funeral (Howard Williams) ...................................................................67
    [Show full text]
  • Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry Abstract
    Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century Poetry Abstract: This article essays the first survey of nineteenth-century poetry that imitates, alludes to, or draws on, theories about Anglo-Saxon language and/or literature. Criticism has so far overlooked such a field as forming a distinct body of literature with shared preoccupations and influences, although some previous attention has been paid to the Anglo-Saxonism of individual poets or texts. This essay, then, provides the first scoping exercise of the extent and limits of a field one could term nineteenth-century Anglo- Saxonist poetry. This corpus is briefly contextualized within the wider field of Anglo- Saxonist literature, itself an important sub-genre of medievalism and medievalist literature. A possible fourfold typology is offered as a framework within which further study might be continued. Some consideration is briefly paid to the use of Anglo-Saxon in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson, Lewis Carroll, William Barnes, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The importance of antiquarianism and philology is emphasized, with passing reference made to writers such as Sharon Turner, George Marsh, and to the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essay addresses a neglected topic in the broader field of the reception of the Middle Ages, and in particular the recovery and reception of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English language and poetry. The essay concludes by suggesting that new narrative models of literary history made be required to accommodate the concept of
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21)
    The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two. II. Historians, Biographers and Political Orators. § 1. Sharon Turner. IN a comparison of English historical literature in the nineteenth with that in the eighteenth century, nothing is more striking than the advance and the expansion of the study of the national past. As was remarked in an earlier volume, 1 Hume’s was the first history of England by a native historian worthy to be classed as literature; and, after him, the subject fell largely into the hands of professed political or ecclesiastical partisans. Robertson’s History of Scotland is not wholly exempt from such a charge; Smollett’s continuation of Hume is certainly open to it; and no other work in the field of national history can be said to have been produced in the course of the century which has survived it except as material for subsequent use. A reason for the unproductiveness, on this head, of the closing years of the eighteenth century, and the early years of its successor, might, of course, be sought in the great national struggle against the French revolution and the conquering power to which it gave birth. This struggle finds its counterpart in the endeavours of the romanticists to break up the literary and artistic solidarity of classicism, and to trace the diversity of actual life in the specific features presenting themselves in national, provincial or local institutions, forms of government, social ways and manners. Scott, more than any other writer in verse or prose, by his incomparable historical novels, taught English historians to reproduce in their works the atmosphere of the times and the colouring of the localities which they desired to recall.
    [Show full text]
  • Dublin, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Tristram and Medieval Nuns in Notebook VI.B.18
    GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 16 (Spring 2016) Dublin, Norwegians, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Tristram and Medieval Nuns in Notebook VI.B.18 Viviana Mirela Braslasu and Geert Lernout Buffalo Notebook VI.B.18 was filled in the spring and early summer of 1927, when Joyce had just started on chapter I.6, while revising and correcting the other chapters of Book I for publication in transition. The sources in this notebook seem to have been mostly historical, but they vary widely. Since the first of the questions to be answered in I.6 was about the “myther rector,” quite a lot of these notes have to do with the city and county of Dublin and the Scandinavian history of the British isles. The first extended set of notes was taken from The History of the City of Dublin: From the Earliest Accounts to the Present by John Warburton, James Whitelaw and Robert Walsh. The two volumes were published on 1818. The clergyman and philantropist James Whitelaw, who had earlier made a census of the Dublin population, collaborated on this history of the city with John Warburton, deputy keeper of records in Dublin Castle and the manuscript was later completed by John Walsh. Although mostly based on earlier studies, the book was widely read. Joyce makes use of the earliest chapters of the first volume and then suddenly stopped after filling no more than three notebook pages. The next source is another older history, this time of the whole county of Dublin, published in 1838 by the Dublin lawyer John D’Alton.
    [Show full text]
  • Voices from the Reign of Æthelred II
    Andreas Lemke ‘Ealle þas ungesælða us gelumpon þuruh unrædas’: Voices from the Reign of Æthelred II I. Introduction 1. King Æthelred II and the Problem of unræd “All those afflictions befell us because of ill counsel.”1 When translating the title of this thesis we get a fair notion of what is to be regarded exemplary for the so- called ‘lamentations’, which are to be found in those annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle covering the reign of King Æthelred II (978-1016). Although he achieved to be the longest-reigning monarch in Anglo-Saxon history, the reputation of his legacy up to the present day has been tainted to a high degree by the work of a single chronicler who composed the ‘main’ account for Æthelred’s reign2 and its subsequent embellishment with discrediting remarks by later historians such as Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury. Æthelred became notorious 1 This is my tranlation of a passage from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 1011: “Ealla þas ungesæla us gelumpon þuruh unrædas […]”, see MS C, ed. K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a Collaborative Edition, ed. D. Dumville and S. Keynes 5 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 95. 2 See pp. 17-19 infra in my chapter on the ‘Æthelredian Annals’. 14 Andreas Lemke for ill-advised policy in the face of the impending Danish conquest of Anglo- Saxon England, almost evoking the impression that he was the one who through his tarrying, incompetence and apparent acts of violence lost the inheritance of the House of Wessex single-handedly.
    [Show full text]
  • Alaris Capture Pro Software
    Richard III as a Fop: A Foolish Myth ANNE F. SUTTON One frivolous and almost unbelievable myth constructed about Richaxd III is that he was a fop or dandy, who took more than the usual interest in clothes and display. The myth has an amusing historiography — and it has had an effect on views of Richard’s morals and life style. After a brief and bright twinkle in Shakespeare’s eye in the early 15905, it became a steady glow in the work of popular historiansfromthe later eighteenth century and continued into the late twentieth century. It will be resurrected, no doubt, by someone in the twenty—first century. It has a number of contributory strands: the dramatic tradition of Shakespeare feeding into that of the popular and academic historians; the lack of sound knowledge and appreciation of the dress of the past again feeding into the work of historians; and thirdly, the tendency of some writers to despise the past, both for its dressand its morals. So, how did Rict III come to be called afop? It all derives ultimately from Shakespeare’s visualisation of the amazed reaction of a deformed Richard when he succeeds in persuading a woman to marry him. I’ll be at charges for a looking-glass, And entertain a score or two of tailors, To studyfashions to adom my body: Since I am crept in favour with myself, I will maintain it at some little cost.1 It is a moment most brilliantly evoked on stage (1944) and film (1954) in Laurence Olivier’s impersonation of Richard III, who fromthat moment was decked in extravagant fashions.
    [Show full text]
  • Chairman's Report
    Newsletter No. 80 – May 2014 Free to members Chairman’s Report In this Issue: Bob Flanagan Good news in that the long-delayed drainage and road- • ConservationThe English Heritage At Risk way works to the main entrance and to Church Road are News Page 3 complete apart from some tidying up. This was always Register Page 3 going to be a difficult operation, involving as it did firstly • The Page 4 • Benjamin closure of Church Road, and in turn use of Church Gate • DisraeliHenry Page and 6 as the entrance to the Cemetery for some 3 months whilst Kaiser Bill’s the works to the main entrance area were carried out. An • John Page 9 operation not made easier by concurrent major roadworks Mother Page 5 in Norwood High Street! However, this did mean that the • Tap Page 12 • The Brookes: a contractors Conway, who in my opinion have done a very • DynastyIron Tsar of Page 13 good job in the Cemetery despite this winter’s appalling Lambeth weather, were on site with heavy equipment and this will • The Page 14 have minimised costs to an extent. Thanks too to Conway Doctors Page 8 • for agreeing to fund the repair to the railings of the • Cemetery Page Gilbart memorial damaged in the preceding phase of the 14Simon McGillivray FRS roadway works. • (1785-1840)Forthcoming Whilst the new tarmac looks stark at the moment, the aim EventsPage 10 Page 15 is to cover this with a bonded gravel surface when funds permit. Such a surface would not only be in keeping with • A31 Bit London of Mystery CemeteriesPage 16 Page 13 • Recent FOWNC Events Page 14 • Forthcoming Events Page 15 • A Bit of Mystery Page 16 Tite Arch and War Memorial, March 2014 the original plan for the Cemetery, but would also hopefully help calm traffic in the cem- etery, speed humps of course being out of the question.
    [Show full text]
  • Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century
    Oral Tradition, 24/2 (2009): 485-502 Where Now the Harp? Listening for the Sounds of Old English Verse, from Beowulf to the Twentieth Century Chris Jones nis þær hearpan sweg, / gomen in geardum, swylce ðær iu wæron (2458b-59)1 There is no sound of the harp, delight in courts, as there once were The way to learn the music of verse is to listen to it. (Pound 1951:56) Even within an advanced print culture, poetry arguably never escapes the oral dimension. For Ezra Pound, whose highly intertextual epic The Cantos, so conscious of its page appearance, could only be the product of such a print culture, poetry was nevertheless “an art of pure sound,” the future of which in English was to be the “orchestration” of different European systems of sound-patterning (Pound 1973:33). Verbal orchestration is meaningless without auditors; it goes without saying that the notion of oral literature simultaneously implies the concept of aural literature. This much is also evident from the very beginning of Beowulf: Hwæt, we Gar-Dena in geardagum, / þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon . (“Listen, we have heard of the Spear-Danes in times past, of the glory of the people’s kings . ,” lines 1-2). While the conventionality of the opening might suggest the evocation of a formulaic idiom often associated with oral composition,2 the emphasis is clearly on aurality, on hearing a voice. Much work has been done in recent decades on the evidence in Old English written texts for a poetics that draws on compositional methods derived from an oral culture, either as it had survived into a period of widespread literacy, or as it was imagined to have once existed.3 This essay will not directly address that valuable rehabilitation of oral-formulaic theory into a more sophisticated understanding of early medieval scribal culture, although it will draw on it at times.
    [Show full text]