MEETING the OTHER in the SEAFARER and the RUIN Thesis

Home , The Ruin

MEETING THE OTHER IN THE SEAFARER AND THE RUIN

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of Arts and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in English

John Layne Hilyer

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, Ohio

May, 2020

MEETING THE OTHER IN THE SEAFARER AND THE RUIN

Name: Hilyer, John Layne

APPROVED BY:

Miriamne Krummel, Ph.D. Committee Chair Associate Professor

Kirstin Mendoza, Ph.D. Committee Member Assistant Professor

Heide Estes, Ph.D. Committee Member Professor

ABSTRACT

MEETING THE OTHER IN THE SEAFARER AND THE RUIN

Name: Hilyer, John Layne University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. Miriamne Krummel

This paper reads two Old English poems through an ecocritical lens. Primarily, I identify the need to see translation—as literary interpretation—of Other languages and environments as a site of relation to a subject. Throughout this essay the subject “Other” refers to both language and environment built by human and natural agents along the border of their worlds. I read The Seafarer as a space of meeting between the land- dweller and sea-dweller, then focus on The Ruin as a scene of transient human presence.

A new space to feel the loss of environment—both human and natural—opens while meeting the Other. In the conclusion, I offer three examples of engagement with ecological loss including both modern and contemporary sources as the beginning of an ecocritique with the terms described in this thesis. Loss ought not place the poet in the posture of defeat, nor avoid translation in transactional terms—that is to say, by putting a price tag on the earth. Rather, I suggest reorientation of the responsibility of the poet toward meeting, speaking, and seeing the Other.

iii TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... iii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

TO MEET WITH TRANSLATION ...... 4

TO SPEAK WITH THE SEAFARER ...... 8

TO SEE WITH THE RUIN ...... 20

CONCLUSION ...... 29

WORKS CITED ...... 33

INTRODUCTION

Our world is not static but being made and unmade continually. If an environment is in-the-making, then environmental thinking does not depend on finding stability in language or overcoming transience and loss. Rather, environmental thinking requires relational seeing, from within and without a place, up-close and from a distance in space and time. Here is the use of literature: to create a space that is otherwise not there as it takes place in natural and human built environments. My aim in this thesis is to decenter the human in Old English studies through meeting the Other in translation of language and of environment, and an ecocritical reading of two poems: The Seafarer and The Ruin.

Questions and decisions about social, spiritual, cultural meaning and identity, or about what ought to be conserved or protected, built or torn down, connected or dissolved constantly interact with human affection for and attachment to a place (Harcourt 164).

Yet, defining place, even place-making, is not reserved only for humanity. With this in mind, I intend to locate language in meeting places between humankind and nature.

Whether set in nature’s or humankind’s built environment, a place—and the language that emerges from its environment—becomes defined by the coming and going of transitory presences of which humanity numbers among many in a community of makers.

That is, in Lawrence Buell’s terms, a “place is associatively thick” by collecting substance from the daily life of both individuals and communities (63). Daily life of humanity, a common subject within humanities’ scholarship, is informed both by personal and social agents. But what of the daily life of the non-human? Dwelling with the whole earth leads to understanding the humanities as relation, as Buell goes on to

1 describe: “contemporary environmental criticism is in part the story of an evolution from imagining life-in-place as a deference to the claims of (natural) environment toward an understanding of place-making as a culturally inflected process in which nature and culture must be seen as a mutuality rather than as separable domains” (167). By using the word inflected, Buell evokes an image of place-making that sees culture, and its expressions in literature, humbly offer to meet nature and become transformed. Seen in this way, the Old English poems The Ruin and The Seafarer exhibit the environmental thick-ness physically, in both seascape and landscape, as well as the humility to receive language from the Other in terms of personal, spiritual, and cultural agents shaping the world.

This thesis is divided into three sections. In the first section, I address the need to see translation as a site of relation. Throughout this essay, the Other refers to language and environment built by both human and natural agents. A place as well as a language is met in translation along the border of the two worlds. In the second section, I turn toward ecocritical readings of two Old English poems. First, I specifically read The Seafarer as a space of meeting between the land-dweller and sea-dweller. While exiled from their home-hall and community the human hears more clearly the cries of the nonhuman world who were already exiled from the land. In this space, human and nonhuman sorrow begins to be shared in a pluralistic environment. Second, I focus on The Ruin as a scene of transient presence. Human civilization has risen and fallen, and in the newly formed space the poet—whose exile in this silent and still place that will again become noisy with human activity—hears the nonhuman voice of the stone. I conclude this thesis with

2 examples of how the ecocritical sensibility appears in modern and contemporary writing, and the work that must continue to unfold.

TO MEET WITH TRANSLATION

Nature and culture intertwine in translation of language. The meeting of two languages places both theory and practice in conceptual and concrete approaches.

Practically, an original language must be present. Theoretically, the translation is where the original language and environment is transformed in the meeting of the Other language. From the living utterance in speech or writing, according to Mikhail M.

Bakhtin, a word is directed toward an object that is present within an environment made of Other languages that is both “elastic” and “tension-filled” and difficult to completely comprehend (276). Yet, turning toward the object—that is, Other language—the original speaker sets the intention of the word, and that intention emerges from the speaker’s language as a whole. With this intention set the word moves toward the boundary between the original and the Other language in a word-built environment. Here is where translation, as the boundary, resides. Translation negates the assumption that a meeting with the Other is merely a conversion of information, knowledge, or literature from one language to the next. Understanding the Other depends less, if at all, upon transaction than upon interaction. Conversation between the original and Other language becomes an alternative to conversion. In an act of linguistic place-making, the borderline of translation becomes a gesture of hospitality from one language to another that hosts interactive understanding.

Understanding occurs in interactive translation, but Benjamin’s theory crosses a threshold Bakhtin’s did not: the original language cannot set its intention alone and remain interactive, rather by “the totality of [the original and Other] intentions

4 supplementing each other” (74). Succumbing to the temptation of exchanging cultural information of equal or lesser value, especially for the sake of quick understanding, results in transaction rather than translation. Finding the intention of a language cannot happen in exchange, as if one language could replace another without any losses.

Assuming that the Other language’s likeness can be preserved in the translation, whether turning Old English (OE) into Present Day English (PDE), or Present Day English into

Old English, the translator must work from the presupposition that “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original” (73). The echo of the original language is a loss, or departure from, of the original. In other words, translation is not a representation—a copy—of the original but a recreation of language as such. As the translator expects the transformation of the original language the place of translation becomes a mystical zone of unsettling and marvelous interaction of temporalities. Benjamin concludes “in its afterlife—which could not be call that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change”

(73). Not only is translation an immediate interaction between living things, but it is an ongoing interaction with the afterlife of those languages, and the task of the translator is to find the intention that resides in the language and the environment of the Other.

For the following ecocritical readings of The Seafarer and The Ruin I assert the task of the translator of Old English as interaction with the boundary of translation now, and as resisting the transactional temptation of exchanging past for the present, or the present for the past. Language always already emerges from meeting the environment within and without time. According to Carolyn Dinshaw, “[s]pirits, ghosts, specters and apparitions, gods and the divine: the supernatural can interrupt at any moment, refusing

5 to let us forget the unsettling, marvelous, fearsome asynchrony of life that the hold of classically scientific time-as-measurement would lead us to discount” (139). Dinshaw carries Benjamin’s terms of translation with the word asynchrony, which liberates the word to be understood apart from history (Dinshaw 212 note 16). The afterlife of the original language becomes spectral in translation and haunts the border as time widens between one language and environment and the Other. Past, present, and future appear in a single now, as Augustine of Hippo describes in Confessions, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuris [presence of past things, presence of present things, presence of future things] (11.20.26 trans. mine). These three temporalities embedded in built environments and languages by memory, presence, and expectation, and their overlap results in a phenomenological instant. That is, as Dinshaw writes, “our ordinary experiences of memory and expectation contribute to a sense of the present that is complex and multifold” (13). Memory, presence and expectation are what the translator brings to the text before her, and translation has an afterlife because of this multifaceted temporality. Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Dinshaw converge in the effect (or, perhaps, affection) of the meeting of languages as a kind of overlap of language, and time in culture, identity, and meaning. In the introduction to the collection Bakhtin and

Medieval Voices Thomas Farrell argues that the importance of Bakhtin’s theory for medievalists hinges on the redefinition of terms allowing room for new approaches to old texts (Farrell 4). Benjamin pushes translation in particular beyond the threshold of the living to asynchronic afterlife where Dinshaw detaches translation from linear and static history altogether enabling language and environment to reckon losses together in relation. I propose the need to see translation as a site of relation with the Other language

6 with particular to the environment built by both human and natural agents, living and dying.

TO SPEAK WITH THE SEAFARER

When decentralized and scattered the human must meet itself through the Other language upon the land and, at times, upon the sea. In The Seafarer the poet sails beyond the borders of those who speak his language. Though the narrator seems frozen within contemplation his own sorrow and death he hears beyond his vessel the Other language: hwilum ylfete song [song of the wild swan]; ganetes hleoþor [cry of the gannet]; mæw singende [sea-mew singing] and the scream of the bigeal urigfeþra [dewy-winged eagle]

(18-24, translation mine).* Yet, the response to these cries comes not from humans but from a tern giving voice to the rocky cliffs: stormas þæ stanclifu beotan þær him stearn oncwæð isigfeþera [Storms beat on the rocky cliffs, where the tern, ice on its wings, gave answer] (23). The sea-environment brims with Other language, and the ability to hear such a language signifies the birds, the sea, and the land are not inert objects set behind where humanity stands, but Others to be meet with hospitality and generosity. Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen explains in Stone, “where enchantment functions…as an ‘affective force’ that might ‘propel ethical generosity,’ a way of thinking that contests dreary and destructive modes of reducing matter to raw material, diminishing objects to uses” (9).

Re-introducing enchantment to reading poetry and the world prevents objects from becoming humanity’s tool and restores them to a place of being heard as they are. With the force of “ethical generosity” The Seafarer’s birds and rocks calling to one another is a vision of wonder not for humanity, but alongside it.

* Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent translations of OE into PDE are my own.

According to Jaques Le Goff, nature as viewed in the early periods of England’s history and well into the Middle Ages was the border between the solid and the mysterious. As with the journeys of holy peoples of Old Testament scripture, voyages into the forest, or over the sea, denoted trial by wandering (Le Goff 48). The desert of the

African and Middle Eastern imagination—that is, the kind of environment that challenges the relationship between interior and exterior worlds—found its British equivalent in the dense forests and vast sea surrounding the island and circumscribing the civilization.

While it is true imagination practiced by those seeking solitude, or self-selected exile, created a distinct contrast between the culture of the town of the High and Late Middle

Ages, the Old English landscape that lay outside the borders were fluid and unstable. In both The Seafarer and The Ruin nature is not viewed as holy or innocent set against threatening civilization. Nature acts as the subject met by the human Other, not the setting for human action. Nature offers a glimpse into the world outside human endeavors, an eternity both present and Other, that could interrupt the transient moment without warning. For example, Bede records a character’s vision describing time on earth like a sparrow that flies into a dwelling place during winter to remain warm throughout the harsh season: “The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all” (Bede II.13). The sparrow exists as co-inhabitant within human time and place for a brief moment. As the character sees the sparrow break in from the outside

9 environment—the Other world—a new space is created, and he listens for what this harbinger might have to say.

As in The Seafarer, the bird, flighty in nature, represents the temporal reality of mortal life and suggests another reality outside of the dwelling of humanity. R.M Liuzza sees Old English poetry, namely Beowulf, as an imaginative encounter with and resurrection of a pagan environment and language in which “…the warm but fleeting pleasures of life are placed against the somber background of its ultimate meaninglessness, and without the hope of conversion of salvation all that is available to make sense of the world is courage, honor, and a stoical acceptance of one’s fate, whether good or bad” (35). In Liuzza’s terms, an environmental tension is evidence of pluralistic culture that surrounds Old English poetry and poets. Plurality in a single world of immaterial and material reality, in a single space of both practical and representational experience, results in a complex identity. Rather than speaking as poet or seafarer, the narrator speaks as poet-seafarer, and merges travel and nature with imagination and work as an exploration of his identity-in-place. As he starts his tale, his imagination swells upon the sea’s waves:

Mæg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan siþas secgan hu ic geswincdagum earfoðhwile oft þrowade bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela atoll yþa gewealc [I can tell a true tale about myself…how in days of toil I often endured a time of hardship, have suffered bitter anxiety of heart, have explored in my ship many halls of care, the fierce surging waves] (1-6).

In one moment, the external and internal life of the narrator rises to the foreground of the poem. The immaterial, and nonetheless real, anxiety of the heart

10 appears within “halls” and upon “waves” hovering like a bird or a spirit. Birds appear above the open water only when land is close, but not necessarily visible, and a scene materializes in The Seafarer that embodies both the promise of land and the vastness of sea. Because the two visions, of halls and of waves, appear at once a tension forms between comfort and the unknown in the imagination of both poet and reader. In an invisible hall, the sea-man’s heart recalls the winemægrum [kindly friends], hleahtre wera [laughter of men], and medodrince [mead], on a lonely ship (16, 21, 22, trans. mine). Yet, the waves cause his cares to be earmcearig [wretched and anxious] while his ship bihongen hrimgicelum hægl scurum fleag [passes through icy gates amid a hail storm] (14, 17). The imaginative tension is enclosed in an environmental tension between the exilic sea and comfortable land. Yet, this tension is a result of moving toward the

Other, either by physical movement along paths, the whale’s or the walker’s, or the formation of the imagination, memory, and body.

While The Seafarer occurs in the immaterial memory of the narrator, the place- making—becoming associatively thick by each movement from sea to land and back to sea—does affect a physical body with ice and wind at a certain time and certain space.

This physical effect is spatial practice. Laura Howes supports my claim in her essay

“‘The Slow Curve of the Footwalker’: Narrative Time and Literary Landscapes in Middle

English Poetry” by drawing attention to Medieval poetry’s frequent use of movement through space as an organizational device (171). An individual is not the same at the beginning of a movement as at the end, whether it be along a garden path or upon the sea.

The Seafarer begins with a description of a material experience, overlayed both emotional and physical toil, and moves not only from sea to land but also from spirit to

11 body. At the onset of the poem the poet-seafarer tells how he is adrift in struggle and ice, and by the poem’s conclusion he admonishes his hearers to think of “where we have a home, and then devise how we may come there…” (117-118). Not only is this a tonal shift from woe to hope, but it is a movement of the poet-seafarer’s imagination from an interior space to an exterior space where the Other resides.

Language emerges from environment and then, in turn, defines the space in The

Seafarer. Tangible, and specifically natural, imagery binds the narrator’s inner reality to the external world. As a result, the details that follow represent the duality of the landscape: the waves, ice, and cliffs are as much material as they are immaterial, as physical as they are spiritual. The narrator places the location of exploration with internal cearselda [halls of care] and external yþa gewealc [rolling waves] (5-6). A vessel for voyaging into immaterial and material space must be of the same duality. The poet- seafarer simply names the vessel that moves through the space of representation ceole

[ship] (5). The Seafarer narrator, himself a kind of ship moving through his halls of care, becomes a part of the place itself and not separated from it thus dissolving the boundary internal and the external worlds. Directly speaking, the narrator’s description of the seascape combines both language (immaterial) and environment (material) together in the thick and tension-filled space.

bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela atol yþa gewealc þær mec oft bigeat nearo nihtwaco æt nacan stefnan þonne he be clifum cnossað [Bitter breast-cares have I abided, explored in a boat many sorrowful places, the terrible tossing of waves] (4-6).

What this means for the seafarer is that he travels not through space as a finite being in infinite time, but through finite time as a fellow object—fated and transient.

Because of its vastness in the not-yet-measurable sense, it appears that space is a vacuum in which human and inhuman objects are pulled and pushed. But the medieval, and the

Old English, poet does not—could not—see space as anything more than a dwelling place in time until he set his vessel upon the water. To move through the landscape was to move through time, and to traverse outside established borders means redefining space with a new language. And this movement toward the Other is not without loss. As the narrator describes the changing of seasons, he cannot help but mention the “sad-voiced cuckoo”—the death bird—because, after all, his time in space is limited (53). His relationship to the sea then is a relationship of object-to-object viator, in transition. The waves of the sea rise and the land, and its inhabitants, grow and wither and grow again.

Nicholas Howe describes a “powerful and sustaining binary”—a dual- placement—that formed the Old English imagination by joining the transient and eternal into a single landscape (92). As the Old English seafarer looks upon the sea, he glimpses the temporal and the eternal at once. In the seascape he finds the interplay of the material and the immaterial, the human and the inhuman, not at odds but in unison. The dual- placement of the seafarer leads to one conclusion: the world, both material and immaterial, is full of enchantment. As spring unfolds before the poet’s eyes,

ealle þa gemoniað modes fusne sefan to siþe, þam þe swa þenceð on flodwegas feor gewitan. Swylce geac monað geomran reorde, singeð sumeres weard, sorge beodeð bitter in breosthord.

[everything urges towards adventure the eager mind in him who thinks of departing far upon the paths of the sea. Then too the sad-voiced cuckoo warns him, the harbinger of summer sings, but bitterly forebodes sorrow to the heart] (50-55).

A strange tension arises from the poem that can only come from a memento mori.

Not only does the poet-seafarer glimpse the transience of mortal life in looking toward the sky, but by looking toward the earth where time and place meet. The value of such a poem is this: learning to see the world as it is all at once as a space held by the tension of environmental trials and personal trials and spiritual trials and physical trials. The structure of the poem itself stands as a foundational example of dual-placement as a single poem with one half in the world, the other in eternity. The first half of the poem begins with the opening lines, “I can tell a true tale about myself, narrate my adventures, how in days of toil / I often endure a time of hardship….” and the second begins “Truly I love more ardently / the joys of the Lord than this dead life / transitory upon earth…” (1-

3; 64-66). Repeating “true.” and its variant “truly.” underscores what the poet-seafarer implies: both physical and cosmic reality are true, and the poem acts as a meeting place.

It is the natural world that aids in making sense of the cosmic world that, for The Seafarer poet seems unapproachable by any other way than exile. The second half of the poem beginning at line 64, when seen as the cosmic environment being illuminated by the natural environment described in the verses that precede it, shows the poet-seafarer’s position as translator of the two worlds he finds himself between. He has built his poem upon the experiences, both internal and external, that he has collected on sea and land.

Moving through space is a movement from one point to another in time but also away from time. Therefore, the narrator ends his poem with the boundary of time itself— eternity.

Throughout the beginning of the poem natural, physical, signs of death materialize, from the sea-swan’s song to the coming of winter. The poet’s audience would not be unfamiliar with the bitterness of winter-death upon land. As mentioned above, pluralistic tension between the pagan and Christian postures toward the world resides within The Seafarer. A devotional language to the daunting and authoritative environment can be seen as a result of the meeting of fate, the Other, and undulating life of humanity. In the poem there are multiple gestures toward an authority, but never a specific deity. Christian, Marian, or Patristic motifs are non-existent, yet the poem— especially the concluding half—is intensely devotional toward the authority of fate and lord. Variations of the word dryhten [lord] appear seven times (41, 43, 65, 85, 106, 121,

124); variations of meotod [creator] appear three times (103, 108, 115); and only one use of god [god] appears (101). Not only are these multiple authoritative names but they are, at best, ambivalent toward a specific religious authority. The devotional impulse toward a power, guide, or ruler is reflective of the Old English poet’s sense of how the world is made and ordered: first, the environment, then the name of the lord, the judge, or the god that emerges from the environment. Arguments for or against a Christian name can be made only in speculation or interpolation. Yet, what, appears in the latter half of the poem. A.D. Horgan continues, “For [the poet] it would perhaps be precisely the Christian material which was unfamiliar, and would engage the primary attention” (41). After the turn into the second half of the poem, the narrator assumes a prophetic posture saying:

Dagas sind gewitene. ealle onmedlan eorþan rices… …Gedroren is þeos duguð eal… …þeah þe græf wille golde stregan broþor his geborenum, byrgan be deadum, maþmum mislicum þæt hine mid wille…

[Gone are the days of old, all the pomps of the kingdom of the world,…All this lordliness has perished, its joys have passed away…Though a brother will strew with gold his brother’s grave, and busy him among the dead with various treasures, it will not go with him…] (80-82, 86, 97-99).

When placed next to the Biblical language of the Psalms, the poet-seafarer’s language becomes more clear: “Be thou not afraid when a man shall be made rich and when the glory of his house shall be increased, for when he shall die he shall take nothing away nor shall his glory descend with him…He shall go in to the generations of his fathers, and he shall see no light” (The Vulgate Bible, Ps. 48.17-18, 20). Both The

Seafarer poet and the Psalmist make sense of dwelling on earth by its movement through time toward an eternal end. The Seafarer illuminates an unfamiliar reality through the movement of the poem, and the poem moves with the sea. Although all things are slanting toward an end, both material and immaterial, the poet reflects the enchantment that comes with the realization that finite things are still holy things. Still, the language of the poem refuses pagan or Christian, or any specific religious meaning by affirming a pluralistic environment where wyrd biþ swiðre / meotud meahtigra þonne ænges monnes gehydd [fate fiercer, the creator mightier, than the intention of any man] (115-116). An environment of authority meets humanity’s intentions and shapes them into a new language. In the language itself is the pluralistic possibility that sets the word and its meaning within an environment filled with tension and movement.

The poet-seafarer’s movement by spatial practice through a space of representation has left him longing to be a part of the world. Setting the intangible realities of being human upon material vessels appears elsewhere in Western literary tradition leading to the Old English poem. In “Venturing Upon Deep Waters in the ‘The

Seafarer’” Marijane Osborn explains that many literate people living in what became

16 known as the Old English period were familiar with the writings of Saint Benedict would have read the mystics, or desert fathers, alongside Holy Scripture (Osborn 5). John

Cassian, a 4th Century mystic quoted by Osborn, writes in sea-terms: “Just as I have taken my little boat into harbor…I see an ocean opening out in front of me…And my little boat has now to venture out among the perils of much deeper water than before” (5).

John Cassian’s sea is analogous to Christian contemplation. Leaving a material world behind for the sake of one completely metaphysical was a part of the notion of “continual progress” or “spiritual perfection” particular to Cassian’s theology (Tsichlis 145). In a similar fashion, the poet-seafarer is drawn out of his interior anxiety and ventures into deeper waters upon the high seas, progressing toward the world of strangers:

forþon cynssað nú heortan geþohtas þæt ic hean stremas sealtyþa gelac sylf cunnige monað modes lust mæla gehwylce ferð to feran þæt ic feor heonan elþeodigra eard gesece [Now indeed there press thoughts upon my heart, that I myself should explore the high seas, the dancing salt waves. Heart’s desire ever urges my soul towards departing, that far from here I should visit the home of strangers] (33-38).

This stanza follows what amounts to a catalogue of sorrows at the hands of a winter sea, both of the soul and the body, through the practiced imagination. Despite the struggle, the heart longs for the departure from land to the “dancing salt waves” (35).

Before the narrator’s mind, the wave’s rise, crest, and fall as a dancer holding ribbons of water. The point of his self-imposed exile is not to detach from the world around him, but rather to see it and to rejoin it wholly. But the home he seeks is far from where he is now.

This restlessness is characteristic of the man in transition—homo viator—developed in

Medieval literature. Identifying as homo viator represented existence in time between

17 eternities, like the sparrow between two windows, and the subsequent feelings of alienation and exile in a “land of unlikeness” (xxi). After being in solitude, and feeling loneliness externally and internally, his desire is to be with others—to visit, as he says,

“the home of strangers” (38). Pleasures, the music of harps, the receiving of wealth, or romantic love are not enough to tie him to England’s shore ac a hafað longunge se þe on lagu fundað [for he whom the sea calls has the longing always] (44). Finding himself unsettled and alien to the land, the poet-seafarer explores knowing that his life is one of transition, like the seasons: bearwas blostmum nimað byrig fægriað wongas wlitigað woruld onetteð ealle þa gemoniað [The woods blossom forth the cities become fair, the fields are beautiful, the world breaks into life—everything urges toward adventure] (48-

50). Yet, even in the warmth and comfort of spring he feels no less drawn to the dangerous sea. Rather than a place of spiritual trial and examination, however, the heart’s desire sails toward the home of the stranger. His longing is not escape from land through spiritual detachment, but to combine the wonder of place and the movement of transient toward eternal time: forþon nú min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan / min modsefa mid mereflode / ofer hwæles eþel [Truly now my heart is restless within my breast, my thoughts range with the ocean flood over the home of the whale] (58-60). His restless heart leads to another home, not beyond earth, but by way of another home—the whale’s.

The lone bird screams, gielleð anfloga and his desire is to move from home to home, all the while searching for the route to another home (62).

In the preceding paragraphs I have described The Seafarer as a poem describing a meeting the Other through language emerging from environment. Though Christian interpretations of the poem’s meaning are possible, it is evident that the complex

18 environment is not a setting for human action, rather it is an environment of plurality from which a language that matches the complexity of meeting. For the seafarer, the loss of laughter and mead-hall are a result of the hearing the call toward the sea. Upon the sea this meeting both decenters human desire and creates desire anew in the human for the

Other. Yet this longing for the Other is a longing for estrangement from home’s language and familiar environment.

TO SEE WITH THE RUIN

A desire to meet the Other does not guarantee mutual intentions. In fact, as mentioned above in the section titled “To Translate a Meeting” the intention of one language to another—or one people to another—is not transferred through transaction.

Rather, intentions are created in the meeting of language and environment. Yet, this meeting must take place with a modicum of humility. For example, consider how language and environment meet in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People with the Roman Church on the side of language, and the pagan natural world on the side of the land. Bede presents an event taking place around AD 605 when a geographical and spiritual meeting-place marked by an oak tree is named by the Roman church after the

British bishop: Augustinæs Ác [Augustine’s Oak]. Bede’s account shows violence as much as peace, and often blood is spilled along the border of English people, that is the

English church, and the Otherworld: “In the meantime, Augustine, with the help of King

Ethelbert, drew together to a conference the bishops and doctors of the nearest province of the Britons, at a place which is to this day called, in the English language, Augustinæs

Ác, that is, Augustine's Oak, on the borders of the Hwicce and West Saxons” (Bede II.ii).

At Augustine’s Oak the bishop of the English church, Augustine of Canterbury, meets

Hwicce clergy to discuss the terms of their conversion. The demands are set: the traditions of the Hwicce must be converted to the English, that is Catholic, church. In particular, the Hwicce date for the central feast of Easter must align with the English date

(Bede II.ii). Therefore, not only is this a meeting of the work of different people, but of work the human and nonhuman. According to Margaret Gelling’s research a place of geographical meeting, that is to say a borderline, often receives a name connected to the

20 environment. An Old English land survey taken in anno domini (AD) 953 describes

Æscesbyrig. Along the border of the land is a langen dic “a low cliff running alongside the parish boundary for about 700 yards south” of what is now called Uffington Castle

(202). These words are an apt implication that meetings take place where no men dwell.

The Ruin is no-man’s land. The poet describes the ruined structure yet exiles himself from the center of the poem. There is no ic [I] in this poem which leaves the ruin to speak for itself. Among the descriptions of the place is wurdon hyra wigsteal westenstapolas [walls become waste-places] (27). The Hall of humanity has been destroyed by wyrd (which seems to be a combination of divine and natural intervention), and a meeting-place of society—in this case a bathhouse—has been destabilized. Seen as a place of meeting-in-the-making the ruin becomes more than scattering of stones. The walls, whether the poet realizes it or not, had come down in order to make way for a new place, or, perhaps, a return of the place it was built upon. The place of waste, wasteland, or deserted place (westenstapolas), as seen with the ác in Bede’s account, is a place absent of human agency. It is literally a no-man’s land. The absence of human agency invites conversation and meeting of the Other. Now, because the built environment is in ruins, the natural world is seen—or seen anew—and met by the first responder: the poet.

It is easier to shrug and mumble “who cares?” before an old building, or a pile of rocks. That is, however, the exact question that we should be asking: who cares, or do you feel anything, or who grieves for a ruin? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s young daughter might be the first to grieve for an exhibit in a museum: “The scale of our earthy duration is short, difficult, limned with violence. Holding her close and running my hand through her hair, I wondered if she was the first to mourn for Lindow Man, wondered if Lindow

Man was worth her tears” (Cohen 96). Without question Cohen’s daughter feels something: she wonders “Is he going to be okay?” as she looks upon the preserved, yet flattened, corpse of the Lindow Man in the British Museum. Here the young person is beginning to see phenomenologically. Cohen writes, “Peering into the glass case at that still form Katherine began to perceive that no matter how much we love our families and our lives, no matter how safe we think our world, all lives end, and most do not end well”

(Cohen 96). In a single moment the overlap of suffering and tragedy, time and place, bound in the Lindow Man becomes sensible, along with the pain he must be enduring.

Phenomenological insight glimpses the active relationship of the temporal and eternal, the human and nonhuman. Stones and corpses appear stationary and inert, but this is a misjudgment: “Without a phenomenological awareness of the constant interaction of that which is time bound and that which is greater than any small history, that which might even cross inhuman temporal gaps, human lives are too easily reduced to mere matter, and matter fixed into immobility” (97). To see a stone still, unmoved and unmoving, is to see it as a non-thing. If, as Cohen states, we are not able to see the stone

(or a corpse) with the phenomenological eye then we reduce the stone object to an immobility that allows, at best, the rational being to have some symbolic experience. But stone is alive, and so are humans, made of material shaped by the weight of time passing.

Stones speak, albeit non-linguistically, of time: “Materiality is the painful weight of the past, which cannot escape the power of time” (Ó Murchadha 16). In order for human or nonhuman bodies to break away from time—perhaps, into eternity—suggests a necessary departure from materiality, and that break is not without its losses. The scop wanders what seems to be a museum of cultural memories: here is the pool where bathwater

22 bubbled up from a spring, and here is where the roof curved under the firmament. The

Ruin reads like a catalogue of past things. Things, mostly made of stone, is the right word here because Boswell-Toller leaves the definition of thynge as open-ended, undefined and unfinished, still-growing. That is to say a thynge that has not yet been, or cannot be, named.

Looking back at Augustine of Hippo’s three-fold present with thynge in mind reveals the praesens de praeteritis as an unstable memory interacting with a scattered attention, like the stones of a building that is now scattered in ruin. But this scattering of stone is not a result of decay, for the stone-thynges were never stable to begin with, just as the past is never really finished. Did the makes of such a magnificent place build with this in mind? While it may not be possible to determine how the Roman builders of The

Ruin’s namesake saw their work, Heide Estes clearly suggests the Old English poet felt the immense weight of mutability in natural and built environments. In Anglo-Saxon

Literary Landscapes she writes, “Human attention cannot always keep built environments from ruin: catastrophic destruction, whether from natural causes such as storm or flood, or human causes such as war, cannot always be staved off; and wooden beams decay over time in spite of attention” (Estes 66). No amount of human attention can keep decay at bay when both masonry and mason are transient: wonath giet se wealstan [Yet, the masonry falls apart] (The Ruin ln. 12).

Estes suggests that the Exeter Text Riddles anticipate Cohen’s sensibility to the ethical dimensions of human relationship to things simply because both equally exist

(145). The substance of a thing’s existence in relation to human beings, as well as human environments and structures, speaks to the complex and interactive nature of dwelling on

Earth. Stone experiences its own existence in tandem with the existence of the Other, and so does humanity. The Old English riddles explore the environment and language of things as subjects. For example, in Riddle 82 stone speaks: ic ful gearwe gemon / hwa min fromcynn fruman agette / eall of eared [I know well who stripped my birthplace and my offspring entirely from my homeland] (6-8). Here stone exhibits not only subjectivity

(ic) and self-awareness, but awareness of humanity. The language pictures an environment where humanity pulls stone from the earth with force, perhaps as miners strip mine or remove mountain tops. In the end, stone remains outside the control of human hands and remains ambivalent to retribution against its eorþan broþor [earthen brother] though it often causes humanity’s hæftnyd or confinement (5; 9). As a facet of a pluralistic Old English society, the subjective life of objects also appears in the Latin vulgate. Within the New Testament, Jesus, before his death, confirms the Hebrew prophet: Quibus ipse ait, Dico vobis quia si hii tacuerint, lapides clamabunt [And he said to them, “I say to you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would cry out”

Luke 19:40]. Not only is stone animate without human permission, falling where they may, but the biblical text suggests stone and wood are aware of human will or presence, and respond with aching, decaying, and talking. Elsewhere in the Vulgate, the Hebrew book of Habbakkuk records: Quis lapis de pariete clamabit, et lignum quod inter iuncturas aedificiorum est respondebit [For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the timber that is between the joints of the building shall answer, Habakkuk 2:11]. Stone and wood have a life of their own alongside humanity. “No wonder” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen concludes, “later medieval writers will wrestle with the idea that stone might itself be a kind of organism, might possess something like animam viventem, a creaturely soul”

(Cohen 126). Indeed, not only would wood and stone have its own animate life, but the whole earth lives and moves as a mutable organism made of organisms on the move.

In The Ruin both the natural and built environments prove to be in flux. The language of The Ruin captures the great change that overwhelms nature’s and humankind’s built environments. The Ruin expresses this continual temporal flux by turning to what remains of a Roman ruin and in this way shows great empires, such as the

Roman, and their accomplishments upon the earth rise and fall, as does the sea, as does the wind upon a hill. This similarity is evidence of the symbiotic relationship between naturally and culturally built environments. The natural world, says Estes, is a world of constant transformation (Estes 71). Dwelling on the earth in essence is a memory of, presence with, and expectation of change. Writing about the environment must resist the temptation of allocating the natural world to setting. As the word implies, a setting is a static backdrop to activity performed in the foreground. If the natural environment is in flux rather than in stasis then it cannot be simply the setting in which human activity is performed. The alternative to setting is place, made of overlapping temporalities and realities: “…an agent alongside humans rather than an unchanging setting for human actors” (Estes 71). That is not to say that environmentalists should interact, or the Old

English poets interacted, with the natural and built environs with a kind of detachment.

Rather, poems like The Ruin exhibit an attention to place, whether temporally and/or geographically distant, that “suggests that Anglo-Saxon attachments to and understanding of place shifted and interacted in complex ways” (Estes 86). Wrætlic is the first word one meets in the poem. According to the Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon dictionary, translated as an adverb this word could mean something like splendid, dazzling, or wonderful.

However, peering deeper into the well of Old English one sees a hidden jewel, barely glimmering beneath the surface of the water. As a compound word, wrætlic reveals itself to be a treasure of sorts. But broken apart, much like the stones of the ruin before the poet’s eyes, two things are discovered. Wræt, meaning jewel or ornament, and lic meaning like. The masonry of the building laid waste by fate is splendid, but it is splendid because it is “jewel-like” and precious. The value of the walls is hidden in stone, and their beauty was likened to the precious stones of a king-, or dragon-, hoard. But lic has another life, too. Lic could be an addition upon the noun wræt, but it could also be a thynge itself. On its own, Lic translates as body, of the living or dead, but usually the latter. Placed next to the ornamental wræt one sees a ghostly vision: a dead body ornamented for burial. This image, right from the beginning, acknowledges the transient mood of design. The architects of the Roman bathhouse described in The Ruin knew they were decorating a dead, or impermanent, thing. Yet, their stone-craft and masonry are splendid, polishing the walls to a shine like sapphire. It is as if the decoration was for sending this building into the world, doomed for destruction, but beautiful in its transience.

Phenomenologically time wraps itself around—not originating from—the object and that materiality is a part of the present-progressive building of environment, as it is a part of the simple past, present, and future. Alfred K. Siewers implies a two-fold experience, distinct in the Medieval present from the Scholastic past and modern future experiences of environment, that “helped shape a dynamic, quasi-ecological sense of region that resisted delusions of being able to possess the world, while blurring boundaries between human and nonhuman, body and idea” (Siewers 16). One moment

26 where the movement of the human and natural world is seen swirling around the stone occurs early in the poem:

oft thæs wag gebad ræghar ond readfah rice æfter othrum oftstunden under stormum […often has this wall, grey with lichen and mottled with red, endured one sovereignty after another, and stood firm under storms…(9-11)]

The scop focuses the gaze on one section of the ruin, a stone wall that is, perhaps, an outer wall standing alone. The poet imagines the stone as the object caught between two forces: human and natural activity. Marks of both worlds are upon the stone: ræghar ond readfah, gray with lichen and red. Lichen, from the natural world, lays claim on stone alongside the red. Whether or not this readfah is blood it invokes the image of human life, and death, speckled alongside the lichen, and the alliterative description speaks of the importance of this visual. Transience and the human world are captured in the alliterative rhythm of rice æfter othrum, one kingdom after the other, again and again, over and over. Human lords and their power rise and fall, and yet the stone remains. The human presence swells against the wall like a summer rain—it is there, then it is gone.

The stone withstands storms of the natural world as well. While human activity energizes the world within the walls, the natural movement electrifies the world outside.

Again, stone appears caught between these two energies and continually withstands whatever comes: oftstunden under stormum. Yet, stone is not as immutable and as detached as it appears. The stone gebad, the stone remembers, experiences, exists with its own agency. In the above section I have shown The Ruin as a poem sensitive to the existence of stone as stone. Though recorded by a human language, the image of stone is determined by the environment it is found in. That is to say that the human language is

27 determined by the stone’s existence and is, as result, shaped by meeting stone. The Exeter riddle is a further example of environmental sensitivity in Old English writing that admits objects to the place of subjects. The Ruin admits stone to speak, and the poet—decentered from the place of subject—listens with humility to the grief stone has endured.

CONCLUSION

After considering language as environment-in-translation, and the act of translation as relational, Old English poems like The Seafarer and The Ruin emerge as exemplars of a language woven and intertwined with the environment. In The Seafarer the poet’s language attests a pluralistic society that suspends pagan and Christian realities amid an ever-changing natural world. Griefs are shared from the heart of humanity upon the sea and join the chorus of birds always already singing. And the stone replies. The

Ruin decenters the human “I” completely and allows for the stone to bear its wounds.

There is, however, the possibility that though sea or stone speak with a language built by meeting their environment the griefs therein will go unnoticed.

But what happens if a person is unable to grieve, or resists the reality that there is any need for grief? In 1915, less than a year before the Western world experienced a great wave of loss life and land beyond imagination, Sigmund Freud writes the short essay “On Transience.” Like Cohen and the The Ruin scop, Freud begins by describing a walk through a built environment. Rather than a museum or fallen hall, the German strolls with two companions through a metropolitan park. One of the fellows, a young poet, cannot bring himself to enjoy the beauty of the growing things around him because of their inevitable ruin. Flowers will wither, trees will rot and fall. The garden, the ground, the place simply will not last forever. Freud notes without hesitation that, though painful, the fragility of the natural environment is true (Freud 305). Fragility of place, acutely felt in the loss of natural environments by disaster of human or inhuman hands, upends any sense of immortality or lasting imprint. In response, despair came upon

Freud’s companion in the form of pessimism. The beauty of the world along with its

29 aesthetic or inspirational value is dimmed by its impermanence. What good is a muse that cannot lift itself beyond death? Freud disagrees that ephemeral beauty involves any loss in its worth—rather, it increases (Freud 305). He persists in near economic terms:

“Transience value is scarcity value in time. Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of enjoyment” (Freud 305). If transience is a part of beauty, then loss and mourning are a way in to experience of beauty, not a way out.

Feeling the weight of existence, despite its ephemeral nature, begins with awareness of both the inevitability of personal loss, and the possibility of global change.

“It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we had regarded as changeless” (Freud 307). After the destruction of war, Freud and the poet found the world changed. All things that seemed permanent were proved temporal. The gardens, as well as art inspired by the gardens, were destroyed in a long instant. This is a very similar place that The Ruin poet walks: destruction had come in the form of fate, taking away the dear things. A great distance between the ruin, and the place it rests, and the rest of the world. Yet, in Freud’s terms, this is the beginning, not the end. He writes,

“I believe that those who think thus, and seem ready to make a permanent renunciation because what was precious has proved not to be lasting, are simply in a state of mourning for what is lost. Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end” (Freud 307). Awareness of this kind is also limited. Michael McCarthy elucidates in The Moth Snowstorm of what catches the attention of those who have turned a blind eye to natural losses: money. Like Freud, McCarthy notices that value—as in a financial gain—occurs in times of natural scarcity. He writes, “For the developing

30 science of environmental economics has enabled us to accord ecosystem services value, real-world financial value, and this has woken up even more people than has the knowledge that we rely utterly on them” (McCarthy 25). McCarthy then gives the hypothetical, though far from improbable, example of mangrove forests in tropical coastlines who, by their simple presence, lessen the strength of—or keep at bay— powerful tsunamis. Putting a price-tag on the goods and services of the natural world wakens companies to the value of what could easily be dismissed as simply in the way of progress.

Yet, profit-based value of nature exists only in a human-built environment that excludes the interconnectedness of thynges, and shuns the reality that environments are built both with and without human hands. Humans are not the only builders, makers, and dwellers on the earth. Nor are they the only creatures who grieve. Both The Seafarer and

The Ruin, along with the Vulgate Old and New Testaments, affirm that if humans do not speak and cry out, in joy or in pain, then wood and stone will. And they are. Hearing the cry of the natural environment, Douglas Christie echoes Freud saying “this seems a simple truth: the fragility and impermanence of things heightens our awareness of their value and preciousness. But it is not east to waken to such awareness. It requires moral effort, a willingness to open oneself to notice and feel the weight of existence” (Christie

85). That is, a capacity to feel the loss at all. As an exemplar of personal loss, nineteenth- century North American naturalist Henry David Thoreau exhibited “sensitivity to loss” that was intertwined with a “heightened awareness of the fragile beauty of the world and his commitment to naming and describing it” (qtd. in Christie 89). Loss ought not place the poet in the posture of defeat, rather reorient her around the responsibility of a poet as

31 a translator, a griever, and a maker. In so doing, loss will drive her to look closer at the delicate and fragile nature of all things. Personal loss becomes an environment of unearthing the unity supporting the individual and global life that constantly begins and ends, and begins again, throughout time.

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