A Cultural Study of Early English Poetic Scripting

Ursula Schaefer

Mute Letters and Speaking Objects: A Cultural Study of Early English Poetic Scripting

1 . Introduction

Our knowledge of vernacular poetry from the earlier Middle Ages is very much a matter of chance . However, before chance in the form of loss of manuscripts or dis- regard is able to jeopardize the transmission, a few basic conditions have to be met to bring about written documentation in the first place . The most basic condition is, of course, the availability of a writing system . Next, it takes individuals who have the will or see the necessity to use this system to write (down) such poetry . As to the availability of a writing system, the wholesale answer for the Germanic speaking peoples is ‘Christianization’: with the missionaries came Latino-Christian literacy . However, what exactly does this mean? Living in a culture where reading and writing are coupled in an all-purpose cultural technology, we tend to forget that having a writing system is only a necessary condition for human utterances or thoughts to make it into this medium . This is why I have just specified that it takes willinga writer or one who sees a necessity of some kind to make that step . However, in the early Middle Ages both willingness and necessity in this respect can hardly have been geared by individual dispositions or insights so that even these do not serve as sufficient conditions . Instead, literacy is also a matter of conventions running along lines of discourse traditions . In the last 30 years or so research in medieval literary history has consolidated the awareness that the composition of early vernacular poetry and its written documentation did not coincide . However, allowing for orality and literacy as simul- taneous cultural conditions also necessitates identifying possible interfaces . While some of these may have been produced by regional specificities, others must have resulted from conditions shared by other early medieval cultures . At points it there- fore makes good sense to take a look into comparable cultures, thus also gaining a wider comparative access . With my general remarks I have indicated the heuristic framework within which I shall set four eighth-century English poems belonging to the earliest in this vernacular . Two of them are ‘manuscript’ poems with a stunning line of transmission: Cædmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death Song. The first poem is preserved over 20 times from the eighth down to the fifteenth centuries as marginal addition of Bede’s Lat- in Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum or as an integral part of the Old English translation of the Historia .1 With over 30 witnesses Bede’s Death Song even out-

1 See O’Donnell, Daniel Paul: Cædmon’s Hymn: A multi-media study, archive and edition, Cam- bridge 2005, p . 78–97 . 304 Ursula Schaefer numbers the Hymn in a line of transmission from the early ninth (see Fig . 1) to the sixteenth centuries 2. As I will argue here, their earliest documentations are excep- tional and isolated cases of transposing an elaborate oral type of poetic diction into ‘mute letters’, an image I have borrowed from Boniface’s biographer Willibald, as I will later explain . The two others are versified runic inscriptions, one along the small sides of a now 5 .3 meter high stone cross, the Ruthwell Cross (see Fig . 2), the other on the front side of the Franks Casket (see Fig . 5), a small box made of whalebone . Both also follow the rules of indigenous metrics, and as many other runic inscriptions they visually represent a voice which makes the ‘objects speak’ about themselves . In his 1974 article “The Oldest English Poetry Now Extant”, still a classic, Eric G . Stanley treats Cædmon’s Hymn and Bede’s Death Song at some length and mentions the runic lines on the cross and on the box, yet excludes them from further consid- eration . For Stanley there “is no way of considering the Ruthwell Cross inscription as poetry except in the context of The Dream of the Rood, preserved in the Vercelli Manuscript of c .1000” . Similarly, he states that “the verse in the inscription on the Franks Casket is of only very slight interest, if any, as poetic endeavour” 3. If not for their quality these two lines are still of interest as the oldest surviving evidence for a-religious versified diction in English . Anyway, my selection is not motivated by the respective poetic achievement but by the likely age of the oldest witnesses . Yet, before we turn to the poems themselves we should look more closely into the culture to which we owe both the existence and the knowledge of these poems . This will be done quite extensively in my next chapter, as a better understanding of early medieval literacy should also provide clues to assessing the earliest documentation of its poetry .

2 . Literacy in Early Medieval England

The information on early medieval literacy in England is thin . As far as research is concerned, my impression is that also among historians it has mainly concentrated on the question of ‘lay literacy’ because (Latin) literacy in the monasteries is taken somehow for granted 4. As by the eighth century this literacy is still quite young in England, and as it is the prerequisite for writing the vernacular in the roman script a closer look into its beginnings seems in order .

2 Dobbie, Elliott van Kirk (ed .): Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems (Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records 6), New York 1942, p . ci–ciii . 3 Stanley, Eric G .: The Oldest English Poetry Now Extant, in:id ., A Collection of Papers with Emphasis on Old English Literature, Toronto 1987, p .115–138, here p .116 [first publ .1974] . 4 For research on early medieval lay literacy see, e .g ., Parkes, Malcolm B .: The Literacy of the Laity, in: Literature and Western Civilization.Vol . 2: The Medieval World, ed . by David D . Daiches/A . K . Thorlby, London 1973, p . 555–576; Wormald, C . Patrick: The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours, in: Transactions of the Royal Historical Academy 27 (1977), p . 95–114; Kelly, Susan: Anglo-Saxon lay society and the written word, in: The uses of literacy in early medieval Europe, ed . by Rosamond McKitterick, Cambridge/New York 1990, p . 36–62 .