Selves and Subjectivities in Medieval North Atlantic Verse

Home , Cynddylan, Exoniensis, Heiti, Nibelung, Pengwern

Daniel Donovan Brielmaier

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

Selves and Subjectivities in Medieval North Atlantic Verse

Daniel Donovan Brielmaier

Doctorate of Philosophy

Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

This thesis explores the construction of speaking-subjects and their subjectivities in medieval

North Atlantic verse. Although first-person poetry in medieval Irish and Welsh, Old English, and Old Norse-Icelandic has enjoyed a good deal of critical attention, little of it, with the exception of the Old English material, has focused on the strategies and rhetoric poets employed in the creation of lyric poetry’s speaking personas. The intent of this project is thus to analyze, discuss, and highlight the creativity and skill with which North Atlantic poets brought the speaking-subjects of their poetry to life.

“Subject” and “subjectivity” are understood in psychoanalytical terms, primarily through the narrative of signification articulated by Julia Kristeva. In particular, Kristeva’s understanding of the formation of subjectivity through the interaction of the semiotic and the symbolic order forms both the thesis’s primary tool of analysis – along with close reading – and its organizing principle. The lyric poems under consideration here are thus organized into chapters according to the relationship of the semiotic and symbolic in the formation of their speaking-subjects. The first chapter, then, examines how Irish monastic poets constructed a Christian subjectivity in which the semiotic, bodily drives of the speaking-subject – in its ideal form – ran in perfect accord with the Christian symbolic order. The second chapter takes up the theme of consolation, and examines how Old English, Irish, and Norse verse could be used as a therapeutic tool to end ii a speaking-subject’s alienation by modelling a process through which the subject signifies himself within an alternative symbolic order, one which enables the speaker to understand his or her subject-position in a more positive light, thus bringing semiotic and symbolic closer to accord. The third and final chapter turns to those alienated speaking-subjects for whom there is no hope of achieving accord between the semiotic desires of the body and the symbolic order, or of finding even consolation. The chapter explores some of the topoi of alienation – eros, old age, illness – prevalent in North Atlantic verse, examining the conditions through which these lyric speakers have become alienated, and what strategies poets employed to represent their estranged state.

iii

Acknowledgments

I owe many people a debt of gratitude for their help and encouragement over the course of my doctoral studies.

The members of my dissertation committee – Ann Dooley, David Klausner, Ian McDougall, and Jill Ross – have been unceasingly generous and enthusiastic at every stage of the process. I am grateful to have had the benefit of their knowledge, creativity, and friendship. They have modelled for me not only how to be a scholar, but also how to be a colleague. In particular, I thank Ann Dooley, my supervisor. Ann’s insightfulness and encyclopedic knowledge improved my scholarship immeasurably. Her patience, advice, and friendship have improved me immeasurably. I also thank the external and interal examiners of my defense, Joanne Findon and Brent Miles, whose suggestions have clarified and improved many of my arguments. I know that, when I revisit this work in the future, I will recognize fondly and gratefully the many marks this group of scholars has made upon it.

I am fortunate to have had many friends among my colleagues who have supported and encouraged me throughout this process. Joe Culpepper, Les Gobbleurs – Rachel F. Stapleton and Joel Rodgers – and especially John McGaughey, who was there at the end, were all invaluable writing buddies. I am also grateful to Rhoda Dullea, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Paul Langeslag, Jaclyn Piudik, Giselle Gos, Tadhg Morris, Jennifer Gilchrist, Jessica Lockhart, Janine Rivière, Rasa Mazeika, Nick Johnston, Robin Sutherland-Harris, et les damoiselles de la maison du fromage (Susannah Brower, Laura Mitchell, and Beth Watkins) et leurs chats (Sam, Al, and Hobbes) for years of encouragement, commiseration, advice, and fun.

Kevin Ouellette, Shaunie and Brian Young, and the Gugel-Heffernans (David, Angela, Rowan, and Elliott) have all been important in keeping me grounded in life outside the academic bubble. Another group of friends has been instrumental (uff) in helping me keep my musical life active and growing in Toronto. For their generosity, I thank Mary McGeer, Valerie Sylvester, Vicki Ellis Hathaway, Gillian Howard, Alison Melville, John Abberger, Shaunie Young, Linda Deshman, Sara Blake, Lionel Tona, Nicole Blaine, Diana Campbell, and Bil Antoniou.

Thanks are also owed to Grace Desa, Rosemary Beattie, Franca Conciatore, Isabelle Cochelin, and Alexander Andree of the Centre for Medieval Studies for their good cheer and help

iv navigating reams of paperwork over the years. I am likewise grateful to the staff of the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies Library – Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Bill Edwards, Fr. Farge, and Michael Sloan – for their assistance and for maintaining a marvelous collection and a congenial space in which to explore it.

I have been fortunate in my employment, which kept me both stimulated and solvent. The Celtic Studies Program was an ideal place to find my feet and grow as a teacher. I am grateful to Jean Talman, Ann Dooley, Máirín Nic Dhiarmada (and Jeremy Harman), and David Wilson for creating such a collegial and enjoyable environment. My colleagues at the International Foundation Program, New College have likewise created a mutually supportive and fun situation that is a joy to return to each year, as was the University of Toronto Libraries cataloguing department, where Anna Slawek was a supportive (and patient!) supervisor. I am also thankful and proud of the work my union, CUPE 3902, has done on behalf of me and my colleagues in the face of an employer and system that regularly devalue our contributions.

My sisters, Kate and Elizabeth, read and proofread the thesis, for which I probably owe them my soul. Their insights and fine eyes for grammar both improved the final product and bolstered my confidence at crucial moments. They also called me a lot, got goofy with me, and Elizabeth sent me the care package to end all care packages. They’re great. Along with the standard package of paternal encouragement, my father, Bob, used his particular talents and interests to regularly get me out of my muddled head, whether by phone or mountain hike or movie. My grandmother, LaVona Schmidt, has done much the same, but with cribbage and piano duets. In addition to her encouragement (and a particular knack for knowing when not to ask about thesis progress), my mother, Sheryl Redding, has modelled for me the kind of tenacity required to see any worthwhile project through. This has been the most important lesson of all.

Finally, I wish to thank and remember those family and friends – my teachers, all – who have passed away since I began this endeavour: my grandparents, Donald F. and Elsie Wild Brielmaier; my aunt, Robyn Schmidt; my (truly) great-aunt, Jan Kormann; my teacher, Máirín Nic Dhiarmada; and my friend, Fiona Broackes-Carter. This work is dedicated to them.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv Table of Contents...... vi Introduction...... 1 Chapter 1: Accord...... 13 Christian Subjectivity...... 14 Imitatio Christi: Constructing Ideal Ascetic Selves...... 22 Idealizing Hermit Subjectivities...... 26 “A Hermit Song”...... 27 “Manchán’s Wish”...... 33 Monastic Moments...... 36 Christs on Earth...... 45 The Powerful Obedience of Moling; or, The Devil went down to Carlow...... 55 Power from Perspective: Marbán and Gúaire...... 58 Íte’s Abject Motherhood...... 69 Patrick – Invoking the Word...... 79 Conclusion...... 91 Chapter 2: Consolation...... 93 The Guiding Speech of “The Wanderer”...... 95 “The Wanderer” in Context...... 96 Audience...... 98 The Eardstapa’s Alienation...... 99 Part 1 (ll. 1-57): From Eardstapa to Guide...... 102 Part 2 (ll. 58-115): Poisoning the Well – The Abject World...... 110 Conclusion ...... 117 Cultivating Columban Consolation...... 119 Columba...... 120 Amra Choluimb Chille and Its Afterlife...... 122 Two Poems by Béccán mac Luigdech...... 127 “Tiugraind Béccáin” (“The Last Words of Béccán”)...... 128 “Fo réir Choluimb” (“Obedient to Colum”)...... 133 Conclusion ...... 142 Catharsis and Consolation in Egill Skallgrímsson’s “Sonatorrek”...... 143 Egill’s Alienation...... 146 Egill’s Consolation: Wood-Words and Mythic Models...... 150 Wood-Words...... 150 Mythic Models of Consolation...... 154 Baldr and Bǫðvarr...... 154 Sacrifice and Consolation...... 156 Being Old: Egill and Llywarch Hên...... 159 Conclusion ...... 163 Chapter Conclusion...... 163 Chapter 3: Alienation...... 165 Eros...... 166 Two Irish Women...... 169 “Géisid cúan” (“The haven roars”)...... 169 “Comrac Líadaine ocus Cuirithir” (“The Meeting of Líadan and Curithir”) vi

...... 177 Conclusion ...... 183 Weoponized Words...... 183 “The Wife’s Lament”...... 183 Guðrún’s “Healing Tears” and Moðugr Mind...... 195 No Joy: Three Failed Laments...... 205 Canu Heledd (The Song of Heledd)...... 206 Canu Heledd: Contents, Background, and Narrator...... 206 Heledd’s Alienation...... 209 “Marwnad Cynddylan”: A Subverted Elegy...... 210 “Stafell Gynddylan” (“The Hall of Cynddylan”)...... 212 “Claf Abercuawg” (“The Leper of Abercuawg”)...... 218 The Alienation of the “Claf”...... 220 Constructing the “Claf”...... 224 Conclusion ...... 231 “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare”...... 232 Conclusion ...... 254 Chapter Conclusion: No Joy...... 254 Conclusion ...... 256 Bibliography ...... 259

vii

Introduction

The Irish, Norse, Welsh, and Anglo-Saxon societies of the medieval North Atlantic, which share a long history of raiding, trade, settlement, and intermarriage, also bear remarkable cultural similarities to one another. In particular, each possessed a pre-Christian, learned, oral-poetic tradition that likely stretched back into antiquity; and each valued highly that tradition's practitioners, a unique class of professional poets, mandarin figures whose duties made them arbiters, historians, genealogists, prophets, panegyrists, satirists, elegists, and more. The early

North Atlantic poets were the providers of tradition and values, acting as intermediaries between not only their patrons and the people, but between the community and its ideals;1 their courtly verse reflects this complex position, careful and politic in its self-awareness.

The arrival of Christianity to the region set in motion long processes of cultural adjustment and accommodation among poets and their practice. As textual culture quickly came to flourish in each society, Latin language and literary tradition – rhetoric, genre, themes – subsumed or was adapted to pre-Christian tradition. The role of the poet was likewise transformed. While the position of professional poets became more clearly defined in law, alongside them developed a rich monastic tradition of literary accomplishment; and rather than being mutually exclusive, the roles of secular and religious poets frequently overlapped. One result of these processes is a broad body of verse in the first-person that reflects the changing social position of North Atlantic poets, the development of social imagination, and the influence of non-native literary traditions.

1 This can be said less certainly of Anglo-Saxon poets, as Roberta Frank demonstrates in her “Search for the Anglo- Saxon Oral Poet,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75:1 (1993): 11-36. Frank observes that the idea that Anglo- Saxon poets performed essentially the same role as their North Atlantic counterparts is an assumption based on analogy with the other North Atlantic poet traditions rather than evidence. Poems portraying pre-historic Anglo- Saxon poets, such as “Beowulf,” “Deor,” and “Widsith,” suggest they may once have performed similar courtly functions. See also Emily V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 1

Although it varies greatly in subject, style, and context, we may nevertheless tentatively divide this subjective verse into two broad groups.

The first group of verse is courtly. This is the formal verse that appears to have been intended for the public space of the court, such as secular or religious praise poetry, elegy, satire, specula principum (advice for princes), prophecy, and propaganda.2 The second group of verse is most often found outside the courtly milieu in the literary environment of the monasteries. The purpose of this verse is not always clear – is it intended as entertainment? for religious edification? – but it shares the unifying formal quality that its speakers are clearly imaginative constructs (or poets speaking through carefully constructed personas), rather than poets speaking in their own voices.3 It is these fictive speakers of the second group and the manner of their construction that is the subject of this dissertation.

Such verse, centred around a single persona, is often called lyric. The term, while useful, is problematic and bears some discussion. For the Ancient Greeks, lyric denoted a specifically metered verse that was accompanied by the lyre or other stringed instrument. The Romans adapted Greek forms for their own version of the lyric, this time recited or read unaccompanied.

From the sixteenth century, lyric could refer to accompanied songs, the verse of poets as diverse as Shakespeare and Spenser, Donne and Milton. And by the nineteenth century, the lyric had

2 For the most recent work on formal court poetry, see Liam Breatnach, “Satire, Praise and the Early Irish Poet,” Ériu 56 (2006): 63-84; Gregory Toner, “Authority, Verse and the Transmission of Senchas,” Ériu 55 (2005): 59-84; Kari Ellen Gade, “Poetry and Its Changing Importance in Medieval Icelandic Culture,” in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61-95; Guðrún Nordal, Tools of Literacy: The Role of Skaldic Verse in Icelandic Textual Culture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Nora G. Costigan, Defining the Divine: Medieval Perceptions in Welsh Court Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales, Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2002). Regarding Anglo-Saxon courtly verse, see n. 1. 3 Though it should be noted that court poets present a self-conscious, professional persona in their public verse rather than a private one.

become synonymous with the idea of poetry itself; this iteration may be characterized as a relatively short poem consisting of the personal thoughts and feelings, often extreme, of a poetic speaker in a specific moment.4 It is this last, the Romantic idea of lyric, that has persisted into our time, and, until very recently, most influenced modern poetic criticism. The Romantic view privileges the expression of the poet’s subjectivity rather than a fictive speaker’s, with the result that the question of how the speaker’s apparently subjective experience is constructed is ignored.

Moreover, the Romantic ideal of lyrical self-expression became a criterion by which poetry of other periods might be judged. In his Aesthetics, Hegel raised the lyric above all other forms of personal expression when he placed at its centre the “inner life of the poet.” For Hegel, it was through the lyric poem that a poet, as “the centre which holds the whole lyric work of art together…,”5 could achieve a whole and perfect expression of subjectivity that “would represent not only perfect expression but the dialectical accomplishment of historical progress, since, in his expression, the poet moves us all forward toward enlightenment.”6 The conflation of poet and speaker, and the idea that apparently subjective poetry indicated cultural development, has been projected backwards onto medieval North Atlantic first-person verse; nativist critics, often eager to brand poems as voices out of the past that revealed both the inner lives of their poet-speakers and the glory of their nations’ achievements, until fairly recently often overlooked the possibility that these were fictive, rather than real personas.7

4 Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), ix; Christopher John Murray, ed., Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850 (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 700. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1133. 6 Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Claire Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, and Paul F. Rouzer, eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), s.v. “lyric.” 7 I explore this problem as it relates to the reception of Irish “hermit” poetry in Chapter 1. Kate Heslop has also called attention to the ways this Hegelian perspective has impeded scholarship on skaldic poetry. See her “‘Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide’: Sonatorrek and the Myth of Skaldic Lyric,” in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society: the 11th International Saga Conference, 2-7 July 2000, University of Sydney, eds. Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney: Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney, 2000): 152-164.

Over the last few decades, new schools of thought on lyric have emerged that take aim at the

Romantic conception of lyric. Among these is the New Lyric Studies, initiated primarily by

Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson.8 Their work criticizes the modern notion of lyric as dehistoricizing, both in that it fails to recognize generic distinctions that may have existed at the time a poem was composed, and in the way it encourages readers to remove poetry from its socio-historical context. For them, there is no lyric genre that transcends historical boundaries, but only poetic forms that, although they owe a debt to the past, are grounded in their originating context. In opposition to this view are those, best represented by the long-time lyric theorist

Jonathan Culler, who believe there is a case to be made for a transhistorical lyric genre.

Culler views the models that have dominated scholars’ engagement with lyric verse – that the lyric is a representation of subjective experience, or that the lyric is a “fictional imitation or representation of a real-world speech act” necessitating the contextualization of the speaker9 – as a limiting perspective that prevents critics from engaging with what he believes are the lyric’s transhistorical rhetorical strategies. These strategies include the use of formal elements of rhyme, rhythm, and other plays on sound, and various forms of address, such as apostrophe; these two characteristics come together to form a special kind of temporality that recalls the ritualistic in that it is non-narrative and non-linear, set apart from regular time. The

8 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); “The New Lyric Studies,” a special collection of essays in PMLA 123:1 (2008): 181-234; Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, eds., The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). For an excellent overview of the New Lyric take on the history of “lyric,” see Virginia Jackson’s entry in Roland Greene, ed., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), s.v. “lyric.” Stephen Burt offers a fine critique of the New Lyric Studies approach (via a review of Jackson and Prins’s The Lyric Theory Reader) in “What is This Thing Called Lyric?” Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval through Contemporary 113:3 (2016): 422-440. 9 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2. Culler responds to the assertions of the New Lyric Studies school in his second chapter, “Lyric as Genre,” 39-90.

“performance” of a lyric – that is, the act of reading or listening to a lyric – is for Culler

“discourse conceived as an act, aiming to persuade, to move, to innovate” within the special temporal space created by its formal features. A lyric poem thus “succeeds as it acts iterably through repeated readings, makes itself memorable,” and so “entering the language and the social imaginary.”10 In contradiction to the New Lyric Studies, however, Culler believes that although the lyric’s function of social inscription makes it possible to read a lyric poem as contributing “to structures of feeling, community formation, instantiation of ideology or its disruption and exposure, subversion or containment,” to do so is folly: “Above all it is the unpredictability of lyric’s efficacy and the different kinds of framings to which it is subject that make any reflection on lyric and society a process in which the analyst cannot but be humbled and dismayed by the contingency of his or her own discourse.”11

Mindful of both schools of thought, I cut something of a middle path between the two in my categorization of North Atlantic “lyric” poetry and how I read it. With regard to genre, I side more with Culler: although contemporary vernacular poets and commentators had little to say on the matter, I do believe that, using Culler’s distinctive formal features, we can identify a lyric tradition among the varied verse of the North Atlantic community. This is namely poetry that is organized around the emotions and subjective state of a first-person speaker, whose utterance creates an experience for its reader that is intended to resonate with them psychologically and socially. On the other hand, because my enterprise is neither theoretical nor transhistorical

(beyond the inherent and problematic transhistoricity that must colour any contemporary reading of an older text), I have few qualms embracing the New Lyric Studies directive to contextualize these lyrics, their audiences, and their effects upon those audiences where possible (and it is

10 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 130-131. 11 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 348. 5

often not). Despite the likelihood that, as Culler warns, no modern reader can possibly account for the contemporary reception of this poetry, that does not seem a good enough reason not to try. Perhaps early medievalists are better inured to not knowing things with certainty.12

Scholarship engaging the North Atlantic lyric has been uneven, to say the least; indeed, outside of Old English studies, little of it has focused directly on the construction of lyric- speakers or their subjectivity. The extent and variety of the surviving Irish material, extending from the 6th-century through the Early Modern period, is unmatched in the other North Atlantic traditions. Yet scholarship here is often editorial and philological, concerned with tracing

Christian, pre-Christian or non-native elements, or with contextualizing the text in history and folklore. Nevertheless, areas related to representations of the self in verse have enjoyed some attention from scholars. Ann Dooley has noted how, despite the highly conventional quality of the verse of the later professional bards, the poet-patron dynamic requires that the projection of the self be a vital part of the stylized display of power inherent in his position.13 The powerfully enduring women's lament tradition has also had its fair share of attention: drawing as much from recent work in folklore as from medieval texts and Early Modern accounts, scholars have shown the social role and process of public lament in Ireland to be continuous.14 These studies do not, however, extend their insights to the verse of the early medieval period, out of which comes some of the most striking first-person utterances in medieval literature.

12 Both the New Lyric Studies school and Culler frequently leap from Horace to Petrarch in their discussion of lyric. 13 Ann Dooley, “The Poetic Self-fashioning of Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh," in Ogma: Essays in Celtic Studies in honour of Próinséas Ni Chatháin, eds. Michael Richter and Jean-Michael Picard (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002): pp. 211- 23. 14 Sean Ó Coileain, “The Irish Lament: An Oral Genre,” Studia Hibernica 24 (1984-88): 97-117; Angela Partridge, “Wild Men and Wailing Women,” Éigse 18 (1980): 25-37; Patricia Lysaght, “Caoineadh os Cionn Coirp: The Lament for the Dead in Ireland,” Folklore 108 (1997): 65-82; Damian McManus, “An Elegy on the Death of Aodh O Conchobhair (d. 1309),” Ériu 51 (2000): 69-91; Kaarina Hollo, “Laments and Lamenting in Early Medieval Ireland.” in Medieval Celtic Literature and Society, ed. Helen Fulton (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005): 83-94.

Norse scholarship on first-person verse has largely focused on issues of metrics, dating, and its significance in prosimetric texts, only sporadically branching away from these more traditional modes of investigation. Roberta Frank, for example, has highlighted the self-reflexive qualities of the Norse poetic tradition,15 and Heather O'Donoghue has devoted a chapter in a recent book to the subjectivity of a saga's poet-hero.16 But a sustained treatment of the poetic speaker – treated as an imaginary construct, rather than an historical figure – still remains to be performed. Scholars of Welsh poetry have likewise directed their energy toward foundational, philological work, editing and dating texts, historicizing literary figures and narrated events.

In contrast to the dearth of Celtic and Norse scholarship on the construction of the poetic speaker, Old English critics, who are far more numerous and prolific, have long since settled philological, editorial, and other textual matters (or at least settled them into familiar debate), and have roamed widely and creatively in their studies of the speakers of Old English verse; I discuss the most germane works below in chapters 2 and 3. Where new energy is perhaps most warranted is in the comparative treatment of Old English lyrics and their North Atlantic counterparts. Comparative work has been performed on Old English, Celtic, and Norse verse, but it was largely done with an eye to identifying and describing genres, themes, or forms common among the traditions, and tracing historical paths of influence from one to the others.17

15 Roberta Frank, "Why Skalds Address Women," in The Seventh International Saga Conference, 4-10 sett. 88 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1990): 67-83. 16 Heather O’Donoghue, Skaldic Verse and the Poetics of Saga Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2005): 136-179. 17 P. L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970), 19-22, 81; Herbert Pilch, “The Elegiac Genre in Old English and Early Welsh Poetry,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 29 (1964): 209- 224; Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 190-228; E. O. G. Turville-Petre, “On the Poetry of the Scalds and of the Filid,” Ériu 22 (1971): 2-22, originally “Um dróttkvæði og írskan kvedskap,” Skírnir 128 (1954): 31-55, reprinted as “Dróttkvætt and Irish Syllabic Metres,” in his Nine Norse Studies (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1972), 154-180; Sarah Lynn Higley, Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 46-50. Higley’s work is notable for highlighting differences among the traditions as much as similarities. 7

In my comparative approach here, I am more interested in clarifying both the affinities and differences apparent in the construction of the speakers of these lyrics, so as to highlight the great inventiveness with which North Atlantic poets approached their work. In doing so, I hope to raise the tenor of discussion of these lyrics, which has often been merely incidental, to a serious study and appreciation of the poets’ aesthetically complex construction of selves and subjectivities.

“Subjectivity” has meant many things to many critics; when I use it, I intend it to mean, as

Sarah Kay put it in her examination of medieval troubadour poetry, “the elaboration of a first person (subject) position.”18 What, then, is a subject, and how do we account for its formation?

The subject is essentially the self, although the latter word does not capture “the sense of social and cultural entanglement that is implicit in the word ‘subject.’”19 The term “subject,” as opposed to “self,” recognizes that the self is always subject to something else – the body, the environment, the social structures within which the self exists, the relationships the self has with other people and objects, and so forth. As Nick Mansfield says, “the subject is not a separate and isolated entity, but one that operates at the intersection of general truths and shared principles.”20

Thus the position the self holds in relation to these truths and principles – such as society and its various structures (e.g., family and other personal relationships, secular and religious hierarchies); ontologies, teleologies, and eschatologies – is the subject-position. For an account of how the subject is formed, and the role of language in the articulation of subjectivity, I have turned to the psychoanalytical work of Julia Kristeva.

18 Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 1. 19 Nick Mansfield, ed., Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 2. 20 Nick Mansfield, ed., Subjectivity, 3. 8

In her narrative of the subject’s formation, Kristeva distinguishes between two major stages of development. In the first stage, the self is not yet a subject, but a proto-subject or distinctiveness formed by the wordless drives of the body. Kristeva calls these drives the semiotic; the space the proto-subject inhabits she calls the semiotic chora.21 In this first stage, the proto-subject is as yet largely unaware of the difference between itself and other things or people, instead understanding the world as an extension of itself. Through processes Kristeva calls abjection and the thetic break (I address these concepts in Chapters 1 and 3, respectively), the proto-subject becomes aware of the difference between itself and other things, and so enters into the symbolic order, the world of objects and social structures to which the proto-subject now becomes subject.

Entering into the symbolic, the subject also enters into language, which is the tool the self uses to articulate and understand how it is subject to the “others” of the symbolic order.22

In the basic details of the process of signification or identity formation, Kristeva’s account tracks fairly closely with the narratives of selfhood articulated by her predecessors, Freud and

Lacan. One of the many significant differences between her narrative and theirs, and one that is integral to the way I have approached the speaking-subjects of North Atlantic lyric in this thesis, is that for Kristeva, signification does not end with the subject’s entry into the symbolic order; i.e., the subject is not a fixed, stable being. For Kristeva, the self’s entry into the symbolic does not constitute a total break from the semiotic,23 but rather the transmission of semiotic drives into the symbolic order. That is to say, the self is subject to the semiotic as well as the symbolic

21 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 22 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43. 23 Cf. Lacan, for whom Kristeva asserts “the subject is completed at the cost of repressing drives.” See Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 32; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Freud´s Papers on Technique, 1953-54, Book 1, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 80, 87, 239.

order. In Kristeva’s words: “once the break instituting the symbolic has been established what we have called the semiotic chora acquires a more precise status,” remaining present in the process of signification.24 And unlike the symbolic, which manifests itself as signs (language), the semiotic now manifests itself, as Corey Marvin describes,

in the materiality of embodied language: in the accumulations and repetitions of sounds in alliteration, consonance, sibilants, assonance, rhyme, and other poetic effects; in the pulsations produced by accents, beats, breaks, and percussions of all kinds: and in intonational surges of volume, rhythm, tempo, timbre. But the semiotic is also evident in places where the clear-cut separations of the language system are infringed by articulation – in puns, for instance, where multiple meanings arise out of a single utterance. In this category are undecidabilities and intertextual ambiguities of all kinds, such as ellipses, puns, pronominal instabilities…. All these affirm the presence of an embodied, drive-based distinctiveness running under a chain of symbolic differences. It is the nature of these articulatory devices to be ‘mobile’ – that is, to bear in and out of language a sense of movement and motion, pressure and process. To the extent that we talk about linguistic and poetic affect, we are talking about the semiotic.”25

It is in poetic language that the semiotic manifests itself, because poetic enunciation – rooted in the body, arising from the semiotic chora – seeks to break through the symbolic, destabilize it, explode its meaning and go beyond it striving for signification, even while it is dependent upon the symbolic for grammar to make it intelligible. Thus, in Kristeva’s words, “poetic language puts the subject-in-process/on trial through a network of marks and semiotic facilitations.”26

The speaking-subjects of the poetry discussed in this dissertation are all subjects-in-process, speakers attempting to articulate their subjectivity, their understanding of their subject-position in relation to the symbolic order of their physical, social, and cultural environment on the one hand, and the semiotic drives and desires of the bodies they inhabit on the other. Signifying the

24 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 68. 25 Corey J. Marvin, Word Outward: Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language (New York: Routledge, 2001), 5. 26 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 58. 10

self, forging identity or selfhood, is thus an unending negotiation between the two modes of expression.

Because the relationship between the two modes is always shifting, any given subject may be said to lie on a spectrum whose poles are alienation on the one side, where a subject’s semiotic is at odds with the dictates of the symbolic, and accord on the other, where the drives of the body run in line with the symbolic. This alienation and accord can be seen in a number of situations.

A physically disabled person, for example, who lives in a community that values people for their sporting ability, would feel alienated, his or her body being at odds with the prevailing order of society. A gender-queer person who must use pronouns that reflect their community’s understanding of their gender rather than their own would likewise feel alienated. In contrast, an able-bodied person with a love for sports would have a subjectivity in which the semiotic and symbolic are in accord in the first situation, as would any cis-gendered individual in the second.

Any such subject’s selfhood is more multivalently formed than my simple examples suggest, of course, but they serve to illustrate how, in the continuous process of becoming a subject, the drives of the semiotic can run either against or with the dictates of the symbolic.

We find this interplay of the two modes of signification reflected in the speaking-subjects of

North Atlantic lyrics. In poetry that explores monastic subjects, for example, poets constructed a range of speakers whose subjectivities fall on either ends of the alienation/accord spectrum. In much of this verse, poets’ speakers express the challenges of monastic life as an alienating experience, with the body’s desires being at odds with the Christian monastic dictates of emotional and physical self-control. Poets also created idealized, emblematic monastic speakers whose semiotic drives run in perfect accord with the symbolic, the desires of their body sublimated to the ideal regimen of monastic life, thereby transforming painful and even life-

threatening practices into joyous experiences. Still other monastic verse effects a shift in the speaker’s subjectivity; the speaker begins his or her utterance in an alienated position, and over the course of the poem he or she is consoled, thus shifting along the spectrum away from alienation and toward accord.

Representations of speaking-subjects’ experiences of accord, alienation, and consolation between the semiotic and symbolic can be recognized in many other North Atlantic lyrics; the distinct interactions between the two provide a useful way of organizing a diverse body of poetry that could reasonably be organized in many ways, e.g., by gender or topic. Focusing on the dynamic between the semiotic and symbolic modes of signification at play in the subjectivity of speaking-subjects emphasizes the variety of situations out of which accord, alienation, and consolation arise, as well as the creativity and artistry with which North Atlantic poets rendered their subjects. In the first chapter, then, I explore how Irish monastic poets constructed a

Christian subjectivity in which the semiotic, bodily drives of the speaking-subject – in its ideal form – ran in accord with the Christian symbolic order. In the second chapter, I take up the theme of consolation, and examine how Old English, Irish, and Norse verse could be used as a therapeutic tool to end a speaking-subject’s alienation by modelling a process through which the subject signifies himself within an alternative symbolic order, one which enables the speaker to understand his or her subject-position in a more positive light, thus bringing semiotic and symbolic closer to accord. In the third and final chapter, I turn to those alienated speaking- subjects for whom there is no hope of achieving accord within the symbolic order, or of finding consolation. I explore some of the topoi of alienation – eros, old age, illness – prevalent in North

Atlantic verse, examining the conditions through which these lyric speakers have become alienated, and what strategies poets employed to represent their estranged state.

Chapter 1 Accord

From the surviving texts of North Atlantic lyric poets, we know they had a particular interest in exploring the subjectivity of those who felt themselves to be alienated. Accordingly, the second and third chapter of this dissertation are devoted to poetry that deals with consolation and alienation, respectively. In this chapter, however, I am concerned with poets, particularly those in monastic environments, and exclusively those in Ireland, who explored the poetic representation of speaking-subjects whose subjectivity demonstrated an accord – sometimes a perfect, impossibly stable accord – between the drives of the semiotic and the symbolic order.27

In the first part of this chapter (Christian Subjectivity) I assert a metaphorical relationship between the semiotic and Original Sin, and between the symbolic order and the Christian view of the world as divinely ordered, as a useful way of understanding the subjectivity of the medieval

Irish Christian. In the next section (Imitatio Christi), I consider how Christ’s profound obedience to God’s will (i.e., the Christian symbolic) became a model for ascetic monastic life, which sought to bring its practitioners’ subjectivity into accord. I examine the evidence of the monks’ own first-person verse to understand how they themselves conceived of an ideal monastic subjectivity. In the final section of the chapter (Christs on Earth), I turn to prosimetric treatments of holy figures whose subjectivities are most closely modelled on Christ’s own divine subjectivity. It is only through such a miraculous subject-position as Christ’s that the

27 See Introduction, 9-11. 13 impossibility of perfect accord can be achieved.

Christian Subjectivity

The doctrine of Original Sin was a famously fraught subject for the early Church; the debate centred on the nature of free will and whether the first sin of Adam and Eve had tainted humankind irrevocably. The view put forth by the British ascetic moralist Pelagius was that humanity had the agency to live according to God’s laws without his aid; that is, they could attain God’s grace, which was lost by the first couple, through good works.28 Pelagius’s main challenger, Augustine, held that such a doctrine of free will rendered Christ’s sacrifice unnecessary. Instead, Augustine argued that Adam and Eve’s crime of prideful disobedience tainted all of humankind. Humanity was intended to live in harmony with God and his created world, but by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, they alienated themselves from God’s order, which had a catastrophic effect on human subjectivity. The first couple’s alienation from God and his grace took several forms: the expulsion from Paradise – that is, no longer living intimately with God and nature, but in contention with it – the introduction of suffering, and the final alienation of humanity from God through death. For Augustine, the only remedy for humankind’s estrangement was Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, through which God’s grace re- entered the world. Furthermore, Augustine argued that Adam and Eve’s disobedience had

28 B. R. Rees, The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988), 37-39.

planted disorder at the root of human agency, making alienation a congenital condition.29 This disorder Augustine termed concupiscentia, the desire for worldly things, and because of it no one is free of the temptation to sin.30 Thus the Christian’s attempts to orient his or her desires toward

God will always be undermined by the tainted nature of their agency, making the crucifixion and

God’s grace the only means by which humanity might reconcile with God. As Augustine put it,

“The whole Christian religion may be summed up in the intervention of two men, the one to ruin us, the other to save us.”31

Although Pelagian views may have been influential in early Christian Ireland and Britain, by the time of the composition of the earliest of the texts I discuss in this chapter – the eighth- century Faeth Fíada – the doctrine of Original Sin had been settled firmly in favour of

Augustine.32 Understandably, the consequences of the Fall appear to have been much on the minds of early Irish monastic writers, whose religious lives were predicated on the postlapsarian human condition. We find an example of their preoccupation with the Fall in a short Middle

Irish lyric of the tenth or eleventh century composed in Eve’s own voice:

1.33 1.

29 Jesse Couenhoven, “Augustine,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin, ed. by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 193. 30 Ian A. McFarland, “Original Sin,” in T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin, ed. by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 308. 31 Augustinus Hipponensis, De gratia Christi et de peccato originali, contra Pelagium et coelestium 2 (Patrologia Latina 44:398, cap. 28): “Sed in causa duorum hominum, quorum per unum venumdati sumus sub peccato, per alterum redimimur a peccatis; per unum praecipitati sumus in mortem, per alterum liberamur ad vitam; quoniam ille nos in se perdidit, faciendo voluntatem suam, non eius a quo factus est; iste nos in se salvos fecit, non faciendo voluntatem suam, sed eius a quo missus est 43: in horum ergo duorum hominum causa proprie fides christiana consistit.” 32 Michael Herren and Shirley Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydel and Brewer, 2002; rep. 2012), 100-101. It should be noted, however, that the Pelagian view – e.g., that human nature was not indelibly stained by original sin, and that salvation is a matter of free will – continued as “a talking point among the faithful” beyond the ninth-century. For a thorough discussion of the textual evidence, see Herren and Brown, 69-103. 33 Gerard Murphy, ed., trans., Early Irish Lyrics: Eight to Twelfth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998; first pub. Oxford University Press, 1956) 50-51. Murphy’s basis for the dating of the poem is linguistic. This edition is based

Mé Éba, ben Ádaim uill; I am Eve, great Adam’s wife; mé ro ṡáraig Ísu thall; it is I that outraged Jesus of old; mé ro thall nem ar mo chloinn: it is I that stole Heaven from my descendants; cóir is mé do-chóid sa crann. by rights it is I that should have gone upon the Tree.

The poet places the blame for the Fall squarely on Eve’s shoulders: each line emphasizes her culpability, lines a-c conspicuously beginning with mé, and 1d stressing the same word in its second stress position. Human agency is responsible for the “Christian condition” of alienation from God and the order he created for humanity; from the beginning human will has proved fallible.

2. 2. Ropa lem rígtheg dom réir; I had a kingly house at my command; olc in míthoga rom-thár; evil the foul choice that disgraced me; olc in cosc cinad rom-chrín: evil the chastisement of crime that has for-ír! ní hidan mo lám. withered me: alas! my hand is not clean.

3. 3. Mé tuc in n-uball an úas; It is I that plucked the apple; do-chúaid tar cumang mo chraís; it overcame the control of my gluttony; in céin marat-sam re lá for that, women will not cease from folly as de ní scarat mná re baís. long as they live in the light of day.

In the second quatrain, the poet keeps our attention on Eve’s disobedience to God. The rígtheg or “kingly house” she commanded provides a native analogy for the status lost in the

Fall: a fall from lordship and control into mortality and the loss of control brought by decay. The image of aristocratic living also contrasts strongly with the monk’s ascetic milieu. Each subsequent line focuses on the foolishness of her choice, with the initial positions given to lamenting outbursts: olc (evil) and for-ír (alas). Although Eve’s first-person pronouns have been de-emphasized, they are still very much present as infixed and possessive pronouns throughout

on Michael O’Clery’s early seventeenth-century Royal Irish Academy MS B IV 2, f. 146b, checked against the mostly illegible fifteenth-century British Museum MS, ADD 19995, f. 2a (193-194).

the stanza in parallel constructions in the penultimate syllable of each line, creating a steady hum of culpability. The third stanza reasserts Eve’s blame for the current state of humanity (and women in particular). Of particular interest in this quatrain is the poet’s use of the word craís in

3b. On the one hand, mo chraís can mean “my mouth” or “my gullet,” which draws attention to

Eve’s role in inciting Adam to disobey God.34 But the term also signifies “gluttony,” one of the eight faults against which monks must struggle, according to John Cassian, the founder of western European monasticism whose writings were influential in Irish monasticism.35 The poet thus works a monastic exegesis, locating a commonly known monastic vice at the root of Eve’s failure.36

The final quatrain summarizes the consequences of the Fall:

4. 4. Ní bíad eigred in cach dú; There would be no ice any place; ní bíad geimred gáethmar glé; there would be no glistening windy winter; ní bíad iffern; ní bíad brón; there would be no hell; there would be no ní bíad oman, minbad mé. sorrow; there would be no fear, were it not for me.

The poet employs images of winter as a metaphor for humanity’s exile from Paradise, a theme we find in other religious writings. An early Irish homily, for example, roughly contemporary to this poem, identifies winter and summer as analogous to hell and heaven, respectively.37

Summer, like heaven, is characterized by “fair weather, blossom and tree, beauty and youth, feasts and feastings, prosperity, and abundance of every good,” while winter, like hell, is all

34 Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, s.v. “cráes.” dil.ie/12717. Accessed 10 May, 2017. 35 For John Cassian on the eight vices, see his Institutiones Books V-XII; on the influence of Cassian’s thought in Irish monasticism see Stephen Lake, “Usage of the Writings of John Cassian in Some Early British and Irish Writings,” Journal of Australian Early Medieval Association 7 (2011): 95-121. 36 The same vice (croís) and greed (sant) are said to have been the tools by which Satan “slew” humanity (i.e., instigated the Fall) in Manannan mac Lír’s poem to Bran in Immram Brain, Séamus Mac Mathúna, ed., (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985), 41. 37 That is, circa the ninth or tenth century; see John Strachan, ed. and trans., “An Old-Irish Homily,” Ériu 3 (1907), 1 and Kuno Meyer, “Eine Altirische Homilie,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 4:1 (1903): 241.

“snow tempest and cold, age and decay, disease and death.”38 To this picture of icy lack, the poet adds hell, sorrow, and fear, adopting a repetitive, forceful parallel phrasing that breaks the final two lines into halves, before ending as he began, with mé, Eve’s self-condemnation.

While the poem can certainly be read – perhaps should be read, given 3cd – as a condemnation of women, its first-person voicing nevertheless requires its reader or speaker to share in its self-condemnation. The poem may thus be understood as a lament on the poor exercise of free will, on making choices that alienate the self through disobedience to God; which is, thanks to that first sin, a universal experience for Christians.

The alienation of Christians from God as a result of the Fall is expressed in the early Irish prose tales known as the echtrae (“adventures” or “outings”) and immrama (“voyages”). In these stories, heroes encounter denizens of the Otherworld and sometimes journey to it. This alternative reality is usually described as a prelapsarian Paradise. In this unfallen Otherworld, like the summery Heaven of the homily noted above, there is no sickness or disease, no aging, and no sin.39 Sexual activities that would be sins in the postlapsarian Christian reality are innocent there, if known at all – conception, we are told, occurs without any sin.40 In nature there is no death, because its trees and blossoms are composed of precious metals and crystal.

Even the sea, always difficult to deal with, is to the inhabitants of the Otherworld a beautiful plain – its waves are horses, its fish cattle.41 To those who live in this blessed, unfallen land, our

38 John Strachan, “An Old-Irish Homily,” 5, 9 (trans.): … soinenn, bláth 7 bile, áilde 7 óitiu, fleda 7 tomalta, sóinmige 7 imbed cach maithiusa … iffirnn … sín 7 úacht, áes 7 chríne, galar 7 bás.

39 Proinsias Mac Cana, “The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain,” Ériu 27 (1976): 99-100. 40 James Carney, “The Earliest Bran Material,” in Latin Scripts and Letters A.D. 400-900. Festschrift Presented to Ludwig Bieler on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, ed. by John J. O’Meara and Bernd Naumann (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 186-187; see also Proinsias Mac Cana, “The Sinless Otherworld,” 99-106, who takes aim at Carney’s assertion that chastity was a dominant theme in the conceptualization of Otherworldly women. 41 As described by the sea-god Manannán mac Lír in a poem from Immram Brain, Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 92-95, st. 1-7.

world is a tragedy: “We see everyone on every side, and no one sees us,” say the Otherworlders, because of “the darkness caused by Adam’s sin which hid us from those who would count us.”42

A central theme in these stories is the conflict between paganism and Christianity.43

Occasionally a figure from the Otherworld will lead one of Adam’s descendants out of the Fallen world and into their own realm. In Echtrae Chonnlai (The Adventure of Conlae) for example, a pagan prince is lured to the Otherworld by a beautiful woman who tells him of its wonders:

Do:dechad-sa a tírib béo, i-nna:bí bás na peccad na imarmus. Do:melom fleda búana cen frithgnam. Caínchomrac lenn cen debuid. Síd már i:taam, conid de suidib no- n:ainmnigther áes síde. [I come from lands of the living, where there is no death nor sin nor transgression. We eat everlasting feasts without effort. There is peace among us without strife. A great síd (mound) we are in, so that we are named the people of síd (mound/peace).] The woman’s description evokes the harmony and deathlessness of the prelapsarian world. John

Carey has noted how her words draw upon phrases most commonly associated with Heaven –

“from lands of the living” (a tírib béo), for example, and the clever pun on síd (mound/peace), that at once speaks to native tradition and Christian tradition by referring to the Otherworld folk traditionally as People of the Mound, where the fairies of folklore dwell, and also as the People of Peace, which Carey takes as referring to the peace of Heaven.44 To this I would add Jerome’s etymology of Jerusalem as deriving from pacis visio (“vision of peace”).45 The story continues

42 Osborn Bergin and R. I. Best, trans., “Tochmarc Étaíne,” Ériu 12 (1938), 180-181, st. 6: teimel imorbuis Adaim / dodonarcheil ar araim. 43 This echoes a central theme in the scholarship on the echtrae and immrama: whether the genres are native, pre- Christian creations, or whether they are post-Christian developments. For an overview of this long debate, see Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth: National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2000), 79-83. 44 John Carey, “The Rhetoric of ‘Echtrae Chonlai,’” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 30 (1995): 44-47. 45 Jerome, Epistle 46, chapter 3 (Patrologia Latina 22: 485): “Totum mysterium nostrum, istius provinciae, urbisque vernaculum est. In tribus nominibus Trinitatis demonstrat fidem: Jebus, et Salem, et Jerusalem appellatur. Primum nomen, calcata; secundum pax; tertium visio pacis.” The etymology later appears in a seventh- or eight-century hymn sung in the Office of the Dedication of a Church (see New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Urbs Beata Jerusalem Dicta Visio Pacis.”

to blend further references to Heaven with descriptions of a prelapsarian Paradise in such a way that makes it difficult to parse if the Otherworld is meant to be a world of the blessed dead or the unfallen. Having made her opening poetic pitch, the Otherworld woman further entices Conlae with an apple which satisfies his hunger and is never eaten up, a reverse image of Eve’s fruit.46

He longs for her, and next time she appears, she says:

47Nall suide On an exalted seat saides Connle sits Conlae eter marbu duthaini among the short-lived dead-ones, oc indnaidiu éco úathmair. and awaiting the dread of death. To-t:chuiretar bí bithbí…. The ever-living living ones invite you….

From her perspective, Conlae lives in the world of the dead, the realm estranged from God. She offers him a chance at eternal life. Conlae is caught between his desire for her and his love for his people. In her final poem the woman acknowledges the pain leaving his loved ones will cause him, but promises him a journey by boat that will take them to the síd of Bóadag, a proper name derived from búadach “victorious,” and appropriate to either a king of the síd or Christ, who is often depicted as a victorious king.48 Conlae leaps into the woman’s boat and his people watch them row away across the sea, never to be seen again.

Critics have seen in Echtrae Chonnlai an allegorical message about conversatio, turning to the monastic life as a way of reconciling oneself to God and achieving salvation.49 In this reading, the Otherworld woman represents either the Church or the monastic life, while Conlae is the Christian struggling to answer Jesus’s call to take up the ascetic life and follow him

46 James Carney, “The Deeper Level of Early Irish Literature,” Capuchin Annual 36 (1969), 162-165. 47 Kim McCone, Echtrae Chonnlai, 122. 48 John Carey, “The Rhetoric of ‘Echtrae Chonlai,’” 51. 49 In addition to the studies cited above, see also James Carney, Studies in Irish Literature and History (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955), 280-295; Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature (Maynooth: National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2000), 79-82.

(Matthew 16:24), for “everyone that has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake, he shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).50 Conlae’s struggle to leave his homeland and loved ones reflects the demand made upon monks and nuns, who leave the world behind for the hope of salvation. At the same time, the ambiguousness of the woman’s Otherworld – is it a prelapsarian Paradise or a heavenly land of the dead? – recalls Paul’s exhortation to the Romans to “be dead to sin but alive to God in Jesus Christ” (Romans 6:11), which early exegetes articulated as ‘dying to the world,’ a martyrdom that leaves the martyred still alive. Conlae’s departure is a repudiation of the Fallen world, a “dying” to it. We see a similar theme in Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), another

Otherworld tale. In this story, the eponymous hero is tempted into leading an expedition of men away from his people over the sea by another Otherworld woman. Their voyage eventually takes

Bran and his entourage to a happy, sinless island of women. When they return to Ireland at the behest of one of his homesick men, they find that centuries have passed; anyone who sets foot on land instantly turns to dust. For all intents and purposes, Bran, like Conlae, has died to the sinful world in order to live in the perfect prelapsarian Otherworld.

Like these heroes, the men and women who enter a monastery likewise die to the world they knew as laypersons. The real world, so to speak, is too alienated from God’s order for one to find accord with God’s will (i.e., salvation) while still living in it. The monastic environment provides a space in which a Christian can focus exclusively on reconciling the self – sinful and disordered since the Fall – to God.

The monk who composed Mé Eba understood well the implications of the Fall. When humanity alienated itself from God, the world was turned against it. This is manifest in the presence of

50 Kim McCone, Echtrae Chonnlai, 100. 21

death and suffering, in the twisting of love into lust, and in the loss of God’s grace, which necessitated the death and resurrection of Christ. The Otherworld tales made much the same claims, pitting the prelapsarian wonders of the sinless Otherworld against the tragedies of our fallen world. Subtly, the echtrae and immrama suggest the monastic life as a means to attaining

God’s grace, and thus salvation, while the monastic poem on Eve may be read as an expression of resentment at Eve’s error, which in the poet’s view is the cause of the fallen state of the world and thus the cause of the need for the trials of the ascetic life. All of them reflect a preoccupation in monastic minds with the root cause of the Christian condition, and of the idyllic, prelapsarian conditions that they hope to regain, when semiotic ran in accord with Christian symbolic.

Imitatio Christi: Constructing Ideal Ascetic Selves

The idea that a life apart from the world could help the Christian attain salvation was inspired by the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark, for example, opens its account of Christ’s life with John the Baptist preaching and baptizing in the desert, the “cry in the wilderness;”51 while Jesus was led to the desert by the Holy Spirit for a period of fasting and contending with temptation before beginning his public ministry,52 and later sought out opportunities for solitary prayer.53 All of these texts locate spiritual enlightenment at the edges of society. Also influential was Christ’s commandment to his disciples to give up all their possessions and emotional ties in order to secure treasure in heaven,54 and his exhortation that they “must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”55

51 Mark 1:1-8. 52 Matthew 4:1-11. 53 E.g., Matthew 14:23, 26:36, Luke 5:16. 54 Mark 10:21, Luke 18:22, Acts 2:45; Matthew 19:29. 55 Matthew 16:24; cf. Mark 8:34, John 12:25. 22

This last theme of imitating Christ, who demonstrated his own profound submission to God’s will by going willingly to the cross, is a central feature of monastic asceticism in Ireland.

Although it was certainly understood that the grace of redemption entered the world through

Christ’s death and resurrection, Michael Herren and Shirley Brown have shown how, throughout the early to late medieval periods, the Irish emphasized the act of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross rather than his resurrection, perhaps a legacy of fourth-century Pelagian thought which privileged the effort to achieve grace over passive acceptance.56 To the Irish, the symbol of the cross could thus be read as both the tool through which God’s grace returned to the world, and “as the ultimate symbol of self-mortification.”57 By emphasizing Christ’s obedience to God’s plan over the miracle of his resurrection, the Irish Christian’s attention was directed toward his mortal aspect. Christ’s divine nature cannot be imitated, but Jesus’s actions as a man could serve as a model for attaining the grace of his sacrifice. As Herren and Brown put it, “the entirety of

Christ’s life might be read as an example of self-mortification, and a summons to the life of effort according to Christ, ‘by whom[, according to Paul,] the world is crucified to me and I to the world’ (Gal. 6:14).”58 For when one has separated oneself from the world – been crucified to and from it, as it were – “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”59 The Christian should die to the world, and so live in Christ’s promise of eternal life.

Monastic life was developed to provide the opportunity to cut earthly ties to family and possessions and “crucify” the self; that is, to correct the sin of Adam and Eve by wresting the thoughts, senses, and desires of the body away from their inherent sinfulness and bringing them

56 Herren and Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity, 17. In this section, which addresses several theological perspectives, I have set aside the idea of grace and how it enters these considerations until Chapter 3, where it becomes most relevant. 57 Herren and Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity, 140. 58 Herren and Brown, Christ in Celtic Christianity, 140. See 140-150 for a comprehensive overview of the biblical and Irish exegetical image of Christ as ascetic model. 59 Galatians 2:20 23

into accord with God’s order. In the commonest form of Irish monasticism, the individual lived an ordered life within a community, attempting to order the self through prayer and contemplation, self-denial, labour, and above all obedience to superiors, as Jesus was obedient to

God the Father. These spiritual counselors provided guidance and meted out penances designed to help the individual sublimate the desires of mind and body toward God’s order. Failure was expected, given humanity’s fallen nature. Kristeva’s psychoanalytical analogue to Christian signification also expects failure; perfect subjectification of the self to the dictates of monastic life, what we might call the monastic symbolic, naturally fell short, as must any project of signification whose objective is permanent accord between semiotic and symbolic. The semiotic will always exceed the symbolic, and the inherent sinfulness of humanity will always curtail the

Christian’s attempt to live according to God’s order.60

Monastic poets, well aware of the challenges of their calling, explored the “monastic condition” in their poetry, sometimes simply expressing frustration at their efforts to master their sinful bodies, other times attempting to use their poetry as an affective device for spiritual development, which I explore further in the next chapter. Excerpts from a tenth-century example of the former kind of verse give voice to the monks’ predicament:61

1.62 1. Is mebul dom imrádud Shame to my thoughts, a méit élas úaimm: how they stray from me! ad-águr a imgábud I dread great danger from this i lló brátha búain. on the day of lasting Judgment.

2. 2. Tresna salmu sétaigid Beyond the psalms they wander for conair nád cóir: on a path that is not right: reithid, búaidrid, bétaigid they run, they disturb, they misbehave

60 This is not to imply that what is semiotic is always sinful. As we will see below, the semiotic can run in accord with the symbolic sinlessly; but it is unstable. 61 Kuno Meyer, “A Religious Poem,” Ériu 3 (1907), 13. 62 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 38-43. 24

fíad roscaib Dé móir, before the eyes of great God,

3. 3. Tre airechtu athlama, Through eager assemblies tre buidne ban mbóeth, through companies of foolish women, tre choillte, tre chathracha – through woods, through cities – is lúaithiu ná in góeth…. swifter than the wind….

12. 12. Rís, a Chríst, do chétchummaid: May I attain perfect companionship with thee, ro bem imma-llé; O Christ: níta anbsaid éccunnail, may we be together; ní inonn is mé. thou art neither fickle nor inconstant – not as I am.

The poet speaks to the limits of human flesh. He acknowledges the impossibility of keeping his thoughts and desires on God and salvation as they wander, against his will, to women and the world carrying on outside his monastery. In the final stanza, he looks to Christ, the perfect, constant monk as both inspiration and intercessor in his impossible aim of being perfectly obedient to the monastic life, and so to God’s order.

In another group of first-person verses that deal with the concerns of monastic life, poets took up the challenge of imagining how it would be to achieve the impossible – a subjectivity in which one’s desires run together with the dictates of the monastic symbolic – a happy ascetic.

This group of poems has often been identified by scholars as “hermit poetry,” a designation put forth as part of a once-popular theory that they are the inspired product of an eremitic movement in Ireland from the ninth to eleventh centuries.63 In this view, these poems were supposed to be a

63 Kenneth Jackson, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 93-109; Robin Flower, “’The Two Eyes of Ireland’: Religion and Literature in Ireland in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries,” in The Church in Ireland: A.D. 432-1932: the Report of the Church of Ireland Conference Held in Dublin 11th-14th October, 1932, eds. William Bell and N. D. Emerson (Dublin: Church of Ireland Printing and Publishing Company, 1932), 66-75; Flower, The Irish Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 42-53; Flower, “The Irish High Crosses,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954): 87-97; Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society (London: Methuen, 1966), 185-193; Peter O’Dwyer, Céli Dé: Spiritual Reform in Ireland 750-900, 2nd rev. ed. (Dublin: Editions Tailliura, 1981), 184-191.

hermit’s personal, perhaps autobiographical responses to the experience of looking, as Kenneth

Jackson put it, “upon the world around him with a fresh wonder that forced him to literary expression….”64 No direct evidence supports this view, nor do the poems, as Donnchadh Ó

Corráin showed through a series of close readings in his seminal article “Early Irish Hermit

Poetry?”, offer the personal expressions of anchorites. Rather, they are expressions of “religious life…seen through the conceits and tropes of cultivated scholarly men writing to meet the needs of a cultural élite.”65 Several of the poems, in fact, have no discernable eremitic context; the presence of some others of those shared conceits and tropes was too suggestive, it would seem, to pass up. Nevertheless, the poems do share a common theme of idealized subjectivity that is relevant to my discussion. In what follows, I will first consider the construction of “perfect” subjectivity in those poems that do place speaking-subjects in an anchoritic environment, before addressing the remaining poems whose contexts are less clear, but whose speaking-subjects are perhaps more perfect.

Idealizing Hermit Subjectivities

Although the communal life of the cenobite was the most typical form of Irish monasticism, opportunities existed for religious to adopt an eremitic life on the edges of the monastic community.66 Whether this life was considered superior to the communal form, the “hermit” poets clearly speak of the eremitic life with admiration and desire. I address three of these poems here, “A Hermit Song” and “Manchán’s Wish,” as they are known editorially, and an

64 Kenneth Jackson, Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 104. 65 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, ed. by Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989), 264. 66 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, The Irish Church: Its Reform and the English Invasion (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017), 29- 42. 26

untitled poem attributed to Columba. I will discuss the well-known hermit poem, “King and

Hermit,” in a later section.

“A Hermit Song”

This eighth- or ninth-century poem67 is placed in the mouth of a pious Christian – likely a monk, though not certainly – describing the environment in which he believes he would be able to create an ideal ascetic self. It is a curious project of double self-construction. The speaker envisions himself becoming, through ascetic practice, a perfect monastic subject, all the while revealing his true subjectivity to be as troubled by his Fallen nature as any Christian.

The speaker begins by invoking the hermit’s hut as the site of his imagined signification, and imbues it with all the attributes he deems necessary for the sublimation of mind and body.

1.68 1. M’oenurán im aireclán Alone in my little cell, cen duinén im gnáis: without a single human being along with me: robad inmuin ailethrán such a small pilgrimage would be dear ré ndul i ndáil mbáis. before going to death’s assembly.

2. 2. Bothnat deirrit diamair A hidden secluded hut do dílgud cach cloín; for forgiveness of each evil; cubus díriuch diamain a conscience unperverted, untroubled dochum nime noíb. directed towards holy heaven.

The speaker’s hermit’s hut is an ideal monastic space – secluded, solitary, and possessing few distractions for the monk attempting to align himself with God’s order. The isolated hut is peculiarly conducive to the ascetic regime, suited to the full gamut of anchoritic experiences. In such a space, a monk could sanctify his body by “trampling” (saltrad) upon it and weaken his

67 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 178; Kuno Meyer, “The Hermit’s Song,” Ériu 2 (1905), 55-57. 68 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 18-23. 27

eyes with weeping (qt. 3) – i.e., subjugating the desires of his body and mind through self- mortification and contemplating the follies of sin. Having thus ordered himself, he will renounce the world and think only pure thoughts (qt. 4); he will confess his beliefs sincerely and will deeply lament the fallen world and the tragic need for Christ’s sacrifice (qt. 5). The hut is also physically accoutred to aid him in his ascetic process; in it are all the tools to keep him on the straight and narrow – a bed purposefully uncomfortable to prevent him from indulging in sleep and to help him be ready for the morning offices (qt. 6), few possessions, meagre food, and water drunk from the hillside to discourage gluttony (qt. 7, 8). He declares the sparseness of his setting and the simplicity of his meals would make for a paradoxically “dear hardship” (inmuin cacht).

Inside this hut, he can be the perfect monk, happy in his self-mortification.

Out of this ascetic regimen he produces the image of the hermit he wishes to be:

9. 9. Longud serbda séimide, A bitter, meagre meal, menma i llebor léir, assiduous attention to study, lám fri cath, fri céilide, rejection of fighting and visiting, cubus roithen réid. a serene, smooth conscience.

10. 10. Robad inmuin araidi How dear …(?) would be ainim nechta nóeb, some pure holy blemish, leicne tírmai tanaidi, withered emaciated cheeks, tonn chrocnaide chóel. skin leathery and thin.

The poet imagines his wasted body, a physical reflection of his willing submission to God’s order. In such a perfected state he imagines that Christ would come to him:

12.69 12. Críst mac Dé dom thaithigid, Christ son of God visiting me,

69 Murphy omits quatrains 11, 14, and 15 as interpolations on the grounds that none of them follow the established pattern of the last line of each quatrain alliterating with the first line of the next. In addition, qt. 13 has a satisfying dúnad (e.g., the last line of the poem echoes the first), while the dúnad in qt. 15 is “formally less perfect, and the metre of 15a and 15c is irregular.” (Early Irish Lyrics, 179). Murphy provides a translation of the three omitted quatrains in his notes (179-180), while Kuno Meyer includes them in the poem proper. See his edition and translation “The Hermit’s Song,” Ériu 2 (1905), 55-57. 28

mo Dúilem, mo Rí, my Creator, my King, mo menma día aithigid my attention directed to God issind f(dot)laith i mbí. in the kingdom in which he dwells.

Having described the highest goal of the monk – the absence of sin and human weakness that allows accord with God – he goes no further, concluding with the same theme with which he opened the poem:

13. 13. Ba sí in chrích fom-themadar Let this be the place which shelters me eter lissu lann amid monastic enclosures, locán álainn eladglan, a lovely little place hallowed by sacred os mé m‘óenur ann. stone, and me all alone there.

As an effort to construct an ideal monastic subjectivity, the poem is only temporarily successful.

It harbours a subtle anxiety about the ascetic experience that has much in common with the narrative of the subject-in-process. The aim of imitatio Christi is to live the vita perfecta, a way of life in which every desire and thought is directed toward God. Because of the postlapsarian human condition, this is impossible to achieve; the Christian will always be tethered to earthly things, so to speak, by his or her innate sinfulness, just as the semiotic will always interfere with the signification of the self in the symbolic mode. In addition, asceticism is particularly challenging because it requires the individual to maintain a highly temporary subject-position almost indefinitely.

The monastic life, whether cenobitic or eremitic, has many of the characterstics of a transitional rite of passage. Drawing upon the work of anthropologist Arthur van Gennep,

Pádraig Ó Ríain was the first to apply notions of ritual and identity into Irish literature. Ó Ríain suggested that the madness that afflicts a number of male figures in Irish literature, producing the traditional “wild man,” was part of a liminal stage of personal development common to many

cultures.70 The basic function of a rite of passage is to see a person from one subject-position into another, as happens, for example, in a wedding or funeral. Van Gennep proposed that there were three parts to a rite of passage: separation, transition, and incorporation.71 Angela

Partridge, applying the distinctions to her own study of Irish lamentation, puts it thus: “rites of separation cut the person off from his previous status, rites of transition keep him in a sort of limbo as he awaits his new status, and rites of incorporation receive him back into society in his new role.”72 In the transition period, the subject often takes parts in rites such as dwelling outside the community, taking special instruction, performing self-mutilation, fasting, eating a special diet, wearing special clothing, speaking a special language, and so forth.73 This stage is temporary, and always followed by rites of incorporation. However, monastic life, which is strikingly analogous to van Gennep’s period of transition, lacks rites of incorporation (except death and resurrection), making what is supposed to be a temporary experience long-term instead. The only way out of the liminal subject-position is to either default back to the original position of sinner, or to achieve the accord between sinful self and ordered world that is, psychologically, impossible.

This poem is a response to that dilemma. The monk fantasizes about a space perfectly constructed for the monastic, Christian rites of transition. It has to be elsewhere from where he is speaking, because he knows that accord is only achievable in a fantasy. His fantasy reaches its climax in qt. 12, where Christ visits him, proving he has achieved accord. But reality reasserts itself in the final quatrain, as he undermines himself (subconsciously, semiotically) in several ways.

70 Pádraig Ó Ríain, “A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man,” Éigse 14:3 (1972): 179-206. 71 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge, 1960; repr. 2004), 11. 72 Angela Partridge, “Wild Men and Wailing Women,” Éigse 18:1 (1980-1981): 35. 73 Pádraig Ó Ríain, “A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man,” 205. 30

First the poet establishes the space in which an ideal subjectivity may be cultivated as

“elsewhere” from the speaker. He cannot become his ideal self where he is (it has not worked yet, after all), so he invokes the Christian mythos of the transformative wilderness of the desert fathers, locating the place of self-formation in the marginal spaces of his community. From the outset, then, his project of identity construction is marked as imaginative rather than possible, separated from his real self.

The persistent theme of enclosure throughout the poem adds to this sense of disconnection.

The speaker declares that his ideal self could be constructed if only he dwelt in an aireclán (little cell) or bothnat (hut), the implication being that he cannot construct it elsewhere. The hut is also ideal not just because it is conducive to the ascetic regimen, as noted above, but because of its evocative place in the monastic psyche. Certainly an Irish cenobitic monk would have observed the conditions of eremitic life; but this is literature: when the poet evokes the hermit hut, he is drawing upon the mythos of the monastic calling, evoking the ascetic athleticism of the desert fathers and other monastic heroes of hagiography. Doing so distances the speaker from the ideal self he outlines in the poem.

Further contributing to the distance between speaking-subject and subject-being-imagined, as it were, is the theme of enclosure. Inside the hut, conditions are perfect for conceiving an ideal subjectivity. But as the speaker describes it, he excludes himself from it. Inside the hut is obedience, clear thinking, joyful self-mortification. Should he bring himself into that space, he knows he would bring his own flawed subjectivity with him. The hut must remain an idea. The poet reinforces this in subtle ways. Significantly, he uses first-person pronouns only in quatrains

1, 7, 12, and 13, and never in the subject position, making himself present only as an object or possessive pronoun. In the first quatrain, for example, he places himself within the aireclán and then backs away, describing the ideal conditions of the hut for six stanzas before reappearing in 31

qt. 7, where, as noted above, he declares how his meagre diet would make of his experience a happy hardship, a passive self-positioning. He disappears again until the culmination of the twelfth quatrain, where he imagines himself the passive recipient of Christ’s visitation. In the final stanza, he again places himself alone in his cell. The speaker is thus present in the poem, but he takes no agency in bringing about the accord he desires with God through Christ. In this monastic idyll, agency lies with the hut rather than the monk. Even surrender requires an act of will, yet this Christian, in his ideal spiritual situation, deemphasizes his responsibility.

The form of the poem itself also suggests themes of enclosure and ephemerality that undermine the speaker’s speech-act. As noted above, each quatrain is linked alliteratively to the next, from d-line to subsequent a-line. The poem also employs a dúnad, a device sometimes used in early Irish verse, in which the final word or line of a poem echoes (semantically or phonemically) the first word or line. Here the dúnad – M’oenurán/m’óenur ann (“Alone”/“all alone there”) – is imperfect, a subtle reflection of the fragility of the speaker’s speech-act. The indirectness of his presence throughout the poem assures us that there is no self-fashioning happening here, and with the dúnad, the poet emphasizes his point by reminding us that the poem itself is an enclosed moment with a clearly delineated beginning and end. The ephemerality of his poetic utterance is analogous to the truth of his situation: even if he were able to achieve his idealized signification, he knows it would be undermined by the interference of his sinful nature. Even in language, the tool of the symbolic, the self he constructs must inevitably be destabilized by the fact of its inherent instability as an unsustainable subject-position. The poem’s imperfect ending reflects that reality.

The next poem, “Manchán’s Wish,” proves as ephemeral in its subject construction, but where the speaker of “A Hermit’s Song” is anxious to create a controlled isolation, the speaker of

“Manchán’s Wish” imagines achieving accord with the Christian symbolic order through breaking down the walls between himself and the world about him.

“Manchán’s Wish”

This tenth-century poem, which is titled “Comad Manchín Léith” in its sole witness, a sixteenth-century manuscript, is attributed erroneously to the early monastic founder Manchán

Léith (d. 665).74 While it is impossible to say whether the poem was originally intended to be spoken by Manchán, its monastic – possibly anchoritic75 – themes were clearly understood as such by its late copyist. Like “A Hermit’s Song,” this poem uses the monastic speaking-subject to outline the ideal conditions of monastic subjectivity, while at the same acknowledging indirectly the impossibility of achieving it. The poem begins in much the same way as the previous one, invoking the hermit’s hut as the site of ideal conditions for signification:

1.76 1. Dúthrucar, a Maic Dé bí, I long for, O Son of the living God, a Rí suthain sen, Eternal ancient King, bothán deirrit díthraba for a hidden little hut in the wilderness commad sí mo threb, that it might be my dwelling,

2. 2. Uisce treglas tanaide Utterly clear shallow water do buith in taíb, beside it, linn glan do nigi pectha a clear pool to wash away sins tría rath Spirta Naíb, through the Grace of the Holy Spirit,

3. 3. Fidbaid álainn immocus A beautiful wood close by, impe do cech leith, surrounding it on every side, fri altram n-én n-ilgothach, for the nurture of many-voiced birds, fri clithar día cleith, for shelter for them to hide,

4. 4.

74 Kuno Meyer, “Comad Manchín Léith,” Ériu 1 (1904): 38. 75 The question of whether the poem depicts an eremitic or cenobitic setting is due to the ambiguity of the text, which has the speaker imagining several buildings about it, not only a bothán (hut), as well as the companionship of students. The desert fathers were known to have disciples who visited them in their isolation. 76 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 28-31. 33

Deisebar fri tesugud, A southern aspect for warmth, sruthán dar a lainn, a little stream across its glebe, talam togu co méit raith choice land of abundant bounty bad maith do cach clainn, which could be good for every plant,

Like “A Hermit’s Poem,” this poem distances the speaking-subject from his eremitic construct, employing descriptive language into which he only lightly inserts himself. Yet although this poem also reflects a monk’s desire to inhabit an idealized spiritual space, it lacks much of the anxiety colouring “A Hermit’s Song.” This speaker is less concerned with the hardships of the ascetic life, imagining instead a happy coexistence with nature as both physical and social succourer. This speaker does not invoke the tropes of the self-denying regimen spoken of reverently in the previous poem; instead he describes with enjoyment the enticing water of a clear stream for sacraments, the companionship of woodland birds, the warmth of southern exposure, and fertile land to provide not subsistence, but an abundance of food. For this religious figure, to be in accord with God is demonstrated by the generosity of nature, which is an articulation of God’s generosity. The pain of self-denial, the body’s recurrent complaining of its needs and desires is absent from this space.

Isolation is also absent from this ideal subject-position. While the first monk eschews visitors, this one wishes for students, obedient and humble, to share in his prayers (qt. 5-6), twelve of them (in literal imitatio Christi), all of them praying with him to the King who makes the sun shine (qt. 7 – ind Ríg ruithnes gréin). He goes further in the next quatrains, inviting more signs of community into his perfect space: a church for worshipping God (qt. 8) and a house for ministering to the body (qt. 9).77 To see to the needs of his little colony, he will not rely on the work-intensive husbanding of livestock and sowing of crops, but grow leeks, keep hens, and find

77 This is difficult to translate. Perhaps a refectory or privy. 34

salmon and bees’ honey, all of which nature provides easily (qt. 10) through the generosity of

God the King (11ab).

The last half of the final quatrain encapsulates the speaker’s idea of the perfect conditions for forming his ideal self:

11. 11. Mo lórtu bruit ocus bíd Raiment and food good enough for me ónd Ríg as chaín clú; from the King whose fame is fair; mo bithse im ṡuidiu fri ré, to just be sitting for a time, guide Dé in nach dú. praying to God in some place.

The poet abandons detail for simplicity in 11cd, uncomplicatedly stating his desire for some time and a place to develop his best self. The dúnad – Dúthrucar/dú – emphasizes the poet’s simple theme of living his best monastic self “somewhere, sometime” by recalling the first word of the poem: together Dúthrucar dú means “I long for a place.” Having declared his simple needs – all to be provided by God – he does not fall back on the idea of the hut as the place that will actively shape his selfhood. Relying on God’s support, the speaker can achieve accord in the unspecific nach dú, some place. There is still a transitive feeling to his last statement – the speaker positions himself away from nach dú, and wishes to be there, which would be in character if the speaker is intended to be the monastic founder Manchán. In this, either way, the poem shares the double self-construction we see in “A Hermit’s Song.”

Yet the path to constituting an ideal subjectivity is markedly different in each poem. The first speaker views the isolated hut as something of a microcosm of the ascetic experience, a ritual structure to which he can passively subject himself. The second speaker requires only the space and freedom to achieve his aim – a space from which he can ease into the accord found in nature, which is a physical manifestation of God’s order. Each in his space imagines constituting his perfect self, but the former imagines himself doing so by remaining confined in the liminal space

of ascetic practice, hoping that Christ will visit him. The latter, on the other hand, dissolves the walls of his hut – in the end, they have disappeared from the poem – in order to embrace and connect to space he imagines, physically and socially. This is evident in his confidence in nature’s good will toward him, a manifestation of God’s order; and in the way he happily includes students and well-developed ecclesiastical surroundings in his space, in contrast to the jealous isolation of “A Hermit’s Song.” For this speaking-subject, finding accord with God and his ordered world is not achieved by isolating the self, but by giving up control of one’s environment, because by recognizing God’s order in all things and everyone, one learns that God is, in an echo of the prelapsarian Otherworld, already present. In the end, however, this monastic voice has not truly cracked the code of accord; it remains outside his reach, a consequence of his mere humanity. And so he constructs his perfect place of Christian signification not right where he is, but nach dú (somewhere).

“A Hermit Song” and “Manchán’s Wish” both indirectly acknowledge the impossible monastic task of forging accord between the drives and limitations of the body and the Christian symbolic order by constructing spaces in which they imagine the task can be accomplished away from their own position. “A Hermit’s Song” imagines an enclosed, isolated space in which, somehow, the ritual space of asceticism will be more easily maintained. “Manchán’s Wish” conjures a space away from that of the speaker, where a monk might easily integrate himself and a small monastic community into the order already present in the natural world. Echoing the monastic condition, neither of these poems’ speakers is able to construct an ideal self in the space from which they speak.

Monastic Moments

This last group of short poems demonstrates monastic subjectivities which, although they

draw upon similar themes, are still quite unlike those above. Each of these six poems is only one or two quatrains long, and only two can be said to incorporate clear monastic themes; the remaining I include because, as Kenneth Jackson noted in his own discussion of hermit poetry, they share enough features with those that they may well depict the monastic context from which they derive.78

The most significant difference between these and the hermit poems is in their representation of monastic speaking-subjects as selves who have achieved – at least for a moment – an accord between the desires of the body and the demands of their asceticism. An early ninth-century poem, found in the margins of a copy of Priscian’s treatise on Latin grammar,79 demonstrates:

1.80 1. Dom-fharcai fidbaide fál A hedge of trees overlooks me; fom-chain loíd luin, lúad na cél; a blackbird’s lay sings to me (an hu mo lebrán, ind línech, announcement which I shall not conceal); fom-chain trírech inna n-én. above my lined book the bird’s chanting sings to me.

2. 2. Fomm-chain coí menn, medair mass, A clear-voiced cuckoo sings to me (goodly hi mbrot glass de dingnaib doss. utterance) Debrath! nom-Choimmdiu-coíma; in a grey cloak from bush fortresses. caín-scríbaimm fo roída ross. The Lord is indeed good to me: well do I write beneath a forest of woodland.

This speaker shows no sense of the overt project of idealized eremitic subject-construction we find in the previous two poems, yet he does share some of their concerns. Like those longer poems, this brief poem describes ideal conditions for his scholarly labours. In this instance, however, the speaker is not constructing an “elsewhere” into which he would wish himself, he is fully immersed in it – of the poem’s eight lines, only one, the sixth, lacks a first-person pronoun; the sixth line is simply a continuation of the phrase begun in the fifth. Furthermore, the first-

78 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 93 n. 2. 79 St. Gall MS. 904; see Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 172-173. 80 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 4-5. 37

person pronouns are placed at the beginning of each line as infixed-pronouns, with the exception of lines three and seven, where they are placed in the second position. The speaker describes his subject-position with evident enjoyment, placing himself at the centre of nature’s attentions.

Donnchadh Ó Corráin, taking aim at the suggestion that this poem was composed as part of the anchoritic tradition, has read the speaker’s apparent self-interest to indicate a “mannered egotism,” while also suggesting that a religious element appears in the poem only to further his self-congratulations: “God is introduced so that he may be complimented for cherishing the poet.”81 Following Kathleen Hughes,82 Ó Corráin argues that the poem, based on its tone and its presence in a scholarly manuscript, is an example of a genre of poems composed by vacationing scholars who wrote pleasant quatrains about their break from routine. Ó Corráin goes further, saying that,

…given its manuscript context, the only plausible background for this poem is a large monastic community with a school and a scriptorium, the type of community that is better called a monastic town. The poet is likely to be master of the monastic school and head of the scriptorium, a scholar whose work may be fairly represented by the manuscript in which the poem occurs.83 Hughes and Ó Corráin may be correct in identifying the poem’s speaker and composer, whom they conflate, as a scholar of a large monastic institution. But I believe that in their effort to show that the poet could not be a hermit, they misunderstand the overall sentiment of the poem.

The monastic speaker is certainly enjoying himself, but where Ó Corráin sees an irreligious attitude of pleasure in his surroundings and a self-satisfied egotism, I see a representation of the contentedness a monk might feel at having achieved, for a moment, accord between the wants of his body and the requirements of his calling. The speaker’s depiction of nature’s attention

81 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?,” 257. 82 Kathleen Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society, 186. 83 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?,” 257. 38

toward him is not indicative of his egotism, but of his perception that all things are acting in harmonious accord. Nature supports him in his scholarly, contemplative work, which he performs as part of his spiritual effort to please God. In the images of the birds singing to him from nearby trees, I am also reminded of the Irish voyage tales (immrama), in which flocks of birds inhabiting distant, prelapsarian Otherworldly islands are said to be the souls of the dead.

These birds of the Otherworld give advice, preach, and sing the monastic offices throughout the day.84 From the perspective of one living in accord with God’s ordered world, all things speak with God’s voice or act with his will. In this poem, there is no vacation from monastic duties, but rather a feeling of well-being derived from carrying them out. The speaker performs his work and expresses the contentedness he feels doing it by interpreting the pleasantness of the day as a reflection of God’s affirmation of his efforts. In the moment described in the poem, the speaker is enjoying a perfect feeling of gladness that arises from the accord occurring between his mind and bodily desires and the dictates of the symbolic. There is no longing, no semiotic/sinful dissonance, simply contentment in order.

The poet’s careful deployment of ornament and word-play further enhances the speaker’s sense of being part of the ordered world, as Daniel Melia has demonstrated in a tour-de-force analysis of the poem.85 Among the many themes at play in the poem, Melia notes “an almost

84 See, for example, Séamus Mac Mathúna, ed., Immram Brain, p. 34 §7, 36 §20 (birds singing the Hours); “Immram curaig Mail Dúin,” in Richard Irvine Best and Osborn Bergin, eds., Lebor na hUidre: the Book of the Dun Cow (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Dublin, 1929), 63, ll. 1831-1851 (birds said to be souls of hermits children and kindred); Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Voyage of the Huí Corra,” Revue celtique 14 (1893): 22-69 (32 §14, 42 §46, 45 §52, 48-50 §56, 58 §72) (birds said to be souls, function as guides, messengers); Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Voyage of Snedgus and Mac Riagla,” Revue celtique 9 (1888): 14-25 (20 §17-18) and Donncha Ó hAodha, ed. and trans., “The Poetic Version of the Voyage of Snédgus and Mac Ríagla,” in Dan do Oide: Essays in Memory of Conn R. Ó Cléirigh, A. Ahlqvist and V. Capková, eds. (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997), 419-29 (bird preaches history of the world and life of Jesus, give advice); Carl Selmer, ed., Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis: From Early Latin Manuscripts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959; rpt, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1989), 22 §11, 45-44 §15, 78 §27 (birds preach, praise God, sing the Hours). 85 Daniel F. Melia, “A Poetic Klein Bottle,” in Celtic Language, Celtic Culture: A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp, ed. by A. Matonis and D. Melia (Belmount, MA: Ford & Bailie, 1990): 187-196.

obsessive concentration on linkages amongst the lines,” going well beyond the requirements of the metre: The lines of the first quatrain are linked prosodically and rhetorically by assonance in the final syllables of lines 1a, 1b, and 1d; by assonance between 1b and 1a, by full rhyme between 1b and 1d; by alliteration on l in 1b and 1c; by anaphora on fom-chain in 1b and 1d; by aicill rhyme86 in 1c and 1d. Quatrain 2 is linked to the first through further anaphora on fom- chain, while internal links are formed by assonance on the final words of 2a, 2b, and 2d; by aicill rhyme between 2a and 2b (mass and glass); by full-rhyme between 2b and 2d; by alliteration on d in 2b and 2c and on c in 2b and 2c; and by aicill rhyme between 2c and 2d (coíma and roída).87

To this intricate interlacing88 of sound we may add a consistent play on terms for singing and writing. Melia notes that, in the early literary period, fo-cain, most often means to “sing under” or “accompany,” suggesting that the birds’ songs (laid, trírech) are meant to accompany the composition he is writing: “Like the ornaments of his song itself, the birds’ songs are intertwined with his song as music is intertwined in parts, and as the words and lines of this poem are with each other.”89

Interlinkage plays out in the poem in several other ways. The poet’s repetitive use of prepositions, preverbs, and images that alternate the idea of “high” and “low” provide the speaking-subject with a sense of enclosure as he sits surrounded on all sides by birds singing from fortress-like hedges and trees.90 Finally, in addition to the fact that the speaker appears in all but one line of the poem (as I noted above), with the exception of the final line, the speaking-

86 A rhyme between the final word of one line with an internal or initial word in the next line. Here, línech (1c) and trírech (1d). See Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Metrics, 28. 87 Daniel F. Melia, “A Poetic Klein Bottle,” 190. 88 To Melia, the deliberateness of the poet’s great intricacy of poetic interweaving recalls the interlacing designs found on artifacts contemporary to the poem, such as the Book of Kells, the Ardagh Chalice, and the High Crosses (190). 89 Daniel F. Melia, “A Poetic Klein Bottle,” 191. 90 Daniel F. Melia, “A Poetic Klein Bottle,” 191-192. 40

subject appears in every verb as an infixed first-person pronoun, effectively “infixing” the speaker as the object of every verb. The infixing of the speaker is made most plain in the tmesis that occurs in 2c: nom-Choimmdiu-coíma. The first-person object pronoun is attached to the meaningless preverb “no.” The rest of the verb, -coíma (“cherishes me”), is broken by the verb’s subject, Choimmdiu (“the Lord”). Taken together, the tmesis is rendered “the Lord cherishes me.”

Melia’s analysis bears out my initial thesis, i.e., that we are to understand the speaker as being fully in accord with the ordered world: “the embrace of words, of trees, of music, of language, and of nature is ultimately the embrace of the Lord himself, just as every element in the poem is representation of His embrace.”91 The speaking-subject, for at least the moment of his poem, expresses his accord not only through the idyllic scene he creates, but also by representing himself as being enmeshed in the poem’s sounds, enclosed within its prepositional relationships, and woven tightly into its structure through infixed pronouns and tmesis.

We find further tastes of that feeling of accord in two other quatrains. The first example is another marginal quatrain, dating from the twelfth- or thirteenth-century.92

93Ach, a luin, is buide duit 94Ah, blackbird, it is well for you cáit ‘sa muine a fuil do net, where your nest is in the thicket; a dithrebaig nad clind cloc, hermit that sounds no bell, is bind boc sithamail th’fet. melodious, soft, peaceful/fairylike is your call.

The imagery is strikingly similar to that above. The blackbird (luin) sits in its nearby nest, making pleasant music. The poet carves out little space for himself, making this more of an

91 Daniel F. Melia, “A Poetic Klein Bottle,” 194. 92 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 39. 93 Kuno Meyer, ed., trans., Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands, Part I (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1919), 66 §151. 94 James Carney, Medieval Irish Lyrics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 83. 41

observance than a revelation of his inner state. Nonetheless, the speaker does reveal his feelings toward the bird and its music in his description of its whistle, which is tuneful and gentle and sithamail, a pun similar to one we saw above that plays on the double-meaning of síd as both

“peace” and “fairy.” With the poet’s metonymic identification of the blackbird (luin) as hermit

(dithrebaig) in the second half of the quatrain, both being hidden in the woods and solitary, and the potentially loaded signification of birds as blessed Otherworldly figures in this poetry, the poet may have intended the adjective sithamail to recall that ideal, blessed state of accord with

God’s prelapsarian world. Thus a moment of observation may also be a brief reflection on the subjectivity of accord, drawing upon both monastic and literary tokens of the prelapsarian condition.

The second quatrain occurs as an example of defective metre in a grammatical treatise and has no other known context.95

96Atá sund ós chind int slúaig There is here above the host eó find fota néim, a bright tall glossy yew; foceird fáid nglúair ngrind cloc bind the melodious bell sends out a clear keen note i cill Choluim húi Néill. in the church of Colum, descendant of Niall.

This verse is even less forthcoming, although its monastic – or at least ecclesiastical – context seems clear enough from the last line. What interest it may have here lies again in juxtaposition, in this case between the tree in the first half and the bell in the second. I would suggest that again the juxtaposition of nature and religious practice is intended to provide a sense of

“rightness,” that everything is in its place because everything is being done according to God’s order.

95 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?,” 256. 96 Kuno Meyer, Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands, 60.

It is likewise tempting to assume a similar impulse behind those quatrains that are devoid of religious references, but thematically similar. These three ninth-century quatrains,97 for example, evoke similar feelings of contentedness and satisfaction:

98Int én bec roléic feit 99The little bird has given a whistle do rind guip glanbuidi, from the point of its bright yellow beak; foceird fáid ós Loch Láig the blackbird from the yellow-tipped bough lon do chráib charrbuidi. sends forth its note over Loch Laoigh. and 100Int én gaires ansin tsail 101The bird that calls from the willow, álainn guilbnén as glan gair; Lovely its little beak with its clear call, rinn binn buide fir druib druin; the melodious yellow bill of the jet-black cas cor cuirther, guth ind luin. hardy bird; a lively tune is sung, the blackbird’s note. and 102Congair infuissi eolach 103The skilled lark calls, téit neach immach dia(s?)fégad I go outside to watch it conaccar angin ginach that I may see its gaping beak [suas] for neam ninach nélach. above against the dappled cloudy sky.

Nevertheless, without a proper context it impossible to say too much about them as representations of ideal monastic subjectivities except, perhaps, that the very brevity of these and

97 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 38. 98 Kuno Meyer, ed., trans., Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands, Part 1, 66 §150. 99 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 10. 100 Kuno Meyer, ed., trans., Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irlands, Part 1, 67. 101 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 11. 102 Whitley Stokes, ed., trans, The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. Irish Manuscript Series. Vol. 1, Part 1: On the Calendar of Oengus (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1880), lxvi. 103 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Natures Poetry, 5. This quatrain and another appear in a gloss on the word ninach in Félire Oengusso (The Martyrology of Óengus), preserved in the fifteenth-century Lebor Brecc. Jackson takes the two quatrains together as one poem, but they are in different metres and both demonstrate usages of ninach, suggesting they belong to separate poems, or are themselves separate poems. The second quatrain (text from Stokes, Transactions, lxvi; translation Jackson, 5) reads: Gebutsa moṡalmu I will sing my psalms arneam nóemdai ninach for holy bright heaven domditen cen[an]ad that I may be shielded from harm, arglanad mochinad. for the purging of my sins.

the short verses above is a reflection of the brevity with which contentedness – the alignment of the subject’s desires with the world outside the self – is experienced.

With the exception of the speaker of “A Hermit Song,” whose imagined subjectivity I showed to be far from that of the ideal monk, nature imagery forms an integral part of the rhetorical strategy Irish poets used to represent the accord between semiotic and symbolic (or body and

Christian order), that characterizes the ideal monastic subject. From his own hermit- romanticizing perspective, Kenneth Jackson saw the relationship between anchorite and nature as

something that transcends both nature and hermit alike. The woodland birds may sing to him around his cell, but through it all, rarely expressed, always implicit, is the understanding that the bird and hermit are joining together in an act of worship; to him the very existence of nature was a song of praise in which he himself took part by entering into harmony with nature. … It was from this harmony with nature, this all-perceiving contemplation of it, that the hermits reached to a more perfect unison with God.104 Jackson’s observation that nature itself praises God, providing both a model and companionship for the monk’s own praise-work, is overstated, though it does occur. Jackson is closer to the mark when he notes the monastic speakers’ desire to enter into harmony with nature. These monastic poems portray several relationships between speaker and nature. The speakers of “A

Hermit Song” and “Manchán’s Wish” imagine that when they achieve accord with God, nature will provide them physical and emotional support, while the speaker of the Columban poem views the natural world as a reflection of God’s order from which he is exiled, as it were, due to his sinful nature. Nature provides the speaker not so much support as a prompt or goad to keep at his ascetic work. For the remaining poems, representing brief moments of accord between the speaker’s desires and monastic life, nature does not provide or goad or do anything, really; it abides within God’s order, as do those speaking-subjects who have found their accord.

104 Kenneth Jackson, Early Celtic Nature Poetry, 108-109. 44

Thus far I have addressed two of the three broad categories of speaking-subject I wished to discuss in this chapter – speakers who imagine themselves forging an idealized Christian subjectivity through monastic themes, and speakers who are experiencing that subjectivity for a moment. I turn now to the third category, which considers prosimetric treatments of holy men and women whose subjectivity is most closely modelled on Christ’s own.

Christs on Earth

As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, the human condition from the Christian perspective shares many parallels with the psychoanalytical narrative of the formation of the self.

Both view the self as being engaged in a process of negotiations between forces from within the self, described as sinful and semiotic, and outside the self, God’s order and the symbolic (the

Christian symbolic). The former forces are always innately disruptive to the latter. Where the narratives diverge is in the outcome of signification. According to Julia Kristeva’s model, the subject never achieves it, because of this disordering power of the semiotic. Christians, on the other hand, while acknowledging the difficulty of mitigating the disorder at the root of their selfhood, insist that it is possible to achieve full subjectification to the symbolic, if not in life then in death. From the psychoanalytical point of view, the Christian model of signification is thus impossible, at least while in life. The figure of Christ and his unique subject-position, however, provide a solution.

As the doctrine of the Incarnation conceives it, Christ embodies the joining of two incommensurate things: divinity enfleshed in the physical world. It was this coming together of divinity and humanity in Christ and his willing self-sacrifice that opened the door to salvation.

Through the concomitance of temporal and eternal in Christ, the translation of the human, 45

temporal self into the divine and eternal is possible. The primary function of Christ in the

Christian story, in fact, is to surmount the separation between God and the world, to provide an interface where the two may meet through the very nature of his existence. Christians’ belief in this narrative of the joining of the incommensurate, supported by the regular affirmation of that belief through Eucharistic ritual and ordering of their disordered nature (i.e., the semiotic) in order to subjectify themselves to that narrative (i.e., the symbolic), is understood to guarantee their eventual transcendence of the physical into eternal life. Christ is the means by which alienation from God and his ordered world, introduced by Eve and Adam, can be resolved.

The idea of Christ as a human-divine interface was well-known to early Irish exegetes, and, under the influence of continental Christian thought, quickly became a part of their understanding of Christian cosmology. Marina Smyth, who has traced the development of early

Irish conceptions of cosmology, notes that the earliest writers explained the organization of the world and the function of its parts through strictly literal readings of scripture that understood

God as not only the architect of the world but as its animating, ordering force. For example, the first known Irish writer to address the issue, Augustinus Hibernicus, emphasized in his seventh- century text De mirabilibus sacrae scripturae (“On the Marvels of Holy Scripture”) that scripture, as the word of God, cannot lie, and so the ordering of the world set out by scripture must be unassailably true.105 As the Irish in Ireland and on the continent engaged with late- antique cosmological ideas, their explanations of the relationship between scripture and their observations of the natural world became less literal and more complex, but the conviction that every created thing had a purpose ordered by God remained a prominent feature of Irish

105 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God and Early Medieval Irish Cosmology,” in Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland, edited by Jacqueline Borsje, Ann Dooley, Séamus Mac Mathúna, and Gregory Toner (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 2014), 120.

cosmology.106 Whatever the disposition of the earth, sea, and heavens, or the movement of the planets or their sizes and paths and so forth, all is ordained and managed by God.

Where I say “God,” however, it is more accurate to say “the Trinity,” because Irish exegetes understood each person of the Trinity, in particular the Father and Christ, to have different roles in the creation and its maintenance. The biblical view of creation holds that it happened ex nihilo

(out of nothing),107 and Augustinus Hibernicus and his colleagues understood the Father to rule over creation, ordering it, which suggests he is somehow outside the universe, transcending it rather than being immanent within it. Christ, however, was understood to exist within the creation, as is outlined in the opening verses of the Gospel of John:

In principio erat Verbum et Verbum In the beginning was the Word, and the Word erat apud Deus et Deus erat Verbum. was with God, and the Word was God. Hoc erat in principio apud Deus omnia The same was in the beginning with God. per ipsum facta sunt et sine ipso factum All things were made by him and without him est nihil quod factum est.108 was made nothing that was made.

et Verbum caro factum est et habitavit And the Word was made flesh and dwelt in nobis et vidimus eius gloriam quasi among us and we saw his glory, the glory of unigentis a Patre plenum gratiae et the only son of the Father, full of grace and veritatis.109 truth.

The aspect of the Trinity that is the Word was made flesh as Christ, but the Word also existed eternally with God the Father before the Incarnation, including at the time of the creation.

Christian scholars had long made the connection between the Gospel of John and the account of the creation in Genesis – both begin with the phrase In principio, and the Gospel of John asserts the presence of Christ in the beginning of creation in Genesis (hoc erat in principio apud Deus;

“he was with God in the beginning”) as the second person of the Trinity. Some Irish writers

106 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 125. 107 2 Maccabees 7:28. 108 John 1: 1-3. 109 John 1: 14.

went further: drawing upon patristic sources and referencing Jesus’s claim ego sum principium

(“I am the beginning”),110 they accepted the idea that Genesis’s In principio did not simply mark the beginning of time, but indicated that the creation occurred “through the Word,” the second person of the Trinity.111 Thus they understood God’s repeated phrase – “Let there be…” – as an address to Christ, the enactor.112 The presence of Christ, then, as an eternal, coequal part of the

Trinity, as well as his later incarnation in the flesh, projects the Trinity into the world, making its divine presence both transcendent and immanent.

The ninth-century theologian philosopher John Scotus Eriugena offers the clearest articulation of an Irish view of this transcendental/immanent relationship of the Trinity to the created world.

Eriugena saw the creation as tied to the active aspect of God, which is located in the

Word/Christ. Creation was, as Marina Smyth puts it, a “self-manifestation of God through the transformation of divine ideas [i.e., God’s divine narrative for the universe]… into their actualisation as spiritual or material creatures.”113 In Eriugena’s own words, “Just as one who speaks, in the word (verbum) that he speaks, necessarily blows forth a breath (spiritus), thus God the Father at one and the same time begets his Son and brings forth his Spirit through the begotten Son.”114 God the Father’s act of creation is the Word/Christ; and so long as the creation is maintained by God, the Word is eternal and immanent in all things created by the Father.

Smyth again explains that “for Eriugena, the Word, as the creative Cause of the created universe,

110 John 8:25. 111 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 137. 112 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 138. 113 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 129. 114 Édouard Jeauneau, ed., Jean Scot: Homélie sur le Prologue de Jean: Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes (Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1969), 242.

is both immanent in all creation and absolutely transcendent, where all creation is contained within the Word through the eternal primordial causes of all created things.”115

The same fundamental understanding of the Trinity as transcendent and immanent, an ever- present ordering force throughout all time and in every place, is found in other sources, such as the influential seventh-century Hiberno-Latin text Liber de ordine creaturum116 and in the later tenth-century collection of exegetical and homiletic writings, the Catechesis Celtica.117 A commentary on Matthew 16:24 in the Catechesis in particular echoes Eriugena’s explication of

God’s and Christ’s relationship to the created world:

… from the Creator himself all things together are created, through him they are fashioned and ordered and in him they are governed in the world. He created the elements, formed them, and now he governs them. For, as the Apostle says, “from him and through him and in him are all things” (cf. Rom 11:36), namely from the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit, as John attests “all things were made through him” (John 1:3), and David too “in wisdom you made all things” (cf. Ps. 104:24), that is, in the Son, and elsewhere: “the heavens are established by the Word of the Lord,” that is by the Father’s Son.118 The Catechesis likewise employs a speaking metaphor for Christ’s relationship to the Father: A word is the word of someone who is speaking, and he who speaks does so by uttering the word that he has brought forth. He entrusts all that is in himself to be governed in the word. For the Father still acts in the Son (cf. John 5:17), since the world unfolds through governance, when angels carry out their commands, when the stars revolve, when the winds alternate, when the depths of the waters are stirred by currents and by various movements of the air, when vines put forth straight shoots and produce their seeds, when animals are born and live out their lives by their various appetites, when the wicked are allowed to put temptations in the way of the righteous. The Apostle says: “In him we live

115 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 141. 116 Marina Smyth, “The Word of God,” 141-142. 117 Although compiled in Brittany, the MS is still regarded as “a major witness to Irish ecclesiastical learning (biblical exegesis and homiletics) of the early Middle Ages.” See Martin McNamara, “Sources and Affiliations of the Catechesis Celtica (MS Vat. Reg. lat. 49),” in Sacris Erudiri 34: 185-237 (200). For the tenth-century date, see Jean Rittenmueller, ed. Liber Questionum in Evangeliis, CCSL 108F, Scriptores Celtigenae 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 67*-79.* 118 André Wilmart, ed., Analecta reginensia: extraits des manuscrits latins de la reine Christine conserves au Vatican (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, 1933), 59: …ex ipso creatore omnia simul creata et per ipsum in ordine formata et in ipso in saeculo gubernata — elimenta creauit, formauit, gubernat. Omnia enim, inquit apostolus, ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt, scilicet ex patre per filium in spiritu sancto, et Iohanne testante: omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et Dauid: omnia in sapientia, scilicet in filio, fecisti, et alibi: verro domini caeli firmati sunt, idest filio patris.

and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), for neither heaven nor earth and all that are in them, that is every spiritual or corporeal creature, dwells in itself but rather in him, that is, in God.119 I have shown already that nature is an integral part of rendering ideal monastic subjectivities in verse. Those speaking-subjects, however, remained limited by their human condition – they were limited to either describing the subjectivity they wished to possess, or they held onto their experience of accord for only the space of a quatrain or two. So it must be with all humans. But

Christ, of course, is also divine. As the Word, Christ demonstrates a miraculous, eternal accord between the semiotic and symbolic because he is the human manifestation of God’s divinely ordered world, which includes the physical and the metaphysical; Christ is the symbolic. There is thus no separation between the bodily Jesus and Christ/the Word – he is at once immanent and transcendent. The subjectivity of Christ is not that of the subject-in-crisis, with the semiotic and symbolic engaged in constant negotiations, but rather a subjectivity that is fully (and miraculously) signified in the symbolic, making Christ the perfected subject. Any speaking- subject who is going to demonstrate true accord with the Christian symbolic will have to somehow attain a subjectivity like Christ’s own.

Saints and saint-like anchorites in Irish hagiography, figures who function as Christian exemplars at a local level, are often represented as living fully in accord with God’s ordered world. Most of them are monks and nuns, living the life of worship and devotion designed to turn them away from the sin endemic to the human condition and toward God’s order. Many of the saints are well-known athletes of asceticism, disciplining their minds and bodies through

119 André Wilmart, ed., Analecta reginensia, 59: Latin Verbum enim alicuius dicentis uerbum est, et dicens dicendo uerbum quod genuit dicens est; ipse autem omnia in se in ipso gubernari commendat. Pater enim in filio usque nunc operatur, quia per gubernationem saecula explicat, dum angeli iusa perficiuntur, dum circumeunt sidera, dum alternant uenti, dum abissus aquarum lapsibus et diuersis etiam per aerem conglobationibus agitatur, dum ui recta pollulant suasque semina euoluunt, dum animalia gignuntur uarioque appetitu proprias uitas agunt, dum iniqui iustos per temptationes exercere permittuntur, — et apos(tolus): in illo vivimus et movemur et sumus, quia neque caelum et terra et omnia quae in eis sunt, uniuersa scilicet spiritualis corporalisque creatura in se ipsa manet, sed in illo, scilicet in deo. 50

extreme forms of the monastic life, often as hermits. And when Irish saints venture away from the monastic community, they dare much for their faith, demonstrating their trust in God’s order, believing without doubt that God has a plan of which they are a part. Being so “plugged in” to the world, it is no wonder that they are able to bring about miracles – often related to nature – or punish those who stray from God’s order with curses that remove them from or restore them to

God’s plans. Using their words, usually in verse, the Irish saints speak the world otherwise than it is into how it should be. As Christs on Earth, perfectly obedient subjects – as Christ was – to the ordered world, their words become local manifestations of the Word, as they work as agents of God. A short scene from the end of the eighth- or ninth-century Bethu Brigte (“The Life of

Brigit”) illustrates:120

46. Foidis alali ígh craibdech co Brigti ara tessed Brigit dia aithrius. Fine nomen eius. … Laæ n-and dí du-fuburt gæth 7 flechud 7 torann 7 saignen. ‘Cia uaib indiu, a ingena, regus liar cærchu iss donin[n] moir-si? 545 Puellæ omnes pa[r]iter recusabunt. Brigita respondit: ‘Ego oves pascere nimmis dilego.’ ‘Nolo ut exeas,’ ar Fine. ‘Mea voluntas fiat,’ ar Brigit. Luid-si iarum 7 gabsi rand occo: 550 Rom-bith laithi solus lat, ar at coeman, at rigmac; ardo maithir Mairi mboid aurgair flechud, aurgair gaith. Do-gena dam-sa mo rí, 555 ní firfe flechud choidchí, fo bithin Brigti indiu teti sund dond ingariu. Pluviam 7 ventum sedavit.

A certain pious virgin sent to Brigit in order that Brigit might go to visit her. Her name was Fine. … One day wind and rain, thunder and lightning set in. “Which of you virgins will go today with our sheep into this terrible storm?” All the virgins were equally reluctant. Brigit answered: “I like pasturing sheep very much.” “I do

120 Donncha Ó hAodha, ed., trans., Bethu Brigte (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978), 16, 32-33; for a discussion of the Life’s date, see xxv-xxvii. 51

not want you to go,” said Fine. “Let my will be done,” said Brigit. Then she left and chanted a verse as she went: “Grant me a clear day with you For you are a dear little one and a royal son; For the sake of your mother, loving Mary, Banish rain, banish wind. My king will do it for me, Rain will not fall till the night, On account of Brigit today, Who is going here to the herding.”

S/he stilled the rain and wind. By pasturing the sheep when others will not, Brigit gladly participates in the ordered actions that allow a monastic community to function, which in turn allows the institution to fulfill its purpose of bringing Christians closer to God. The apparent purpose of the episode is to mildly reprove the nuns for their reluctance to do their monastic duty, but it also serves to demonstrate what willing collaboration with God’s plan can produce – a personal, even friendly, relationship with

Christ, judging by Brigit’s familiar language, and as happy a relationship with the world in which

Christ is immanent. And why not? A saint and Christ are not so different in their earthly deeds; both order their lives to work God’s will, and often saints’ deeds closely echo Christ’s own.

When Christ used his power to still the storm on the Sea of Galilee,121 he rebuked his frightened disciples for their lack of faith; Brigit, in her more domestic scene, admonishes the nuns of

Fine’s community and stills the storm by calling on Christ’s power. Moreover, Brigit and Christ come near to being conflated when she declares that she enjoys looking after a flock, a clear indication that we are to understand her role on earth as the same as Christ’s. Submitting to

God’s order, she becomes his agent, gaining the power – through Christ – to restore order where she finds disorder. Thus she rights the weather, does the needed work, and provides moral instruction to the nuns, looking after the spirituality of her flock.

121 Mark 4: 35-41. 52

Brigit’s poem further reinforces this connection between her role as an agent of God’s will and the power she has over her locale. She invokes her power in the form of journey poem, a genre in which the traveller asks God for protection. When Brigit asks for a clear day, however, she does not ask for it so that she might do her work more comfortably, but so that she may be

“with you” (lat), her “little dear one” (coeman) and “royal son” (rigmac). Brigit claims a relationship with Christ that gentles him and allows her to cajole him from the position of friend, or perhaps even mother, for in the next line (1c), she asks him to think of Mary, perhaps conflating herself with Christ’s mother. Invoking Mary also serves to remind him of Brigit’s own human limitations and her dependence upon him: banish the wind and rain so I may be with you and do the work. In the second quatrain, Brigit speaks with utter confidence. She no longer speaks to Christ, but perhaps to her audience of nuns (over her shoulder as she departs?): My king will stop the rain until tonight because Brigit – speaking in the third-person – will be here herding. Where the saint works, God works, and order prevails. The line immediately following the poem puts a seal on the hypostatic relationship between Brigit and Christ; lacking a clear indication as to who is the sentence’s subject, either Brigit or Christ may be responsible for calming the storm: pluviam 7 ventum sedavit (S/he calmed the rain and wind).

Another brief episode concerning Brigit makes clearer the importance of accord of semiotic and symbolic in empowering the Irish saint.122 St. Brendan, the famous sea-traveller, has been accompanied for seven years by two monsters, one attacking Brendan, the other blocking the first monster from attacking the saint. The latter monster prays to all the saints of Ireland for

122 Donncha Ó hAodha, ed. and trans., Bethu Brigte, 18, 35. Bethu Brigte survives in only one manuscript – Rawlinson B. 512 – and this episode immediately follows the Life. The language is Middle Irish, placing it some centuries later than the Irish-Latin Bethu Brigte. The episode can also be found in the marginal notes to “Broccán’s Hymn” on Brigit, edited and translated in Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, eds. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia Prose, and Verse, Vol. II. Non-Biblical Glosses and Scholia; Old Irish Prose; Names of Persons and Places; Inscriptions; Verse; Indexes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 334- 335. 53

protection, but finds only its prayers to Brigit are efficacious. When Brendan later seeks out

Brigit, he finds that not only is she a more powerful protector, but also that nature is more amenable to her needs: when Brigit takes off her wet cloak, she casts it on some sunbeams, and there it stays, hanging in the air. Brendan is able to follow suit, but it takes him three tries.

Brendan then asks Brigit “what labour she used to do for her lord” (Ro-focht Brenaind do Brigti cid sæthar do-gnid dia codnach). Brendan says that, for his part, he has not gone over seven ridges without thinking of God. Brigit confesses she has not taken her mind off God since she first put it on him. The episode serves to show that Brigit’s power to defeat forces that would disrupt God’s order (such as Brendan’s attacking monster), as well as the way nature provides for her (the casual use of sunbeams as clotheslines), derives from her unshakable focus on God, an achievement that we can assume would be impressive to any monastic, given the discussion above.

The saints’ role in preserving God’s ordered world and maintaining the Christian narrative locally is related to the liminal nature of their position. The saint lives out Jesus’ life and virtues in small, reaffirming his sacred narrative locally, within the narratives of his or her own community. That the saints, being so much in accord with the order of the world, should be able to speak it into action is no surprise. As imitators of Christ in the way they conform their bodies and desires to God’s will, the saints inhabit a similar subject position to that of the Incarnation.

As they work to make the Word manifest in the world, they give themselves over completely to the sacred narrative, their will and desires in sync with God’s. I will comment on three examples from Irish prosimetric, religious literature that make this Christ-like subjectivity clearer. The first poem, on the Irish saint Moling, demonstrates the agency that can be gained through perfect obedience to God. The next example, a poem concerning the half-brothers Gúaire and Marbán, a king and a hermit, completes the discussion on idealized monastic subjectivities begun in the first 54

half of this chapter. Their praise of the eremitic life through beautiful evocations of nature demonstrates the power of perspective in the formation of subjectivity. The third example, a brief episode in the life of St. Íte, takes the discussion of perspective in self-formation further, exploring how a blend of love, horror, and faith can create an ideal virginal/maternal subjectivity.

The final example is a poem attributed to Patrick, who invokes the immanent subject-position of

Christ as a bodily and physical protection against forces that threaten Patrick’s ability to further

God’s plans in Ireland.

The Powerful Obedience of Moling; or, The Devil Went down to Carlaw

The alignment of the saint’s will to God’s – as we saw with Brigit above and will see with

Patrick below – is essential to the subjectivity of a saint. In Brigit’s case, the relationship between the saint and God’s order was cast as a happy, playful one, emphasizing the joy of working in concert with the ordered world. The narrative I discuss in this section takes a significantly different tack to representing the Christian subjectivity of accord, reflecting the different stakes at play in it. In this story – an anecdote concerning the Irish hermit Moling – the obedience of saints is foregrounded, as Moling is tested through temptation and threats of bodily and spiritual harm at the hands of demons. He demonstrates how willing participation in God’s order can be a defense against all things that threaten that order.

Moling was a seventh-century founder of the monastic institution St. Mullins in what is now

Co. Carlow, but he had a substantial afterlife in religious literature where he appears as a bishop, monk, and hermit.123 In addition to his own vernacular and Latin lives,124 he is an also an

123 Pádraig Ó Ríain, A Dictionary of Irish Saints (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), 487-490. 124 Whitley Stokes, ed., trans. The Birth and Life of St. Moling, Edited from a Manuscript in the Royal Library, Brussels with a Translation and Glossary (London: “Privately printed,” 1907); Charles Plummer, Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, partim hactenus ineditae, Vol. 2. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), 190-205.

important figure in the textual tradition that developed around the mad king Suibhne, and is the protagonist of several anecdotes preserved in a handful of manuscripts, composed at some point before the compiling of its earliest manuscript witness, the Book of Leinster (c.1160).125 In the relevant anecdote, Moling is approached by the devil, who hopes to receive either the saint’s blessing, which he could use to his advantage, or Moling’s curse, which would harm the mouth that spoke it. When the devil is unable to perform or benefit from even the smallest ascetic act of fasting, study, or genuflection, Moling refuses to either bless or curse him. The devil gives up and praises the monk in verse. Although the poem is not spoken by Moling nor composed in the first-person, it nevertheless supports the view that a key element of perfect Christian subjectivity is accord with the Christian symbolic. The devil expresses this accord in a series of metaphors that equate the unshakeably obedient saint with elements of nature and society that signal well- being and beauty, while the subject who goes against God’s order is described in terms of alienation and danger.

1.126 1. Is ór glan, is nem im grein He is pure gold, he is the sky around the sun, is lestar airggit co fin, he is a vessel of silver with wine, is aingil, is eacna name he is an angel, he is holy wisdom, cach aen dogní toil ind ríg. whoever does the will of the King.

2. 2. Is én ima n-íadann sás He is a bird round which a trap closes, as nói tholl dian eislind guas, he is a leaky ship in perilous danger, is lestar fas, is crann crín, he is an empty vessel, a withered tree,

125 The anecdotes have received no critical attention beyond editions and translations, with the recent exception of a 2012 dissertation by Elín Ingibjörg Eyjólfsdóttir, “The Bórama: The Poetry and the Hagiography in the Book of Leinster” PhD diss., University of Glasgow, 2012, retrieved from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3717/1/2012EyjolfsdottirPhD.pdf. Editions and translations include: O. J. Bergin, et al, eds. and trans., Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts, Vol. II (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co.; Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1908), Kuno Meyer, ed., trans, “Anecdotes of St. Moling,” Révue celtique 14 (1893): 188-194; Vernon Hull, “Two Anecdotes Concerning St. Moling,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 18 (1930): 90-99; Whitley Stokes, ed., trans., Goidelica: Old and Early-Middle-Irish Glosses, Prose, and Verse, 2nd ed. (London: Trübner and Co., 1872), 179-182; Whitley Stokes, ed., trans., The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee: Félire Óengusso Céli Dé (London: Harrison and Sons, 1905), 150-157. 126 Whitely Stokes, ed. and trans., The Martyrology of Oengus, 156-157. 56

na déine toil in rig thuas. who does not do the will of the King above.

3. 3. Is craeb chumra cona blath He is a fragrant branch with its blossom, is lestar is lan do mil, he is a vessel full of honey, is lia lógmor cona bail he is a precious stone with its goodness dogní toil Maic Dé do nim. who does the will of the Son of God of heaven.

4. 4. Is cnú caech na bí amain He is a blind nut, wherein is no profit, is brence brén, is cránn crín, he is a stinking rottenness, he is a rotted tree, is cráeb f(h)iadabhla cen blath he is a blossomless branch of a crab-apple cach na deine toil in Rig. whoever does not do the will of the King.

5. 5. Dogní toil Maic Dé do nim Who does the will of the Son of God of is grian etrocht a mbi sam, Heaven is airithe Dé do nim he is a brilliant sun round which is summer, is lestar glainide glan. he is a dais of God of heaven, he is a pure crystalline vessel.

6. 6. Is ech buada tar mag réid He is a race-horse over a smooth plain, fer atcosna flaith Dé máir, the man that strives after the kingdom of great is carpat fegtar fo rig God; dober buada allaig náir. he is a chariot that is seen under a king that bears off victories….127

7. 7. Is grian gurois richid nóeb, He is a sun that warms holy heaven, fer dian buidech in Ri mór, a man for whom the great King is grateful, is tempall sonaide sóer he is a temple prosperous, noble, is scrín nóeb conutaing ór. he is a holy shrine which gold bedecks.

8. 8. Is altoir forsn-dailter fin He is an altar on which wine is dealt, ima canar ilar cór, round which a multitude of melodies is sung, is cailech glanta co lind he is a cleansed chalice with liquor, is find-druine find, is ór. he is a fair white-bronze, he is gold.

Quatrains 1, 3, 5-7 all compare the obedient Christian to various ordered aspects of nature and society – in nature, he who follows God’s will is metaphorically associated with the pure

127 Stokes renders 6d as “which wins a prize from bridles of gold” in Goidelica, 181.

perfection of crystal and precious metals and gems (1ab, 3c, 5d, 8d);128 he is the sun and the air about it which provide warmth and beauty (1a, 5b, 7a); he is a vessel to contain good things such as honey, wine for the table and wine for sacraments (1b, 3b, 5b, 8c); he is a shrine and a temple, containing holy things (7cd); he is a thing to be used by others – a dais for God to sit upon (5c), a steed with which to win races (6a), and a chariot to be used to carry off victories (6cd); he is an altar to be used to praise God (8ab); and he is a minister of God’s will by being an angel and the embodiment of wisdom (1c). The devil’s praise of Moling (or any obedient Christian subject, given the impersonal use of the third-person) makes him immanent within the Christian symbolic, using metonymic language to embed him at every level of the good, created world.

The poet brings the “rightness” of the obedient Christian subject into relief by offering contrasting metaphors for the disobedient man in qt. 2 and 4. Such a man who acts against the symbolic order is in a dangerous spiritual position (2ab). He is not equal to a pure, deathless metal but rather wholly organic and mortal, a withered and rotted, fetid tree (2c, 4b). Unlike the obedient man who is a vessel of many kinds of goodness, this man is empty (2c); there is no potentiality in him, a nut missing its meat (4a), a branch without a blossoms (4c) – living outside

God’s order he rots and dies. The metaphorical language of Moling’s fiendish adversary demonstrates the thorough integrity of the Christian symbolic by showing how that order is present at the natural, social, and spiritual levels of the human condition.

Power from Perspective: Marbán and Gúaire

A feature of the so-called hermit poems discussed above was their dual-construction of subjectivity. Each had a speaking-subject articulating a subject-position they desired while at the same time articulating indirectly the less satisfying one they actually had. In this poem, a hermit

128 Note that precious metals are often found in place of organic materials in tales of the undying Otherworld. 58

demonstrates the importance of re-contextualizing the natural world through the lens of the

Christian symbolic, radically shifting one’s perspective to understand that the evils of the world are also a part of God’s order.

The poem, editorially known as “King and Hermit,” is part of a Munster story-cycle that focuses on a well-attested historical ruler of seventh-century Connacht, Gúaire Aidne.129 That cycle is mostly lost, but surviving stories about Gúaire generally depict him as a king renowned for his generosity.130 His half-brother Marbán, on the other hand, seems to be a wholly literary creation. He is not accounted for in any histories or annals, and outside of the poem discussed here, Marbán occurs as a main character only in the later Middle Irish satire Tromdámh Guaire

(more or less “The Oppressive Poetic Retinue which Afflicted Gúaire”). In that story, Marbán has rejected worldly things and chosen instead a hermit’s life, serving as his brother’s swine- herd. He emerges from the woods to save Gúaire from the predations of a burdensome retinue of poets, whose demands are out of keeping with the rules of hospitality. Marbán, with the help of the saints of Ireland, restores order and returns to the woods. In this we may see some of the active maintenance of God’s order performed by those who sublimate themselves to him.

In the poetic dialogue discussed here, idealized subjectivity is represented as a matter of perception – all the world, according to Marbán, is as it should be; what seems harmful or uncomfortable no less than the pleasurable. The prose leadup to the poem is as follows:

Marbán, who lives by himself in the woods, has fallen ill. Gúaire goes to his brother and asks him, in verse, to leave the inhospitable woods and return to his hall where he can be cared for.

Doing so initiates a fundamental mode of discourse in Irish, the dialogue poem or colloquy

129 Kuno Meyer, ed., trans., King and Hermit: A Colloquy between King Guaire of Aidne and His Brother Marbán (London: David Nutt, 1901), 8; for a discussion of the contents and themes of this Munster cycle, see Seán Ó Coileáin’s important essay, “The Structure of a Literary Cycle,” Ériu 25 (1974), 88-125. 130 Maud Joynt, ed., Tromdamh Guaire (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Study, 1931), x. 59

where one character asks another a question in order to open up a subjective space of selfhood.

Near death, Marbán responds at length and in marvelous detail his subjective experience of life in the woods, which is quite different from what Gúaire expects.

1.131 Gúaire: 1. Gúaire: A Marbáin, a díthrubaig, Marbán, hermit, cid ná cotlai for colcaid? why do you not sleep upon a bed? Ba meinciu duit feiss i-m-maig, More often would you sleep out of doors, cenn do raig for lár ochtgaig. with your head, where the tonsure ends, upon the ground of a fir-grove.

2. Marbán: 2. Marbán: Nicon cotluim for colcaid I do not sleep upon a quilt, ge bethear com imslanud: Though it were for my health’s sake: ataid sochaidi-) amoig There are many abroad atraicc hocim imradud. Who come to share my meditations.

Marbán knows his health is deteriorating, but he will not go where he could recover; he has obligations to those who benefit from meditating with him. In the next stanzas (3-7) Marbán notes the deaths of their brothers and bequeaths his few possessions to a leper. The remainder of his stanzas (8-32) – are given over to a description of his life as a hermit.

8. Marbán: 8. Marbán: Atá úarboth dam i caill; I have a hut in a wood; only my Lord knows nís-fitir acht mo Fhíada; it: an ash-tree closes it on one side, and a uinnius di-síu, coll an-all, hazel, like a great tree by a rath, on the other. bile rátha, nosn-íada.

9. 9. Dí ersainn fraích fri fulong Two heather doorposts for support, and a ocus fordorus féthe. lintel of honeysuckle. The encircling wood Feraid in chaill immá cress offers its mast for fat swine. a mess for mucca méthe.

10. 10. Mét mo boithe — bec nád bec, The size of my hut – small yet not small – a baile sétae sognath. homestead with familiar paths. A woman in Canaid sian m-binn día beinn blackbird-coloured cloak sings a pleasant ben a l-leinn co londath. song from its gable.

131 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 10-18. Meyer dates the poem to the tenth century on linguistic grounds (King and Hermit, 5), and Gerard Murphy to the ninth, though he provides no justification (Early Irish Lyrics, 10). 60

To Gúaire, Marbán’s living situation is rough indeed, out in the wilderness, with the ground within a grove serving as a bed. Though near death and aware that living in the wild is harmful to his poor health, Marbán nevertheless perceives his surroundings as having everything he needs.

Where Gúaire sees a grove of trees, the hermit sees, as Donnchadh Ó Córráin has noted, the structure of a ring-fort, “the normal secular dwelling of those of socio-economic consequence,” the poet’s description “consciously transmuted into woodland terms with a few quick artistic touches” (st. 8-9).132 Looking at the same scene, the king and the hermit perceive different realities, although both see themselves as inhabiting the choicest place. This duality, as in the

“Manchán’s Wish,” recalls the duality of the Otherworld. The two tales discussed earlier –

Echtrae Conlae (“The Adventure of Conlae”) and Immram Brain (“The Voyage of Bran”) – describe the Otherworld in ways that resonate with Marbán’s description of his life as a hermit.

In both tales, noblemen encounter an Otherworld woman who describes in verse the wonders of their world. They appear and disappear at will, and not everyone can hear them, only their chosen audience. The suggestion is that the Otherworld exists immanently with our own world, but can only be perceived by those blessed by the Otherworld.133

It should be inferred that Marbán is so blessed because of his Christ-like subject-position. He inhabits that subjective space only hinted at in the hermit poetry, in which the distractions of his body are in complete accord with God’s order, and so all things he experiences in nature he interprets as God’s will, and so a good thing. Only those who are part of this ordered world can perceive it as it truly is.

132 Donnchadh Ó Corráin, “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?” 258. 133 John Carey, “The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition,” in The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Tradition, ed. Jonathan Wooding (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000; repr. of. Éigse 19 (1) (1982), 36-43), 113-119. 61

This dual reality plays out in Marbán’s description of his life as a hermit. Like Bran and

Conlae, who leave their communities behind to follow the call of an Otherworldly woman,

Marbán has turned his back on his community so that he might embrace God’s order and live in accord with it. Like those men, Marbán is rewarded with the company of an Otherworldly woman, whom Gúaire perceives as a bird (st. 10). And although his life appears to Gúaire to be one of privation, in fact his brother lives a life of great feasting and entertaining. Marbán’s hut is bec nád bec (“small yet not small”) (st. 10); it is small, but to his eyes, it is sufficient to host an entire community of companions, entertainers, and the means to feast them. The poem at this point rhapsodizes the life the hermit leads out in the wilderness, which resembles the sinless life of pleasure and fun that the inhabitants of the Otherworld enjoy. The poet prefaces his long description with an invitation to Gúaire to come tour his home:

12. 12. Mennután díamair desruid Little hidden humble abode, with the día m-bí selb sétrois. path-filled (?) forest for estate: Día décsin in rega limm? will you go with me to see it? My life, Rofinn mo bethu it écmais. even without you, has been very happy.

As Marbán begins his description, the poet subtly emphasizes the anchorite’s joy in the world he sees by shifting out of a more prosaic rannaigecht metre – a quatrain of seven syllables with end- rhyme in b and d, and also between the end-word of c and a medial word in d134 – and into an unnamed metre of six lines of four syllables, the end of end-rhyme between at least c and f, and a good deal of alliteration. The effect of the shift is quicker, more energetic statements with an insistent rhythm.

13. 13. Mong co libri Long branches of a yew-green yew tree:

134 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Metrics (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1961; repr. 1973), 52. 62

ibair éoglais: glorious augury! Lovely is the place: the great nósta cél! greenery of an oak adds to that portent. Caín in magan: márglas darach darsin sén.

14. 14. Aball ubull There is an apple-tree with huge apples such (mára ratha) (great are these blessings), and an excellent m-bruidnech m-bras; clustered crop from small-nutted branching barr dess dornach green hazels. collán cnóbec cróebach n-glas.

15. 15. Glére thiprat, Choice wells are there and waterfalls (good to essa uisci drink) – they gush forth in plenty (?); berries (úais do dig) — of yew, bird-cherry, and privet (?), are there. bruinnit ilair; cáera ibair, fiadait, fir.

With this quickened metre and heightened sound-play, the poet attempts to reveal something of the speaking-subject’s feelings about the world he perceives through the lens of God’s order. He is not merely content in nature, he is rapturous. The pleasures of the body do not alienate

Marbán from God, but flow in accord with God’s creation. As the world, imbued with God’s will (i.e., the Word) generously pours forth its beauty and sustenance, Marbán’s own body, reconciled to that will, itself now pours forth beauty in his words. His words are as abundant and generous as nature itself, as is evident from the many stanzas he gives to detailing every last aspect of his world in the woods to his brother the king:

16. 16. Foilgit impe Around it tame swine, goats, young pigs, wild mucca cenntai, swine, tall deer, does, badger-cubs (?), and cadlaid, uirc, badgers have their lairs. mucca alltai, uiss aird, ellti, bruicnech, bruic,

17. 17.

Buidnech sídech, Grouped in bands at peace, a mighty army slúag tromm tírech, from the countryside, an assembly gathering dál dom thig; to my house—; foxes come to the wood ina erchaill before it: it is a lovely sight. tecat cremthainn: álainn sin!

18. 18. Caíni fleda Delightful feasts come [to] my house… (swift tecat moteg, preparing), pure water …, salmon and trout. tárgud tricc, uisce idan barrán (bitchai,) bratáin, bricc.

19. 19. Barrán cáerthainn, Produce of mountain ash, black sloes from a áirni dubai dark blackthorn, berry-foods, bare fruits of a draigin duinn, bare… túarai dercna cáera lomma lecna luimm.

20. 20. Líne ugae, A clutch of eggs, honey, mast, and heath- mil, mess, melle, pease (sent by God), sweet apples, red (Día dod-roíd), cranberries, whortleberries. ubla milsi, mónainn derca, dercna froích.

21. 21. Coirm co lubaib, Beer and herbs, a patch of strawberris (good loc di subaib, to taste in their plenty), haws, yew-berries, somlas snó, nut-kernels. sílbach sciach derca iach, áirni chnó.

22. 22. Cuach meda A cup of excellent hazel mead, swiftly served; colláin cunnla brown acorns, manes of bramble with good co n-dáil daith; blackberries. durcháin donna, dristin monga mérthain maith.

23. 23. 64

Mad fri samrad, When summer comes – pleasant rich mantle – suairc snóbrat, tasty savour: earth-nuts, wild marjoram, leeks somlas mlas, from the stream (green purity); curair, orcáin, foltáin glaise, glaine glas;

24. 24. Céola ferán Notes of gleaming-breasted pigeons (a m-bruinne forglan beloved movement); the song of a pleasant forom n-dil; constant thrush above my house; dordán smálcha caíne gnáthcha úas mo thig;

25. 25. Tellinn, cíarainn, Bees, chafers (restricted humming, tenuous cerdán cruinne, buzz); barnacle geese, brent geese, shortly crónán séim; before Samain (music of a dark wild); gigrainn, cadain, gair ré samain, seinm n-gairb chéir;

26. 26. Caínciu gestlach, A nimble linnet (?), active brown wizard, druí donn desclach, from the hazel bough; there with pied don chraíb chuill; plumage, woodpeckers, a vast multitude. cochuill alaid snaic ar daraig, aidbli druing.

27. 27. Tecat caínfinn, Fair white birds come, herons, gulls-the sea corra, faílinn; sings to them; not mournful is the music made fos-cain cúan; by dun grouse from russet heather. ní céol ndogra cerca odra a fráech rúad.

28. 28. Rescach samaisc The heifer is noisy … in summer, when a samrad weather is brightest: life is not bitter not (soilsiu sín): toilsome over the rich delightful fertile plain. ní serb sáethrach úas maig máethlach mellach mín.

29. 29. 65

Fogur gaíthe The wind’s voice against a branchy wood, on fri fid flescach, a day of grey cloud; cascades in a river; roar forglas néol; of rock: delightful music! essa aba; esnad ala: álainn céol.

30abc. 30abc. Caíni ailmi Beautiful are the pines which make music for ardom-peitet, me, unhired; ní íar n-a creic:

Through his othering words, Marbán makes out of the local wildlife a warrior company and companions for feasting (st. 16-18, 22, 25-26), for whom there is delicious and abundant food and drink (st. 14-15, 18-23). Ample music is provided in every season by birds and insects (and a cow), by the wind, and by water rushing among rocks (st. 24-30a-c). Through all this joyous description, Marbán is addressing the underlying anxiety troubling Gúaire: the fear of leaving behind the comforts and status he enjoys in society. Marbán sets him at ease by demonstrating the power of willing participation in God’s order to transform solitude into a social scene rivalling that of a king’s own hall.

It is at this point, midway through st. 30, that the poet pivots from his bewitching portrayal of a life rich in the pleasures of community, in which the wilderness provides his every physical and social need, and moves to his real subject, the role Christ plays in achieving Marbán’s idealized subjectivity.

30def. 30def do Chríst, cech than, through Christ I am no worse off than any of ní mesa dam you. oldás deit.

31. 31. Cid maith latsu Though you relish that which you enjoy, a n-do-milsiu, exceeding all wealth, I am content with that mó cech maín; which is given me by my gentle Christ. buidech liumsa do-berr damsa 66

óm Chríst chaín.

32. 32. Cen úair n-augrai, With no moment of strife, no din of combat cen deilm n-debtha such as disturbs you, thankful to the Prince immut-foich, who gives every good to me in my hut. buidech dond Flaith do-beir cech maith dam im boith.

33. Gúaire: 33. Gúaire: Do-bérsa mo ríge rán I will give my great kingdom and my share lam chuid comorbsa Calmáin, of Colmán’s135 heritage, undisputed a dílse co úair mo báis, possession of it till my death, to live with ar beith it gnáis, a Marbáin. you, Marbán.

In st. 31-32, Marbán demonstrates to Gúaire that while each of them enjoys the same pleasures in life, each arrives at them differently. Gúaire’s life has been built upon the dictates of heroic values and economics. He enjoys great wealth (st. 31), but it was won through battle and political contention, and is kept through more of the same (st. 32). Marbán’s subjectivity, on the other hand, is untroubled, even as death approaches. His happiness is dependent upon constant striving to interpret the world around him to reflect his understanding of Christ’s immanence in nature. Marbán translates this view into Irish secular terms by figuring Christ as the most generous of lords, and giving himself entirely to Christ’s keeping. Believing in the immanence of Christ in nature and having faith in his generosity, the world itself provides Marbán with all his needs. All his emotional and bodily desires are satisfied by his subjection to the order of his lord, the Word, bringing the desires of his body into accord with the world as organized by God.

Gúaire, seeing Marbán’s happiness, quickly abandons his worldly perspective and commits

135 St. Colmán of Kilmacduagh (Co. Galway). He was a seventh-century hermit of aristorcratic lineage. He appears as a player in the same Munster story-cycle where he is claimed as a brother of Gúaire’s (see J. G. O’Keeffe, “Colman Mac Duach and Guaire,” Ériu 1 (1904):43-48. For a fuller account of his appearances and feast day, see Pádraig Ó Ríain, A Dictionary of Irish Saints (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), s.v. “Colmán of Kilmacduagh.” 67

himself to the idealized hermit, enabling the hermit to fulfill his saintly role of bring order to disorder.

Marbán’s fearless attitude toward death is another important component of his Christ-like subjectivity that is represented multivalently in this text. Seán Ó Coileáin has shown how the hermit’s name is derived from the adjective marb “dead,” with Marbán then meaning “little dead one.”136 The name, in fact, is antonymous to “beóán” or “little living one,” which was a fairly common epithet among ecclesiastics. The name “Marbán” may have been intended for the satirical Tromdamh Guaire as an ironic reference to “Beóán.”137 In the context of Marbán’s colloquy with Gúaire, the name signifies the metaphorical death of the hermit, who must “die” to the world in order to embrace the everlasting life offered by the Word. Further, the poem’s allusions to the Otherworld recall the fate of Conlae and Bran in their respective tales. Conlae accepts the invitation of the Otherworldly woman, sailing off with her in a magical boat, never to be seen by his family again. Bran returns to his people to discover that many years have passed and he cannot return without crumbling to dust. In each case, they have effectively died to their original lives and taken up new lives in the prelapsarian, Christian Otherworld. Marbán too inhabits a prelapsarian space, having died his “little death” to reach it. Furthermore, the hardships of his life in the wilderness, while represented by Marbán as nurturing and wholesome, are nevertheless bringing the hermit closer to death than if he were home with Gúaire. But, of course, to be brought closer to death is to be brought closer to eternal life – again, it is a matter of

136 Ó Coileáin derives the name “Marbán” from a lament on the death of saint Cummíne, which refers frequently to the saint’s body with the words marb and marbán, i.e., “dead” as adjective or substantive “dead one,” and “little dead one,” respectively. See “The Making of Tromdámh Guaire,” in Ériu 28 (1977), 53. See also Thomas Owen Clancy’s doctoral dissertation for a fuller treatment of Cummíne Fota and the role of the “divine fool” in medieval Irish literature: “Saint and fool: the image and function of Cummíne Fota and Comgán Mac Da Cherda in early Irish literature,” PhD thesis: University of Edinburgh, 1991. Retrieved from https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/7381 137 Seán Ó Coleáin, “The Making of Tromdámh Guaire,” 56. 68

perspective, which Marbán has clearly mastered. Finally, the poet makes a final play on the hermit’s name in the dúnad in the final line when he has Gúaire address Marbán directly, saying he will give all his possessions and status to come live with him, “a Marbán” (“O Little Death” or “Little Dead One”). Marbán himself thus becomes a metaphor for the monastic life and the accord with God’s ordered world it claims to offer.

As a religious literary figure, Marbán is likely intended to set an inspirational example for turning one’s back on the material world as a way of coming closer to salvation. He also serves as an example of an ideal Christian subject – recognizing that only through death and suffering can one achieve life everlasting. Hardship becomes God’s grace, through which the promise of the Word is fulfilled.

Íte’s Abject Motherhood

The translation of death and suffering into eternal life as part of a perspective-shift grounded in a Christ-like subjectivity also lies at the heart of a prosimetric story about the early Irish saint

Íte. Here, however, that theme is explored together with ideas of religious womanhood, in particular how an avowed virgin can also take on the subject-position of motherhood.

Abbots and abbesses of Irish monasteries were often understood to play a parental role in their communities, while the monks and nuns who lived under their authority and guidance constituted a “familia” or “muinter.”138 As spiritual mothers and fathers to a community of people who had left their families to join a religious family, monastic leaders were responsible for the education and spiritual development of their charges. We see this relationship played out in many of the Irish Lives of saints, but the spiritual mother par excellence is Íte, a sixth-century

138 Lisa M. Bitel, Isles of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) 89. 69

abbess who was active in what is now Killeedy (i.e., Cill Íte, “Church of Íte”), Co. Limerick.

Although in her own Life little emphasis is placed on her mothering, she appears in other saints’ lives as a foster-mother and teacher to many of the sainted monastic founders of the next generation, such as Brendan the Navigator and Cummíne Fota. In these lives, Íte is often addressed by her foster-sons, even when they are grown, in terms that emphasize a maternal identity, such as a sancta mater or pia mater (“holy mother” or “pious mother”) or nutrix

(“nurse,” “foster-mother”), in addition to the more typical epithets of virgo or sancta (“virgin,”

“saint”).139 Íte, in turn, sometimes calls the men she once fostered and subsequently advises alumpnus (“fosterling,” “nursling”) or fili mi (“my son”).140 In these representations of a nun’s virginal-maternal identity, we see a conflation of two roles for women which were considered defining during the first five centuries of the Irish church, virginity and motherhood.141 Of the two, it is motherhood that is most inextricable from early ideas of womanhood; even when the women in question are religious virgins, a desire remains to enact some kind of mothering role.

The model for such virginal mothering is of course the Virgin Mary. Dorothy Ann Bray notes that although Mary’s body is not violated by either sex or “the birth process, the acts of nurturing and feeding Christ are the womanly functions she must perform to be the Mother of God.” Thus breastfeeding is the “only truly biological female function permissible to the Virgin Mother of

God.”142 The image of grown men nursing at Mary’s breast was not uncommon in continental iconography and literature, and has been fruitfully connected to a long tradition of biblical and secular antecedents of men imbibing the Word of God from the “milk” of salvation or attaining

139 Plummer, Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, Vol. 1: 71, 92, 181; Vol. 2: 119, 164, 167, etc. 140 Plummer, Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, Vol. 1: 136, 145. 141 Lerner, Elizabeth A., “Virgins and Mothers: Feminine Ideals and Female Roles in the Early Irish Church.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 14 (1994): 162-174 (166). 142 Dorothy Ann Bray, “Suckling at the Breast of Christ: A Spiritual Lesson in an Irish Hagiographical Motif,” Peritia 14 (2000): 287.

knowledge by suckling at the breast of Wisdom.143 Women, as Caroline Walker Bynum has noted, more often receive visions of themselves suckling Christ as an infant, allowing them to identify with Mary’s virgin motherhood,144 which is presented as an ideal female Christian subjectivity.

In the Irish context, however, which predates the largely twelfth-century setting of the

Continental examples, despite several interesting incidents of men suckling children,145 only two female saints,146 Brigit and Íte, are closely identified with the maternal Virgin Mary, despite an apparently broad definition of what constitutes motherhood by the early Irish church. Brigit, for example, is not particularly known for looking after infants or children, but was known as a keen administrator and generous provider in domestic contexts; by the eighth century she was popularly known as another “Mary, who will dwell among you.”147 Íte, on the other hand, demonstrates a strong spiritual maternal role in the Lives of other saints, as noted above. In one other instance in particular, recorded not in the Lives but in a brief story that survives as an extended gloss in prose and verse from the calendar of saints called Félire Óengusso

143 See Bray, “Suckling at the Breast of Christ,” esp. 286-292. For more on the metaphor of Christ as mother in relation to the motif of the nursing male saint, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s chapter on “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” pages 110-169 in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Andy Orchard addresses the metaphor of scholars “sucking at the milk of knowledge from the paps of sacred Wisdom,” which was known in Ireland, in “The Hisperica Famina as Literature,” Journal of Medieval Latin 10 (2000): 30-31. 144 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 270. 145 Bray, “Sucking at the Breast of Christ,” 282-283. 146 A gloss for the entry on March 29th in The Martyrology of Oengus mentions two sisters, “Ethne and Sodelb, who used to nurture Christ.” See Whitley Stokes, ed., trans., The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee: Félire Óengusso Céli Dé (London: Harrison and Sons, 1905), 102-103. Stokes directs the reader to a fuller account of their story in The Book of Leinster (Lebar Laignech), 358b, which I have not had opportunity to consult. 147 Donnchadh Ó hAodha, Bethu Brigte, 3 §11, 22 §11. In the scene, a bishop recounts a vision of Brigit: “’Anda lem,’ olse, ‘ad-condarcc ind nocht Mairi n-ingein im chotluth, 7 ar-rubart frim alali clerech sruith: ‘Hæc est Maria quæ inter vos habibet.” (“’I thought,’ said he, ‘that I saw this night the Virigin Mary in my sleep, and a certain venerable cleric said to me, ‘This is Mary who will dwell among you’”)3 §11, 22 §11.

(“Martyrology of Oengus”) (c.800), Íte is shown to achieve an idealized maternal Christian subjectivity through decidedly odd, but striking, circumstances.148

The gloss follows an entry for January 15th, Íte’s feast day, for which this single quatrain was composed:

Xviii. cal. Febr. [January 15:] Foráith már ṅgur ṅgalar, She succoured many grievous diseases: she carais már tromm tredan, loved many severe fastings, the white sun of in grían bán ban Muman Munster’s women, Íte the devout of Cluain. Íte Chluana credal. The scribe then expands on the ascetic aspect of Íte’s illnesses in the gloss that follows:

15Mur .i. monachus et discipulus Benedicti abbatis. Íte o Chill Ite i nHuib Conaill Gabra hi Mumain que Desertum prius vocabatur. Foraith mor ngur ṅgalar .i. ro fortachtaig Dia di nó ro reithistar mor ngalair .i. ár ba mor in galur di, dael oc a diur méitigther oirce ro chlóid a lethtaeb uile, ní f(h)itir nech sin furri. Téit fecht n-óen amach : tic in dael assa fochlai dia heis. Atchiat na caillecha hé 7 marbait didu hé. Tic-si iarsin [7] cia dusfaraill hé? Na gat nem foirnd, ar na caillecha, 7 sinde ro marb hé, 7 ní fetamur nabob urchoitech hé. Cid fil ann sin, 7 ní geb-sa didu, ar isi, óm Thigerna, co tuca [a Mac] a nim a richt naíden dia altraim dam dono. Co tainic in t-aingel no gnathaiged timthirecht disi ara hamus. Mithig em, atbered sí fris. Co n-erbairt fria : doberthar duit inní conaighi. Co tainic Críst chuici a richt naíden. Conid ann atbert i:

15 Mur etc. Íte of Cell Íte in Hui Conaill Gabra in Munster, quae etc. She succored great grievous disease, i.e., God helped her, or much of her disease ran (to her), i.e., for great was her disease, a stag-beetle as big as a lap-dog a-sucking her destroyed the whole of one of her sides. No one knew of that upon her. Once upon a time she goes forth, and the stag-beetle comes out of its den after her. The nuns see it and kill it. Thereafter she comes, and since it came not to her she asked, “Where has my fosterling gone?” she says, “and who has visited it?” “Do not rob us of heaven!” say the nuns: “’tis we that have killed it, for we knew that he was hurtful.” “However that may be,” saith Íte,

148 Whitley Stokes, ed., trans., The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee: Félire Óengusso Céli Dé (London: Harrison and Sons, 1905), vii. Stokes bases his edition and translation on Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 610 (S.C. 1132). For a discussion of the other manuscript witnesses, as well as a still useful bibliography of editions, translations, and secondary literature, see E. G. Quin, “The Early Irish poem Ísucán,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (Summer, 1981): 39-52, esp. 39-41.

“for that deed no nun shall ever take my succession.149 And I will not take (aught) from my Lord until He give me His Son out of heaven in the shape of a babe to be fostered by me.” Then came to her the angel who used to attend her. “’Tis time indeed,” quoth she to him. Whereupon he said to her: “What thou askest will be given to thee.” So Christ came to her in the form of a babe, and then she said: 1.150 1. Ísucán It is little Jesus alar lium im dísiurtán; who is nursed by me in my little cía beith cléirech co lín sét, hermitage. is bréc uile acht Ísucán. Though a priest have stores of wealth, it is all deceitful save Jesukin.

2. 2. Altram alar lium im thig, The nursing done by me in my house ní altram nach dóerathaig — is no nursing of an unfree tenant: Ísu co feraib nime, Jesus with Heaven’s inhabitants is frim chride cech n-óenadaig. against my heart every night.

3. 3. Ísucán óc mo bithmaith: Little youthful Jesus, intent on my ernaid, ocus ní maithmech. lasting benefit, In Rí con-ic na uili grants and remits not cen a guidi bid aithrech. – the King who controls all things – failure to make supplication to Him will bring regrets.

4. 4. Ísu úasal ainglide, Noble, angelic Jesus noco cléirech dergnaide, No ignoble cleric he alar lium im dísirtán, whom I have in fosterage in my little Ísu mac na Ebraide. hermitage – Jesus, son of the Hebrew woman.

5. 5. Maic na ruirech, maic na ríg, Though princes’ and kings’ sons im thír cía do-ísatán, come into my country – ní úaidib saílim sochor: not from them do I expect a sound is tochu lium Ísucán contract; I set higher hopes on little Jesus better.

149 The annals do not record any woman leading the community after Íte’s death. 150 Translated following Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 26-29 and E. G. Quin, “The Early Irish poem Ísucán”: 43- 50 for reasons that will be clear below. The poem is dated c.900, about a century after Félire Oengusso (Murphy, 183). 73

6. 6. Canaid cóir, a ingena, Sing a fitting harmony, maidens, d' fir dliges bar císucán; to the legal recipient of your atá 'na phurt túasucán tribute-ling. cía beith im ucht Ísucán. Little Jesus is in his mansion above-ling, though he be in my bosom.

The gloss expands upon the first line of the quatrain on Íte. This line tells us that not only was

Íte afflicted by disease, but that she encouraged her disease, which, together with fasting, formed part of her ascetic life. According to the story, her illness took a repugnant form – an enormous stag-beetle that visited her frequently, sucking at her side (presumably her breast) and eventually destroying it. The nuns of Íte’s community are understandably alarmed by the stag-beetle and its behaviour, and kill it. The saint’s reaction to their good intentions is surprising. Rather than thanking the women, St. Íte punishes them, excluding women from ever holding her station. At the same time, the saint reveals that she, like Marbán, has a subjective experience of the world that is radically different from theirs. Where the nuns saw an obscenely large insect threatening their abbess’s life, the saint saw her foster-child, whom she lovingly nourished with her own body. The only fit replacement for the stag-beetle, she declares, is Christ himself, in no other form than a baby, whom she will nurse. There is much to unpack in the prose before turning to the poem; the chief question is how Íte’s nursing of the deadly beetle is a representation of an ideal maternal, Christian subjectivity.

Íte’s story clearly seeks a visceral response from its audience. The reader sympathizes with the nuns: their instinct to destroy the giant stag-beetle is relatable – the creature provokes our revulsion and, seeing it harm another person, stokes our fear for them and for ourselves. We reject it utterly, or as Julia Kristeva would put it, we abject it.

According to Kristeva’s model of signification, things that horrify or disgust us play an important role in the constitution of the self. Abject things, such as excrement, spoiled food, or a 74

corpse, prompt feelings of denial or rejection in us because they disturb “identity, system, order”

– that is, they threaten the integrity of our selfhood by suggesting the end of the self as a discrete person, the dissolution of our self as an individual; and so we abject them.151 Doing so reinforces the integrity of our selfhood. Understanding this, we can also understand the behaviour of the nuns – and the sympathy we feel for their reaction – as abjection of a creature that threatened their selfhood by rousing within them fears of “nonbeing.”

Íte understands the abject quite differently. Rather than viewing the stag-beetle as a threat, Íte sees it as key to signifying herself within God’s order. For like Marbán, the saint understands anything that brings her closer to death as something to be embraced, because it brings her nearer to fulfilling God’s narrative of death and resurrection. For the nuns, the semiotic rallies itself in opposition to the abject, causing instinctive rejection of it. But Íte, like Marbán, has brought her bodily desires into accord with the Christian symbolic: embracing the abject is a fulfillment of her desire to attain complete signification of her self in God’s order. The sin the nuns committed was failing to understand the function of the beetle in Íte’s spiritual life and to recognize it as a right and proper part of the ordered world, thus showing themselves unworthy to be her successors. When Íte calls on God to send her the infant Jesus to nurse at her breast, she explicitly links the role of the beetle in her spiritual life to Christ’s central role in the signification of Christians. The scene also demonstrates the belief that Christ is immanent in all created things, regardless of how good or bad we perceive those things to be, by equating the beetle with Christ in her petition to have Christ as an infant replace her lost “fosterling.” One goal, then, of the glossator is to attempt the same thing the composer of the dialogue between

151 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. 75

Marbán and Gúaire achieved: to transmute the fearful, abject aspects of the human condition into the very means of salvation.

Another goal is the explication of a lesson about women’s spirituality. Íte’s happiness as foster-mother is another aspect of her subjectivity that recalls the happiness that Marbán found by turning his back on the world. By rejecting the world and its heroic ethos, and recognizing the Word in all things, Marbán was able to enjoy the same social pleasures as his brother, a king.

Likewise, Íte can reject marriage and biological motherhood, but still experience the culturally vaunted joys of motherhood by embracing the life of a religious virgin. Íte’s nursing of the beetle/baby Jesus allows her to take on a particularly Marian position – by seeing the beetle as the immanent Christ, she sublimates her presumed maternal desires to the Christian order, just as

Mary nursed and served her son. Doing so, she demonstrates metaphorically how religious women can achieve a maternal identity through spiritually nourishing their charges.152 Part of that identity is established in the descriptions of her legacy in the Lives of her foster-sons, while in this gloss, Íte’s abjectionable nursing arises as a theme through which the glossator can construct and explore a subjectivity both Christ-like and Marian.

Íte’s poem emphasizes her Marian and Christ-like subjectivity in several ways. The poem’s straightforward narrative of the nun taking Jesus into her house and providing him unconditional love and care obviously demonstrates her maternity. But the diction the poet employs, much of which is drawn from legal terminology, is quite unusual for such a “feminine” or domestic episode, being rather the domain of traditionally masculine spaces. E. G. Quin, who has produced an exhaustive treatment of each of the dozen or so legal metaphors at play in the poem,153 reveals a text whose complications are often obscured by translations that may be

152 Lerner, “Virgins and Mothers,” 165-166. 153 E. G. Quin, “The Early Irish poem Ísucán,” 39-52. 76

“feminizing” Íte’s words. It is understandably odd for a nun to be speaking in legal metaphors in what is essentially a lullaby, and Quin makes no attempt to assess the poem as a whole in light of their presence. I would suggest that Íte is using legal language to assert a spiritual independence that is monastic in character. Using law terminology, she attacks as unreliable the secular wealth of royalty and clerics. A wealthy cleric has made a poor investment if he has not also invested in

Jesus (1cd). Kings and princes can make their offers, but no contract is good save the one made with Jesus (5). The only safe investment, ladies (she says), is in Jesus – be sure to pay your

(spiritual) taxes to him (3, 6). By speaking this traditionally masculine, educated language of conviction – the language of the Irish, Christian symbolic order – we are shown another dimension of Íte’s Christ-like subjectivity. She demonstrates a confidence in her faith that recalls Brigit’s and Marbán’s own conviction, rooted in an obedient, trusting, monastic subjectivity.

If the symbolic mode is best represented in the poem’s metaphor of the legal argument, the semiotic – here representing the maternal drive of an ideal female Christian subjectivity – is present in several subtleties of sound and rhythm. The poem’s metre, for example, is irregular.

All lines but the first contain seven syllables, but the finer metrical requirements of end- and internal-rhyme and line-ending stress are haphazardly applied. Given the poet’s deliberate deployment of diction, I suggest the metrical unevenness is intentional, and meant to reflect a homey simplicity, as opposed to a professional rigidity, appropriate to a lullaby. Further emphasizing the lullaby’s cozy tone, in spite of the legal metaphors, is the poet’s use of diminutives. Of the eight times Íte speaks Jesus’s name, the poet appends the diminutive ending

“-(c)án” to it five times, the effect being to humanize and infantilize Christ. Also noteworthy is that Christ is never called Christ, but Jesus, which emphasizes his humanity and highlights Íte’s maternal relationship to him. We can also see an attitude of maternal doting in the loading up of

adjectives in 3a, where Íte addresses Jesus as Ísucán óc (“little young Jesus”); and 4a Ísu úasal ainglide (Jesus noble, angelic). Toward the end of the poem, the poet makes use of diminutives in sometimes strange ways as well. Íte twice refers to her home as dísertán “little hermitage”

(1b, 4c), which is straightforward enough. But in the last quatrain, the poets adds –(c)án to the last word of lines 6bcd: Ísucán in d, and císucán and túascán in 6b and c, respectively. These last two are nonsensical. The first word means “tribute,” the second is the preposition túas

“above.” “Little tribute” or “tribute-ling,” as I have unsatisfactorily rendered it, makes little sense, unless we are to understand the nuns to whom Íte speaks would pay a small (metaphorical) tribute, or perhaps a “cute” tribute to Jesus. A diminutive form of “above” makes even less sense. In addition, the final rhyming position of each of these words in the last three lines of the poem is very unusual in Irish verse. This suggests to me that the poet is softening or subverting the poem’s legal tone in order to emphasize the feeling of a lullaby. By deploying these simple nonsense rhymes, the poet produces sounds soothing to an infant, but with semantic content that is strikingly dichotomous, a feature common to many lullabies.154

The poem’s and prose narrative’s construction of Íte’s subjectivity is multivalent. The saint shows her spiritual independence in her rejection of clerical and secular authority, confident in the rightness of all she does because she has devoted herself completely to Jesus. Her confidence is a reflection of her complete conviction that so long as she acts with Christ in mind, she can only do his will. That it is pleasing to her, even when it is killing her, is a reflection of the joy inherent in the saintly achievement of perfect accord between personal desire and the demands of the symbolic order: her will is God’s will. The maternal aspects of her subjectivity are evidence of that joy. As a female saint, by remaining a virgin and putting herself completely in God’s

154 Lullabies regularly offer contradictory content and tone, such as babies falling from trees (“Rock-a-bye, Baby”), infants being called black-eyed pigs and told to fall into a deep pit of ghosts (“Sofðu nú svínið þitt‘). 78

hands, she is able to perceive her deadly circumstances as the fulfilment of feminine Christian identity, becoming a mother to God himself.

Patrick – Invoking the Word

The composers of Marbán’s and Íte’s brief prosimetric accounts employ subtle strategies of perception to construct Christ-like subjectivities of accord for their speaking-subjects. In this last section I consider how prayer – specifically a lorica or breastplate poem placed in the mouth of

St. Patrick – can likewise be a means of adopting the immanent subjectivity of Christ.

In his own writings, and in the hagiographical tradition that developed after his life, Patrick is portrayed as a brave missionary, doggedly fighting the pagan political and spiritual force of

Ireland in an effort to bring its people to the Christian faith.155 The various Lives of Patrick provide many episodes, inspired by folktales and biblical confrontations, in which the saint pits his faith against that of his pagan adversaries. Patrick’s faith is validated by God’s intercessions on his behalf, which keep him and his followers safe, and punish those who would interfere with his holy work. As with Brigit and the biblical models, such as Moses, frequently cited for

Patrick, the hagiography is clear that Patrick’s power is not personal, but is granted him through his willing participation in God’s plans. By submitting to God’s will and working to maintain his order, Patrick is able to invoke divine power to perform his work.

155 Patrick was most likely, in fact, sent to Ireland to minister as a bishop to a Christian community already established there, not as a missionary. That role he seems to have taken upon himself. See Patrick’s Confessio in A. B. E. Hood, ed. and trans., St. Patrick: His Writing and Muirchu’s Life (London: Phillimore, 1978), 27 §26, 46 §26. 79

In these hagiographies, Patrick speaks seldom and rarely in first-person verse, so we have only a few examples of poetry exploring the saint’s subjectivity. One is the extended frame narrative Acallam na Senórach (“Colloquy of the Ancient Ones”). The other example occurs in a brief prosimetrum preserved in the eleventh-century Liber Hymnorum. The passage introduces a verse prayer attributed to Patrick, who spoke it as a prayer of protection against an ambush set by the pagan King of Ireland, Loegaire. Whoever speaks the poem, the text tells us, will likewise be protected:156

T. Patraicc dorone in nimmunsa. I naimseir Loegaire meic Néil dorigned. Fád a dénma immorro dia diden cona manchaib ar náimdib in báis robátar i netarnid arna cleirchib. Ocus is luirech hirse inso fri himdegail cuirp ⁊ anma ar demnaib ⁊ dúinib ⁊ dualchib. Cech duine nosgéba cech dia co ninnithem léir i nDia, ní thairisfet demna fria gnúis, bid dítin dó ar cech neim ⁊ ḟormat, bid co[e]mna dó fri dianbas, bid lúrech dia anmain iarna étsecht. Patraicc rochan so intan dorata na etarnaidi ara chinn ó Loegaire, na digsed do silad chreitme co Temraig; conid annsin atchessa fiad lucht na netarnade comtis aige alta ⁊ iarróe ina ndiaid .i. Benen; ⁊ fáeth fiada a hainm.157 [Patrick made this hymn; it was composed in the time of Loegaire son of Níall. It was composed in order to protect him and his monks from deadly enemies, who were lying in wait for the clerics. And it is a breastplate (lorica) of faith, to protect body and soul against demons and men and vices. If anyone recites it every day, with his mind fixed wholly upon God, demons will not stand against him, it will protect him against every poison and jealousy, it will guard him against sudden death, it will be a breastplate for his soul after death. Patrick recited it when Loegaire had set an ambush for him, lest he come to Tara to spread the Faith, so that it seemed to those who lay in wait that they were wild deer, with a fawn following them (that was Benén). And its name is Fáeth Fiada (“the Deer’s Cry”).158

156 The poem appears at the end of the Early Modern copy of the ninth-century Bethu Phátraic (i.e., the Vita Tripartita Sancti Patricii) in MS Egerton 93, and is also interpolated into the copy of Bethu Phátraic found in MS Rawlinson B 512. 157 Whitley Stokes and John Strachan, eds. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia Prose, and Verse, Vol. II. Non-Biblical Glosses and Scholia; Old Irish Prose; Names of Persons and Places; Inscriptions; Verse; Indexes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 354. 158 John Carey, King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 130, n. 10. Carey notes that Faíd Fiada appears to be a reinterpretation of the term féth fia, which appears in Middle Irish and subsequent sources, and indicates a spell of invisibility.

This episode developed out of a brief account from Muirchú’s seventh-century life of Patrick;159 the prose introduction dates to the same period as the manuscript (ninth century), while the Fáeth

Fiada has been dated to the eighth century and was likely composed independently of the story.160 Before considering the poem, a brief overview of the genre’s features would be helpful in light of its unique function as a speech-act of both invocation and self-fashioning.

The “breastplate” poem or lorica is a genre native to Ireland, composed in either verse or rhythmic prose, and typically in Irish;161 the earliest surviving example was composed by the monastic scholar Laidcenn some time before his death in 661.162 The genre draws its main conceit – that speaking it establishes a protective breastplate around the speaker – from the

Pauline metaphor of the lorica fidei (“breastplate of faith”) and the lorica iustitiae (“breastplate of justice”).163 Although loricae may vary significantly from one to another, they share some consistent features: they invoke the Trinity, the various orders of heaven and nature, and they enumerate the parts of the body that are to be protected. A consistent aim of the loricae is to closely bind the speaker and God together; lorica-poets often achieve this by employing repeated prepositional constructions, which also serve to reinforce the image of the breastplate.164

Patrick’s lorica, the Fáeth Fiada or “Deer’s Cry,” is the best example of the genre, and makes use of all these characteristics. As I argue below, the rhetorical features of the lorica may be understood as reflecting the two modes important to the constitution of an ideal Christian self –

159 Carey, King of Mysteries, 135. For text and translation see A. B. E. Hood, ed. and trans., St. Patrick: His Writing and Muirchu’s Life (London: Phillimore, 1978). 160 D. A. Binchy, “Varia. III,” Ériu 20 (1966), 234-237. 161 Gearóid Mac Eoin, “Invocation of the Forces of Nature in Loricae,” Studia Hibernica 2 (1962): 212. 162 The poem is also known incorrectly as the Lorica of Gildas, based on an ascription found in one later manuscript witness. See Michael Herren, “The Authorship, Date of Composition and Provenance of the So-Called Lorica Gildae,” Ériu 24 (1973): 35-51, and Herren’s Hisperica Famina II: Related Poems (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 13, 42-45. 163 1 Thes. 5.8; Eph. 6.14. 164 Jennifer Reid, “The Lorica of Laidcenn: The Biblical Connections,” in The Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002): 141. 81

the Christian symbolic, here articulated as Christian sacred narrative, which encompasses the

Trinity and the various tiers of the natural and divine world; and the semiotic, which is represented here as the subject’s desire to share in the immanence of the Word, with the aim of creating a subjectivity completely encased, and so protected, within the perfection of God’s order. This effort at signification also reflects the duality of the poem’s speech-act – at the same time Patrick invokes the Christian symbolic, which Christ embodies as the Word, he binds himself to it in attempt to share in Christ’s immanence.

1. 1. Atomriug165 indiu Today I gird myself niurt tréun: with a mighty power: togairm Trindóite, invocation of the Trinity, cretim Treodataid, belief in the Threeness, faísitin Oendatad, affirmation of the Oneness, i nDúlemon dáil. in the Creator’s presence.

2. 2. Atomriug indiu Today I gird myself niurt gene Críst cona bathius, with the power of Christ’s birth together with niurt a chrochtho cona adnacul, his baptism, niurt a essérgi cona fhresgabáil, with the power of his crucifixion together niurt a thoíniudo fri brithemnas mbrátho. with his burial, with the power of his resurrection together with his ascension, with the power of his descent to pronounce the judgment of Doomsday.

The poet begins the construction of his breastplate at the foundation of Christian belief – the

Trinity, its three-in-one nature, and its immanence. By affirming his belief in the immanent nature of the Trinity, he affirms the essential fact upon which the order of the world rests, as well as the foundation upon which the themes of the subsequent sections of the poem are built. In the

165 See Binchy, D. A. “Varia. III.” Ériu 20 (1966), 232-234 for a discussion of the translation of “atomriug.” Binchy derives the form from ad-rig “It binds, girds myself, buckles on…,” preferring this to another popular derivation from *ess-reg “It arises” on the grounds that, while each might be linguistically valid, the former makes better sense for a text is invoking the idea of a “breastplate” as protection from spiritual and physical threats. 82

second section, he invokes and binds to himself the Word, i.e., the narrative of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Again, doing so he affirms another essential aspect of Christian belief.

The sacred narrative, in quite a feat of compression, is invoked and bound to the speaking- subject, girded as protection, though not yet employed as such. Each step in that narrative is shown to be an inextricable part of God’s plan by the anaphora on niurt (“strength,” i.e., “by the power…”) at the beginning of each line, emphasizing again the power that lies in God’s order and in striving to signify oneself within it.

Having raised the power of the Trinity and the Word, the speaker then enumerates the hierarchy of those who perform God’s will, the enactors of the Word:

3. 3. Atomriug indiu Today I gird myself niurt gráid hiruphin, with the power of the order of the cherubim, i n-aurlataid aingel, with the obedience of angels, i frestul inna n-archaingel, with the ministry of the archangels, i freiscisin esséirgi with the expectation of resurrection ar chiunn fochraicce, for the sake of a reward, i n-ernaigthib uasalathrach, with the prayers of patriarchs, i tairchetlaib fáithe, with the predictions of prophets, i preceptaib apstal, with the precepts of apostles, i n-iresaib faísmedach, with the faith of confessors, i n-enccai noebingen, with the innocence of holy virgins, i ngnímaib fer firén. with the deeds of righteous men.

The poet’s list does not emphasize the power of the people enacting God’s will, but rather their actions, as with the saints, underscoring their obedience and ministry, prayers, faith, innocence, and so forth. The power with which the speaker seeks to strengthen his own faith is the willing participation of each person according to his or her ability (or station) in the Word. In this way, the poet positions himself within that symbolic order.

The poet’s bodily drives are also in play here, complementing his words, tools of the symbolic, and demonstrating the accord between the two as he constructs his self within

(literally) the power of the immanent Word. The use of the word niurt in the second line links the stanza linguistically and thematically back to the previous sections, while the repetition in subsequent lines of the preposition “i” (“with”) followed by a genitive construction provides an emotional energy that is simply executed but complex in content. The repetition reflects urgency in the speaker’s desire to invoke the power of the Word, as well as enthusiasm for bringing his desirous self closer to the Christian symbolic order. The repetition also has an accretive power that is enhanced by the rushing rhythm of each line, especially those that begin with the preposition. The weak beat of the i followed by the stressed first syllable of the prepositional object creates an anticipatory upbeat, as in, for example 3c: x / xx / x and 3d x / x xx / xx.

The sense, emotional and logical, is that the detailed litany of the Christian hierarchy is both precise and plentiful. Every aspect of God’s order is exact, and its totality is abundant and comprehensive, but never superfluous. Thus feeling and meaning come together to reflect the reaching of the semiotic toward a complete signification in the brimming totality of the symbolic/Word.

This energizing patterning continues in the next section, where the poet shifts his catholic litany to physical aspects of the world:

4. 4. Atomriug indiu Today I gird myself niurt nime, with the strength of heaven, soilse gréne, light of the sun, étroichtai éscai, brightness of the moon, áni thened, brilliance of fire, déni lóchet, vehemence of lightning, luaithi gaíthe, swiftness of wind, fudomnai mara, depth of sea, tairismigi thalman, firmness of earth, cobsaidi ailech. stability of rock.

Where the previous section invoked the perfect order of the metaphysical and social hierarchies of Christendom, this section invokes the perfect order of the natural world, no less a part of 84

God’s ordered creation. It repeats the parallel genitive construction noted above, placing emphasis on fierce and powerful aspects of the natural world, rather than their gentler aspects, in keeping with the theme of strength (niurt).166 The persistent rhythm of the stressed initial syllables in short paired bursts is not gentle, and the short duration of each line suggests less an exuberant procession of images, as above, than an aural evocation of a deep strength the speaker perceives in nature itself. The hard fierceness of the language reveals a coming together of semiotic and symbolic as the speaker-subject mirrors in his enumeration of the elements the strength he wishes to be imbued with.

Having called up the Trinity, and in turn, the narrative of salvation, the good actions of those who enact God’s order, and that order as it is embodied by nature as the substance of his breastplate, the speaker turns to God, addressing him as a personal intercessor:

5. 5. Atomriug indiu Today I gird myself niurt Dé dom luamairecht. with the strength of God to steer me. Cumachtae nDé dom chumgabáil, The might of God to exalt me, ciall Dé dom imthús, the mind of God to lead me, rosc nDé dom remcisiu, the eye of God to watch over me, cluas Dé dom étsecht, the ear of God to hear me, briathar Dé dom erlabrai, the word of God to speak to me, lám Dé dom imdegail, the hand of God to defend me, intech Dé dom remthechtas, the path of God to go before me, sciath Dé dom imdítin, the shield of God to guard me, sochraite Dé dom anacul, the help of God to protect me, ar intledaib demnae, from the snare of demons, ar aslagib dualche, from the temptations of vices, ar for-imthechtaib aicnid, from the drives of nature, ar cech duine mídúthrastar dam, from everyone who wishes me ill, i céin ocus i n-ocus, far and near, i n-uathud ocus i sochaidi. among few and among many.

166 The calling up of nature in this section may also have drawn upon an earlier legal tradition that called upon nature to enforce the conditions of an oath. The early Irish sagas relate oaths being made where the elements are called upon to guarantee they are kept, and nature is often seen to reflect the quality of kings. See Gearóid Mac Eoin, “Invocation of the Forces of Nature in Loricae,” Studia Hibernica 2 (1962), 217; and Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), 18, 198. 85

It is significant that the first aspect of God’s power the poet invokes is his strength “to steer me”

(dom luamairecht), a term usually used to describe piloting or navigating a ship. The poet makes of himself a tool for God’s use, again signalling his willing participation in shaping God’s order.

He does not act except as a conduit for God’s will, as did the actors of section three above.

God’s might can make him stronger and protect him, but only when the poet has committed himself to God’s direction.

Also of note is that the relationship between the speaker and God here is not immanent – the powers of God are represented as intercessory, coming from outside the speaker rather than something with which has been imbued within him. This is reflected in the prayer’s tempo, which slows down significantly, moving from the insistent two-stress pulse of the preceding sections to more complex variations of three-stress pattern (e.g., 5c: / x x / x / x x or 5d: / / x / x) resulting in a more deliberate pacing, perhaps to emphasize the awesomeness of God’s personal attention upon the individual, temporarily slowing the rush of semiotic energies infusing the poem, a reflection of the poet’s desire to subject himself to God’s symbolic order.

The tempo immediately picks up again in the last six lines of the same section as the poet switches from gathering the power of God’s intercession to placing it between himself and the powers of evil, which threaten God’s order. He returns to the repetition of prepositions at the beginning of each line (ar – “from, before, against”) as well as the genitive constructions and double-stress pulse (e.g., 5l: x / x x / x and 5m: x / x x / x). In the last two lines, the pulse doubles with a repetition of the preposition i in each line and verbal repetition of the word ocus, a brief brilliance of consonance and assonance and alliteration, demonstrating again the alliance of the poet’s semiotic drives with the semantic power (or Word power) of the symbolic to construct the breastplate of God’s order as protection against the powers that would seek to turn him away

from the order he seeks to preserve. His signification as a perfect Christian subject, however, is as yet unrealized.

The sixth section marshals all the powers thus far enumerated, and places them between the speaker and the powers of disorder:

6. 6. Tociuriur etrum indiu inna uili nert-so Today I interpose all these powers between fri cech nert n-amnas n-étrocar fristaí myself dom churp ocus dom anmain, and every harsh pitiless power which may fri tinchetla saíbfháithe, come against my body and my soul, fri dubrechtu gentliuchtae, against the predictions of false prophets, fri saíbrechtu heretecdae, against the black laws of paganism, fri imchellacht n-ídlachtae, against the crooked laws of heretics, fri brichtu ban ocus gobann ocus druad, against the encirclement of idolatry, fri cech fiss arachuille corp ocus anmain against the spells of women and smiths and duini. druids, against every knowledge which harms a person’s body and soul.

Having created his breastplate, the poet interrupts the litany-like pattern of the previous sections by beginning the first line not with the straightforward statement Atomriug indiu (“I gird myself”) but a longer, prose-like statement of intention, its difference renewing our attention.

The poet is no longer building power, but, in a thematic reversal of section three, with its invocation of the actions of those committed to God’s order, he positions it against the disordering powers of heretics, idolaters, witches, druids, and so forth, whom he enumerates with the energized rhythms of the earlier sections, enthusiastically opposing those who, in terms of the

Fall, allow their bodily tendency toward sin to disrupt the Christian symbolic.

All the truths of Christian order, invoked through speech infused with faith, embody the idealized selfhood the poet desires for himself, a subjectivity attuned to God’s order. Yet, as noted above, a distance remains between himself and God the intercessor; and the order of the natural world and the Christian hierarchy is about him, but not part of him. It is in the

penultimate section that the poet signifies himself as fully as he can in the Christian symbolic by invoking Christ the immanent.

7. 7. Críst dom imdegail indiu Christ protect me today ar neim, ar loscud, ar bádud, ar guin, against poison, against burning, against condom-thair ilar fochraicce. drowning, against wounding, Críst limm, Críst reum, Críst im degaid, that many rewards may come to me. Críst indium, Críst ísum, Críst uasum, Christ be with me, Christ before me, Críst desum, Críst tuathum, Christ behind me, Críst i llius, Críst is sius, Críst i n-erus, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ Críst i cridiu cech duini immumrorda, above me, Críst i ngin cech oín rodom-labrathar, Christ to my right, Christ to my left, Críst i cech rusc nodom-dercathar, Christ where I lie down, Christ where I sit, Críst i cech cluais rodom-chloathar. Christ where I stand, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me, Christ in the eye which looks on me, Christ in every ear which hears me.

The poet does not bind Christ to himself as before, because Christ is not part of the breastplate he constructed, to be placed outside himself – his relationship with Christ is different. Instead, the poet seizes on the idea of the Incarnation and speaks it into reality, perceiving Christ within and about himself, and in every place and person he might encounter. The poet’s body becomes a vehicle for Christ’s incarnation, the Word enfleshed in his body, mind, and spirit, as well as in the Other about him. The metre continues to reflect the accord between the poet’s conscious and subconscious desires. In the symbolic mode, the poet runs the gamut of prepositions in his attempt to encompass Christ’s immanence in language. In the semiotic mode, the poet’s emotional energies are present in the persistent pulse of Críst – Críst – Críst, a subconscious prayer for oneness in accord with the semantic intent of his language.

The final section repeats the first section verbatim, bookending the poem with the poet’s understanding of the foundational position of the Trinity to the ordered world. The poem then ends with a brief tag or coda in Latin.

Domini est salus, Salvation is of the Lord, Domini est salus, salvation is of the Lord, Christi est salus; salvation is of Christ; Salus tua, Domine, sit semper may your salvation, Lord, be always with us. nobiscum.

The stanza nicely sums up the spirit of the foregoing: God and Christ are the means to salvation, and Christ’s salvation is present always and everywhere. Through his poetic speech-act, the poet seeks not just to adjust his perspective to that of Marbán or Íte, seeing salvation, the Word, in all things, but to be an incarnation of the Word himself, living it always and everywhere he goes.

The poet’s switch to Latin serves several rhetorical functions. The linguistic shift signals that the heady, descriptive invocation is at an end, while the tag’s simple, repetitive, and prayerful diction recalls the calm authority of Christian benediction. The words do not seek to explicitly invoke anything, but simply state the fact of Christian belief that salvation may only be achieved through Christ and God.167

As a poetic prayer to be spoken by a devout Christian, the Fáeth Fiada strengthens Christian subjectivity in the face of adversity. In many ways, the poem resembles a confessio or credo, a statement of key beliefs, which attempts to encapsulate in language the essentials of the ordered universe, the Word. But as a lorica, the logic of the credo is extended and intensified with

167 Many of the surviving Continental Celtic curses and other loricae share rhetorical features with the Fáeth Fiada, including a tendency to blend vernacular and Latin words. In those cases, however, the blending tends to occur throughout the verse (perhaps as a demonstration of magical authority or an effort to cover all the speaker’s semantic bases) rather than as a summary tag at the end. For an overview of the relationship between this poem and other Celtic curses and charms, see Bernard Mees, Celtic Curses (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2009); for a sturdy criticism of Mees’s methodology and analysis so far as it relates to identifying a continuous tradition between Continental and Insular Celtic, see also Jennifer Reid’s review in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111:2 (2012): 224-226. 89

rhetorical devices designed to infuse its meaning with the emotional drives of the semiotic, creating a heightened confession of faith that requires outlet, which in the Fáeth Fiada occurs at the moment when the speaker dons his belief as armour (so to speak) against all harm. In contrast to the “hermit” poems’ brief and ultimately false worlds, which are predicated on the desire for accord with Christ, Patrick’s lorica is instead built on the cosmic totality of Christ himself. Invoking that ordered totality, the speaking-subject places himself at its centre, becoming its agent.

For an example of how the lorica was imagined to work in practice, we must return to its prose preface, which indicates that the Fáeth Fiada was at some point attached to an episode derived from Muirchú’s seventh-century life of Patrick.168 In that story, Patrick angers Loegaire, the king of Tara, and his people when he kills one of the king’s disrespectful wizards. Patrick curses the king, calling down great darkness in which the king’s men all turn on one another, killing most of the king’s entourage. Loegaire’s wife begs the saint for forgiveness, and the king pretends to submit to Patrick. Loegaire later tries again to kill Patrick and his followers, but the saint, knowing the king’s intentions, blesses his companions, eight men and a serving boy.

(Muirchú’s Life does not give the blessing, but the eleventh-century preface above says it was the Fáeth Fiada.) As Patrick and his monks approach the king, they disappear from Loegaire’s sight; all he sees are eight deer and a faun making their way to the wilds. Patrick survives to fulfill his role in God’s plan. What in the hands of the usual Christian is a plea for salvation becomes, in the hands of a saint, a prayer of real, transforming power. Patrick is enabled to disappear into nature, to blend in perfectly with the natural because those who threaten him are outside the ordered world and may thus be fooled.

168 Carey, King of Mysteries, 135; for the text see A. B. E. Hood, ed. and trans., St. Patrick: His Writing and Muirchu’s Life, 69-70, §18. 90

The Fáeth Fíada is a powerful tool of signification in any Christian’s mouth. The poem as a speech-act invokes the Christian sacred narrative and draws power out of its order, its rightness, while emphasizing the role of Christ’s immanence within that order. At the same times, it draws the emotional drives of its speaker into the detailed invocation of the symbolic, infusing the latter with the semiotic forces of the speaking-subject, bridging, as Christ does, the human and the divine.

Conclusion

The Irish religious viewed the ascetic life as the means by which they could bring their inherently sinful selves into accord with God’s ordered world, achieving salvation. Monastic poets engaged with this idea, often constructing speaking-subjects through which they might explore how an ideal Christian subjectivity of accord might be articulated. In a number of the so-called hermit poems, poets acknowledged the difficulty of achieving accord in a “real-world” situation by constructing idealized ascetic spaces elsewhere where they imagined they might achieve it easily. In these idealized spaces, where human intervention is minimal, the ordered world would provide all they need, physically and psychologically. Ultimately, however, the innately sinful subject-position of the fantasizing speaker asserts itself, and the enterprise fails.

In the shorter monastic poetry, the speaking-subjects briefly achieve accord; they use similar rhetoric of nature and asceticism to capture a moment, always brief, of communing with God’s ordered world. In the final group of poems, ideal Christian subjectivities are articulated through the mouths of holy men and women, who, through their willing obedience to God, possess subjectivities closest to that of Christ. Their sublimation of body and will – the semiotic aspect of their selfhood – to God’s will – the Christian symbolic – is so complete that they become powerful agents of God within the ordered world.

The saints’ stories offer several rhetorical strategies for representing their miraculous, permanent accord. Brigit’s poem demonstrates an easy friendship with Christ, reflecting the gladness with which she does God’s will and the power her gladness gives her over the world.

Moling is shown to derive his great authority over demonic force through his faith, enacted through complete obedience. Marbán’s and Íte’s accord is shown quite differently. Where

Brigit and Moling act as agents of order, changing the world to bring it in accord with that order,

Marbán and Íte change their perception. If everything is part of God’s plan, and if one is to live in harmony with that plan, then what seems harmful must be good. Marbán’s poetry revels in descriptions of his wilderness dwelling, his words infused with semiotic forces expressed in ecstatic rhythms and plays of alliteration and consonance. In Íte’s story, what seems abject is revealed to be an integral part of the saint’s Christian, maternal subjectivity, further enhanced by her authoritative lullaby. Finally, Patrick’s lorica encapsulates all of Christian order in its litany- like recitation of the hierarchies of the creation as a power to be wielded by any believing

Christian against all forces that seek to disrupt God’s works.

Chapter 2 Consolation

In the first chapter, I discussed poetry that explored an ideal Christian subjectivity in which the inherently sinful nature of the body had been successfully suppressed by or sublimated to

God’s ordered world. The tool essential for these perfected speaking-subjects to achieve accord was perception, with which a saint or hermit could, for example, transform abject experiences into ones that reaffirmed their signification within the Christian symbolic, rather than alienate them from it. Those speaking-subjects inhabited subject-positions that no mere human could ever hope to achieve; thus they were exemplary, yet unachievable, models of sanctity. The poems I discuss in this chapter are more practical in that they were composed with the goal of helping their audiences. The speaking-subjects of this these poems are offered as instructive models whose common purpose is to provide consolation to their audiences.

Loss, and the alienation of selfhood it causes, are what create the need for consolation. In

North Atlantic verse, the commonest losses are of social status or loved ones, which lead to a radical displacement of the subject from the conditions that formed his or her subjectivity, as I discussed briefly in Chapter 1. To find one’s subject-position significantly altered, especially by conditions outside one’s control, is to be estranged from the self one wants to be. The speaking- subject of the Old English “Wanderer,” for example, a poem I discuss below, experiences loss through exile from his home, brothers-in-arms, and lord: everything essential to his identity as it is signified through the heroic symbolic order (i.e., the system of values and social relationships based on the heroic ethos). As an exile, he has no home, status, or protecting lord, and so he is

estranged from the subject-position he thinks of as his self. Because conditions prevent him from recovering his former subject-position, the framework through which he interprets his present exile-position must change instead. This is where poetic language steps in as a tool of self-fashioning. The holy speaking-subjects of Chapter 1 used language to represent the joyous union of semiotic and symbolic that characterized their subjectivity; they began and ended their poems already reconciled to the Christian order. Here, the speaking-subject uses verse to develop a new interpretive framework – a new perspective on the world and their place in it – that transforms their present, undesirable subject-position into something more tolerable. Thus, over the course of “The Wanderer,” the speaker abandons the heroic symbolic order, in which he is an estranged figure, for the Christian symbolic order. Shifting his self-interpretive framework from heroic to Christian, he is able to understand his suffering not as estrangement from the subject-position he desires, but as a step along a journey toward a better and permanent subject- position. He is thus consoled.

Consolation as I understand it here, then, is a therapeutic use of poetic language to develop alternative interpretations of a subject’s alienated state with the aim of ending their alienation.

Moreover, I argue that poems of consolation were not intended to represent the consolation of a speaking-subject only, but to offer that speaking-subject as a guide through the process of consolation for those who read or heard those works. How poets constructed their speech-acts to do so is the topic of this chapter. In the first part (“The Guiding Speech of “The Wanderer”), I argue that the poet of “The Wanderer” carefully constructs the poem’s speaking-subject not so much as a figure to be consoled, but as the audience’s guide to consolation. This poet carefully positions the speaker as both sympathetic exile and authoritative guide, drawing upon a variety of rhetorical registers to encourage a sequence of insights within his audience that lead to their eventual Christian consolation. In the second part (“Cultivating Columban Consolation”), I 94

consider how the early poets of the cult of the Irish saint Columba used their legendary patron to address monastic anxieties of identity that centred on the abandonment of family and traditional male social roles. In the final section (“Catharsis and Consolation in Egill Skallagrímsson’s

‘Sonatorrek’”), I explore the catharsis and consolation of Egill Skallagrímsson, the speaking- subject of the Old Norse poem “Sonatorrek.” Unlike the self-consciously audience-oriented

“Wanderer” and Columban poems, Egill is not at all concerned with an audience’s grief, but only his own. In his poem, we see clarified the potential power of self re-creation inherent in the construction of the poetic ego, and its usefulness as a tool for shifting the way one perceives the world and one’s position in it.

The Guiding Speech of the Wanderer

The Old English poem “The Wanderer” is among the most anthologized and discussed texts in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon verse; only Beowulf can boast a larger body of criticism. The elegy,169 as it is often called, deserves its reputation. Its speaking-subject, a man exiled from his home, friends, and lord, describes the exile-condition and expresses his emotions with a pathos that is affecting even to the modern reader, despite the distance of time and culture. On the scholarly side, over a hundred years of steady critical discussion on “The Wanderer” has

169 A term of convenience intended to capture the elegiac tone of this and other poems like it; the Old English “elegies” are not poems for the dead, nor are they composed in a particular metre, as we see with Classical verse. A broadly accepted definition of the genre is found in Stanley B. Greenfield, “The Old English Elegies,” in Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature, ed. E. G. Stanley (London: Nelson, 1966): 143: “a relatively short reflective or dramatic poem embodying a contrasting pattern of loss and consolation, ostensibly based upon a specific personal experience or observation, and expressing an attitude toward that experience.” For an overview of the literature and debate, see Anne L. Klinck’s chapter “The Nature of Elegy in Old English,” in her The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study, 2nd ed. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 221-252. More recent useful discussions of the genre include Paul Battles, “Toward a Theory of Old English Poetic Genres: Epic, Elegy, Wisdom Poetry, and the ‘Traditional Opening,’” Studies in Philology 111:1 (2014): 1-33; and Andy Orchard, “Not What It Was: The World of Old English Elegy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 101-117.

produced a number of editions and well over a hundred commentaries,170 inspired by, among other things, its poetic ambiguities of language and structure, which have led to various interpretations of the poem. We still are not sure, for example, just how many people are speaking in the poem; nor are we clear on the related issues of its structure or internal logic,171 or the reasoning behind its use of several different rhetorical registers and its intertextuality, and how these relate to the speaker’s consolation.172 My reading of the “The Wanderer” attempts to makes sense of these particular issues by taking the view that the varieties of rhetoric and the ambiguities of the poem’s speaking-voices are part of a strategy of consolation that involves a way of philosophical reasoning that embraces both logic and emotion as a means of achieving wisdom. First, however, I wish to place “The Wanderer” in its context and to consider the nature of its audience, whom I believe were intended to share in the “lyric” thinking of the speaking- subject.

“The Wanderer” in Context

170 For an exhaustive bibliography from 1930-2000, see Bernard Muir’s The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501. Vol. 2: Commentary (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, rev. 2nd ed. 2000; orig. pub. 1994), 729-799. 171 Stanley B. Greenfield, “The Wanderer: A Reconsideration of Theme and Structure,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 50 (1951): 15- 20; R. M. Lumiansky, “The Dramatic Structure of the Old English Wanderer,” Neophilologus 34 (1957): 104-12; John C. Pope, “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968): 533- 70; Ellen Spolsky, “The Semantic Structure of the Wanderer,” Journal of Literary Semantics 3 (1974): 101-19; Rolf Breuer, “Vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit: zur Structur des altenglischen ‘Wanderer,“’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974): 552-67; Gerald Richman, “Speaker and Speech Boundaries in The Wanderer,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 81 (1982): 469-79; William Alfred, “The Drama of The Wanderer” in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, eds. Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982): 31-44. 172 Carol Braun Pasternack, “Anonymous Polyphony and The Wanderer’s Textuality,” in The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 33-59, revised and reprinted from Anglo-Saxon England 20 (1991): 99-122; Paul De Lacy, “Thematic and Structural Affinities: The Wanderer and Ecclesiastes,” Neophilologus 82:1 (1998): 125-137; Andy Orchard, “Re-Reading The Wanderer: The Value of Cross-References,” in Via crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross, eds. James E. Hall, Thomas N. Hall, Thomas D. Hill (Morgantown, WV: University of West Virginia, 2002): 1-26.

“The Wanderer” is a poem of 115 lines preserved only in the Exeter Book,173 a manuscript compilation of some 130 Old English poems (and one Latin poem), written in one hand, and produced in the latter half of the tenth century in a monastic context.174 The Exeter Book poems themselves are assumed to predate the manuscript’s production by no more than a century or so.175 Of the Old English verse miscellanies, the Exeter Book’s poetry is the most diverse; it includes long religious narrative poems (e.g., “Christ I, II, III,” “Guthlac,” “Juliana”), shorter wisdom poems that catalogue secular and religious values (e.g., “The Gifts of Men,” “Precepts,”

“Maxims I”), allegorical verse on fantastic beasts (e.g., “The Phoenix,” “The Whale”), a great number of verse riddles, and the so-called elegies (e.g., “The Wanderer, “The Seafarer, “The

Wife’s Lament”).

Scholars have made many attempts to find an organizing motive behind the selection and arrangement of the Exeter Book poems. The most detailed analysis of the production and organization of the Book has been performed by Patrick W. Connor, who contextualizes the

Book within the Benedictine reforms of the late tenth century. The reforms were part of a revival of contemplative monastic life that saw the staffing of monastic institutions such as

173 Properly, Exeter, Cathedral Library MS 5301. See Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), no. 257. The Exeter Book is one of four Old English manuscripts preserving the bulk of Old English verse. The other poetic miscellanies are the Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11), the Vercelli Book (Vercelli, Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII); and British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, alternatively known as the Nowell Codex, Cotton Manuscript, or “Beowulf” Manuscript. 174 Bernard Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501. Vol. 1: Texts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, rev. 2nd ed. 2000; orig. pub. 1994), 1-3. Exactly which monastic context has long been a question for debate. Muir finds for either Crediton or Exeter itself (3), while Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993), 27-32, 94, places its production in Exeter; Richard Gameson, “The Origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry,” Anglo- Saxon England 25 (1996): 135-185, challenges Conner, arguing for a Glastonbury or Crediton provenance; and most recently, Robert M. Butler, “Glastonbury and the Early History of the Exeter Book,” in Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context, ed. Joyce Tally Lionarons (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2004): 173-215, has placed the Book’s origins at Glastonbury. 175 Norman F. Blake, “The Dating of Old English Poetry,” in An English Miscellany: Presented to W. S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1977): 14-27; Bernard Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology, 40-41.

Exeter shift from the hands of secular clerics to devout monks.176 Based on codicological and palaeographical examination, Connor identifies three separate “booklets” within the Exeter Book that range chronologically from before to after the Benedictine reforms.177 He sees the shift toward more strictly religious interests reflected in the contents of each booklet. The third and first booklets, for example, were copied during and after the revival, respectively, and demonstrate a more “monastic” attitude in their style and spirituality in that they are the work “of intellectuals which demand the critical skills of an audience educated in Christian Latin texts;”178 the poems in these booklets are thus more limited in their source material – largely monastic sources such as learned homilies and liturgical texts. The second booklet, which includes “The

Wanderer,” predates the reforms. The verse here is as learned as that of the later booklets, and it is not limited by the reform’s spiritual dictates, which can be seen especially in the case of the elegies, whose appeal would likely be to a more secular clerical audience than a strictly religious one. This flexibility is evident in the “The Wanderer’s” more varied religious and secular themes, as we will see below.

Audience

Determining for whom Old English poetry was intended is always a thorny issue; the provenance of most of the Exeter Book poems, including “The Wanderer,” is unknown and unknowable. We can, however, make some informed suggestions as to whom the producers of the Exeter Book had in mind when they (or he) selected which texts to include in the codex. Although the miscellany is eclectic in subject and form, a common thread apparent in all of them is that they

176 Antonia Grandsen, “Traditionalism and Continuity during the Last Century of Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40:2 (1989): 159-207. 177 Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, 148-149. 178 Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, 164.

are instructional.179 Each poem, whether riddle, wisdom poem, hagiographic narrative, or elegy, has an easily discernible didactic aspect that invites its reader to contemplation or study. Whom were they intended to instruct? There we are on less firm footing. If the Exeter Book was compiled in Exeter itself, then working from Conner’s reconstruction of the contemporary minster, we know that Exeter was an active and significant intellectual centre before it was incorporated into the Benedictine reforms, and that any audience for “The Wanderer” would be secular clerical: educated, ordained, religious, but not monastic.180 It may be said, then, that the intended audience of the earliest Exeter Book poems would have been well educated in both religious and secular literary trends and traditions, and that they would have understood and appreciated “The Wanderer,” with its mix of religious and secular language.

The Eardstapa’s Alienation

“The Wanderer” presents the thoughts of a man struggling to reconcile himself to life as an eardstapa (ln. 6), “an earth-stepper” or exile. He remembers his joyful past, when he was part of a retinue of warriors in service to a generous, wise lord. At some point, fate turned against him, and now he finds himself walking the wræclastas, the “paths of exile,” in a state of anguish and physical discomfort. All that sustains him, we gradually learn, is the wisdom he has gained through stoic contemplation of his situation, which has led him to faith in God, the one stable thing in his world.

179 Michael C. Drout, “Possible Instructional Effects of the Exeter Book ‘Wisdom Poems’: A Benedictine Reform Context,” in Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence, ed. by Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, Maria Amalia D’Aronco (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007): 447-449. 180 Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon Exeter, 30. A similar environment would obtain at any of the other likely institutions at which The Exeter Book was compiled. In particular, Glastonbury was a centre of reform activity: see Richard Gameson, “The Origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry,” 135-185.

The eardstapa’s alienation derives from the contrast between his past and present. In the past, he enjoyed a happy subject-position within what we might call the heroic symbolic order.181

He had the patronage and guidance of a lord whom he in turn served with a coterie of fellow retainers. In this position he had status, companionship, guidance, and all the pleasures of the hall. As an exile, he finds himself in a subject-position of no worth in the heroic order. Because he cannot recover his earlier subject-position, his challenge, then, is to find a way to recuperate his subjectivity by using the same tool that was used to great effect by Íte and Marbán. In other words, the eardstapa must find a new framework through which to understand his position in a positive light.

This process from exile eardstapa to consoled snottor on mode (“one wise in mind”) has been traced by a number of critics. The consensus view is that “The Wanderer” is a Bildung-poem, a first-person account of spiritual development in which the speaker moves through three phases: from anhaga (“solitary one”), who dwells unhappily on the deaths of companions and lord; to the modcearig (“anxious-minded”) man who broadens the parameters of his contemplation to consider his experience in context of the violent history of humanity in our ephemeral “middle- earth;” and finally to snottor (“wise one”), who accepts the vicissitudes of the world, rejecting its pleasures and miseries, and learns to put his trust in the hands of the Creator, in whom lies the

181 For a fuller consideration of the heroic code in its literary manifestations, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Heroic Values and Christian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 107-125 (esp. 107-109).

100

only true stability.182 In doing so, he trades the framework of the heroic symbolic order for that of the Christian.183

The “lesson” of “The Wanderer” is straightforward enough, but the rhetorical path on which the speaker makes his journey from alienation to enlightenment and consolation wends its way through a great many cultural spaces. In terms of diction, the poet draws upon several registers of language and culture that we are not accustomed to seeing gathered in the same poetic space – the language of exile is prominent, naturally, but so too are the “beasts of battle” of heroic verse, biblical images of ruined societies, the forlorn voice of the ubi sunt tradition, the didactic tone of homily, and so forth. There is also the shifting grammatical positioning of the poem’s speaker to be considered – sometimes the speaking-subject speaks from a deeply personal first-person “I,” sometimes in the third person, and sometimes in the impersonal. The Bildung-model of the poem’s three phases of development has helped make sense of these, but there is more to be said about the intent behind the poem’s rhetorical shifts, what Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion has called “the intricacies of its hidden logic, its deep structure,”184 and how they are used to effect consolation.

Champion’s fascinating psychological reading of the poem understands its “hidden logic” as a process through which the speaker finds his consolation by positioning himself as a hybrid singer, a Christian poet who speaks praise to God as Cædmon did, and a traditional poet who

182 Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, “From Plaint to Praise: Language as Cure in ‘The Wanderer,’” Studia Neophilologus 69 (1998): 187-202; Robert E. Bjork, “Sundor æt Rune: The Voluntary Exile of The Wanderer,” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 119. See also Anne L. Klinck’s commentary on “The Wanderer” in The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 107-126. 183 Although he does not give up the heroic entirely. Manish Sharma argues that in fact the figure of “The Wanderer” stands as a representative of the poet’s desire to preserve the disappearing legendary past as part of a contemporary Christian, Anglo-Saxon identity. See Sharma’s “Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer,” Neophilologus 96 (2012): 611-629. 184 Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, “From Plaint to Praise,” 187.

101

praises himself as Widsith did. Thus, his speech doubles as both “private passion and public blueprint.”185 As a speaker of consolation in a Christian/traditional mode, we might say that he casts his subject-position as one having value in both the heroic and Christian symbolic orders. I agree with Champion’s general outline of the process of consolation, but I do not believe the speaker’s consolation is occurring during the poem. Rather, he has already worked his way to consolation, and the poem is his vehicle for demonstrating to his audience how it can be done.

This is indicated by the last lines of the poem, where the speaker says,

ne sceal næfre his torn to rycene 112 beorn of his breostum acyþan, nemþe he ær þa bote cunne eorl mid elne gefremman.186 [A man must never too hastily express his anxieties from his heart, unless the man knows beforehand how to effect the cure with courage.]187 If he is to be the model of his own advice, then we are to understand that he did not begin his consoling speech-act without first knowing the path from eardstapa to wise Christian. Thus our attention should not be on the speaker’s consolation, but on how he represents his consolation for the benefit of his audience. As we will see, focusing on the speaker as consoler rather than consoled helps make sense of the poem’s many shifts in rhetoric and voice.

Part 1 (ll. 1-57): From Eardstapa to Guide The opening lines set the poem’s agenda and introduce an important ambiguity in the speaker’s voicing:

Oft him anhaga are gebideð metudes miltse, þeah þe he modcearig geond lagulade longe sceolde hreran mid hondum hrimcealde sæ, wadan wræclastas. Wyrd bið ful aræd. 5

185 Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, “From Plaint to Praise,” 202. 186 George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), with occasional silent emendations of punctuation. 187 Translations follow S. A. J. Bradley, ed. and trans., Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Everyman (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 321-324, with significant revisions of my own. 102

Swa cwæð eardstapa, earfeþa gemyndig wraþra wælsleahta, winemæga hryre: Often a solitary one experiences grace, the mercy of the Measurer – even though for a long time, anxious of mind, he has to stir with his hands the ice-cold sea over the watery way, to travel exile-paths. Fate is inexorable. So spoke a wanderer, remembering hardships, savage slaughters, the destruction of loving family: The first five lines state the poem’s basic thesis: although the exile will experience the grace of

God, he must first experience his exile-life. How one gets from exile to graced by God

(consoled) is to be laid out by the speaker. Deciding who that speaker is, or how many there are, has been the subject of significant debate. Is the speaker at the beginning the eardstapa

“wanderer” of 6a, an impersonal narrator, or the poet or poem’s performer? Today, most critics take the first five lines as the eardstapa’s utterance, with an interjection in lines 6-7, before returning to the wanderer’s voice in 8. Others have suggested that lines 1-7 are entirely in a narrator’s voice, the swa cwæð (“so spoke”) of 6a signalling the beginning of the eardstapa’s speech in line 8.188 Syntactically, all readings are possible, and I think the ambiguity is deliberate.

The tone at the outset is impersonal: no personal pronouns, only a description of an anhaga

(“solitary one”) that, however dramatic, with its alliteration on dolorous words, is certainly not spoken in the first-person confessional tone that we see from line 8. Rather than confessional,

188 For example, Krapp and Dobbie begin the eardstapa’s speech at line 8, as do W. F. Bolton, ed., An Old English Anthology (Evanston: Northwestern Universtiy Press, 1966) and Bernard Muir, ed., The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Vol. 1: Texts. Benjamin Thorpe, ed., Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry; Roy F. Leslie, ed., The Wanderer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966; repr. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985); T. P. Dunning and Alan J. Bliss, eds., The Wanderer (London: PUB, 1969); and Anne L. Klinck, ed., The Old English Elegies: a Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal: McGill-Queens University, 1992) assign ll. 6-7 (and 111-115) to a narrator and the rest to the eardstapa. Stanley Greenfield, citing what he understood to be formulaic first-person openings to “The Wife’s Lament” and “The Seafarer,” suggested that the eardstapa’s speech runs from ll. 8-110 in “The Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” Speculum 30:2 (1955): 205, which he affirms in “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices in the Wanderer and The Seafarer, Journal for English and Germanic Philology 68:2 (1969): 212-220, a response to John C. Pope’s (“Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,” 164-193) analysis that divides the poem into several more sections of two voices than is now considered standard. Greenfield later reversed himself in a review of Dunning and Bliss’s edition (Notes and Queries 17:3 (1970): 113-116 (113)).

103

the opening words are objective and thus authoritative, invoking the authority traditionally assigned to the figure of the poet.189 The basis of that authority lies in tradition, skill, and learning, and also in the fact that a poet controls the story, so to speak, and knows the outcome of his utterance beforehand, indicating to the audience that they have a reliable narrator and are in his good hands. In these first lines, then, the speaker is speaking in what I will call the poet- mode, the voice that is guiding its audience through this process.

At the same time, however, ll. 6-7 do introduce an ambiguity: are the foregoing lines the speech of the eardstapa, or is what comes after his speech, as Krapp and Dobbie suggest with their addition of a colon at the end of ln. 7? This element of uncertainty conflates the authoritative speech of the speaker’s poet-mode with that of the eardstapa. Thus, when he begins his monologue proper from ln. 8, the personal emotionality of his language is validated by the authority with which he began the poem, ensuring that his speech will be received as instructive.

Ultimately, as Eric Stanley observes, “…it is not easy to tell where the fictitious characters take over from the poet, where they take over from each other, and where the poet takes over from them…. It is the poet’s teaching, whoever may be speaking.”190

In the next section, the poet establishes his speaker’s subjectivity as the eardstapa in order to gain the empathy of his audience, then begins a process of repositioning him as authoritative guide.

189 The authority I attribute to Anglo-Saxon poets is not of the vatic or shamanic kind often assigned them through comparative analysis of their Norse, Irish, or Welsh counterparts, but rather the authority of learnedness, here married to experience. For an amusing critique of the former view, which still persists, see Roberta Frank, “Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75:1 (1993): 11-36. For a sustained overview and investigation as to the reality of Anglo-Saxon poets “on the ground,” see Emily V. Thornbury, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See particularly her third chapter, “The Poet in the Community,” 95-160 where Thornbury demonstrates the influence of the instructive poet could have over the spiritual and intellectual well-being of his community. 190 E. G. Stanley, “Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 73 (1955): 463. 104

"Oft ic sceolde ana uhtna gehwylce 8 mine ceare cwiþan. Nis nu cwicra nan þe ic him modsefan minne durre 10 sweotule asecgan. Ic to soþe wat þæt biþ in eorle in dryhten þeaw, þæt he his ferðlocan fæste binde, healde his hordcofan, hycge swa he wille. Ne mæg werig mod wyrde wiðstondan, 15 ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman. Forðon domgeorne dreorigne oft in hyra breostcofan bindað fæste; swa ic modsefan minne sceolde, oft earmcearig, eðle bidæled, 20 freomægum feor feterum sælan, siþþan geara iu goldwine minne hrusan heolstre biwrah, ond ic hean þonan wod wintercearig ofer waþema gebind, sohte sele dreorig sinces bryttan, 25 hwær ic feor oþþe neah findan meahte þone þe in meoduhealle min mine wisse, oþþe mec freondleasne frefran wolde, weman mid wynnum. Often I have had to bemoan my anxieties alone at each dawn. There is now not one living being to whom I dare plainly express my heart. I know for truth that it is an lordly virtue in a nobleman that he should bind fast his mind and keep close his thoughts, let him think as he wishes. A weary mind cannot resist fate, nor can troubled mind afford help. Therefore, those caring for reputation often bind sorrow fast in their breast. So I, often wretchedly anxious, separated from my home, far from noble kinsfolk, have had to fasten my heart with fetters ever since, years ago , the darkness of the earth enfolded my generous and loving lord, and I, despondent, travelled away, oppressed by wintry anxiety, over the ambit of the waves; full of sorrow I was seeking the hall of a treasure-giving lord where, whether far or near, I might find the one who would acknowledge my love in the mead-hall or would comfort me in my friendlessness and win me over with good things. The speaker digs deep into the rhetoric of the exile experience: being far from home (20b), from his friends, kin, and his lord (22-23a) causes him unhappiness and an oppressiveness of mind, expressed in varied but classic terms:191 anxieties (ceare – 8a), a weary mind (werig mod – 15a), regretful thought (hreo hyge – 16a), sorrow (dreorigne – 17b), sorrowful (earmcearig – 20a), abject (hean – 23b), he is oppressed by winter anxieties (wintercearig – 24a), the weather and

191 The classic essay on the extensive use of the exile-theme in Old English verse is Stanley Greenfield, “The Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” Speculum 30:2 (1955): 200-206. 105

loneliness making him most miserable because he is lacking a hall (i.e., “hall-sad,” seledreorig –

25b). The chief cause of the eardstapa’s pain, however, is the lack of a lord to confide in, which denies him an acceptable outlet for his pent-up emotions and cuts him off from consoling counsel, intensifying his anxiety. It is this lack of a guiding lord that set him travelling in search of a new lord to comfort and provide for him (25-29a). The urgency of his need is conveyed by the repetition and variation of exile-words, which resonate throughout his plaint.

Such language would have been well known to an Exeter audience; the same or similar exile formulae appear in a great many of the Exeter Book poems as well as Beowulf, demonstrating a broad rhetorical tradition.192 Its deployment here as an extended, first-person treatment of the experience forms the basis for the poet’s efforts to build the sympathy of his audience for his speaker, speaking in his eardstapa-mode. The section is not all unrelenting exile rhetoric, however. In lines 11b-16, the speaker uses images of binding to describe how, not having a lord to confide in, it is expected that he bind up his thoughts within his body, presenting a stoic face to the world. Binding imagery is another commonplace in Old English verse, occurring in hundreds of formulaic instances; its use here would not be unexpected. In terms of how it might play in the minds of the audience, Megan Cavell has noted how its use here is “particularly heroic,” meaning stoic;193 while Ruth Wehlau has observed the contrasting themes of binding tight one’s mental state while the world around the exile appears to be coming apart, especially in the second half of the poem.194 To these rich readings of the speaker’s effort to keep his

192 Stanley Greenfield, “The Formulaic Expression,” 201-206. These other texts include “The Seafarer,” “The Wife’s Lament,” “Genesis,” “Juliana,” Guthlac,” “Maxims II,” “Phoenix,” “Widsith,” “Resignation,” and “Christ” among others. 193 Megan Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 227-228. Cavell notes that the language is similar to that employed by the noble king Hrothgar in Beowulf, ll. 1876b-1880a (see p. 225). 194 Ruth Wehlau, Riddle of Creation: Metaphorical Structures in Old English Poetry, Studies in the Humanities 24 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 50.

106

thoughts under wraps we can also add its physiological consequences. In her model of the

“hydraulic mind,” Leslie Lockett notes how Old English poets locate great emotion, whether grief or anger, in the breast, where it can seethe and overflow into unmoderated speech, a danger to any self-respecting man. It is a man’s duty to keep such emotions “tethered in the breast.”195

Each reading emphasizes the speaker’s efforts to behave according to the heroic script, behaviour which would be laudable to his audience.

On the other hand, it may seem as though the speaker’s pitiable description of his loneliness is evidence of his having failed to moderate his emotions. Nevertheless, at the same time he has been cultivating his audience’s sympathy, he has also been positioning himself as an authoritative, guiding figure. Part of the evidence for this lies in the skill he employs in drawing together the various rhetorical registers noted above to paint himself as the sympathetic eardstapa. His mastery belies his patheticness, and reminds us that he already knows the cure to the exile’s angst. The remainder of the evidence lies in his syntax and tone. Syntactically, the speaker separates himself from owning his self-binding actions by introducing the relevant phrase with indirect speech (Ic to soþe wat / þæt…“I know for truth that…” – 11b). This takes him out of the first person and allows him to say his statements about ideal conduct (12-16) in an impersonal tone that echoes the gnomic mode of wisdom verse. Doing so, he again positions himself more authoritatively, indicating to the audience that he has reflected upon that advice and tested it through his own experience. The speaker thus models the process of transitioning from suffering eardstapa to critical evaluator of his experience and the expectations the heroic order has for him as an exile.

195 Leslie Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 81-83.

107

We know that he is positioning himself more critically with the first word of the next line

(17). Forþon – “therefore, seeing that” – often functions as a correlative between a section of analysis and the next step in an argument.196 In this case, the speaker gathers the received wisdom about not sharing his thoughts and applies it to himself, returning to the first person in the section’s remaining lines. His move back into the first person has not returned him fully to the eardstapa-mode of lines 8-11a, however; we know this because now the speaker describes his experiences in the past tense, still indirectly separated from his experience, but temporally rather than syntactically. Thus the effect of comparing his personal experience to the generalized gnomic advice of 11b-16 is to push him further into the poet-mode, the guiding position from which he can demonstrate to his audience how to reconsider experience such as his in light of the rhetoric of his culture. In this way, he models moving away from the agency-less subject- position of the exile and toward the cultural-critic subject-position of the poet, reframing the way he sees the world and his experience.

In the next section, the speaker continues to reposition himself as guide by externalizing his exile-experience.

Wat se þe cunnað, hu sliþen bið sorg to geferan, 30 þam þe him lyt hafað leofra geholena. Warað hine wræclast, nales wunden gold, ferðloca freorig, nalæs foldan blæd. Gemon he selesecgas ond sincþege, hu hine on geoguðe his goldwine 35 wenede to wiste. Wyn eal gedreas. Forþon wat se þe sceal his winedryhtnes leofes larcwidum longe forþolian… He who tries it knows how cruel is grief as a companion to him who has few loved bosom friends. Him the exile-paths preoccupy, not coiled gold, the frozen breast, not the splendour of the earth; he recalls the men of the hall and the gift-receiving ceremonial, and

196 Dictionary of Old English, s.v. forþǣm, for-þon, for-þȳ. Accessed 20 June, 2017. http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/. 108

how in his youth his generous lord entertained him at the banquet. Happiness has perished utterly. Therefore, he who has to do without his beloved lord’s guiding words for long understands… The speaker contrasts past joys with present miseries, focusing on the loss of society one must endure as an outcast, again noting in particular how difficult it is to endure without his lord’s larcwidan or “lore-speech” (i.e., “guiding words”). The emotionality of the speaker’s language is muted by the switch to third-person pronouns, although the thrum of exile-anxiety is revealed semiotically in the persistent alliteration linking words of woe. As the speaker distances himself from the exile condition, his treatment of it becomes less personally visceral, and more general, as well as visual. Before, he spoke in physical terms of the bodily binding of feelings; now, no longer describing himself, the words flow freely as he externalizes his experience onto another, drawing clear pictures of the hall and its society. The speaker has emerged from the exile rhetoric as the authoritative poet, having created for both himself and his audience an

“everyman” wanderer, an archetype to be used as a tool for generalizing what was, back at ln. 8, a personal experience. Doing so, the poet links pathos both to the speaker’s ethos and his ability to sway listeners. He further develops that authority with his audience in ln. 37 by employing another forþon-clause. In this case, the speaker uses forþon to point out the question his audience should have distilled from his description of the exile-condition: with no companion but grief, how does one negotiate the wræclastas, the exile paths, without the advice of a lord?

The poet, through his speaker, is demonstrating how to guide oneself. He shows how he derives wisdom for himself by reasoning through his experience. At the same time, he cultivates authority with his audience through pathos tempered by his admirable moderation of thought, demonstrated in the way he casts his experience into axiomatic language. Furthermore, by externalizing his experience into an archetypal wanderer, he positions himself more clearly as a

109

guide: the audience no longer looks at him as an eardstapa to be pitied, but as an expert in the treatment of the exile-condition.

From ll. 39-57, the speaker’s exploration of the exile reaches its peak. He tells how, for the solitary man, the line between grief and sleep can become so ambiguous as to create a dreaming fantasy state in which the exile is back in the company of his lord, only to wake to reality: waves beneath him and, instead of companions in the mead-hall, sea-birds calling. It is in this liminal moment, when the contrast between waking and dreaming, present and past, when the two experiences are closest together, that the anxiety of the exile is keenest: “Then the heart’s lacerations, sore in the wake of the loved ones, are the harder to bear. Sorrow is renewed”

(Þonne beoð þy hefigran heortan benne, / sare æfter swæsne. Sorg bið geniwad – 49-50). Yet as poignant as the scene must be to his audience, the speaker continues to externalize his experience so that the eardstapa he has created outside himself remains the object of sympathy, not himself, allowing him to retain the authority he has cultivated thus far.

Over the course of the first half of the poem, the speaker has emerged from the text as a guiding voice. That voice models wisdom to its audience by externalizing and reflecting upon its experiences, at the same time drawing upon and critiquing the rhetoric that his culture has developed to deal with those experiences in order to find meaning in them. By the poem’s midpoint, the speaker has adjusted his position from eardstapa, the object of the audience’s sympathy, to authoritative poet, by whose hand the audience is now being led firmly along the journey from exile to consoled.

Part 2 (ll. 58-115): Poisoning the Well

At this midpoint, the speaker switches tactics. Returning to the first-person voice, he employs another forþon-clause, gathering up all that he has led the audience to consider thus far and

110

asking a question that extends the questions of the exile to the condition of human society and the world:

Forþon ic geþencan ne mæg geond þas woruld for hwan modsefa min ne gesweorce, þonne ic eorla lif eal geondþence, 60 hu hi færlice flet ofgeafon, modge maguþegnas. Swa þes middangeard ealra dogra gehwam dreoseð ond fealleþ. Therefore, I cannot think why in this world my heart does not grow dark, when I thoroughly contemplate the life of men — how swiftly they, brave warrior-thanes, have yielded up the hall. Just so this middle-earth each and every day declines and decays. The reasoning space the speaker has kept between himself and his emotional experience as an exile in the first half has allowed him to make a key insight – the life of an exile is a microcosm of the human experience; more than that, it is the condition of all earthly things. Yet how has this knowledge, born of his painful experience, not left him despairing?

In the first half of “The Wanderer,” the speaker’s wise consideration of the exile-condition led him to realize that the entire interpretive framework that produces such a subject-position, the heroic order, must be rejected. Doing so, the speaker is then free to adopt another framework through which he might signify his subjectivity. As is clear from the beginning and end of the poem, the Christian symbolic order is that framework. His task as guide in this second half of the “The Wanderer,” then, is to enable his audience to recognize the heroic order as something they should reject. He does so by invoking several touchstones of Anglo-Saxon cultural history and emphasizing their instability. Poisoning the well, as it were, out of which his audience members construct their subjectivity, will cause them to turn to the alternative he offers: reconstructing their subjectivity predicated on the Christian promise of the stable home that awaits them in heaven.

111

To begin to answer his question – i.e., why he does not despair upon realizing the ephemerality of worldly things – the speaker returns to gnomic speech. Instead of the indirect, testing language we saw in his first employment of wisdom language (11b-16), here he speaks confidently, leading off with another forþon-clause to signal his considered reasoning:

Forþon ne mæg weorþan wis wer, ær he age wintra dæl in woruldrice. Wita sceal geþyldig, 65 ne sceal no to hatheort ne to hrædwyrde, ne to wac wiga ne to wanhydig, ne to forht ne to fægen, ne to feohgifre ne næfre gielpes to georn, ær he geare cunne. Beorn sceal gebidan, þonne he beot spriceð, 70 oþþæt collenferð cunne gearwe hwider hreþra gehygd hweorfan wille. Therefore, one cannot call himself wise before he has a share of years in the world. A wise man must be patient; he must not be too passionate nor too impulsive of speech, nor too eager, nor too greedy for riches, and never too desirous of making a boast before he is fully aware: a man must wait before he utters a pledge until that person of bold spirit is fully aware which way his mind’s thinking wants to turn. The speaker uses sententious statements to confirm to the audience the authority he cultivated for himself in the first half of poem, which he says is gained through the marriage of experience and moderation. His time as an exile combined with age and observation revealed to him (ll. 58-63), in a gestalt moment of understanding, that the path of exile is the path of the world; it is not unique to him. For his audience, although the aristocratic, secular axiomatic language of these lines (64-72) would likely be familiar and perhaps clichéd, in the context of the speaker’s insights, his gnomic statements have been made freshly relevant to both him and his audience.

Doing so, he also positions himself more strongly than ever as a guiding figure, because the advice highlights the need for considered speech, which is the domain of the skilled, experienced speaker himself.

In lines 73-87, the speaker again shifts his rhetoric, from wisdom to a dark nostalgia:

112

Ongietan sceal gleaw hæle hu gæstlic bið, þonne ealre þisse worulde wela weste stondeð, swa nu missenlice geond þisne middangeard 75 winde biwaune weallas stondaþ, hrime bihrorene, hryðge þa ederas.197 Woriað þa winsalo, waldend licgað dreame bidrorene, duguþ eal gecrong, wlonc bi wealle. Sume wig fornom, 80 ferede in forðwege, sumne fugel oþbær ofer heanne holm, sumne se hara wulf deaðe gedælde, sumne dreorighleor in eorðscræfe eorl gehydde. Yþde swa þisne eardgeard ælda scyppend 85 oþþæt burgwara breahtma lease eald enta geweorc idlu stodon. A prudent man must recognize how terrible it will be when all the wealth in this world stands waste – as even now randomly through this middle-earth walls stand, wind-blown, rime-covered, the ramparts storm-beaten. The halls decay, their lords lie deprived of joy, the whole troop has fallen, the proud ones, by the wall. War took off some, carried them on their way, one, the bird took off across the deep sea, one, the gray wolf shared with death, one, the dreary-faced man buried in a grave. And so He destroyed this city, He, the Creator of Men, until deprived of the noise of the citizens, the ancient work of giants stood empty. Nostalgia for a lost past is a persistent theme in the Old English elegies and elsewhere. It is usually figured as a yearning for a better, lost world, which contrasts favourably with the unsatisfactory present;198 the speaker in eardstapa-mode expressed this feeling in the first half of

“The Wanderer.” The speaker now begins the process of invoking within his audience a profound horror at the ephemeral state of the world, beginning with human society. He locates evidence of the world’s instability in the ruins of the Anglo-Saxon landscape. The image of the ruined hall was particularly resonant in Anglo-Saxon communities, and indeed in the North

Atlantic generally.199 As Kathryn Hume notes in her study of the theme in Old English verse, the hall embodied a rich nexus of social associations for the Anglo-Saxon: “As the seat of the local

197 Cf. the ruins in qt. 14 of “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare” in Chapter 3. 198 Melanie Heyworth, “Nostalgic Evocation and Social Privilege in the Old English Elegies,” Studia Neophilologica 76 (2004): 4-5. 199 See, for example, Canu Heledd and the poems attributed to Gormlaith in Chapter 3.

113

lord, they were a source of wealth and land, protection, social recognition, and at times of food, drink, and companionship. As the source of shelter, order, reward, and entertainment, it would naturally become the symbol for what was best in life.”200

The silence of those ruins, beaten by storms, would give rise to existential angst in the audience, and their imaginations would easily fill them with lost peoples. Moreover, such imagery would have deeper associations among the educated audience of the Exeter Book.

Familiar with biblical exegesis and their own history, the image of the ruins would no doubt bring to mind the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, who foretold the destruction of major cities by God, as well as the fallen Tower of Babel, as R. M. Liuzza has suggested, and their own lost history of migration.201 Such historical associations would only emphasize the meaninglessness of human achievements. The speaker adds a touch of the gruesome to this existential angst by invoking the classic “beasts of battle”: a bird who carries off the dead, and a wolf who shares what he scavenges with death (ln. 81-82). The presence of these iconic animals, well known in

Old English verse, often signals death and carnage of the battlefield.202 Their use here introduces another element of the speaker’s argument that the heroic order is unsettlingly ephemeral; to be dispersed in death and become no more than carrion is certainly an ignoble fate.

In the penultimate section (88-110), the speaker encourages his audience to face the terrifying transience of the world head on, as moderate, wise men must. He raises their anxiety to a peak

200 Kathryn Hume, “The ‘Ruin Motif’ in Old English Poetry,” Anglia 94 (1976): 357. 201 R. M. Liuzza, “The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 36:1 (2003): 1-35. 202 E. G. Stanley, “Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent’s Prayer,” Anglia 73 (1955): 413-466 (esp. 442-443). For a list of all occurrences of the beasts outside Beowulf, see F. P. Magoun, Jr., “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 56:2 (1955): 81-90. Adrian Bonjour provides a more thorough treatment of the topos in relation to Beowulf, “Beowulf and the Beasts of Battle,” PMLA 72 (1957): 562-573; while M. S. Griffith offers a formula- analysis of the topos in “Convention and Originality in the Old English ‘Beasts of Battle’ Typescene,” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 179-199. 114

with the plaintive rhetoric of the Latin ubi sunt tradition followed by an apocalyptic vision of the world, yet holds onto his guiding position, putting the words in the mouth of the prudent man he has steadily encouraged his audience to be:

Se þonne þisne wealsteal wise geþohte ond þis deorce lif deope geondþenceð, frod in ferðe, feor oft gemon 90 wælsleahta worn, ond þas word acwið: Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago? Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa? Hwær cwom symbla gesetu? Hwær sindon seledreamas? Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala þeodnes þrym! Hu seo þrag gewat, 95 genap under nihthelm, swa heo no wære. Stondeð nu on laste leofre duguþe weal wundrum heah, wyrmlicum fah. Eorlas fornoman asca þryþe, wæpen wælgifru, wyrd seo mære, 100 ond þas stanhleoþu stormas cnyssað, hrið hreosende hrusan bindeð, wintres woma, þonne won cymeð, nipeð nihtscua, norþan onsendeð hreo hæglfare hæleþum on andan. 105 Eall is earfoðlic eorþan rice, onwendeð wyrda gesceaft weoruld under heofonum. Her bið feoh læne, her bið freond læne, her bið mon læne, her bið mæg læne, eal þis eorþan gesteal idel weorþeð!" 110 He who has sagely reflected upon this foundation and, wise at heart, deeply contemplates this dark life, often recalls a multitude of violent assaults, and utters these words: ‘Where has gone the steed? Where has gone the man? Where has gone the giver of treasure? Where has gone the place of the banquets? Where are the pleasures of the hall? Alas, the gleaming cup; alas the armoured warrior; alas, the majesty of the prince! Truly, that time has passed away, has grown dark under the helm of night as thought it had never been. Now there remains among the traces of those dear people a wall, remarkably high, painted with serpentine patterns. The might of ash spears has snatched away the men, the weapon greedy for carnage, notorious fate; and storms beat upon those heaps of stones. A falling snowstorm fetters the earth, winter’s howling. Then darkness comes; the shadows of night spreads gloom and sends from the north fierce hailstorms to the terror of men. The whole kingdom of earth is full of hardship; the dispensation of fate makes mutable the world below the heavens. Here wealth is ephemeral; here a friend is ephemeral; all this framework of earth will become desolate.’ The ubi sunt lines (92-96) would echo familiarly in the minds of the speaker’s audience, part of an inherited rhetorical tradition of crying out against the inevitable destruction of human things,

115

whose pedigree would only emphasize the ephemerality of human works.203 That transience is extended to the world itself in the next lines (97-107). The darkness and wintry weather that covers all evidence of human society, locking the earth in icy fetters, recalls, as Paul Sander

Langeslag has noted, Bede’s famous simile of the sparrow. The simile, which would certainly be known to the audience, is a speech given in an historical recreation of a discussion of the

Northumbrian King Edwin’s council, who must decide whether to adopt Christianity in place of their pagan religion. One of his councillors urges them to accept the new religion, because their own religion gives them no knowledge of what comes before or after life. He compares the life of the human to the flight of a sparrow through a hall: in the brief space the sparrow is in the hall, it is protected from the storms of winter, yet it quickly returns out into the winter – dark and unknowable – from which it came.204 The image of the wintry storms in “The Wanderer” thus signals the transience of the present world.205

The eschatological tone of the storms is further intensified by the poet’s placement of the climatic events at the end of time. Ruth Wehlau observes that the storms arrive to encase the ruined world with a sense of finality. She notes in particular that the word hreosende (“falling”), used to describe the falling snowstorm, is more often used to indicate “the apocalyptic collapse of the world” than simple stormy weather.206 Employing such language, the speaker, through the voice of the wise man who must confront the transience of life, doubles down on his view of

203 James E. Cross, “‘Ubi sunt Passages in Old English: Sources and Relationships,’” Vetenskaps‐societen i Lund Årsbok (1956): 25–44 (esp. 26, 39); Claudia Di Sciacca has sourced this particular use of the ubi sunt motif to the Synonyma of Isidore: Finding the Right Words: Isidore's ‘Synonyma’ in Anglo‐Saxon England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 138-143. 204 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 182-184. 205 Paul Sander Langeslag, “Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012),” 66-68. 206 Ruth Wehlau, “Landscapes of Despair in The Wanderer, Beowulf’s Story of Hrethel, and Sonatorrek,” Parergon 15:2 (1998): 7. 116

the world as ephemeral, ending his audience’s desire to place their hopes in it. In this final statement, lines 88-110, the speaker, renders the very framework of the earth (eorþan gesteal) unstable.

Over the second half of the poem, then, the speaker has extrapolated the alienation of the individual’s exile experience to the common experience of humanity. More than that, he has extended the instability of exile to the foundations of the earth, rendering undesirable not only the heroic symbolic order, but the world itself. It is here, at the greatest moment of existential angst, that the speaker offers his cure:

Swa cwæð snottor on mode, gesæt him sundor æt rune. 111 Til biþ se þe his treowe gehealdeþ, ne sceal næfre his torn to rycene beorn of his breostum acyþan, nemþe he ær þa bote cunne, eorl mid elne gefremman. Wel bið þam þe him are seceð, frofre to fæder on heofonum, þær us eal seo fæstnung stondeð. 115 So spoke a man wise in mind, and sat apart in thought. Worthy is he who retains his faith; a man must never too hastily express his anxieties from his heart, unless the man knows beforehand how to effect the cure with courage. It will be well for him who seeks grace, consolation from the Father in heaven, where for us all the immutable abides. Returning to his own voice, the audience’s guide speaks from the authoritative position he has cultivated throughout the poem. He directs, in homiletic fashion, his audience’s attention to this ideal man, the snottor on mode (“one wise in mind”), who has successfully assimilated the speaker’s lesson: all the mutability of earthly existence can be understood to serve a purpose if you recognize its inherent unreliability. The only way to achieve permanent stability of selfhood is to construct it within the framework of Christian salvation, rather than earthly transience.

Having destroyed philosophically the audience’s home and laid bare the futility of human achievement, he offers them a stable home in the steady hands of the only eternal guiding Lord, which is received through God’s grace. The word the speaker uses here is the same he used in

“The Wanderer’s” first line: ar (= ær in ln. 113) Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion points out

117

that ar has several meanings that straddle the Christian and heroic – “grace” and “mercy,” but also “dignity,” “honour,” and “glory.”207 The ambiguity of the word provides a doubled consolation: assurance of God’s grace or mercy is a relief to the audience after learning to see their world as hopeless, while at the same time, this Christian framework still offers them a version of the dignity and honour they sought within the heroic order. Thus hope and home in heaven, with honour provided by a guiding Lord, are not so unfamiliar after all.

Conclusion

Reading the “The Wanderer” as an instructive tool of consolation, the key to its success lies with the poet’s carefully constructed speaking-subject. Over the first half of the poem, the speaker establishes his bona fides as an authority in the mould of the learned poet, demonstrating his mastery of poetic language, at the same time as he relates his time as an exile, which provides him with the additional authority of lived experience and the sympathy of the audience. He uses the gnomic rhetoric of wisdom, which counsels both moderation in thought and respect for experience, and externalizes his exile-experience to further his position as a figure of guidance.

In the second half of the poem, he extends the eardstapa’s abject experience of the world to that of every human, undermining the perceived permanence of the tangible world and urging his audience to reject it, as the eardstapa rejects the self the heroic order tells him to be. With the underpinnings of the seeming stability of the world and heroic order removed, the speaker offers the Christian symbolic order, with its undying heaven and Lord, as a better framework within which to constitute one’s subjectivity.

207 Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champion, “From Plaint to Praise,” 201; 207 Dictionary of Old English, s.v. ār, āre. Accessed 10 May, 2017. http://tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/ 118

Rather than a pastiche of different speakers, of poems within poems, or inexplicable shifts of person or rhetoric or style, the poem is a carefully wrought and manipulative (i.e., pedagogical) text desiring to inculcate, through both logic and emotion, the superiority of the poet’s Christian worldview.

In the next part of this chapter, we see again the importance of the speaking-subject in the consolation of an audience, this time the monastic familia of the cult of the Irish saint Columba.

Like the “The Wanderer,” the speakers of these Columban poems draw upon native and

Christian literary culture in order to fashion poetry of consolation. The consolation sought by the

Columban monastic communities, unlike the more secular audience of the Exeter Book, has to do with the concerns of men playing out relatively new social roles of religious contemplation and devotion, rather than the traditional masculine roles of early Irish heroic society.

Cultivating Columban Consolation

In this section, I discuss how one person, the early Irish saint Columba, was cultivated over time by religious poets as a figure of consolation to the monks of his monastic familia. In the first chapter, I discussed some of the commonest anxieties that arose among Irish monks seeking to bring themselves into accord with the Christian symbolic order. They fretted over the difficulty of suppressing their bodily needs and desires, and their wandering thoughts. To these daily struggles we should add the challenges that come with embracing the monastic attitude of contemptus mundi or “dying to the world” in the context of a society still reconciling its heroic values with Christian values.

119

Religious exile took many shapes in medieval Ireland, both metaphorical and literal.208

Joining a monastic community was a form of exile, requiring the separation of the individual from worldly things, including one’s family and native territory. Becoming a monk or nun, then, caused a great shift in the circumstances that conditioned one’s identity: a monk gave up his family identity,209 or at least it was greatly altered, as would be his social status and the relationships bound up with it, such as might be formed with a lord and patron. Irish monasticism had mechanisms in places to assuage some of these otherwise alienating shifts: a monk’s local monastic community and its broader familia supplied a kind of family, for example, and the lost guidance of a lord or other superior was replaced with the spiritual guidance of an abbot and other monastic leaders. Consoling loss of status would be trickier, since in a monastic context humility is the only remedy offered. Another anxiety of monastic life would be a gendered concern over the worthiness of monastic life as a vocation for men.

These concerns are all addressed to some degree in the earliest poetry concerning Columba, the founder of one the most influential monastic federations in Ireland, Britain, and the

Continent. The poems I discuss here – the Amra Choluimb Chille (“The Praise of Colum Cille”), and two poems attributed to the monk Béccán mac Luigdech – come from an early period in the development of Irish Christian verse. Each poem experiments with both native secular poetics and the newly introduced Christian textual tradition in order to enhance Columba’s reputation as an intercessor on behalf of the monastic foundations he established, and to build him up as a

208 Stephanie Hayes-Healey, "'Irish pilgrimage': A Romantic Misconception," in Princes, Prelates and Poets in Medieval Ireland: Essays in Honour of Katharine Simms, ed. Seán Duffy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013): 241-260 (243). 209 This is truer in the case of non-aristocratic monks. The monastic institutions of Ireland were in many ways tied politically to their secular counterparts. The federation of monasteries established by Columba, for example, was led for generations by members of Columba’s family. See Kathryn Hughes, The Church in Early Irish Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 65-79, esp. 76-78. 120

model of monastic and heroic masculinity for the members of the Columban familia. First, a brief overview of Columba’s activities in life is necessary to provide context for the poems.

Columba

As Irish monasticism grew in the sixth century, it followed the political expansion of Irish territories into northern Britain.210 Among the earliest and most influential to take part in that expansion was Columba (in Irish, Colm Cille, i.e. “Church Dove”). Little is known for certain of

Columba’s life, the sources for early Christian Ireland being scant; to construct an historical biography of the saint we must depend on the literary texts that came after his time.211 The earliest of these is the Amra Choluimb Chille, composed after Columba’s death in 597,212 which concurs with genealogical tracts that identify Columba as a member of the Cenél Conaill, a branch of the royal Northern Uí Néill dynasty. The poem also confirms other aspects of his traditional biography, specifically that he went as an exile to Britain and that he preached among

“the tribes of the Tay” (i.e., the Picts).213

That Columba left Ireland for Britain as an exile (a theme important to the poems under discussion here, as well as to later Columban hagiographies214) is supported in the other

210 T. M. Charles-Edwards, “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio,” Celtica 11 (1976), 43-59. 211 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 9. 212 The dating of the Amra has been a subject of some debate, although the general consensus is with the c.600 date rather than the minority view placing it c.900. For an overview of the relevant scholarship, see Jacopo Bisagni, “The Language and Date of the Amrae Coluimb Chille,” in Kelten am Rhein: Akten des dreizehnten Internationalen Keltologiekongresses. 23. bis 27. Juli 2007 in Bonn. Zweiter Teil: Philologie. Sprachen und Literaturen, ed. Stefan Zimmer (Mainz am Rhein: Zabern, 2009): 1. Bisagni argues that the poem originated in the late sixth or early seventh centuries, but was “re-elaborated and enlarged by a 9th-century reviser” with an eye to emphasizing Columba’s aristocratic origins (10). 213 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, 10-11. 214 Until recently, the concept of Irish religious exile abroad, or peregrinatio pro amore Dei (“pilgrimage for love of God”) as it is often called, has been understood to describe a movement from the sixth to at least the ninth century in which a great and constant number of ambitious ascetics headed overseas to live out self-imposed exiles. For a thorough review of the evidence linguistic and historical evidence, which reveals that Irish peregrinatio was less distinctly Irish and not so widespread as believed, see Stephanie Hayes-Healey, “’Irish

121

important textual source about the saint, the Vita Columbae, a Latin Life composed in the late seventh century by Adomnán, Columba’s kinsmen and the ninth abbot of Iona, the leading monastery of the Columba paruchiae.215 The Vita, sourced from the collected knowledge of both Adomnán’s monastic community and his aristocratic family,216 corroborates much of what is outlined in the annals, namely that Columba founded a number of monasteries in the Uí Néill territories, including Durrow and Derry, and that c.563 he ventured across the Irish Sea to establish a foundation on the island of Iona, which would later become the base of missionary operations to the Picts of Scotland and, after his death, the Northumbrians of northeast

England.217 The Vita also indicates that while Columba led the community of Iona as abbot, he also retained authority over all the monastic communities associated with him.218 Moreover, kinship played an important role in the administration of the developing Columban monastic federation or paruchia: many members of his Cenél Conaill branch of the Uí Néill dynasty managed important Columba monasteries, such as Iona and Durrow, both during his life and for generations after.219

Given Columba’s role as founder of his paruchia and the dynastic interests built into its hierarchy, it is no surprise that the Columban community of monks, the familia, should take an

pilgrimage’: A Romantic Misconception,” 241-260. For a bibliography of relevant scholarship, see especially 241- 242, no. 3. To Hayes-Healey I would add Elva Johnson’s recent article “Exiles from the Edge? The Irish Contexts of Peregrinatio,” in The Irish in Early Medieval Europe, eds. Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016): 38-52. 215 Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds., trans., Adomnan’s Life of Columba (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 3-7; 103-105. 216 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, 12-13, 47-57; A. O. and M. O. Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba, 92- 98. 217 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004), 302. 218 Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, 33. 219 For example, an eighth-century list of those who travelled with Columba to Britain includes an uncle and two first cousins, two of whom, according to the Vita, managed nearby monasteries, while a first cousin ran Durrow. See Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells, and Derry, 34-35, 310-311; A. O. and M. O. Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba, 264-267 (I: 29), 306-307 (I: 30), 268-269 (I: 41), 294-297 (I: 45), 545-549 (Appendix). See also Herbert’s Genealogical Tables, 310-311. 122

interest in raising his profile, in part through the development of the Columban dossier of hagiographical texts, among them the Amra Choluimb Chille and the two poems of Béccán mac

Luigdech. I turn first to the Amra in order to establish how it provided a Christian/heroic hybrid model of Columba, which was subsequently exploited by commentators on the poem and by

Béccán in his own poems as a tool of consolation for a monastic audience.

Amra Choluimb Chille and Its Afterlife

The Amra (literally “wonder” or “marvel”) of Columba was, as I noted above, likely composed c.600 on the occasion of the saint’s death.220 An eleventh-century prose preface to one of the several manuscript copies of the poem attributes it to the poet Dallán Forgaill.221 The poem itself provides some context, as the poet says it was commissioned by an “Aed,” probably the saint’s cousin King Aed mac Ainmirech of the Northern Uí Néill, as the glosses indicate.222

This may have marked the first (known) occasion, then, in which a court poet was required to praise an aristocratic religious figure upon his death.

Accordingly, the poem is in the first person and clearly modelled on the elegiac mode of a court poet’s lament on the death of a secular leader. Such poetry would focus on the subject’s noble ancestry, their martial prowess, and their fame. The Amra is more highly learned (or esoteric) than was usual, celebrating Columba with native poetic rhetoric adapted to a new

220 Copies of the earliest recension of the Amra are found in Dublin, Trinity College, Liber Hymnorum (11th c.); Lebor na hUidre (12th c.); Oxford, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 502 (12th c.). 221 “Dallán Forgaill” is a nickname meaning “the little (or dear) blind one of testimony.” Dallán himself has a fairly extensive life in legend: he was venerated as a saint, called “chief-poet” of Ireland, and is the subject of several stories, including some that describe the circumstances of the Amra’s composition. Despite this afterlife, there is little historical evidence to tie him to the Amra. See Thomas Owen Clancy and Gilbert Márkus, eds. and trans., Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 97-100; a summary of the Dallán legendaria can be found in Daithi Ó hÓgáin, Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopedia of the Irish Folk Tradition (London: Ryan Publishing, 1990): 148-150. 222 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 290; Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille,” Revue Celtique 20 (1899), 282-283, §115.

123

religious context that shows the poet’s deep knowledge of both traditions. The poem is thus dotted with Christian references in Latin (some adapted to the Irish grammar, some not) and impenetrable passages in, as John T. Koch puts it, “grammatically dismembered form,” resulting in an altogether “rococo” style.223 The difficulty of the poem – and its richness – is attested by the extensive apparatus of glosses and commentarty that Irish scholars had developed around it by the eleventh century.224 Although the Amra was likely intended for court performance, it was preserved and copied by monks of the Columban familia, and may thus be considered in terms of how it served to develop the figure of Columba in that context.

The Amra’s 178 lines are divided into an opening invocation and ten sections of varying lengths. The bulk of the poem, as is typical of heroic court elegy, is concerned with praising the hero’s marvelous attributes and deeds, evoking lamentation rather than solace. The first section demonstrates:

225 Ní díscéoil duë Néill. Ní uchtat óenmaige, mór mairg, mór n-deilm. Dífulaing riss ré as[-indet]: Columb cen beith, cen chill. 5 … Is nú nad mair, ní marthar lenn, 8 ní less anma ar suí. Ar-don – cond íath con-róeter bïu – bath, 10 ar-don-bath ba ar n-airchend adlicen, ar-don-bath ba ar fíadat foídiam; ar ní-n fissid fris-bered omnu húain,

223 John T. Koch, ed., Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), s.v. Dallán Forgaill. 224 Máire Herbert, “The Preface to the Amra Choluim Chille,” in Sagas, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, eds. Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989), 67-75. 225 Clancy and Márkus, eds. and trans., Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, 104-115. For an edition that includes the preface and extensive glosses, see Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille,” Revue Celtique 20 (1899): 31–55, 132–183, 248–289, 400–437. Corrigenda in Revue Celtique 21 (1900): 133–136. Edition based on twelfth-century MS Rawlinson B. 502. 124

ar nín-tathrith to-sluinned foccul fír, ar ní-n forcetlaid for-canad túatha Toí. 15 Not newsless is Níall’s land. No slight sigh from one plain, but great woe, great outcry. Unbearable the tale this verse tells: Colum, lifeless, churchless. 5 … Now he is not, nothing is left to us, 8 no relief for a soul, our sage. For he has died to us, 10 the leader of nations who guarded the living, he has died to us, who was our chief of the needy, he has died to us, who was our messenger of the Lord: for we do not have the seer who used to keep fears from us, for he does not return to us, he who would explain the true Word, for we do not have the teacher who would teach the 15 tribes of the Tay [i.e., the Picts] The poet draws upon the heroic social anxieties associated with the death of a chieftain to construct his elegy. In the Amra, the traumatic losses characterized in a prince’s lament in terms of threatened economic and physical security are here mapped onto the religious figure: the Irish of the north have lost the spiritual guidance of Columba, their Uí Néill prince, and their future – both in this world and the world to come – is uncertain. Instead of focusing on any hoped-for intercessions on their behalf by their kinsmen, however, the majority of the poem instead follows the secular elegiac form, downplaying hope for the future in favour of fully articulating the matchless deeds of the poem’s lost hero: Columba’s learning was a pillar to all and he filled his territories with the light of clerics (II); he has joined the company of the apostles and archangels in the Promised Land (III); his suffering as a monk led to his triumph in maintaining the laws and doctrines of Rome in Ireland (IV); through his scholarly work he enlightened students about the

Psalms, Cassian’s teachings on monastic life and the monastic rule of St. Basil,226 the wisdom

226 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 286. 125

texts of the Bible, astronomy, natural science, exegesis, and he counted all the stars (V).

Sections VI-VIII continue to highlight his accomplishments in the monastic life, how he wrestled with and defeated vice and the desires of his body, tolerated neither indifference nor heresy, ended jealousy and envy, and was constantly mindful of the cross. In the penultimate section, the poet describes the grief of Conn’s land (i.e., the territory of the Cenél Conaill) at Columba’s death, and how deserving he is of salvation. The heroic characterization of his work on behalf of

Christianity demands the same respect and praise expected for a stalwart secular leader, claiming a high-profile position for him within the Cenél Conaill tradition, and at the same time claiming high status for those who emulate him.

The tone changes significantly in the last short section, where the poet shifts from praise and lament to how Columba might intercede from beyond death on behalf of his audience:

Amrad inso ind ríg ro-dom-rig. For-don-snáidfe Sïone. Ro-dom-sibsea sech riaga. Rop réid menda duba dím. Dom-chich cen anmne 5 Húa huí Choirp Cathrach con húasle. Oll rodiall, oll natha nime nemgrían, nímda húain.

This is the elegy of the king who rules me. He will protect us in Sion. He will urge me past torments. May it be easily dark defects go from me. He will come to me without delay, 5 the descendant of Cathair’s offspring, Coirpre, with dignity. Vast the movements of the poem, vast the splendid sun of heaven, I have no time.

The first line announces the end of the Amra proper with all the self-conscious egotism of a court poet, declaring his own achievement and invoking the authority of his position. In the same line, he also declares continued allegiance to Columba, ind ro-dom-rig “the king who rules me.” The poet does not name him, but uses the title rig “king,” leaving it ambiguous for six lines as to 126

whether he is talking about God or Columba. Doing so, he both seizes a range of intercessory possibilities for his subject, and reinforces the poet/patron relationship he has with Columba by appealing to the same traditional vanities he would with a secular lord. Furthermore, whereas an elegy on a secular subject might mention the subject’s heir, praising him and telling the community that they will have continuity through him, here the poet mentions no heir to

Columba’s monastic overlordship, instead assuring all that he will continue to look after them, a consolation to the familia in a period of transition, as well as to those monks coming afterward who would always have the extra supportive figure of Columba as part of their monastic identity.

Taken altogether, the Amra at this early stage of the cult of Columba served to valorize and legitimize the monastic life, and thus monastic identity. It also established Columba as a divine intercessor who could act on behalf of his familia. As Columba moved from recent history into legend, his familia came to view him not as the lost lamented leader of the Amra, but as a patron who could and did intervene in the spiritual welfare of his monks. The afterlife of the Amra reflects this development, and suggests further roles for Columba in the negotiation of monastic identities.

The Amra was copied prolifically in Irish textual culture well into the later medieval period, acquiring an extensive apparatus of glosses and commentary that sought not only to explain the poem’s many obscurities, which became only more obscure as time went by, but also to explain

Columba himself. This additional Columban material emerges in both prose and poetry and demonstrates a desire to emphasize his intercessory qualities. The eleventh-century preface to the poem, for example, fetishizes the Amra as an instrument of power. A brief poem quoted in the preface declares that whoever recites the Amra, “whose meanings is difficult” (is amreid inne), will receive heaven from Columba; whoever recites it with understanding (cona chéil), shall have “prosperity on earth” (sonus for in talmain) and “save his soul past pain” (soerfaid a 127

anmain sech phein).227 That Columba was invoked regularly in this manner from an early date is indicated by Adomnán, who tells us in the Vita Columbae that “ordinary people, even criminals, were using prayers and songs to Columba to protect them in times of dire danger;” he also claimed to have collected hundreds of examples of their efficacy.228

These monastic concerns and the role that Columba might play were further developed by another poet, Béccán mac Luigdech, who follows the Amra by only forty or so years.

Two Poems by Béccán mac Luigdech

What little is known of Béccán mac Luigdech, the poet to whom two poems on Columba,

“Tiugraind Beccáin” (“The Last Verses of Béccán) and “Fo réir Choluimb” (“Obedient to

Colum”), are attributed, places him within the Columban familia of the mid to late seventh century. Like Columba, he was a member of the Uí Néill, though of the Cenél nÉogain branch rather than the Cenél Conaill;229 the poet emphasizes his Uí Néill connection in both his surviving poems. Which monastic institutions he was associated with is impossible to know for certain, but geographical comments in his poetry and other evidence make Iona a distinct possibility.230 There is also the simple fact that Columba is the subject of Béccán’s poetry, which further suggests he had a place within the saint’s community, especially when that poetry, as I argue below, was used for spiritual guidance as well as for praising Columba as a spiritual patron within the monastic context.

227 Whitley Stokes, ed. and trans., “The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille,” 134-135. 228 Clancy and Márkus, The Earliest Poetry of Iona, 164, 173; A. O. and M. O. Anderson, Adomnan’s Life of Columba, 202-203 (I: 1). 229 Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans., “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille,” Ériu 24 (1973): 2-3; Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans, “Tiughraind Bhécáin,” Ériu 26 (1975): 66, 74-75. 230 In “Tiugraind Beccáin,” Béccán refers to Columba’s activities in northern Ireland as taking place to the south, positioning him in Scotland; Béccán may also be identified with a Béccán solitarus who is addressed in a letter together with Ségéne, abbot of Iona, in 632 or 633. He may also be the same Béccán of the monastery of Rhum (a Hebridean island) who is referenced in the Martyrology of Tallaght and the Annals of Ulster (s.v. 677), compiled at Iona. See Clancy and Márkus, The Earliest Poetry of Iona, 130-134. 128

In his two poems, Béccán creates connections between the secular and religious in order to lead his Columban confrères to a better understanding of their subject-position as monks; that is,

Béccán, perhaps inspired by the Amra, hybridizes the language of the heroic ethos, from which the monks have exiled themselves, to the language of monastic asceticism in order to provide them with the language and ideas necessary to forge a consoling subjectivity that incorporates secular, masculine values in monastic values. The poet applies this language to Columba, who, together with the poems’ speaking-subjects, function as exemplary subjectivities for the monks.

“Tiugraind Béccáin” (“The Last Words of Béccán”)

The first ten of the poem’s twenty-five stanzas are a recital of Columba’s actions establishing his monastic network in Ireland and of his journey across the sea to Scotland. The descriptions of the founder echo the Amra’s religious-heroic tone. Columba is a shining light, a “wide-spread candle” (lethan caindel)231 (1) and “candle of Connacht, candle of Britain, wonderful lord”

(caindel Connact | caindel Alban | amrae fíadat) who led “an army” (cechaing tríchait) across the sea (4). “He broke passions” (brississ tola) (3) and he brought “the virtue of wisdom” (birt búaid n-eccnai) (6), and he was a “wonderful hero” (amrae tuire) (7). All his deeds were aided by God and the Trinity (8-9). He was a “shepherd of monks, judge of clerics, finer than things / than kingly gates, than sounds of plagues, than battalions” (Búachail manach | medamc cléirech | caissiu rétaib, / rigdaib sondaib | sonaib tedmann | tríchtaib cétaib) (10).

These stanzas provide useful images for the monastic audience to apply to themselves; as part of Columba’s legacy, stories about him are also stories about the history and nature of their shared past, making praise of the saint an analogue for praise of heroic ancestors or common leaders in a secular context. The stanzas also highlight the wide geography of Columba’s

231 All text and translation from Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans, “Tiughraind Bhécáin,” 80-86, with some emendations silently adopted from Clancy and Márkus, The Earliest Poetry of Iona, 146-151. 129

influence and reputation, which is naturally linked to the Columban familia united under the spiritual patronage of its founder. The monks may take particular pride in the heroic and bold story of the foundation of the Columban federation’s headquarters at Iona, a noble, far-reaching deed by their religious “lord.” In fact, the venture echoes the táin or raiding expedition that provided regular opportunities to prove oneself; these men could be said to be on a missionary táin of their own. The subtexts here are that, even though they have left behind family identities and the option to achieve status as men through the usual, secular avenues, their new familia has noble antecedents, and their work is heroic in its way; how they live as monks should be as highly valued as the accomplishments of secular men.

The second section (11-19) turns from Columba’s exploits to the many roles he fulfilled in life, again marking them out to the monastic audience as noble and important: he was a candle that illuminated the meaning of the (biblical) law and a hero whose activities reached even the darkest places of Scotland (11); he controls (now, in the present) the weather and protects the poet’s soul (12); he was famous for his works, bearer of knowledge and wealth, and a listener to the people (13); he was an oak and a rock of protection, a sun to monks (14). In 15-19 the poet focuses on his more quotidian achievements as a monk, presenting them as heroic: he lived and slept against a rugged rock (marking the landscape visible to Béccán’s audience with Columba associations) (15); he crucified his body with fasting, and chose learning and suffering over comfort (16); he slept little – inserting here a classic, heroic exclamatory aside: “fairest of deeds!” – and broke passions (17); for love of learning he kept only books and gave up all other things (including battles, by which a secular man would make his reputation) (18), and finally, he gave up chariots and instead embraced boats, and then exile (19).

In the last section, st. 20-25, Béccán switches modes from heroic-religious praise to a litany- like invocation of Columba as protector: 130

20. Columb Cille Columb boíë Columb biäss Columb bithbéo ní hé sin in snádud ciäss. 21. Columb canmae co dáil n-écco íarum, riäm, ríaraib imbaiss ima-comairc cách fo-n-gniäm. 22. Guidiu márguidi macc do Eithne is ferr moínib, m’anam día deis dochum ríchid re ndomuin doínib.

20. Columb Cille, Columb who was, Columb who will be, Constant Columb, not he the protection to be lamented. 21. Columb we sing, till meeting with death, before, after, by the rules of poetic knowledge, which salutes him whom we serve. 22. I pray a great prayer to Eithne’s son, he is better than treasure, my soul to his right hand, to heaven, before the world’s people. Béccán opens his invocation with Columba’s full name, “Columb Cille,” a simple restatement of his essential theme. With an alliterative, repetitive thrum on “Columb,” Béccán places Columb in both the past and future (20a), boldly connecting his glorious past to an expectedly glorious future as patron. He is bithbéo “constant” or “everlasting” (a nice pun on the repetition of his name), as is his snádud “protection.” In 21, Béccán opens up his invocation to include his monastic brethren, speaking in the first-person plural for the first time – we praise Columba, we serve him. Doing so, Béccán steps back from his authoritative position as poet to remind his brothers he is one of them, and that this work of praise is part of the work they all share.

In the last three stanzas, Béccán returns to the specifically monastic qualities that make

Columba a hero of asceticism:

23. Día fo-ruigni, rígdae écndairc, hi land lessaib, la toil n-aingel, hauë treibe Conail cressaib.

131

24. Cernach dúbart Día do adrad, aidchib, laithib, lámaib fáenaib, findaib gartaib, gnímaib maithib. 25. Maith boí hi corp, Columb Cille – cléirech nemdae – imbed fedbach, fírían mbélmach, búadach tengae.

23. He worked for God, royal prayer, within church ramparts, with the will of the angels, child of Conal’s household, in vestments. 24. Triumphant plea: adoring God, nightly, daily, with hands outstretched, with splendid alms, with right actions. 25. He was good in body, Colum Cille, heavenly in clerical habits – abundantly able-bodied – loud-spoken just one, tongue triumphant. Béccán narrows the scope of Columba’s accomplishments to focus on his exemplary behaviour as a monk: the saint worked within the walls of churches in the vestments of a priest (23), presumably to celebrate mass and worship God in the same way that the members of the

Columban familia would; and the saint worshipped God (gaining salvation) with generosity, alms, and right behaviour, also the daily work of a monastic community (24). The final stanza emphasizes the saint’s corporeality, that Columba was once flesh and blood as they are, and that beyond death he triumphed, as the monks of his community, who live as he did, may also do.

Only saints, Béccán’s message seems to be, can accomplish the great deeds and attain the marvelous qualities of the saint laid out in st. 1-19; but this saint was also a monk, like his audience, following the daily regime, as they strive to do, and Columba’s triumph can be gained for them by the same means.

The last line of the poem’s reference to the saint’s triumphant tongue (búadach tengae) seems also to be self-referential: although the obvious reference is to the wisdom of Columba’s speech,

Béccán also asserts his authority here as a poet, a speaker of truths and special knowledge who is

132

to be listened to carefully by his community, lending more power to his appropriation of

Columba and his narrative as a model figure. In Fo réir Choluimb, Béccán draws more explicitly upon that authority, invoking the tone of the court poet and the special space of identity-work it evokes, but within a monastic context.

“Fo réir Choluimb” (“Obedient to Colum”)232

Béccán begins his poem with a clear statement of its major themes and thesis:

1.233 1. Fo réir Choluimb céin ad-fías, Obedient to Colum, while I speak, find for nimib snáidsium secht; may the bright one in the seven heavens set fri húathu úair no-tías, protect me; ni cen toísech: táthum nert. when I go on the road of fears, I am not lordless: I have strength. A lot is happening in this first quatrain. First, Béccán establishes a layered relationship with

Columba. He describes himself as obedient to the saint, bringing to mind the total obedience demanded of a monk to his superiors as part of his spiritual development. The second part of 1a

– céin ad-fías “while I speak” – draws attention to Béccán’s poetic act, and so to the rhetoric of secular praise, in which the poet calls attention to his craft as in order seek reward from his patron, emphasizing the unique set of skills he possesses and which his patron depends upon. In the second line, Béccán invokes Columba’s intercessory powers using the verb snaidsium (> snáidid, “protects”, verbal noun snádud). Snádud was a legal term indicating protection or safe

232 A single complete version of the poem is found in the seventeenth-century Dublin, National Library of Ireland, G50. See Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans., “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille,” 1. 233 All text and translation from Fergus Kelly, ed. and trans, “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille,” 8-23, with some emendations silently adopted from Clancy and Márkus, The Earliest Poetry of Iona, 136-143.

133

passage granted by one person to another of equal or lesser status for the length of time they remained within the granter’s territory.234 By using the term, Béccán continues to craft a blended figuration of Columba as spiritual and secular lord. Although the clearest meaning of the term’s use here is the spiritual protection the saint can provide, it also implies his territorial lordship over the Columban federation. The idea of Columba as provider of snádud in its sense of “safe conduct” is implicit in the sense that the poet is asking for his protection through life and into heaven, but Béccán invokes it more clearly in 1c, where he speaks of travelling the set fri húathu

(“road of fears”), subtly connected to snáidsium by alliteration. The third line then connects syntactically to 1d, where Béccán declares he is not without a lord (after all), and thus has strength.

Béccán’s thesis, then, is that despite having given up positions in secular hierarchies that provided the support of a lord or other guiding figure, that loss is more than compensated for by

Columba, whose snádud ranges far beyond that of any usual leader. Béccán gestured toward this transmutation in Tiugraind Bhéccáin, but here Columba stands explicitly in the place of a lord.

The poet challenges the fear that monastic exile has robbed his brothers of the social underpinnings of the bond between lord and retainer, because fo réir Choluimb, obedient to

Colum, they have a lord upon whom they may rely for confidence and consolation in their ascetic life.

In addition to consoling that monastic anxiety, the poet also carefully positions himself for the benefit of his audience. As a brother to his audience, he shares their anxieties and desires to be consoled. As a poet, he is authoritative, asserting that he is obedient to Columba while he speaks and thus a voice to be listened to, doing the will of his patron. Like the speaking-subject of the

234 Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988), 82, 140. 134

“Wanderer,” then, he brings together several vectors of cultural expectations about the poet in order to fashion himself as a resonant Columban voice.

Stanzas 2-5 briefly cover the deeds that are the foundation of Columba’s fame, acts of ascetic triumph expressed in heroic terms, as we have seen before. He gave up comforts, prayed diligently, and “he crucified – not for crimes – his body on the grey waves” (crochais – níbu hi cinta – / a chorp for tonna glassa) (2cd), becoming an exile. Béccán directly connects Columba to Christ; the implication is that the saint’s willing crucifixion through exile gained salvation not only for himself but for those who follow his example. St. 3 recounts his next deed: the establishment of the community of Iona – Gabais a n-adamrae n-aí (“He staked a marvelous claim”), for which he is exalted in the fourth stanza (e.g., tindis a ainm amail gréin, / ba lés i comair cach oín (“His name glistened like the sun; he was a light before each one”). Finally

Béccán tells us “The one best thing of all things” that Columba ever accomplished: “he has freed his monks from wealth” (A n-óen as dech di rétaib: / ro-sóer a manchu moínib – 5ab), emphasizing the importance of turning one’s back on the material world. In these quatrains,

Béccán claims for Columba the credit for establishing the monastic community, for paving a way to salvation, and for the continued well-being of that community in much the same way a court poet stakes claims for his lord in order to assure the community and its individuals of their security.

Having rehearsed Columba’s famous deeds, Béccán returns to his thesis that ní cen toísech, he is not without a lord:

6. 6. Is dín úathaid, is dín slúaig, He is the protection of a few, he is the slán cach eslán asa dún; protection of many, is dún n-inill, is caín mbúaid safe is every unsafe person to whom he is a buith íar Coluimb Chille cúl. fort;

135

he is a safe fort, it is a fine benefit to be in Colum Cille’s care. This stanza could easily be inserted into any court panegyric, so heroic is the rhetoric. The alliteration of the line and repetition of key ties together several semantic concepts (the “d” on dín “protection” and dún “fort,” which are both repeated; and the “c” alliteration in the last name that connects cach “everyone” in line 2 to Columba’s care (cúl) in the last) emphasizing the saint’s role as protector. This is powerful, inspiring language that would resonate in the ears of

Béccán’s fellow monks.

The poet develops his religious-heroic figure over the next several stanzas, now mixing in language that emphasizes Columba’s accomplishments as an ascete. Columba was “uniquely triumphant” (óen-búadach) over lust, and a noble-born flame of the northerners, born of a noble mother (8); his fame was great enough to make him known to the King of Heaven, and again

Columba is invoked as a protective figure in the here and now – whoever praises him will be blessed in any difficulty (9). Being just of speech, Columba’s word was a spear-cast that slew lies (10); he left Ireland and crossed the sea on a campaign to shatter lusts (11-12). The last stanza of the section again summarizes the reasons for his fame and, in a neat semantic ambiguity, casts his reward for his deeds in both secular and religious terms:

13. 13. Fích dri colainn catha íuil, He fought with the flesh familiar battles, légais la sin suíthe n-óg, in addition, he read pure learning, úagais, brígais benna síuil, he sewed, he hoisted sail tops, sruith tar fairrgi, flaith a lóg. an esteemed one across seas, a kingdom his reward. Béccán, again in a supportive nod to his brothers, places Columba’s daily ascetic practices of fasting and studying on par with his adventurous self-exile, which together led to his being sruith

“esteemed.” His reward is flaith, which can mean a kingdom, Heaven, or lordship, the

136

implication being that Columba earned all three in life, and presides from heaven as a lord over his kingdom.

Where the previous section (7-13) was concerned with elevating the challenges of monastic life by describing Columba’s triumph over them in heroic language, in the next section (14-17)

Béccán seeks to raise the profile of the monks who accompanied the saint across the Irish Sea, providing more achievable or relatable exemplars for his audience.

14. 14. Lessach, línmar, slain co céill, Successful, numerous, in safety, curchaib tar sál sephtus cló, a wind swept them over the sea in boats, Columb Cille, caindel Néill, Columb Cille, candle of Níall,235 ní frith i corp cummae dó. his like was not found in human body. 15. 15. Dánae arbar asa chrúas, Brave is the host who has his toughness, clér co n-imlúad aingel cert, an order with true angel’s movements, cemtis buidir, boíthus clúas, though they were deafened, they had hearing, cemtis lobuir, boíthus nert. though they were weakened, they had strength. 16. 16. Ninaig ar glenn gabsait foss, At the wave’s glen they took rest, forienn Choluimb, clothach dám, Colum’s crew, a famous band. dánae buiden, boíthus coss, Bold company, they had a foot, Columb i mboí, boíthus lám. with Colum, they had a hand. 17. 17. Leathan indbas i cach dú, Great treasure in every place, Columb Cille, cáich di Níall, Colum Cille, of all Níall’s folk: ní cen toísech, táthus sóer, not lordless, they have a nobleman, sét fri temel, táthus cíall. on darkness’s path, they have wisdom. Béccán gives Columba’s followers the same martial treatment the saint has received; just as a chieftain’s retinue would partake of the glory of his deeds, so too do the monks who accompanied Columba. Columba’s spiritual dimension is also present in the way he and his followers recall Christ and his disciples in their numbers, and in the sea journey itself, which

235 I.e., Níall Noígíallach (Níall of the Nine Hostages), the progenitor of the Uí Néill dynasty. 137

echoes Paul’s journey to Rome (Acts 27-29) in his work to spread the faith, as well as Christ’s travel across the Sea of Galilee (and calming of the storm) (Mark 4: 35-41).

Béccán has another strategy at work in this section, which has been an undercurrent throughout the poem: he has steadily brought his monks’ subject-position closer to Columba’s.

In the opening of the poem he claimed for himself a disciple/spiritual mentor relationship with the saint (in addition to those of the poet/patron and retainer/lord). As a member of the familia himself, Béccán also stands in as a confrère of the community, and thus the relationships he forges with Columba would also be understood as being his brothers’. Thus far, Béccán has emphasized the retainer/lord relationship in his emphasis of Columba-as-protector. But he has also clearly demonstrated the value of the saint’s ascetic practices, which are also the practices of the monks; in that, at least, the brothers, Béccán, and Columba are all equals in the daily challenges they face, and so they have shared aspects of their subjectivity. In the section just above, Béccán has explicitly shown how the monks who followed Columba abroad shared in his reward (i.e., salvation). Béccán’s brothers, many of whom may have actually made the same physical journey, have all certainly made the same metaphorical journey of exile from former subjectivities constructed by family, status, and territory. They too should reap the benefits of their patron’s successes, having followed in his and his companions’ footsteps. And so, after

Columba’s disciples have arrived in Scotland over the course of st. 14-16, in st. 17, they find rewards – “treasures” (indbas) – for their daring everywhere (17a), providing the poet an opportune moment to recapitulate his main theme: Columba’s followers are not lordless (ní cen toísech), they have a nobleman (sóer) and his wisdom (cíall) to guide them (17cd).

Béccán then employs a speech-act reminiscent of the Fáeth Fíada (i.e., “Patrick’s Lorica) suffusing the immediate world with his presence and again emphasizing his ascetic achievements: 138

18. 18. Columb i taig for cach ngin, Colum within on each mouth, Columb i maig, medar cáich, Colum outside, the talk of everyone, Columb Cille, cóelais tin, Colum Cille, he made himself thin, toingtit ingnaith, moltait gnáith. strangers swear by him, friends praise him. 19. 19. Gabais míltni muintir noíb, He served with a holy band, níbu hingnath aidchib téoil, he often spent nights withdrawn; toë la sin, séime toíb, silence, too, thinness of side, tendál Alban ecnae a béoil. Britain’s beacon, his mouth’s wisdom. St. 18 urges that Columba be on the tongues and in the minds of all, nicely doubling Béccán the court poet’s desire that his words of praise and his subject live on in the minds of his audience, and Béccán the monk’s desire that he and his brothers think and speak only proper things. In st.

19, the image of Columba among his disciples, his muintir noíb (“holy band”), should again remind the audience that they are part of that monastic troupe, bolstering their resonant connection with the hero-monks of the previous section. The heroic language is tempered in

19b-d, however: rather than enjoy the comitatus of the retinue in what would be, in a secular context, a scene of carousal. Columba’s fame and success is tempered by his diligent asceticism

– silence instead of shouting or singing, fasting instead of feasting.

To this point, Béccán has created an overlapping network of secular and religious resonances designed to lead his audience to the insight that, despite the exile of monasticism, they have gained much more than they lost – in Columba they have a lord who protects them and provides them the opportunity to share in the greatest of rewards he has earned, salvation. In the remaining stanzas (20-25), Béccán crafts his hybrid themes into a kind of prayerful spell-work aimed at cementing this new hybrid perspective on monastic subjectivity in the minds of his audience.

20. 20. Bendacht Choluimb cháith fil form, Holy Colum’s blessing on me, corop mo lorg laithib mís, that he may be my daily path,

139

bendacht ruirech biäs form, the Great King’s blessing on me, arna gáibthi na ríag rís. so that I be spared the perils of torments. 21. 21. Rom-ain ar thein, tress cach oín, May he protect me from fire, everyone’s Columb Cille, caindel sóer, conflict mad-cloth a dál, dath ram-boí, Colum Cille, noble candle, berthum co ríg credbas clóen. well-famed was his assembly, there was brightness to him, may he bring me to the king who ends evil. Béccán invokes the blessing of Columba, with the intention that he will be his lorg, his “path” or

“model,” trusting him to see him past all trouble, recalling his invocation of Columba’s snádud

“safe conduct” in the first quatrain. Throughout this section, Béccán speaks more consistently in the first person than anywhere else in the poem, presenting himself and his words with confidence as another model for his audience, a self who believes in the power of his words, and invoking the cultural cachet he has gathered speaking in the modes of both courtly and monastic poet.

In st. 22, Béccán reiterates his invocation of Columba as protector:

22. 22. Columb Cille, céine mbéo, Colum Cille, while I live, bid mo dúchonn, dáil co feirt, will be my chant, until the grave; fri cach ngúasacht géra dó in every risk I shall call him, dath a molta méit mo neirt. when I’ll praise him with my full strength. Béccán again presents himself as a poet/monk/retainer to Columba and model to his audience, encouraging them to put their faith in their patron. In st. 23, he draws on both biblical and legal language to emphasize his confidence in his relationship with the saint:

23. 23. Ní gairm fri fás fil form gein, No “cry in the wilderness” what’s on my lips, gigsea dom Día dúais mo bláith, I shall pray of my God my poet’s reward; berthum sech ríg trebas tein, may he bear me past the king of fire, íar sin is fair fil mo ráith. after that my surety falls to him. In 23a, Béccán is confident his words are not the marginalized words of one crying in the wilderness, but the majority report on Columba, his fame, and his efficacy as a lord; it must be 140

true, because Béccán, a poet, is saying so. He then displays further confidence in 23b, when he continues his hybrid language as he tells his audience he will seek his dúas from God. Dúas is a legal term indicating the fees a patron owes a poet upon the fulfillment of his duties in a formal client arrangement.236 In 23cd, Béccán avers that God will see him past Hell, and that he will then be responsible for his ráth, another legal term meaning “guarantee” or “surety.” The gist is that Béccán has fulfilled his poetic duties so well, that God is now responsible for his well-being.

The poet again effectively blends his roles as poet and monk in order to give his speech-act power in the minds of his audience.

The poem’s last two quatrains are problematic in that st. 25 may be a later addendum to the poem: as Fergus Kelly notes, it has a distinctly different metre, alliterative pattern, and rhyme scheme, and use of consonance. Furthermore, the syntax of 25c reflects eleventh-century Irish rather than early eighth.237 That st. 24 could be the original final stanza is supported by its final word, don-foir, which makes a dúnad with 1a. In terms of sense, st. 24 would serve well as

Béccán’s final word:

24. 24. Rígdae bráthair búadach ríg, A royal kinsmen of triumphant kings, rathmar fíado, feib ron-ain, lord full of grace, thus may he guard us. gétait gosite ndemnae dím, He will remove the demons’ snare from me, dúbart a bard, bés don-foir. his poet’s prayers perhaps may save us. The quatrain captures the essentials of Béccán’s project of consolation. 24a and 24b remind his listeners of the double-antecedents of Columba: he is noble-blooded and he is blessed by God, bringing him both a temporal and a spiritual authority that makes him their ideal lord and protector. In 24c, Béccán declares himself safe from damnation – he can himself escape the snare of the devil, because (24d) his prayer (and the prayers of other poets) honouring Columba

236 Fergus Kelly, A Guide to Early Irish Law, 45, 48, 310. 237 Fergus Kelly, “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille,” 34. 141

may protect him. Béccán here calls himself a bard, “his (Columba’s) poet,” using a term for himself that ranks him low among the grades of early Irish poets (although requirements of alliteration may have influenced his diction here). Béccán’s humility is at play here, certainly, but calling himself Columba’s poet efficiently accomplishes several things here at the end of his poem. The term minimizes his status to keep the focus on his words rather than his skill and standing, highlighting his humility, but more importantly, the poet once more hybridizes his position and his poetry. Béccán’s work carries with it all the authority of the court poet, but when he abandons the traditional poet’s hubris to speak as a humble bard, he offers himself as a brother from among his audience who is using his skills to speak to something important – the spiritual and emotional well-being of his community.

That is as good a place to end, but there is still st. 25 to deal with. Regardless of whether the stanza is a later addition, it does have a valedictory quality that suits the poem:

25. 25. Do-m-air trócaire ría mbás, May mercy come to me before death, ropo aithrige no-thías. may it be penance that I seek, ro-béo com chond is com chéill, may I be in my mind and my sense, fo réir Choluimb céin ad-fías. obedient to Colum while I speak. 25ab are standard in sentiment, praying for mercy and forgiveness before death. But lines 25cd suggest something of the poem’s afterlife, specifically that Béccán was successful in his intent that “Fo réir Choluimb” be recognized as a poetic prayer that models a life of thought and action obedient to the example of Columba, which, if followed, can alleviate the exile-anxieties of his familia.

Conclusion

In his poetry, Béccán has skillfully blended the traditional rhetoric of the panegyric and the newer language of spiritual cult, replacing the secular patron with the spiritual-lordship of a saint

142

and founding-father of a monastic familia. Béccán has also successfully drawn his monastic audience into his conceit – if Columba is the hero of this poem, then the monks are his retinue, doing battle alongside him, and claiming their reward at the end. Where the Amra Choluimb

Cille sought to praise Columba, ambitiously experimenting with traditional lament and Christian rhetoric and creating a new, hybrid social narrative of what “heroic” may encompass, Beccán not only hybridized heroic and Christian-monastic social narratives, he also packaged them for delivery, so to speak, exploiting the traditional authority of his position as poet in such a way that he is able to appropriate Columba’s story as a model for his community, providing consolation and an exemplar for the quotidian anxieties of the ascetic monastic life.

Catharsis and Consolation in Egill Skallgrímsson’s “Sonatorrek”

So far in this chapter, I have explored how a speaking-subject and a cultic figurehead can be used as the means of delivering consolation to targeted communities. In this final part, I discuss a rather different representation of consolation. One key difference is that the poet’s sole target of consolation is the poet himself, making his lament less interested in positioning an argument for his audience. Another difference is that while Old English and Irish poetics are, as we have seen, open to compositional strategies that make multivalent use of rhetorical styles, Old Norse poetics is awash in a rich tradition of metaphorical language dependent upon the language of pre-

Christian myth. The Norse tradition also endows the poet with more power, both social and supernatural, than we see in non-legendary representations of other North Atlantic poets, which is reflected in the confidence and egotism common to first-person Norse poetry. The comparatively strong voice of the poet-speaker and the richness of its multivalent rhetorical strategies thus allows us to consider the themes of this chapter being played out in a context particularly conducive to the reconstruction of self and subject-position through verse.

143

“Sonatorrek” (“The Grievous Loss of Sons”) is a famously difficult but well-regarded poem attributed to the tenth-century poet and hero Egill Skallagrímsson. The poem is difficult for several reasons: it is preserved complete but badly jumbled in only two seventeenth-century manuscripts;238 it was composed in a highly virtuosic manner that may have made it difficult for even contemporaries to understand it; and like “The Wanderer” and many other poems discussed in this project, it is multivalent or polyphonic in its construction, drawing upon many cultural threads to weave its way to consolation. These include pagan myth and religion,239 funeral ritual, and a long oral-literary inheritance of generic conventions that are in many cases too far in the undocumented past to be fully recognizable to us.240 A further challenge in assessing and interpreting “Sonatorrek” is that its provenance is unclear. The poem is preserved as part of the thirteenth-century biography Egils saga Skallagrímssonar, but the poem may have been

238 AM 453 4to and AM 462 4to. These two MSS are themselves copies of a lost Ketilsbók, written out by Ketill Jörundsson at the end of the seventeenth century. The first stanza of “Sonatorrek” is preserved in most major medieval manuscripts of Egils saga, into which the poem has been incorporated. This suggests that the poem was so well-known that an audience or performer would be expected to supply the remaining stanzas from memory. The earliest copy of the first stanza is found in the fourteenth-century Möðruvallabók. The first helmingr (half- verse) of st. 23 and all of st. 24 are preserved in the thirteenth-century guide to Norse poetics, Skáldskaparmál. See E. O. G. Turville-Petre, ed. and trans., Scaldic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 27-28; Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skáldskapurmál. 1: Introduction, Text and Notes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 1998), 9. 239 Possible Christian elements have not gone unproposed, e.g., Torfi Tulinius, “Le statut théologique d’Egill Skalla- Grímsson.” In Hugur: Mélanges d’histoire, de littérature et de mythologie offerts à Regis Boyer pour son 65e anniversaire, eds. Claude Lecouteux and Olivier Gouchet (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1997): 279- 288 (esp. 280-282), who argues that Egill’s daughter fills a Marian typology whose intervention prevents her father’s suicide. 240 These valences have been best synthesized by Joseph Harris in a series of articles on the poem: “Elegy in Old English and Old Norse. A Problem in Literary History,” in The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 46-56; “A nativist approach to Beowulf: The Case of Germanic Elegy,” in Companion to Old English Poetry, eds. Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), 45-62; “Sacriﬁce and guilt in Sonatorrek,” in Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck, ed. Heiko Uecker (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1994), 173-196; “‘Goðsögn sem hjálp til að lifa af’ í Sonatorreki,” Heiðin minni: Greinar um fornar bókmenntir, eds. Haraldur Bessason and Baldur Hafstað (Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1999), 47-70; “Erfikvæði, myth, ritual, elegy,” in Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004, eds. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 267-271; “Homo necans borealis: Fatherhood and Sacrifice in Sonatorrek,” Myth in Early Northwest Europe 3 (2007): 153-174; “‘Myth to Live By’ in Sonatorrek,” in Laments for the Lost: Medieval Mourning and Elegy, eds. Jane Tolmie and Jane Toswell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 149-171.

144

composed by Egill himself in the tenth century; opinions vary, but for my purposes here, I follow

Russell Poole’s nuanced assessment of the evidence and arguments, from which he tentatively concludes that the poem is an authentic composition of Egill’s, but that it may have undergone alterations as it was gradually incorporated into the saga.241 In my discussion, then, I read the poem as it has been incorporated into its thirteenth-century saga-context.

Egils saga recounts the life and adventures of the viking, poet, and farmer Egill

Skallagrímsson. Egill is a famously cantankerous, unpredictable figure, modeled in many ways on his patron Oðinn, the god of poetry.242 He is equally famous – both in his saga and outside it

– for his poetry. Of the many poems attributed to him, “Sonatorrek” is regarded as Egill’s greatest achievement, and perhaps the greatest poem in Norse tradition, due as much to its artistry as the fact that its emotional and confessional nature – unusual in saga-verse – appeals to modern readers.243

According to his saga, Egill composed “Sonatorrek” upon the death of his son Bǫðvarr, whose death followed closely upon the death of another son, Gunnarr. The scene comes later in the saga, when Egill, after a long period of viking activities abroad, has returned to Iceland and

241 See Russell Poole, “’Non enim possum plorare nec lamenta fundere': Sonatorrek in a Tenth-Century Context,” in Laments for the Lost: Medieval Mourning and Elegy, eds. Jane Tolmie and Jane Toswell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 173-200 (especially 174-181). 242 Annette Lassen provides a brief overview of the Óðinn-type in “Textual Figures of Óðinn,” in Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004, eds. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, Catharina Raudvere (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006), 280- 284. For a more detailed analysis of the Odinnic figures in saga, see Lassen’s monograph Odin på kristent pergament. En texthistorisk studie (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011). See also Margaret Clunies Ross’s assessment of Egill’s Odinnic nature in Christian context in “The Art of Poetry and the Figure of the Poet in Egils Saga,” in Sagas of Icelanders, ed. John Tucker (New York: Garland, 1989): 126-144. 243 The poem’s personal, almost confessional character resonated strongly with the Romantic ideal of lyrical self- expression, and came to represent for some the blooming of the Northern branch of a general Western cultural process of poetic development – from the communal mythic expressed in epic form, to the emergence of the individual within society expressed in a personal, subjective poetry. This Romantic perspective can sometimes obscure the deeply integrated mythic elements that are integral to Egill’s self-expression. See K. S. Heslop, “’Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide’: Sonatorrek and the Myth of Skaldic Lyric,” in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society: the 11th International Saga Conference, 154.

145

settled down with his family.244 Egill was having a shipment of wood conveyed to him by water.

His young son Bǫðvarr wanted to go along with the ship. The sea becomes rough, and all hands are lost. The bodies of Bǫðvarr and the others wash ashore. The same day, Egill goes to the shore seeking bodies. He recovers Bǫðvarr’s body and rides with it to his father Skallagrímr’s mound. He lays Bǫðvarr beside his grandfather, returns home to Borg, shuts himself up in his bed-closet, and no one dares speak to him.

The family grows worried, and Egill’s son Ásgerðr sends for his sister Þorgerðr. She arrives and lays a trap for her father. Þorgerðr says that she will not outlive her father and brother, and asks her father to let her into the bed-closet. She lies down on another bed and chews seaweed, saying it will help her die faster. Egill also chews the seaweed, and they become very thirsty.

Þorgerðr asks for water. Egill also takes some water, but they have been tricked – the water is milk. Þorgerðr suggests that, since their plan has been foiled, they might as well live long enough for Egill to compose a proper elegy – an erfikvæði (“funeral poem”)245 – on Bǫðvarr, and then they can die afterwards if they still want to. Egill struggles to compose his poem, but eventually does so. After he recites it for his family, he is consoled.

Egill’s Alienation

On the face of it, Egill’s great grief is caused solely by the death of Bǫðvarr. His erfikvæði, however, reveals that he is distressed not only by his son’s loss but also by the alienating effect

244 For the prose, the standard edition remains Sigurður Nordal, ed., Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ÍF 2 (Reykjavík: Íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933). See 242-257 (Kapítuli LXXVIII) for this episode. 245 This is the only instance of the term erfikvæði in Old Norse, although it is used today by scholars to indicate a poem associated with funeral ritual (see Joseph Harris, “Erfikvæði – Myth, Ritual, Elegy,” 267). I use the term throughout this section because it suggests something of the poem’s cultural richness.

146

that loss has upon his subject-position:246 with his son dead, the future of his family is in doubt and his social standing is in decline.247 This is most clearly seen in the poem’s middle sections

(st. 4-20).

4.248 4. Þvíat ætt mín Because my lineage (ætt) has come to an end, á enda stendr, like weather-beaten trees of the forest, it is not sem ‘hræbarnir a glad man who carries the dead body of a hlinnar marka’; relative out of the house. era karskr maðr, sá er kǫggla berr frænda hrørs af fletjum niðr. Though the poem’s title alludes only to sons, Egill’s real concern is the death of his ætt or

“family line,” which he likens to a withered forest, weakened and fruitless.

In st. 5, Egill broadens his memorializing beyond his son to include his parents, remembering their deaths. In st. 6, he characterizes his son’s death as a hlið – an opening or gap – in the frændgarðr of his father. This latter term can be translated in a number of ways: Bjarni

Einarsson gives “lineage,” while Bernard Scudder calls it a “wall” of the father’s kin; Gabriel

Turville-Petre offers “family-circle.”249 Cleasby-Vigfusson gives as an equivalent the term frændbálkr (a “fence of friends”) and translates frændgarðr as a “stronghold of kinsmen.”250

246 Cf. Beowulf ll.2444-2462, known as “The Father’s Lament,” as well as the Welsh cycle of poems known as Canu Llywarch Hên (“The Songs of Old Llywarch”). These laments offer no consolation, but share many of the concerns of old age and powerlessness that Egill wrestles with. I discuss them further in Chapter 3. 247 It should be noted that in his saga, Egill does have a surviving son. That this is glossed over in both saga and poem suggests either an oversight on the part of the saga-author, or that we are to infer that the surviving son is not expected to amount to much. 248 Norse text is from E. O G. Turville-Petre, ed.and trans, Scaldic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 28-41. I have also consulted Sigurður Nordal, ed., Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, Íslenzk fornrit 2 (Reykjavík: Íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933), 246-256; and Bjarni Einarsson, ed., Egils saga (London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 2003), 146-154. Translations are modified from Turville-Petre. 249 Bjarni Einarsson, ed., Egils saga, 148 n. 6; Bernard Scudder, trans., The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Vol. 2: Outlaws and Nature Spirits – Warriors and Poets – Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Robert Cook et al (Reykjavík: Leifur Ericksson Publishing, 1997), 152. 250 Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandd Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1874), s.v. “frændgarðr.” 147

Garðr on its own oftenest means an enclosure or yard, though it may also mean a house. Clearly it is an enclosing structure that was, before the death of Egill’s son, complete. Such a structure may be constructed of wood, but more importantly (and extending the metaphor) it is a structure made of building materials that Egill inherited, and whose duty it was to maintain. The metaphor of the unbroken frændgarðr suggests protection and continuity. His son is the missing component that threatens its integrity. Taking that together with the previous stanza’s reference to Egill’s dead parents, his concern is again the failure of his family line.

Over st. 7-9 Egill continues to express anxiety over the threat to his family while also introducing two other concerns contributing to his alienation. In st. 7 he lays blame upon the sea for his son’s death, as well as the deaths of other kinsmen. Rán and Ægir, sea-deities, have treated him roughly, and he is “stripped of kinsmen” (ofsnauðr at ástvinum – 7cd), because the sea has broken “the cords of my kin, a hard-spun strand from myself” (sleit marr bond minnar

ættar, snaran þátt af sjalfum mér – 7e-h). In st. 8, Egill says that if he could take up a sword against Ægir and Rán in revenge, he would kill them. One of the prescribed methods of redressing the death of kin (and thus recuperating status) in Norse society was to enact vengeance against the perpetrator. But in this case, the enemy is the sea, and no meaningful action can be taken; indeed, Sonatorrek may also be translated as the “difficult vengeance of sons,” as Alison Finlay has observed.251 Adding to Egill’s feelings of helplessness is his age. As he says himself, “an old man’s lack of support is obvious to all” (at alþjóð fyrir augum verðr gamals þegns gengileysi – 9e-h). Egill’s concern over his family continues, but it is now compounded by the more immediately personal problem of the fact that without his son’s backing, the social handicap of his old age is more apparent – Egill has no supporters, and he has

251 Alison Finlay, “Elegy and Old Age in Egil’s saga,” in Egil, the Viking Poet: New Approaches to Egils Saga, eds. Laurence de Looze, Jón Karl Helgason, Russell Poole, and Torfi H. Tulinius (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015): 111-130 (116); here, Finlay is following Sigurður Nordal, Egils saga, 257. 148

no son to act in his or his family’s interests. Over the course of his saga, Egill has made himself a prominent strongman in his community, buttressed by the continuity of his sons. That supporting structure is now gone, and so he feels himself to be alienated from the subject- position he built over a long career; an old man with no worthy son, he has lost standing and security.

The son’s importance to the father’s subjectivity is amplified in st. 10:

10. 10. Mik hefir marr The sea has deprived me of a great deal; it is miklu ræntan; painful to enumerate the deaths of kinsmen, grimt es fall since the shield of my family died and went to frænda at telja, the world of delight. síðan er minn á munvega ættarskjǫldr aflífi hvarf. That much rode on the survival of Egill’s son is clear from his epithet: ættarskjǫldr “family’s shield.” The term speaks to several important aspects of the father’s subjectivity. In one sense, the son is the shield of his ætt, by being the means through which it will be continued, i.e., the children he will have. In another sense, the son is also expected to defend the interests of the family, physically and materially. The centrality of this aspect of Egill’s relationship to his own subjectivity is the concern of st. 11-20.

In st. 11, Egill calls his son a randviðr “shield-tree” – another kenning using wood as a signifier for a family member, and an image of protection – and says confidently that had he grown up, he would have matured into a good man: Bǫðvarr mostly obeyed him (showing good spirit) and supported him, even against the words of others (st. 12). This brings to the father’s mind the loss of brothers. He wonders in the midst of battles (st. 13) who will support him now against enemies (st. 14), now that he without brothers and sons. He know that he “stumbles

149

when friends decrease” (verð ek varfleygr er vinir þverra – 14gh). Furthermore, finding someone trustworthy is difficult, because anyone can be bought off (15). In st. 17, Egill refers to a proverb that describes how the only compensation for a son or brother is to have another son in his place; but the son he had, whom we might say replaced Egill’s dead brother Þoroldr, is himself gone. In st. 18, Egill declares his dislike of other men; the only one whose company he would keep, his son, is off to be with Óðinn. Finally, in st. 19-20, which are syntactically linked,

Egill feels the weight of Ægir (the sea) pressing down upon him, and mentions the death of another promising young son, Gunnar, who died earlier of a “cruel sea-fever” (sóttar brími heiptugligr – 20bc).

The picture st. 4-20 paint of Egill’s anxieties makes it clear that the alienating shift in his subjectivity lies not only in the loss of his son himself, but in what the loss means for his idea of himself. Before the death of his son, Egill’s subjectivity was predicated on the assured continuance of his family through a worthy successor to himself. He was also assured of having some of the unavoidable loss of authority that comes with old age mitigated by a son who listened to him and supported his causes. If Egill is to find some kind of consolation, he must find away to interpret his new subject-position as a positive one.

Egill’s Consolation: Wood-Words and Mythic Models

Egill achieves his consolation by employing two strategies in his erfikvæði. The first strategy draws upon the metaphor of linking wood and family noted above. The second strategy relies on the deep mythic tradition underpinning much of Egill’s self-representation.

Wood-Words

As I noted above, in st. 4 Egill expresses his anxiety over the threatened integrity of his family through the image of battered trees of a forest. In his metaphor, each relative is a

150

“crushed” or “felled” maple tree, the weather-beaten forest signifying his family. In the second helmingr (half-stanza), he relates having to bear the body of his son to the family mound. While not immediately significant in terms of wood imagery within the context of the poem, it is worth pointing out that according to the prose leading up to the erfikvæði, Bǫðvarr was aboard a ship carrying timber. The boat sank and all the bodies—and presumably the cargo of timber— washed ashore. With that event fresh in an audience or reader’s mind, it is reasonable to suppose that the saga-author at least intends us to connect the image of Bǫðvarr’s corpse with that of the timber, reinforced in this stanza by the reference to Egill’s family as stricken trees. The relationship is made clearer in the next stanza, where Egill also introduces another wood metaphor, this time to represent the production of poetry:

5. 5. Þó mun ek mitt Yet I shall first recount my father’s death ok móður hrør and mother’s loss, carry from my word- 252 fǫður fall shrine (mind) the timber that I build fyrst um telja; my poem from, leafed with language. þat ber ek út ór orðhofi mærðar timbr máli laufgat.

Egill declares his intention to memorialize his family, bearing out the “timber” with which he will construct his erfikvæði from his mind. This act echoes st. 4, where Egill carries out the body of his son, again linking wood with family, and also with the materials of his poem. That the timber he uses is laufgat (“leafed”) indicates that he sees his words as having a quickening power; he strengthens the structure of his lineage with living wood, rather than the battered wood of the previous stanza.

252 All kennings are in italics followed by its meaning in parentheses. 151

The next group of stanzas (6-20), which I have discussed above, contain only two wood- references. The first is in st. 11, where Bǫðvarr is explicitly referred to as a randviðr or “shield- tree,” a common kenning for “man” or “warrior:”

11. 11. Veit ek þat sjálfr, at í syni mínum I know myself that the stuff of an evil man var(a) ills þegns had not grown in my son, if that shield-tree efni vaxit, (man) had been able to ripen until the hands ef sá randviðr of the host-father (Óðinn) took him [i.e., till røskvask næði he had been able to fall in battle as a mature unz her-Gauts man]. hendr of tœki. The second reference is more oblique:

15. 15. Mjǫk er torfyndr It is hard to find one whom I can trust among sá er trúa knegum all the people of Elgr’s gallows (Yggdrasill, of alþjóð the world-tree), because it is an evil traitor of Elgjar galga, kinsmen who sells his brother’s body for því at niflgóðr money. niðja steypir

bróður hrer við baugum selr.

The kenning alþjóð Elgjar galga is difficult, but the likeliest interpretation holds ‘Elgr’ as a heiti for Óðinn,253 with galgi being his gallows Yggdrasill, the cosmic tree on which he sacrificed himself to himself in order to gain his arcane knowledge, and which links all the various realms of Norse mythology. Taken all together, the kenning is thus “all the people of the world.”254

The place in the poem in which the reference falls suggests no obvious connection to the wood/family/poetry metaphors, but it may be that we are to take away from it deeper mythological associations of Egill’s speech-act. Much of Óðinn’s power is demonstrated

253 A heiti is a synonym, often an alternative names for Óðinn. 254 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 36. 152

through his poetry and speech in the stories about him; the kenning could be an indirect reference to Egill’s share in that power as a poet and Odinnic figure. More generally, the image of the tree standing at the centre of the cosmos could serve as an analogy of Egill’s reconstructive, recuperative speech-act in that it shows that the world itself is organized around images of wood.

But this is all speculative.255

We are on firmer ground in st. 21:

21. 21. Þat man ek enn er upp um hóf I still remember when the friend of the Gautar í goðheim (Óðinn) raised up to the world of the gods the Gauta spjalli ash-tree of my lineage which sprouted from ættar ask, me and the kin-branch of my wife. þann er óx af mér ok kynvið kvánar minnar.

Egill further extends the family/wood metaphor to a tree growing from himself and from his wife’s own family, and links it to a myth about the origin of humanity. According to this story, which is found in two mythological texts, the poem “Vǫluspá” and Snorri Sturluson’s prose narrative Gylfaginning,256 Oðinn and his brothers created humanity by imbuing breath, spirit, and motion into two pieces of driftwood – Askr (“ash”) and Embla (“elm”)257 – found along the shore. Bǫðvarr, also found along the shore by his father, echoes the image.258 Egill is clearly

255 To this speculation, we might also add the possibility that Egill’s reference to untrustworthy men who would kill their kin for gain may be actually self-reproach; he may blame his own commercial ambitions for the death of Bǫðvarr, who died with the shipment of wood Egill had ordered. 256 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 39; “Vǫluspá” st. 17: 5-8 in Ursula Dronke, ed. and trans., The Poetic Edda, Vol. II: Mythological Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 11; Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 2nd ed., ed. Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 2005), 13. 257 Ursula Dronke, ed. and trans., The Poetic Edda, Vol. II: Mythological Poems, 123. For the derivation of Embla as “elm,” Dronke notes that embla may have been a diminutive feminine form of almr. 258 In a brief note, Michael J. Bintley suggests that Egill may have seen in the driftwood-like corpse of his son the completion of a cycle of life begun with the quickening of Æskr and Embla. See “Life-cycles of Men and Trees in Sonatorrek,” Opticon1826 6 (Spring 2009): 1-3.

153

identifying his own family branch and his wife’s “kin-wood” contribution as continuations of the line established by the progenitors of all humankind. Doing so, he acknowledges Óðinn as both the patron of his family in addition to his role as Egill’s poetic patron, thereby linking poetry and family through wood metaphors.

At this point, four-fifths into the poem, Egill sets aside his wood-words and focuses on his relationship with Óðinn. Yet by conflating the material of poetry with that of family, Egill has effected part of his consolation. Embodying his family in his erfikvæði, using the living timber of leafed words, Egill has repaired the gap in his family’s frændgarðr, preserving it whole in immortal verse. But this speech-act consoles only the part of his alienation rooted in the fear of his family’s demise; it does not address completely Egill’s feelings of impotence in the face of death.

Mythic Models of Consolation

Baldr and Bǫðvarr

In his work on the pagan and mythological underpinnings of “Sonatorrek,” Joseph Harris has noted how Egill’s situation, specifically his inability to enact revenge on behalf of his son, echoes the myth of the death of Baldr. In this myth, Óðinn is unable to avenge the accidental death of his son Baldr because it occurs within a sanctuary, where no vengeance may be taken.

Harris, following the work of Jan de Vries259 and Magnus Olsen,260 argues that among Norse poets, the Baldr-myth was “a fundamental part of the thought-world of early erfikvæði,”261 so that the powerless grief of Óðinn for his son would have been paradigmatic in early funeral laments.

259 Jan de Vries, “Der Mythos von Baldrs Tod,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 70 (1955): 41-60. 260 Magnus Olsen, “Om Balder-digtning og Balder-kultus,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 40 (1924): 148-175. 261 Joseph Harris, “Myth to Live By,” 166. 154

In “Sonatorrek,” the myth is present in a number of ways. The primary theme in relation to

Egill’s mourning is Óðinn’s impotent grief: like Óðinn, Egill cannot take vengeance. Another theme present in both poem and myth is that the deaths of sons have far-reaching implications for their fathers. Where Egill becomes concerned about losing status and security at the death of his prized heir, Óðinn looks ahead to Ragnarök, the final battle at the end of the world, and sees that with Baldr’s death they have lost their greatest defender.262 There are a number of other allusions to the Baldr-myth throughout the poem,263 but the question at hand is – how does

Egill’s modelling himself on Óðinn help him achieve consolation?

In the story of Baldr and Óðinn, the god of poetry finds no consolation. But for Egill, there is comfort in seeing himself follow a tragic paradigm that even the gods could not escape. In the

Odinnic world, death is not just part of the human condition; even the gods cannot escape it or its sorrows. Joseph Harris has argued that the prevalence of the myth among other early erfikvæði suggests that its re-enactment in verse and ritual was likely a part of Odinnic funerary rites, and would therefore have played an important part in catharsis and consolation.264 It is unknown whether Egill was properly a worshipper of Óðinn, or if he was simply steeped in Odinnic mythos by virtue of his training as a poet,265 but either way his self-modelling on the god and subsequent consolation indicates that he at least found comfort in identifying with the idea that a greater being than himself was also dealt tragedy and sorrow.

262 Joseph Harris, “Myth to Live By,” 167. 263 For a complete discussion, see Joseph Harris, “Myth to Live By,” 166-170. 264 Joseph Harris, “Homo necans borealis: Fatherhood and Sacrifice in Sonatorrek,” 159-162. 265 Sigurður Nordal laid out the the possibility that Egill converted at some point to Óðinn-worship in his classic essay “Átrúnaður Egil Skallagrímssonar,” Skirnir 98 (1924): 145-165.

155

Sacrifice and Consolation

In another mythic treatment of “Sonatorrek,” Harris has identified a mythic model that is echoed in the poem, the story of Óðinn and Starkaðr.266 Over the course of his famously long life, Starkaðr receives a number of gifts from Óðinn – among them the gift of poetry – after he sacrifices his foster-brother to the god. Harris sees Egill as also receiving gifts for the sacrifice

(however unwilling) of his sons Bǫðvarr and Gunnar (referred to in st. 20). From Gunnar’s death specifically, he derives Egill’s gift of poetry because Egill refers to both his son’s (20) and his own gift of poetry (24) as vamm “spotless” or “stainless:”

20. 20. …síz son minn …since the vicious fire of sickness seized my sóttar brími son from the world, the one whom I knew heiptuglegr avoided evil speech, on his guard against úr heimi nam, faults. þann er ek veit at varnaði vamma varr vid vámæli 24. 24. Gáfumk íþrótt The enemy of the wolf (Óðinn), accustomed to ulfs um bági battle, gave me that skill devoid of faults vígi vanr [poetry], and such a spirit that I was able to vammi firrða, identify enemies from dissemblers. ok þat geð er ek gerða mér vísa fjandr af vélundum. Thus the death of pure-speaking Gunnar, the first of Egill’s sacrifices, was repaid by Óðinn with the pure-speech of poetry.267

266 Joseph Harris, “Sacrifice and Guilt in Sonatorrek,” 173-196. Harris addresses two other less strikingly modelled myths in his article – that of King Aun and Haraldr hilditǫnn. 267 Joseph Harris, “Sacrifice and Guilt in Sonatorrek,” 189-90.

156

The second of Óðinn’s gifts is found in the second helmingr of st. 24: the ability to recognize enemies among plotters, or provoke enemies to make themselves known among those plotting in secret.268 This would be a skill particularly suited to a viking who would wish to bring his enemies out into the open, which Egill certainly does in his saga. As Harris points out, Egill would understand this skill as having been key to saving his life in many situations.269 There is less congruency between this skill and his depiction of Bǫðvarr, but here is thematic coherence in that this son is described in terms of his potential as a warrior that links the two thematically.

The consolation Egill receives from seeing himself as a “Starkaðr” type is more clearly seen in reviewing st. 22-24 while read through the lens of this exchange of sacrifice and reward:

22. 22 Átta ek gott I had good relations with the lord of the spear við geirs dróttinn, (Óðinn), I had confidence in him, until the gerðumk tryggr lord of victory (Óðinn), broke off friendship at trúa hánum, with me. áðr vinátt

vagna rúni sigrhǫfundr um sleit við mik. 23. 23. Blótka ek því I do not worship Vílir’s brother (Óðinn), the bróður Vílis, protector of the gods, because I am keen to; goðjaðar, nevertheless, Mimr’s friend (Óðinn) has, if I at ek gjarn sék; consider the better side of it, granted me þó hefrr Míms vinr recompense for my ills. mér um fengnar

bǫlva bœtr ef hit betra telk. 24. 24. Gáfumk íþrótt The enemy of the wolf (Óðinn), accustomed to ulfs um bági

268 The translation in st. 24 is my own; Harris suggests that von See’s “‘made open foes among hostile plotters’ avoides emendation and seems superior” (see “Sacrifice and Guilt in Sonatorrek,” 190; also Klaus von See, “Sonatorrek und Hávamál, ” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 99, Bd. H. 1 (Mar. 1970): 26- 33 (29 n.)). 269 Joseph Harris, “Sacrifice and Guilt in Sonatorrek,” 190. 157

vígi vanr battle, gave me that skill devoid of faults vammi firrða, [poetry], and such a spirit that I was able to ok þat geð identify enemies from dissemblers. er ek gerða mér vísa fjandr af vélundum.

Egill’s sacrifices were unwilling, but by imagining himself in the same position of Starkarðr, who in the most extensive version of his story was likewise given his gifts before he sacrificed his brother, Egill is able to see his loss through an Odinnic interpretive framework that makes the deaths of his sons the cause of his own successes as a viking and poet. Furthermore, these gifts gain for him a different kind of immortality rooted in Odinnic skills: the ability to achieve viking-deeds worthy of remembrance, and the poetic skill to encapsulate those deeds in verse for all time. In addition to that, is the fact that it is through poetry that Egill is likewise able to immortalize his family.

This Odinnic outlook is extended in the saga itself, as Laurence de Looze has noted. After his consolation, Egill seems to embrace his renewed connection to Óðinn. He has a remaining son,

Þorsteinn, but his lack of poetic talent and vigour does not interest him.270 Egill seeks elsewhere for an heir through which to continue something of his spirit, if not his blood. De Looze see this continuation occur through an episode that extends the theme of the “family-shield”

(ættarskjǫldr) that once was Bóðvarr. In this episode,271 Egill is befriended by a young poet named Einarr Helgason skálaglamm (“bowl-rattle”). Einarr is very much like Egill: he was an uncommonly talented poet from a young age, and he is also an able viking. The two talk poetry and about their exploits and become fast friends. Einarr is later gifted a costly shield by an earl in exchange for a fine poem. He gifts it to Egill, who, seeing it as a challenge to him to compose

270 As a woman, Ásgerðr does not merit Egill’s consideration, despite her understanding of how the poetic process could help her father. 271 Sigurður Nordal, ed., Egils saga, 268-273 (kapituli 78). 158

a poem in praise of it, at first sets out to kill Einarr for his boldness. Egill decides instead to compose the poem, and the two remain fast friends the rest of their lives.

In Einarr, de Looze sees a “poet-son:” the two look alike, are similarly talented, and even

Einarr’s name and nickname seem to echo Egill’s: “Einarr Skalaglamm” – “Egill

Skallagrímsson.” Their episode is rather comic, and Einarr is surely to be taken as parodic, yet their relationship provides a continuity of Egill’s identity that is lacking in his relationship with his surviving son, in whom he apparently sees little of himself. Egill and Einarr’s relationship, on the other hand,

“postfigures Egill’s own life and passes on poetic craft to the next generation. A genealogy of poetic creation and creators has thus taken over from the genealogy of the bloodline: the lineage of poetic productions, articulated by the intercalated verse [in their conversations in the saga], is matched by a lineage of poets which does not necessarily correspond to any family tree. Einarr becomes a kind of extension, or better, a repetition of of parody of Egill’s own life.”272 Egill, consoled by the comfort of recompense for sacrifice, by the mythic models of paradigmatic loss and mourning, and by the power of his own verse to immortalize himself and his family, abandons his anxiety over the threat to his blood family, and embraces the continuation of his identity as a thoroughly Odinnic poet and warrior.

Being Old: Egill and Llywarch Hên

There is one last episode worth examining in Egils saga where the importance of mythic narrative to Egill’s consolation is demonstrated. As Egill enters extreme old age, he grows feeble and loses both his hearing and his sight. He becomes a figure of ridicule to the women of

272 Laurence de Looze, “Poet, Poem and Poetic Process in Egils Saga Skalla-Grímssonar,” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 104 (1989): 138-139.

159

his household. One day, when he stumbles and falls outside, some women laugh at him, saying that now that he falls, he is finished. Egill then speaks a verse:

58.273 58.274 Vals hefk vǫ́fur helsis; My head bobs like a bridled horse váfallr em ek skalla; it plunges baldly into woe. blautr erum bergis fótar My middle leg both droops and drips borr, en hlust es þorrin. while both my ears are dry.

In another instance, a cook shoos him away from the fire for being in the way:

59. 59. Hvarfak blindr of branda, Blind I wandered to sit by the fire, biðk eirar Syn geira, asked the flame-maiden for peace; þann berk harm á hvarma such affliction I bear on the border hnitvǫllum mér, sitja; where my eyebrows cross. es jarðgǫfugr orðum, Once when the land-rich king orð mín konungr forðum took pleasure in my words hafði gramr at gamni, he granted me the hoard Geirhamðis mik framði. that giants warded, gold.

Finally, on another occasion Egill goes to the fire to warm himself. Someone warns him not to stretch his legs too close to the fire. Lamenting his lack of control over his legs and his blindness, he says:

60. 60. Langt þykki mér, Time seems long in passing ligg einn saman, as I lie alone, karl afgamall, a senile old man án konungs vǫrnumæ on the king’s guard. eigum ekkjur My legs are two allkaldar tvær, frigid widow, those women en þær konur need some flame. þurfu blossa.

Bent, frail, and impotent is how Egill now understands himself. No use around the homestead, no longer a warrior, no longer able to participate in legal proceedings, no longer sexually viable.

273 Norse text from Siguður Nordal, ed., Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, 294-296. Numeration follows this edition. 274 Translations based on Bernard Scudder, trans., The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, Vol. 2, 174-175. 160

Unable, in short, to perform any of the acts that in his youth had won him standing in his community.

All of the same concerns of aging are voiced by another aged figure from Welsh literature.

The historical Llywarch Hên (“the Old”) hailed from sixth-century northern Britain. Over the course of centuries, he became the subject of story tradition that eventually found form in what is now presumed to be a lost late eighth- to tenth-century prosimetric saga-cycle centred in

Wales.275 Only the cycle’s verse survives. From the surviving verse, a brief narrative has been established for the saga. Llywarch, old and feeble, wholeheartedly embraces the heroic ethos.

No longer able to fight, he shames and eggs on his twenty-four sons to fight honourably in conflicts along the Welsh border. All of them die, leaving Llywarch alone and without support.

The majority of his poems are marwnadau or elegies for his dead sons, in which he simultaneously praises them, takes credit for their abilities, and expresses regret for his role in their deaths. Llywarch is unable to find any consolation in the deaths of his sons; unlike Egill, he has no mythic models through which to re-envision his grief, nor is he wise and self-aware enough to use verse to critique the heroic order and establish a new framework through which to view himself, as “The Wanderer”-speaker did.

In the final poem, known editorially as “Cân yr Henwr” (“Song of the Old Man”),276

Llywarch provides an extensive laundry-list of the disadvantages he experiences as an old man attempting to operate within an heroic order, many of which resonate with Egill’s verses. Before he was “bent-backed” (kein vaglawc – 1a) he had the support of the men of the court (1c) and was welcome in the drinking hall of the court of Powys (2bc), he was “bold” (hy – 2a) and

275 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 7-10. For a detailed discussion of the figure of Llywarch and the development of his saga-cycle, see 7-72. For the dating of the poetry, see 367-389 (esp. 386-389). 276 Text and translation, with amendments, from Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 415-418, 475-476. 161

“dazzling” (eiryan – 3a) and his spear was always first in the fray (3b). Now, lacking youth and vigour, the tickets to heroic success, he is “depressed and wretched” (wfy trwm wyf truan – 3c).

From 4-10, he addresses his “little wooden staff” (baglan), a cane, but also a symbol of his stunted virility. No men converse with him, he says, and he is rejected by young women. He gives himself epithets of talkativeness – “Llywarch of constant speech” (llywarch lleueryd uodawc – 8c), “Llywarch of long speech” (neut wyf llywarch [lauar] pell – 10c) – the chatty old man no one wants to visit, the old man whose tongue got his sons killed. Old age mocks him from his hair to his feet, and no one is interested in the “protuberance” (cloyn) that was once well-liked (11-12). Those things he once loved – “a girl, a stranger, and an unbroken horse”

(merch estrawn a march glas – 15b) are now hateful to him, reminders of his decrepitude.

Egill’s and Llywarch’s feelings of alienation are more or less the same. Feeble and impotent, both are excluded from the centre of their heroic communities because of their inability to perform the acts that are required to attain high-status positions. Llywarch, so close an adherent of the heroic order, is unable to make the critical evaluation of his own society and how he sees himself in it that is necessary to console himself. Egill, however, does not have that problem.

As his last act in the saga, Egill finds inspiration once more in an Odinnic myth. The old man tries to hitch a ride to the annual gathering of Icelandic leaders, the Alþingi. His plan is to scatter two chests of silver at the Logbǫrg (Law-rock) and then sit back and enjoy the ensuing chaos.

As Gabriel Turville-Petre observed, this plan is reminiscent of an episode from the famous myth of how Óðinn stole the mead of poetry. As part of his scheme, Óðinn threw a whetstone in the air among a group of slaves, all of whom cut each other’s throats as they tried to win it.277 Egill is prevented from following through with his plan, but he does instead create consternation for

277 E. O. G. Turville-Petre, Scaldic Poetry, 27. For the myth of how Óðinn stole the mead of poetry, of which the whetstone story is a part, see Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skáldskapurmál, 4. 162

everyone by burying his treasure somewhere on his homestead. With Óðinn as a model, heroic values may be set aside in favour of outwitting one’s opponents. Doing so again allows Egill a consoling modicum of independence that Llywarch, with his unequivocal – even if regretful – support of the heroic ethos, cannot allow.

Conclusion

The process of Egill’s consolation is represented in the saga as happening through the composition of his erfikvæði and his subsequent performance of it. Remembering, composing and speaking his situation in doubled language that contextualizes his own situation with the paradigmatic experiences of the Ódinnic mythos serves to connect his own his grief to that of great figures of the past. Sharing what has seemed to be a uniquely painful subject-position of powerlessness and grief with gods and heroes allows him to assert himself as one of the greats, rather than an old, failing man. In addition, by reaffirming his connection to Óðinn, he reminds himself of his power as a poet. Using it to preserve the integrity of his family in poetry, and choosing to see his poetic powers as recompense for his suffering, opens the door of Egill’s personal suffering to see his life in a new, Odinnic light that sustains him, according to the saga, to the end of his days.

Chapter Conclusion

The speakers of “The Wanderer,” the Columban poems, and “Sonatorrek” are successful in their projects of consolation because they have the rhetorical tools available to allow them to develop alternative understandings of their respective situations. “The Wanderer”-poet extends the language of personal exile to transform the heroic world into an abject, existential scape; he offers as an alternative the stability of the Christian narrative of salvation. Béccán mac Luigdech and the author of Amra Choluimb Chille adapt Christian themes to native rhetorical strategies of

163

praise to create a hybrid Christian-heroic figure in Columba, who in turn served as a model of consolation to his monastic familia. And finally, Egill Skallgrímsson draws upon the paradigmatic truths of myth and belief in the power of the poetic speech-act to re-contextualize his losses as tolerable experiences, and to guarantee the continuance of his family not through blood, but through verse.

164

Chapter 3 Alienation In the first chapter, I explored how Irish poets constructed a Christian subjectivity in which the semiotic, bodily drives of the speaking-subject – in its ideal form – ran in line with the

Christian symbolic order. In the second chapter, I examined how verse could be used as a therapeutic tool to end a speaking-subject’s alienation by modelling a process through which the subject signifies himself within an alternative symbolic order, one which enables the speaker to understand his or her subject-position in a more positive light. Alienation, as I noted in that chapter, can be described as the radical displacement of the subject from happier conditions that previously formed his or her subjectivity. In this final chapter, I turn to those alienated speaking- subjects for whom there is no hope of achieving accord within the symbolic order, or of finding consolation. I explore some of the topoi of alienation prevalent in North Atlantic verse, asking how these speaking-subjects have become alienated, and what strategies poets employed to represent their estranged state.

I have divided the chapter into two sections. The first section (Eros) considers the impact of falling in love upon subjectivity. Love introduces a profound dependence upon another person for the integrity of one’s own subjectivity. In the poems I discuss here – two Irish texts, “Géisid cúan,” “Comrac Líadáin ocus Cuirithir”; the Old English “Wife’s Lament;” and the Norse eddic poem “Guðrúnarkvíða in fysrta” – the integrity of the lover is radically altered by either the death of, or permanent separation from, the beloved. In the Irish poems, the absence of the beloved is shown to leave the speaking-subject so hopelessly alienated that only death provides escape from an intolerably altered subject-position, as words provide neither solace nor relief.

For the Old English and Norse speaking-subjects, on the other hand, when words of comfort also

165

fail them, rather than die, they use words to weaponize their own alienation as vengeful speech- acts against those who have caused their pain. In the final section (No Joy: Three Failed

Laments), I discuss the construction of three speaking-subjects: the Welsh princess Heledd, sole survivor of her people; a leper living isolated from both God and society; and the Caillech or old woman of Beare, a mythic figure now coming to terms with old age. All three have arrived at their alienation through different circumstances, but are united by the fact that they each begin and end their poems in the same subject-positions, gaining scant psychological ground, prevented from finding consolation by their desire for their lost, happier subject-positions, as well as by the intensity of their present misery.

Eros

Love in its many forms is the animating force behind much of North Atlantic literature. We have already seen in the first chapter a number of representations of religious love (agape), and anyone familiar with northern sagas, histories, and pseudo-histories can recognize the creative possibilities that attend friendship (philia) and familial love (storge). In this section, however, I discuss how North Atlantic poets exploited the richly dramatic potential of eros, that love which

Plato characterized as desirous and acquisitive.

While eros was generally understood to indicate any great desire,278 Plato locates eros in the space between having and not having. For Plato, love can be inspired by what Anders Nygren

278 Kenneth Dover, ed., Plato: Symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1. Plato’s figuration of eros has been adapted many times over in western thought and literature. For an account of its place in Christian theology, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, rev. ed., trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadephia: The Westminster Press, 1953); for the classic exploration of eros and the emergence of romantic love in the west, see Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, rev. and augm. ed., trans. Montgomery Belgion, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983; orig. 1956); Howard Bloch offers a more recent account of romantic love from a gendered perspective in Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). Freud introduced eros into psychoanalytical thought as a life instinct whose energies stand in opposition to those of the death drive (see “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in James Strachey, ed. and trans., The Standard

166

describes as “the consciousness of a present need and the effort to find satisfaction for it in a higher and happier state.”279 That is to say, when we discover we need something, our desire for that thing can be intensified in two ways: by the fact that we value that thing (i.e., if we desire something, we must value it), and by not having it. Once we have what we desire, we can no longer desire it, and eros dies; thus acquisitive love depends on wanting and not having. The more we value something, and the further we are from attaining it, the greater our desire for it, which can lead, as Plato observed, to a frenzied mind. Plato urges us to regard eros as a tool for the betterment of humanity: because acquisitive love is directed toward something of value (i.e., if we desire something, it must be valuable), then eros should naturally lead humanity to desire the divine and “ideal.”280

Poets and storytellers, on the other hand, have preferred to revel in less exalted manifestations of eros, seeing it as an common human experience that is also a richly exploitable thematic. In literature, the feverish wanting-but-not-having of eros provides occasion for all manner of romance, passion, violence, tragedy, and death. The inherent drama of eros is related to the radical way in which desire for something – very often someone – out of reach changes the desirer’s subjectivity. Anne Carson has most clearly marked out this change in Eros the

Bittersweet, a treatise on the various configurations of love and desire in Greek verse, and it is on her insights that I draw for my discussion.

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Vintage, 2001): 7-64; and both “The Ego and the Id” and “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” in Vol. 19 (London: Vintage, 2001): 1-66 and 212-224, respectively). For feminist/gendered accounts of eros, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Julian Henriques et al. eds., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (London: Methuen, 1984): 227-63. For a recent publication that offers a variety of current perspectives on eros, see also Byung-Chul Han, ed., The Agony of Eros (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 279 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, 176. 280 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, 177.

167

For Carson, eros “denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack, ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.”281 This already complex formula is further complicated by the fact that desiring another person introduces and reveals in the same moment both a need and a lack in the lover’s identity. As Carson puts it,

If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the believer. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.282 Introducing another person into the equation of what makes us whole, incorporating them into our identity, makes the integrity of that identity dependent upon that other person. Remove them from the equation of our self, and we become unbalanced. We long not just for them, but for the person we were (or could be) with them.

As Anne Carson also observes, “a space must be maintained or desire ends.”283 North

Atlantic poets had a number of strategies for maintaining space between speaking-subjects and their objects of desire, and therefore many ways to explore how such lovers, the speaking- subjects of their poetry, might speak out against their estrangement from the selves they most wish to be.

My intent in this section of the chapter, then, is to discuss how several poets have created erotic conditions for their speaking-subjects, and how those speakers are shown to react to those conditions. I have organized my examples into two groups. In the first group (Two Irish

281 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998; Orig. publ. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 10. 282 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 30-31. 283 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 26. 168

Women), I discuss two brief prosimetra whose poetic speakers find themselves trapped in situations where there is no hope of being united with their beloveds. The first, the story of Créd and Cáel, considers the case of a powerful woman whose relationship with a warrior so enhances her subject-position, both materially and emotionally, that her lack of him causes her to die. In the second text, the poetess Líadan’s decision to take the veil separates her from the man she loves. Unable to set aside her desire for her lover, she lives at odds with her religious life, tortured by desire for both her lover and the person she would have been with him.

The second group of poems (Weaponized Words) turns to the Old English “Wife’s Lament,” and the Norse verse narrative “Guðrúnarkvíða in fyrsta” (“Guðrún’s First Poem”). The speakers of these poems, a woman abandoned by her lover and a woman whose husband has been murdered, respectively, react to the betrayals that have robbed them of their ideal selves by weaponizing their words as speech-acts of vengeance, with the aim of imposing their own hateful subject-positions on their enemies.

Two Irish Women

“Géisid cúan” (“The haven roars”)

The story of Créd and Cáel, which ends with the lament “Géisid cúan,” is one of a number of short narratives incorporated into the great Middle Irish prosimetrum Acallam na Senórach

(“Colloquy of the Ancients”), which was likely composed in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.284 The Acallam is a frame-tale about a remarkable confluence of figures from Irish

284 Ann Dooley, “Date and Purpose of Acallam na Senórach,” Éigse (2003), 97-126. The text survives in five later manuscripts. Three are fifteenth-century: MS Laud 610, Bodleian Library, Oxford; The Book of Lismore, Library of the Duke of Devonshire; MS Rawlinson B 487, Bodleian Library, Oxford; while MS Franciscan A 4, Killiney is sixteenth-century, and MS Franciscan A 20(a), Killiney is seventeenth-century. The standard edition of the text is Whitley Stokes, ed., “Acallam na Senórach,” in Irische T exte IV/1, ed. Whitley Stokes and Ernst Windisch (Leipzig, 1900), ix-xiv, 1-438. For a complete translation based on all MSS, see Ann Dooley and Harry Roe, trans., The Tales

169

legend and history. Caílte, a poet and warrior, is the leader of a fían or warrior-band from third- century Ireland, an era of legends and heroes. The fíana have survived into the fifth century, where they encounter St. Patrick and his followers, who are travelling through the country converting the aristocracy. As they travel together, Caílte shares with Patrick the dinnshenchas or “lore of place-names,” a rich body of prose and verse stories about specific locations dotted throughout Ireland. In the course of this unfinished tale, Caílte and his compatriots pass along some two hundred tales of the fíana, their adventures, battles, romances, and encounters with the síde or fairy-people.

Créd and Cáel’s tragic story, told by Caílte, is as follows. The fenian hero Finn and his fighters meet Cáel Cródae Cétguinech (“the Brave and Quick-wounding”) on their way to battle on the coast of Ventry. Cáel, following the instructions of a dream, is on his way to woo Créd, the daughter of Cairbre Cnesbán (of the White Skin), a king of the síde in Kerry. Créd is an infamous deceiver who has gathered to herself almost all the treasures of Ireland and Scotland.

Anyone wishing to marry Créd must present her with a poem describing all her possessions and palaces. Accompanied by the fíana, Cáel performs a long and successful poem (provided by his stepmother) cataloguing Créd’s wealth, successfully wooing her. After a week, during which

Créd royally feasts her guests, the couple set off for Ventry with the fíana. There, Créd demonstrates further great generosity, providing the fighters with milk and tending the wounded, while Cáel proves himself the ablest fighter there. On the final day of battle, Cáel drowns in the sea. When his body washes up on the shore, Créd stretches herself beside it, speaks her lament, and dies.285

of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). An edition and translation of Lismore was completed by Standish Hayes O’Grady, ed. and trans., Silva Gadelica (I-XXXI): A Collection of Tales in Irish with Extracts Illustrating Persons and Places, 2 vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892). 285 Whitley Stokes, ed., “Acallamh na Senórach,” 21-25, lines 742-868. 170

The justification for the fatal extremity of Créd’s grief lies in the shifts of subjectivity she experiences over the course of the brief story. All we know of Créd before she meets Cáel is that she is highly acquisitive, an “infamous deceiver,” who has gathered to herself enormous wealth and status. Créd is independent, wealthy, and master of herself and her wealth; a unique position for women. So why would she jeopardize that independence by making herself available to suitors? and why do so through the mechanism of a poem? To answer the former question, it is perhaps safe to assume that in such a story, the contemporary audience’s and saga-author’s horizon of expectations would assume that any single woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a husband. As for the latter question, by requiring potential suitors to compose an account of all her possessions in verse, Créd cleverly invokes a poetic mode of codifying her wealth and status.

An important aspect of poetry in medieval Ireland was its authority as a vehicle for the preservation of official knowledge. Laws and the histories of places and peoples were all preserved in verse in early Ireland, and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, verse was often used to authenticate histories and scholars’ claims.286 Indeed, the authentication of events through verse is a dominating theme employed repeatedly throughout Acallam na Senórach, whose rationale is the preservation of knowledge. Thus, Cáel’s poem for Créd should be understood to be doing double duty by both confirming her impressive reputation to any who heard it, and by preserving it in perpetuity as a fact (collected, in fact, in the Acallam na

Senórach itself).

Another aspect of Créd and Cáel’s transaction that preserves Créd’s independent identity is their unequal footing at the couple’s first encounter. Cáel’s poem to Créd is pitched in economic

286 Gregory Toner, “Authority, Verse and the Transmission of Senchas,” Ériu 55 (2005): 62-68. 171

terms, as might be expected, given its subject; but the economic aspect of the poem extends beyond Créd’s possessions and into the social dynamics of lord and supplicant. Cáel’s poem positions the two of them as if she were a lord and he a poet seeking a position in her household.

In among the praises of Créd’s treasures are appeals not to her heart, but to her generosity as a patron. In quatrains 15 and 16 of his poem, for example, Cáel says

15.287 15. Madam buidechsa don mnaí, If I have reason to be thankful to the woman, do Chréide dá ngairenn caí, to Créd, for whom the cuckoo calls, her mérait ní bas lía a laíde, poems shall live on more abundantly, mad dá ndíla a commaíne. provided that she pay the rewards due for them.

16. 16. Mad áil la hingin Cairbre If it be the will of Cairbre’s daughter, she will Nídam-chuirfe ar cóir cairde, not treat me by way of postponement, but will co n-apra féin rim i fus say to me here “Your journey is indeed “Is mo móirchen dot turus.” welcome.”

As a supplicant for marriage, Cáel’s poem is petitionary, and so it is no surprise to see that tone here, but its implications are certainly novel. In addition to the surety that her poems will preserve her reputation, he also asserts that when she accepts Cáel’s poem, Créd will become both his wife and his lord, again assuring a continuity to her high status.

Immediately after her acceptance of Cáel’s poem-proposal, we see an abrupt shift in Créd’s character from acquisitive to generous that makes much better sense in light of my interpretation of her wooing requirements. Créd immediately demonstrates an unparalleled generosity by ceaselessly feasting her guests for the week of wedding celebrations, providing each of them with a valuable cloak, and succouring the fíana at the Battle of Ventry. That the fíana are clearly superfluous to Créd and Cáel’s meeting makes her generosity all the more impressive. We are

287 Gerard Murphy, eds, and trans., “Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century” (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998; orig. pub. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 140-147.

172

told that “she surpassed the women of the fían in bestowing wealth and treasure” (mar do cinn an ingen ar mhnaibh na Fénne um thidhnacul sét & máine).288 By commissioning and hearing the poem about her wealth declaimed, Créd is now free to distribute it freely, because her reputation as a wealthy and independent woman is now secure. Further, by accepting Cáel’s petition, she must fulfill her end of the bargain by playing the role of open-handed patron. This marks another significant shift in her subjectivity. Out of love, Créd now considers Cáel a part of her selfhood. Their economic relationship adds another layer to this, in that she must honour him as she would a poet in her court.

Cáel is not entirely in a lower social position than Créd in this arrangement. Although it is clear she has more standing in terms of wealth, she uses it to aid Cáel, first by feasting the fían, and so rewarding them for their support of his cause, and second by accompanying him to the

Battle of Ventry, thus supporting Cáel in his efforts to repay the fían for their assistance, and also enabling him to prove his worth as the best hero there, cementing his worthiness of Créd in the sphere of masculine heroics as well as at court. The two are shown to be unrivaled in quality by any member of their respective sex, and so are uniquely well-matched.

Having built them up, the saga-author cuts them down at their height, introducing an insoluble erotic space between the lovers: Cáel is drowned on the seventeenth day of battle. With the death of her lover, the saga-author introduces a painful lack into Créd’s newly constructed subjectivity. It should be noted that love was not the only aspect of their mutually constituted identities. Cáel’s proposal-poem served to preserve in perpetuity her great wealth; that remains.

But Créd’s relationship to Cáel as his patron, through which her standing was further enhanced by enabling her to demonstrate generosity, is lost. She can go no higher, and will not return to a

288 Whitley Stokes, ed., “Acallamh na Senórach,” 24, lines 831-832. 173

lower level of standing. Having known what for her must have been the greatest happiness, both in love and in social standing, her new erotic subject-position, replete with desire for her husband and the self she was with him, is untenable. With no avenue open to her to obtain the object of her desire (who is both Cáel and her self-with-Cáel), and no wish to return to her less desirable, pre-Cáel subject-position, Créd dies.

Before dying, however, Créd first resorts to speech to articulate her alienation. In the prose, we are told that Cáel’s death was accompanied by the death of several nearby animals.289 These faunal psychopomps are only generally described in the prose, but the poetry is specific, using their cries of distress to structure Créd’s poem. In eight of its eleven quatrains, the first line is the lament of some aspect of the natural world crying out its own loss with Créd.

1.290 1. Géisid cúan The haven roars ós buinne rúad Rinn Dá Bhárc: over the fierce stream of Reenverc: badud laích Locha Dá Chonn the drowning of the warrior from Loch Dá is ed chaínes tonn re trácht. Chonn is what the wave striking the shore laments.

2. 2. Luinchech corr A heron calls i seiscenn Droma Dá Thrén: in the marsh of Druim Dá Thrén: sisi ní aincenn a bí— she is unable to protect her live ones — coinfíad dá lí for tí a hén. a two- coloured fox is on the track of her birds.

3. 3. Trúag in fáid Sad the cry do-ní in smólach i nDruim Chaín; the thrush makes in Drumkeen; ocus ní nemthrúaige in scol and no less sad the call do-ní in lon i Leitir Laíg. the blackbird of Leitir Láig makes.

4. 4. Trúag in séis Sad the sound do-ní in dam i nDruim Dá Léis: made by the stag in Drumlesh: marb eilit Droma Sílenn; dead is the doe of Druim Sílenn;

289 For more on this narrative oddity, see James Carney, “The So-Called ‘Lament of Créidhe, 228. 290 Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 148-151. 174

géisid dam dílenn dá héis. a mighty stag roars now that she has gone.

The first word of the poem, géisid (“roars”), both open and closes the poem, forming a dúnad.

Thus the poem’s initial and final aural impression is of the roaring, churning waters crying out in protest at the death of Cáel, mirroring Créd’s state of mind. Over the next three quatrains, sound dominates – animals cry out in futility, unable to save their loved ones. The image of the crane watching helpless as her babies are stalked by a fox in qt. 2 and the powerless roar of the strong stag at the loss his mate in qt. 4 drive home Créd’s feelings of powerlessness, both as one responsible for a dependent and as a spouse, reflecting her dual relationship with Cáel.

In the next quatrains, Créd explains the cause of her grief simply. She is grieved because the warrior who used to lie with her has a cross above his head (5); that he lies next to her drowned grieves her (6), and his beauty maddens her (is ed rom-mer mét a áeb – 6d). She seems to retain something of that madness as she listens again to the sounds about her in qt. 7-9. Now the cry is made by water that drowned Cáel, and its waves beat upon every shore:

7. 7. Trúag in gáir: Sad the cry do-ní tonn tráchta re tráig; made by the shore’s wave upon the beach; ó ro báid fer ségda sáer since it has drowned a fine noble man it is sáeth lim Cáel do dul ‘na dáil. grievous to me that Cáel ever went near it.

8. 8. Trúag in fúaimm Sad the sound do-ní in tonn risin trácht túaid, made by the wave on the northern shore, ac cenngail im charraic caín, rioting around a great rock, ac caíned Chaíl ó do-chúaid. lamenting Cáel since he died.

9. 9. Trúag in tres Sad the strife do-ní in tonn risin trácht tes; made by the wave against the southern shore; mise do-dechaid mo ré: as for me my life has reached its term, messaite mo gné (ro-fes). and by reasons of it my appearance (as it is clear to all) has suffered.

175

The waves’ sad sounds are all around Créd. The repetitiveness of the formula in the a- and b- lines (sad sound + wave and direction) echoes the endlessly repeating waves, reinforcing a broad feeling of futility in the powerless cries of the animals, the waves, and in Cred’s own lament.

Surrounded by these sounds, Créd declares that her wealth means nothing to her (qt. 10). In the final quatrain, she offers one last praise of Cáel and makes it clear no other could replace him:

11. 11. Ó ro báided mac Crimthain Since the son of Crimthan has been drowned nochan fuil m’inmain dá eis; no one I may love exists after him; is mór tríath ro thuit le a láim; many chieftains fell by his hand; a scíath i ló gáid nír géis. in a day of stress, his shield never cried out.

The quatrain includes both grief and pride in Cáel’s matchlessness; no enemy got close enough to him to strike his shield. The last word goes to the dúnad on géis “cried out,” ending the poem with the same verb that began it, now a verb that signals futility and loss, as well as heroic pride.

There is an irony to Créd’s versifying that needs noting. Through his poem about Créd, Cáel was able to effect a transformation in Créd’s (and his own) identity by entering into both a romantic and an economic arrangement. When Créd makes a poem for Cáel, she can accomplish nothing, despite all her great wealth and material generosity.

As is to be expected in a compilation like the Acallam na Senórach, poetry and prose are not in perfect sync. Nevertheless, both present a unified picture of Cáel’s essential place in Créd’s idea of herself. Without him, she is no longer the person she wishes to be. The prose leading up to the lament does an admirable job of taking Créd from a tricky, powerful yet acquisitive woman to an admirable woman of great generosity, all through the curiously economic yet loving relationship with Cáel, and then dashes it tragically by opening an intolerable erotic space between them. The poem complements the enormity of Créd’s alienation at the loss of Cáel and her own ideal self by speaking all the world into her grief.

176

“Comrac Líadaine ocus Cuirithir” (“The Meeting of Líadan and Curithir”)

The story of “The Meeting of Líadan and Curithir” is a ninth- or early tenth-century prosimetric text that tells of the thwarted love of two seventh-century poets.291 The story has been popular with anthologizers because of what Robin Flower described as the “tender and beautiful poetry contained in it.” Its prose, on the other hand, is “brief and obscure,”292 perhaps indicating it is intended to be a synoptic account, rather than a full treatment.293 Most of the dialogue is conducted in verse, and it is in the lovers’ quatrains that we find further strategies of eros and alienation played out.

Líadan, a woman-poet (banéces) from the south of Ireland, is on a circuit traveling and performing through Connacht. There, she meets Curithir, another poet, who makes a feast for her. Curithir suggests they marry, as a son of theirs would be famous. Líadan agrees, though she wishes to complete her poet’s tour; Curithir should then find her at her home, and she will marry him. Curithir then travels south to meet her, and learns that Líadan (rather inexplicably) has become a nun. The two immediately enter a monastery and put themselves under the spiritual direction of Cummine Fóta (the Tall). Rather than separate the lovers completely, Cummine

291 Kuno Meyer, ed., trans., Liadain and Cuirithir: an Irish Love-Story of the Ninth Century (London: D. Nutt, 1902), 8-9. Meyer bases his dating of the text on linguistic grounds, with Murphy concurring. The story is preserved in only two sixteenth-century manuscripts, British Museum Harl. 5280, fo. 26a-26b and Trinity College Dublin H. 3. 18, p. 759. Murphy derives Líadan and Curithir‘s estimated dates from the prologue of the H MS version of “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” where Líadan is listed as one of the four female poets of the Corcu Duibne of Munster. See Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 208-209. 292 Robin Flower, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, Vol. 2 (London: Printed for the trustees of the British Museum, 1926-1953), 304-305. 293 Angela Bourke et al, eds. and trans., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork: Cork University Press in assoc. with Field Day, 2002), 115.

177

offers them a choice: “Shall it be seeing for you, or talking?” (In ba déicsiu duíb ná himmacallam?). Curithir chooses talking, assuming that “What will come of it will be better” (Is ferr a mbía de).294 They converse, in verse, separated by a wall. As they talk, it becomes apparent that speech is just as dangerous to their religious vows as sight. Cummine tests the couple, ordering them to sleep next to each other with a young student between them. In the morning, it is clear they have failed the test. Curithir is sent to another church and later goes on pilgrimage in the southeast. Líadan goes seeking him, and speaks a longer poem about their tortured relationship. In it, it is explained that she wronged him by taking the veil too hastily.

When Curithir hears that Líadan is following him, he departs overseas; she never sees him again.

She sits upon a flagstone Curithir often used for praying, and dies there. Líadan is buried under the flagstone, and her soul goes to heaven.

If eros is wanting without having, then this short tale, a study in delayed desires, is exemplary. By introducing a series of social and physical barriers to Líadan and Curithir’s romantic union, the saga-author causes a crisis of selfhood in each. Anne Carson’s erotic equation is very much in play here, and not one-sided: the lovers, desirous of one another, are denied fulfilment of their desire. They now perceive the lack of the other as a lack in their own selfhood. Feeling that lack, and having no agency to alter their situation, they resort to verse to express their distress.

The barriers keeping them apart are varied. Líadan introduces the first barrier by delaying their union, and then another by becoming a nun, manifested physically as a veil. When Curithir becomes a monk, he removes an obstacle. They began on equal footing and are in a position to be together. When they both take vows, they are again on equal footing, yet while they can be

294 Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., Liadain and Cuirithir: An Irish Love-story of the Ninth Century (London: D. Nutt, 1902), 1-2. All text and translations from Meyer, with silent amendments. 178

together, they must sublimate their desire for one another into what Cummine Fóta calls anmcharde, a “soul-friendship.” This spiritual relationship is usually between a penitent and his or her confessor.295 Cummine’s decision to allow them to either see or speak to each other introduces yet another barrier between the lovers, one that is both sensorial and physical, as represented by the wall that separates them. By this point they are thoroughly alienated from the subject-positions they once held, when their relationship could be consummated. All the subsequent barriers put in their way have thoroughly denuded them of agency as well. It is at this point that the lovers first speak in verse. Their quatrains show how much they have changed from when they met:

Is and asbert si: Then [Líadan] said:

Cuirithir in t-athéces Curithir, the one-time poet carsam, nímráinic a less: I loved; it did me no good: inmain flada dá coss nglas, dear lord of the two shining feet,296 bid dirsan a bithingnas. alas to be without his company forever.

In lecc fri derthach andess The flagstone to the south of the oratory forsa mbíd in t-athéces, upon which is the once-poet, minic tíagar dí im cach ndé often it was resorted to fescor iar mbúaid ernaigthe. at evening after the benefit of prayer.

Nicon biaid aice bó He shall have neither cow ná dairti ná dartadó, nor yearlings nor heifers, nocha bia cnáim297 do liss never a mate shall be for láim deis ind athécis. at the right hand of him who once was a poet.

Líadan’s verses are a lament for what the couple could have been, and a catalogue of the changes that have affected their subjectivity: she will never see him again, he will never have a family or poet’s revenue; and three times, once per quatrain, Líadan refers to Curithir as an ex-poet. Not

295 Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, s.v. anmchairde. dil.ie/3681. Accessed 7 June, 2016. 296 A reference to Curithir’s patronymic mac Doborchon, i.e., “Otter’s son,” perhaps a literary license as he is listed in the Ciarraige genealogy from Rawlinson B. 502 as the son of mac Mílae, a “small creature” in general. See M. A. O’Brien, ed., Corpus genealogiarum hiberniae (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), 577. 297 I take this as bone/body, and possibly a reference to Eve = “companion” or “mate.” 179

only will he not become the prosperous, happy man he anticipated becoming with her, he is also no longer a poet, alienating him entirely from the man he was and wished to be.

Curthir’s response is more guarded: Inmain guthán rocluniur, Beloved is a dear voice that I hear, fáilte fris nocho lamur, I dare not welcome it! acht is ed atbiur nammá: But this only do I say: is inmain in guthán sa. beloved is this dear voice!

Throughout the text, Líadan is free in her use of verse to express her discontent. Curithir, however, does not follow her lead. It is tempting to see in his brevity something of the restraint found in the Anglo-Saxon attitude toward masculine expression of emotions, as in “The

Wanderer.” But the terseness of his speech belies the intensity of his feeling. This is emphasized by the fear to speak he expresses in line b, and by the intense restatement of line a in d, where the indefinite “dear voice” (gúthan) becomes an emphatic “it is beloved, this dear voice!)” (is inmain in gúthan sa). Curithir’s expression is less forthcoming, but no less representative of inner turmoil than Líadan’s. On the other hand, he fears to speak too much and give in to his emotions, suggesting a serious concern for his monastic vows. These attitudes will influence each lover’s fate.

Líadan reacts in turn to hearing Curithir’s voice:

Guth domadbat trie clethæ The voice which comes to me through the is maith dó domincrechæ: wattled wall, is ed dogní frim in guth, it is right for it to blame me: nachomléci do chotlud. what the voice does to me, is it will not let me sleep.

Líadan has the doubled distress of being parted from her lover as well as being the source of his distress, through her choice to take the veil. Although she blames herself, Líadan also asserts for herself an important role in the constitution of Curithir’s selfhood. Holding herself responsible for his unhappiness, she makes herself a continuous part of him. She now feels what he was

180

trying to avoid by speaking briefly. The result is emotionally disastrous and not at all spiritually efficacious. While he tries to distance himself from her, she only wraps him more tightly into her selfhood.

When the two fail to spend the night together chastely, Curithir is sent away. This final separation drives him to his last speech in the story:

Di chíanaib Of late ó roscarus fri Líadain, since I parted from Líadan, sithithir cech lá fri mí, long as a month every day, sithithir mí frí blíadain. long as a year every month. Curithir clearly still longs for Líadan. But far away from her, in the context of a monastic institution, the eros he feels may be understood to have been sublimated to a monastic subject- position. As above, he recognizes that speech can be dangerous, as it is to Líadan, so he does not indulge. Also noteworthy is that, as in his first utterance, Curithir asserts no particular knowledge of Líadan’s emotional state, whereas Líadan does, inserting herself into his interiority. She attempts to do so again:

Másu Churithir indiu If Curithir today dochúaid co rétairiu, is gone to the scholars, dirsan in chíall dusngéna alas for the sense he will make fri nech nachid aithgéna. to any who do not know!

Líadan assumes Curithir is maddened by his lack of her, that he is as consumed with her as she is with him, but Cummine is not having it:

Ní maith lim aní atbir, I do not like what you say, a Líadain ben298 Chuirithir, Líadan, Curithir’s woman. roboí sunnæ, nirbó mer, Curithir was here, he was not mad, cid síu tísed Cuirither. any more than before he came.

298 The word means “woman,” but is ambiguous enough to also mean “wife” or “harlot,” signalling Cummine’s opinions of romantic love. 181

The saint refutes her claim; though Curithir desires her still, he has accepted his monastic life, and incorporated his longing for Líadan into his identity as a monk.

Líadan, on the other hand, has made no effort to adopt any such monastic subjectivity, and so continues to be defined by eros. As Curithir goes further away on pilgrimage, Líadan sets out to follow him, speaking her final poem. The first four stanzas are given over to self-recrimination for the role she played in ruining their chances at happiness: an ro carus ro cradius (“what I have loved I have vexed” – st. 1). She also holds Curithir blameless for embracing the monastic life

(qt. 3), but again suggests no such inclination on her own part. Her unwillingness to sublimate her desire for Curithir to religion is encapsulated in st. 5:

5. 5. Mé Líadan; I am Líadan; ro carussa Cuirithir; I loved Curithir; is fírithir ad-fíadar. this is as true as anything told.

Líadan sees her selfhood bound to the tortured condition of eros: to be Líadan is to want Curithir and to not have him.

In st. 6-7, she reflects on the joy she felt being with Curithir – which is to say, when she felt her identity to be complete – and again regrets her choice to take the veil (st. 8). The final stanzas affirm her statement of selfhood in st. 5:

9. 9. Ní chela; Conceal it not; ba hésium mo chrideṡerc, he was my heart’s love, even though I should cía no carainn cách chena. love all others besides

10. 10. Deilm ndega A roar of fire ro thethainn mo chridse; has split my heart; ro-fess, nicon bía cena. without him for certain it will not live.

182

Desiring to preserve his monastic identity, Curithir goes overseas when he learns that Líadan is pursuing him. But Líadan holds true to her identity, and, like Créd, Cáel’s lover, dies, unable to reach her beloved and unwilling to forge a new, monastic selfhood.

Two Irish Women Conclusion In the narratives of Líadan and Créd, eros is figured as an inescapable paradox – the loss of the other means the loss of the self. That the loss of the beloved is permanent for both women renders their experience of eros unbearable, because it has no hope of ever being relieved through reunification with the beloved. Lament becomes, then, not a means of consolation, nor even catharsis, but rather an exercise in futility. In the next section, I turn to two poems whose speakers find themselves in similar circumstances, but with the difference of having available to them a tradition of vengeance through speech-act that allows their words more efficacy than their

Irish counterparts.

Weaponized Words

“The Wife’s Lament”

“The Wife’s Lament”299 is an Old English poem in fifty-three lines preserved only in the tenth-century Exeter Book.300 Like “The Wanderer,” the poem is generally classified by modern scholars as one of the so-called elegies, whose primary concern seems to be the expression of a speaking-subject’s emotional state.301 Little can be said with certainty about the poem’s speaker,

299 As with the other Exeter Book poems, the title is modern. 300 See Chapter 2, 97-99 for discussion and bibliography of the Exeter Book. 301 For a general discussion of the Old English “elegy”, see Chapter 2, 3 no. 1. For possible antecedents in a Germanic genre of funeral lament for “The Wife’s Lament” (and other Old English and Old Norse poetry), see Joseph Harris, “Elegy in Old English and Old Norse: A Problem in Literary History,” in The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983): 46- 56. Matti Rissanen has explored thematic and textual similarities in this and other Old English elegies in, “The Theme of ‘Exile’ in ‘The Wife’s Lament,’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70:1 (1969): 90-104.

183

beyond the now-accepted fact that she is a woman,302 a rarity in Old English verse. Scholars have proposed various suggestions as to her identity, such as ghost303 or deity,304 or even the solution to a riddle,305 but the general consensus at this point is that she is a woman who, for reasons unclear, has been abandoned by her husband and imprisoned in an underground space in the wilderness.306 Alone, and feeling the pangs of eros at her forced separation from her husband, and thus alienated from the subjectivity she constructed with her lover, for the bulk of the poem (ll. 1-41) she recounts the relevant events of her relationship with her lover, the many barriers that have been raised between them, and the effect they have had upon her. The last section of the poem (ll. 42-53), however, remains difficult to parse.

The poem’s final lines mark a turn in the speaker’s attitude. After reciting and assessing her situation, she directs her speech away from herself and toward her absent husband in what is either a gnomic comment on his fate or a curse. I believe her words are a curse, and more. As the speaker examines her situation, the poet gradually diminishes her agency to nothing, while at

302 Arguments that the speaking-subject is a man are based on an assumption that there was no space for women’s voices in “heroic” verse. See Benjamin Thorpe, Codex Exoniensis. A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, from a Manuscript in the Library of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter (London: 1842), 441-444; and Levin L. Schücking, “Das angelsächsische Gedicht von der Klage der Frau,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 48 (1906): 436-449); Rudolf C. Bambas, “Another View of the Old English Wife’s Lament,” in Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 303-309; Martin Stevens, “The Narrator of The Wife’s Lament,” Neuphilologus Mitteilungen 69 (1968): 72-90; Jerome Mandel, Alternative Readings in Old English Poetry (New York: Peter Lang, 1987): 152-155. Angela M. Lucas’s “The Narrator of ‘The Wife’s Lament’ Reconsidered,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70:2 (1969): 282-297 offers a rebuttal to the usual arguments that reflects the general consensus of the field today. For a consideration of the poets of “The Wife’s Lament” and “Wulf and Eadwacer” as women, see Marilyn Desmond, “The Voice of the Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy,” Critical Inquiry 16:3 (1990), 572-590. 303 Elinor Lench, “The Wife’s Lament: A Poem of the Living Dead,” Comitatus 1 (1970):3-23; Raymond P. Tripp, “The Narrator as Revenant: A Reconsideration of Three Old English Elegies,” Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972): 339-361; William C. Johnson, “The Wife’s Lament as Death-Song,” in The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), 1983: 69-81. 304 A. N. Doane, “Heathen Form and Christian Function in The Wife’s Lament,” MS 28 (1966): 77-91 (esp. 88-89). 305 In his introduction to his translation of “The Wife’s Lament,” S. A. J. Bradley suggests the poem may be read as a Christian allegorical riddle whose solution is the identity of the woman-speaker: Zion, the soul, or the Church. See Anglo-Saxon Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 382-385. 306 A. C. Bouman, Patterns in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1962): see “The Old English Poems The Wife’s Lament and The Husband’s Message,”43-60; Matti Rissanen, “The Theme of ‘Exile’ in ‘The Wife’s Lament,’ 98-99. 184

the same time he employs an erotic strategy that inflames and frustrates the speaker’s desire for her husband, despite his cruelty. Desirous of him, and powerless to affect her fate, the speaker weaponizes her words against her husband, wishing him a fate that punishes him with the frenzy of insoluble eros, yet also brings them closer together.

The poet opens with a brief introduction that signals the speaker’s inward contemplation:

Ic þis giedd wrece bi me ful geomorre, 1 minre sylfre sið. Ic þæt secgan mæg hwæt ic yrmþa gebad, siþþan ic up weox, niwes oþþe ealdes, no ma þonne nu. A ic wite wonn minra wræcsiþa. 5

I make this giedd about myself – very sorrowfully – 1 my own life’s journey. I am able to tell what hardships I have endured since I grew up, but old or new, never worse than now – ever I suffer the torment of my exile. 5 The poet emphasizes the speaker’s inward focus with an intense verbal interweaving of first- person pronouns and nouns relating to her life experience. The declarative first word is ic (I), followed immediately by þis giedd (this tale/song/riddle), juxtaposing subject and object before the verb wrece (utter), linking self and life-story inextricably through her speech. Similar juxtapositions occur in the remaining lines of the introduction, a pattern of “I” + [life- experience], often followed by a verb of speaking or experience: the first-person bi me (about myself) is followed by ful geomorre (very sorrowful) in 1b, in 2a minre sylfre (my own) is followed by sið (journey/experience), and ic again precedes the demonstrative pronoun þæt

(referring to her giedd presumably) with the verb secgan (to say) in 2b. Ic precedes yrmþa

(hardships) linked by the verb gebad (endured) in 3a, and precedes wite (torment) followed by wonn (endured) in 5a. Finally, the possessive pronoun minra (mine) claims wræcsiþa in 5b.

Alliteration also does its part to emphasize the link between self and personal history and

185

speaking. Giedd (tale/song/riddle) and geomorre (sorrowfully) in 1; sylfres (own), sið (journey), and secgan (to tell) in 2; ic (I) and yrmþa (hardships) in 3; and in the fifth line, wite (torment), wonn (endure or fight), and wræcsiþa (exile). The poet is at pains to draw our attention to the speaker’s self-conscious examination of her identity – who she has been in the past, and how she got to the isolated subject-position she now inhabits.

The word giedd requires some comment. Giedd is one of the few contemporary terms indicating genre in Old English literature. Unfortunately, its precise meaning is unclear to modern critics. The word is often translated as “poem,” “song,” “speech,” “riddle,” “lament,” or some other term for verbal art.307 In her study of genre and the Old English elegies, Anne L.

Klinck perhaps comes closest to pinning the word down. Noting how works self-identifying as a giedd are often associated with wisdom, proverbial, and Biblical parable literature, as well as riddles, she suggests that because it “cuts across the modern distinctions between song and speech, fact and fiction, prose and verse,” we may define giedd as a “relatively extended utterance, of an artistic kind, with a narrative content and an instructive or exemplary value.”308

Put another way, a giedd is something to be contemplated in a manner analogous to a riddle or wisdom poem.309 From this perspective, the speaker’s attitude would be self-reflective in the sense that she hopes that by rehearsing moments that have shaped her identity, she will be able to construct some meaning out of her suffering, a solution to her alienation, just as occurs in a poem of consolation.

307 Dictionary of Old English, s.v. “gydd.” tapor.library.utoronto.ca/doe/?E13456. Accessed 28 August, 2017. 308 Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 245. 309 John D. Niles, “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament,” Speculum 78:4 (Oct. 2003), 1108. Faye Walker-Pelkey, “Frige hwæt ic hatte: ‘The Wife’s Lament’ as Riddle,” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992): 246-266 argues that the enigmatic character is due to its being a riddle, as demonstrated by its placement in the Exeter Book after fifty-nine riddles, several didactic poems, and more riddles. Her solution to the riddle is a sword separated from its lord (261). Kristin Brandser offers a productive critique of Walker-Pelkey’s line of reasoning in “The Wife’s Lament: A Riddle of Her Own,” Ennaratio 4 (1997): 128-142 (esp. 128-129). 186

The speaker begins the project of understanding the giedd that is her subjectivity in the next section, ll. 6-14. She relates how her husband departed “hence from his people” (heonan of leodum – 6b). With his departure, eros comes into play: lacking him, she lacks an integral part of her selfhood and she pines for him. She wakes early with “dawn-cares” (uhtceares – 7b), and, like Líadan above, sets out after him, looking for her husband’s retainers “on account of my woeful need” (for minre weaþearfe – 10b). Her selfhood troubled by his absence, the speaker seeks to physically close the gap between them.

In lines 11-14, the speaker becomes aware that

Ongunnon þæt þæs monnes magas hycgan 11 þurh dyrne geþoht, þæt hy todælden unc, þæt wit gewidost in woruldrice lifdon laðlicost, ond mec longade. This man’s kinsmen began to think 11 with deceitful thought, that they would separate us, so that we two should live far apart in the kingdom of the world, most horribly, and I was made to long. The interference of a third party, her lord’s relatives, curtails the speaker’s agency. The relationship between herself and her husband till now has been discussed in terms of “I” and

“him.” It was her relationship with him. When hy (they) become involved, having plotted secretly, and without consulting either of them (so far as she knows), the wife and husband become the dual pronouns wit (we two – 13a) and unc (us two – 12b), implying their mutually dependent subjectivity and emphasizing the trauma that dividing causes them. Indeed, it is at the thought of their separation by others that the speaker recalls how mec longade (I longed) (14b).

Though it is idiomatic in Old English to use the verb langian in the impersonal with an accusative object, it is nevertheless worth noting that the construction also suggests the encroachment of others’ desires upon the speaker’s agency. She does not long of her own volition; rather, she is made to long by the changes forced upon her. The more ways the poet 187

devises for her to lack her lover and the agency she enjoyed as a lord’s wife, the more aware of her loss she becomes, and the more intense her feelings about it. That her desire to be united with her husband is increasing is apparent in how the poet has returned to the syntactic pattern of the first five lines (i.e., first-person + affective term) and alliteration: minre weaþearfe (my woeful need) with alliterating wineleas wræcca (lordless exile) in line 10, and in line 14 lifdon laðlicost (lived most horrible) and mec longade (I longed); each links her state to a verb of desire.

In lines 15-26, the poet further intensifies the speaker’s eros when she reveals that her husband commanded her to live apart from him and plotted against her, all the while continuing to narrow her autonomy:

Het mec hlaford min herheard niman, 15 ahte ic leofra lyt on þissum londstede, holdra freonda. Forþon is min hyge geomor. Ða ic me ful gemæcne monnan funde, heardsæligne, hygegeomorne, mod miþendne, morþor hycgendne. 20 Bliþe gebæro ful oft wit beotedan þæt unc ne gedælde nemne deað ana owiht elles; eft is þæt onhworfen, is nu swa hit næfre wære freondscipe uncer. Sceal ic feor ge neah 25 mines felaleofan fæhðu dreogan. My lord commanded me to take up dwelling in this grove, 15 I had few loved ones in this place, or trustworthy friends. Therefore is my thought sad. Then I found out this man, so well-matched to me, hard-fated, sad-minded, his mind concealed, planned murder. 20 With cheerful manner, very often we two vowed the two of us should not be divided, except by death alone, nothing else; all that is changed now as if the love of us two never were. I must, near and far, 25 endure the enmity of my dearly beloved.

188

Herheard, the place to which the speaker has been exiled, requires some explanation. The word is a compound of the words hearg and eard. The latter indicates a dwelling-place, while the former can be understood to mean a temple, altar, sanctuary, or perhaps grave. Various interpretations of the poem have led to attempts to definitely define herheard.310 My focus on subjectivity allows for some flexibility; it is sufficient to consider the speaker as having been commanded to dwell in a space that has clear associations with the liminal: it is a space away from community, it has associations with the pre-Christian past, and it may be a place associated with the dead, a possibility that is dealt with somewhat less obscurely in the next section.

By commanding the speaker to live in such a place, the lord acts to limit her agency and places yet another obstacle between her and the object of her desire. Moreover, he places her in an environment where she has no friends or supporters, a signal that he has abandoned her:

“Therefore is my thought sad” Forþon is min hyge geomor – 17b). In 18-20, her desire for him is further complicated when she reveals how she learned that her husband, an intergral part of her subjectivity, had planned to murder her. The poet works hard to bring into stark relief the contrast between her past understanding of her relationship and its present reality through a brief but intense application of alliteration. In line 18, the poet alliterates me, gemæcne, and monnan, positively linking together “me” and “man” with “well-matched”; and in 19 he links the negative terms heardsælinge (hard-fated, unfortunate) with hygegeomorne (sad-minded). In line 20, he returns to the m-alliteration, now with condemning terms, and uses another h-word to bind this

310 For example, Thomas M. Davis, “Another View of the Wife’s Lament,” Papers on Language and Literature 1 (1965): 291-305 (esp. 303-4); Karl P. Wentersdorf, “The Situation of the Narrator in the Old English Wife’s Lament,” Speculum 56 (1981): 492-516 (esp. 509). Joseph Harris argues a more mundane explanation based on Germanic architecture in “A Note on eorðscræf/eorðsele and Current Interpretations of The Wife‘s Lament,” English Studies 58:3 (1977): 204-208. 189

new understanding of the lord’s character together: the speaker’s lord secretly plans her death

(mod miþende, morþor hycgendne).

Contrasts are again heightened in the remaining lines of the section. When the speaker relates how before she and her husband had often promised that only death would part them, she speaks again with dual first-person pronouns (wit, unc, uncer), an indivisible “we/us two” (20-22a).

That relationship, by which she defined herself, is now as if it had never existed (22b-25a). She finds herself now so isolated that “near or far” she must endure the enmity of her “dearest one”

(felaleofan – 25b-26). This last term, felaleofan, speaks again to the nature of desire and identity. The further he is from her, the more heightened her desire to reclaim her threatened identity, and so, despite his apparent hostility toward her, he remains her “dearest one.” This paradox is again expressed in alliteration, where felaleofan is linked paradoxically to fæhðu

(enmity, feud).

By this point, the entirety of the speaker’s story is told up to the present moment, and she has a good handle on the contrasts between the positions of her present, speaking self, and her past self. The penultimate section (ll. 27-41) is a disquisition on her experience dwelling in the herheard. She reiterates how she came to be there, and describes her exile-prison:

Heht mec mon wunian on wuda bearwe, 27 under actreo in þam eorðscræfe. Eald is þes eorðsele, eal ic eom oflongad, sindon dena dimme, duna uphea, 30 bitre burgtunas, brerum beweaxne, wic wynna leas. Ful oft mec her wraþe begeat fromsiþ frean. A man commanded me to dwell in the barrow of a grove, 27 beneath an oak in this earth-cave. Old is this earth-hall – I am all upset with longing – the valleys are dark, the hills high, 30 the town-enclosures are inhospitable, overgrown with thorns,

190

a dwelling without joy. Very often the departure of my lord grievously seized me. Unlike the beginning of the previous section – Het mec hlaford min (My lord commanded me…

– 14a) – the speaker uses the impersonal term mon (one, a man) for her husband. In doing so, she acknowledges now that he is not and never properly was her lord and husband. She shows, in a small way, that she understands her situation and the truth of her relationship, and asserts some power over that story by reducing her husband from desired object to indefinite “man.”

Nevertheless, she has not excised her lord from his subjectivity, and eros still drives her.

The speaker turns to a more detailed description of the herheard. Again, the actual nature of her dwelling is difficult to decode, but that is unnecessary for my reading of the poem. What is important is the isolation that imbues the place. It is deep in a valley, bounded by hiding hills.

The valley’s town, perhaps an old ruin, is unapproachable because of untended briars. The earth- hold in which she dwells is itself old, and likely forgotten by most. The wife has been consigned to a place of the past. In that place, she has no future, only an endless present that has driven her repeatedly to recall what she has lost, and so grieve:

Frynd sind on eorþan, 33b leofe lifgende, leger weardiað, þonne ic on uhtan ana gonge 35 under actreo geond þas eorðscrafu. þær ic sittan mot sumorlangne dæg, þær ic wepan mæg mine wræcsiþas, earfoþa fela; forþon ic æfre ne mæg þære modceare minre gerestan, 40 ne ealles þæs longaþes þe mec on þissum life begeat. There are lovers on earth, 33b dear living ones, lying in bed, while I walk alone at dawn 35 under the oak through this earth-cave. There I must sit the summer-long day, There I may weep about my exile-journey, my many hardships; therefore I can never

191

put to rest the cares of my mind, 40 nor all the longings which have befallen me in this life. The poet contrasts the lovers (frynd) lying together on earth, while she is up at dawn, anxious as before in ln. 7. In that first instance, she was able to take action and set out to find her lord.

Now, exiled to this empty, timeless place of the earth-cave, she has had her agency utterly reduced. She has been left with nothing but time to consider the giedd of her life (again heralded by the return of a cluster of first-person pronouns throughout) and grow frustrated at her inability to take any action.

Thoroughly denuded of agency, still in love but betrayed and frustrated, the speaker makes her last speech in ll. 42-54. As I noted above, debate about the last lines of “The Wife’s Lament”

(42-54) has centred on whether to interpret them as a statement of resigned, gnomic commentary or perhaps good wishes for the speaker’s lord, or as a curse wishing a similar experience of loneliness upon her errant husband. I side with the latter interpretation. In the foregoing analysis, I have shown how the poet focuses on foregrounding the many ways in which, through the will of others, the speaker’s subject-position has shifted from lord’s wife to exile, and how that alienating shift in identity has led her to examine her loss through her speech act of self- understanding, her giedd. At the same time, the poet has emphasized her diminishing ability to affect her own fate, leaving her only her ability to speak. Finally, throughout these processes, the distance that has grown between speaker and husband has only served to keep her longing for him (and for the self she was with him) at a peak. Powerless, alienated, and still desiring her lover, the speaker has only her words.

192

John D. Niles has laid out a compelling case for an interpretation of this section as a curse rather than the stoic, passive acceptance of an heroic age Anglo-Saxon woman.311 Niles looks to the broader practice of cursing in medieval Britain and Ireland, the Continent, and ancient Rome.

His survey yields important insights to the context of the wife’s speech-act, the most important of which is that cursing is a weapon of the powerless. A person who has political, martial, or economic power has the means to assert control over their situation. Only those who lack such means must resort to cursing.312 Predictably, then, because women in the Middle Ages more often than men lacked the ability to protect their position, most curses are found in the mouths of women. Most relevant to the situation of the speaker, Niles concludes “that individual persons who resort to cursing are most likely to do so out of a sense of shame and loss of place or status.

Persons who are in possession of what they regard as their due have no need to curse. It is thus not powerlessness per se that predisposes people to curse; rather, it is a sense of wounded honor.”313 The speaker of “The Wife’s Lament” has certainly experienced this loss of place, and the poet, as I have pointed out, is at pains to demonstrate her powerlessness. Niles views her curse, then, as a vindictive speech-act effecting revenge. I do not disagree – there is a vengeful hope in her words – but I also believe that the pull of her desire for her lover, the carefully constructed distance between the two that has increased her longing for him, despite his betrayal of her, is very much in play.

311 John D. Niles, “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament,” Speculum 78:4 (Oct. 2003), 1107-1150. See also earlier work by Barrie Ruth Straus, “Women’s Words as Weapons: Speech as Action in “The Wife’s Lament,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23:2 (1981): 269-285. Straus challenges the assumption that the speaker of “The Wife’s Lament” is a passive figure, arguing that before she was imprisoned, she took every action available to her to bridge the distance between her lover and herself; Barrie reads the poem and its ending, as I do, not as passive, but as active attempts to understand and act upon her situation (however futilely) and those who have wronged her (276). Niles provides evidence to support this view which is otherwise lacking in Straus’s article. 312 John D. Niles, “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament,” 1139. 313 John D. Niles, “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament,” 1140. 193

The shift in the speaking-subject’s tone in the last section is clear. In the previous section, the poet keeps her focused inward, as demonstrated by the frequent first-person pronouns and the spatially isolated and temporally stretched space of the herheard. In the final eleven lines, however, she refers to herself only twice and indirectly (min “mine” in 47b, 50b); she is now engaged in the business of creating a new subject-position for her lord.

A scyle geong mon wesan geomormod, 42 heard heortan geþoht, swylce habban sceal bliþe gebæro, eac þon breostceare, sinsorgna gedreag, sy æt him sylfum gelong 45 eal his worulde wyn, sy ful wide fah feorres folclondes, þæt min freond siteð under stanhliþe storme behrimed, wine werigmod, wætre beflowen on dreorsele. Dreogeð se min wine 50 micle modceare; he gemon to oft wynlicran wic. Wa bið þam þe sceal of langoþe leofes abidan. Always may a young man be sad-minded, 42 his hearth-thoughts hard. Likewise, may he who keeps a cheerful countenance also suffer heart-grief, a crowd of constant sorrows. Let him depend upon himself 45 for all his worldly joys. Let him be an outcast far abroad in a distant land, so that my friend may sit under a stony slope, frozen by storms, (my) weary-spirited friend, islanded by water in a dreary hall. My friend will suffer 50 great anxiety of mind; too often he will remember a happier home. Woe is to the one who must hope for a loved one to come out of longing. Using the jussive subjunctive throughout most of the section, the poet invokes a subjectivity for the wife’s husband that draws heavily upon the same diction of exile we see in “The Wanderer” while closely matching the speaker’s own suffering. It is essentially a masculinized version of her own subject-position – she wishes that he suffer and feel as she does. As she sits in her earth-cave, powerless and lonely, she puts him in a cave surrounded by water and crowded with

194

freezing storms, so that he might experience the same icy, wet wretchedness as the men of the other Exeter elegies. She wishes him to be friendless, sad and anxious, and plagued by memories of a happier past, just as she is. The circumstances of the exile she imagines for him are gendered male, but the emotions he will experience as a result of that exile will be the same as the emotions of the woman he betrayed. A perfectly fitted vengeance.

Yet underlying the Wife’s need to avenge herself upon her lord is the desire she still has for him, which is bound up with her eros, her desire to recover her past self. She has made an effort to reject him – or abject him, remove him from the constitution of her subjectivity and thus reinforce her own. We see this in the impersonal pronouns she uses in lines 27a and 42a, where her husband is simply “one, a man.” When this occurs at the beginning of her curse, it is a clear pronouncement of disassociation by the Wife to herself – “may that one suffer.” Yet her desire for him gets the best of her when she abandons her pretense of indifference and calls him “my lover/friend” (min freond) in 47b, and “my friend/protector/lord” (min wine) in 50b (and indirectly in 49b). Niles takes these terms as ironic,314 but sarcasm is often animated by embarrassment. The speaker yearns for her lord, yet wants to punish him. She cannot recover her original subject-position, the past identity in which she was ignorant but happy. By her curse, she hopes to steal agency from him as it was stolen from her, to isolate him as she was isolated, and to spur in him the same longing for a lost identity, the eros that he has forced upon her. Accomplishing this, the speaker and her former-lord would now share the same subject- position, becoming – ironically – closer than they ever were before.

Guðrún’s “Healing Tears” and Moðugr Mind

Though there is far too little surviving Old English literature from which to deduce whether

314 John D. Niles, “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament,” 1145. 195

the presentation of women’s agency and speech-acts in “The Wife’s Lament” were emblematic of women’s representation in that tradition, those themes are front and centre in Old Norse-

Icelandic literature. In medieval Icelandic society, for the most part, only men were allowed to participate in legal proceedings, which included matters of vengeance and compensation for wrongdoing.315 For women, the best recourse they could take in the face of their lack of agency was, in literature at least,316 in speech. In both saga and narrative verse, women take action in their lives and their communities through their words, whether by inciting men into taking vengeance through exhortation or shaming, for example, or cursing those who have wronged them.

The poem I consider here, “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta” (The First Poem of Guðrún), is one of a number of poems that make up the Poetic Edda, a thirteenth-century collection of Old Norse mythological and legendary narrative verse. The legendary poems, to which “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta” belongs, are part of the Norse branch of tales derived from the Germanic Vǫlsung-

Nibelung cycle. The Poetic Edda constitutes one of two important literary articulations of the legend from medieval Iceland, the other being the roughly contemporary Vǫlsunga saga (Saga of the Vǫlsungs).

315 Jenny Jochens, Women in Old Norse Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 113-114. 316 Whether whetting and other speech-acts by women were practiced in medieval Icelandic society or were confined to literature is still debated. See Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 19-20. See in particular pp. 17-34 for an overview of the range of speech-acts performed by Norse women. On whetting in particular see also: Rolf Heller, Die literarische Darstellung der Frau in den Isländersagas (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1958), 98-122; Else Mundal, “The Position of Women in Old Norse Society and the Basis for Their Power,” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 1 (1994): 3–11; William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 212-213 and “Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England,” Law and History Review 1 (1983): 179-181; Carolyn Anderson, “No Fixed Point: Gender and Blood Feuds in Njal’s Saga,” Philological Quarterly 81 (2002): 421–40; Jane Tolmie, “Goading, Ritual Discord and the Deflection of Blame,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4 (2003): 294-297. 196

The story relates the adventures, loves, and revenges of a family of heroes, the Vǫlsungs, and their often unfortunate spouses. The part of the narrative that gives rise to Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta concerns the love triangle of the Vǫlsung Sigurðr, the shield-maiden Brynhildr, and

Guðrún, daughter of the ambitious Gjúkling family. Sigurðr and Brynhildr meet, fall in love, and promise themselves to each other. Guðrún’s mother, ambitious for her family, gives Sigurðr a potion to make him forget Brynhildr. He then marries Guðrún, while Guðrún’s brother Gunnar enlists Sigurðr’s aid in marrying Brynhildr himself. Sigurðr helps him trick Brynhildr into marrying Gunnar. When Guðrún reveals the truth to Brynhildr, the betrayed woman incites her husband Gunnar against Sigurðr. Gunnar enchants one of his brothers, causing him to attack

Sigurðr as he lies unarmed in bed. Both Sigurðr and the enchanted brother die, while Brynhildr kills Guðrún and Sigurðr’s son.

Eros is richly applied in this story, as obstacles are placed between lovers, and lovers are taunted by third-parties: Guðrún’s mother makes Sigurðr unavailable to Brynhildr; Guðrún, desiring Sigurðr and jealous of the love he shares with Brynhildr, throws her marriage in

Brynhildr’s face, in turn inflaming the shield-maiden’s desirous love for Sigurðr, which leads her to incite Guðrún’s brothers to kill Sigurðr, thus forcing Guðrún to share in her unattainable love for the hero. It is a tangled skein of longing leading to wronging. Furthermore, as we saw with the speaker of “The Wife’s Lament,” the agency of the women involved is severely curtailed by outside influences, leaving them words as their only recourse to exact vengeance. In the immediate aftermath of Sigurðr’s death, emotions run high for both Guðrún and Brynhildr, wronged women whose subjectivities have been traumatically shaped by others and by their own actions. “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta” demonstrates how words of vengeance can sometimes provide solace where lament cannot.

197

The poem begins with a problem: Guðrún’s emotions are so intense she is unable to mourn, intending instead to die: 317

1.318 1. Ár var, þaz Guðrún gorðiz at deyia, Long ago, Guðrún set herself to die, er hon sat sorgfull yfir Sigurði; when she sat sorrowful over Sigurðr; gerðit hon hiúfra né hǫndom slá, she did not sob or strike her hands né qveina um sem konor aðrar. together, or wail like other women. 2. 2. Gengo iarlar alsnotrir fram, The wise earls came forward, þeir er harðz hugar hána lǫtto; they tried to assuage her grief; þeygi Guðrún gráta mátti, yet Guðrún was unable to weep, svá var hon móðug, mundi hon springa. she was so móðugr, she might have burst.

Guðrún’s intention to die is appropriate to the situation. With her family having plotted against her husband (and so, herself), she cannot rely on them to exact revenge for his death; nor does she, as a woman, have clear avenues by which to enact vengeance herself (although she does manage it later on in her tragic story). Nevertheless, the household intervenes to prevent her death by sadness: men attempt to console her, yet Guðrún is unable to mourn.

The cause of Guðrún’s inability to grieve seems to be the intensity of her feeling, which is described as moðugr (sg. fem., moðug). Móðugr is a difficult adjective to render in English and many translations of the word are highly gendered. Cleasby-Vigfusson, for instance, define

317 A prose introduction contains much the same characterizes Guðrún’s emotional state thusly: Guðrún sat yfir Sigurði dauðom. Hon grét eigi sem aðrar konor, enn hon var búin til at springa af harmi. Til gengo bæði konor oc karlar at hugga hana; enn þat var eigi auðvelt. Þat er sǫgn manna, at Guðrún hefði etið af Fáfnis hiarta oc hon scilði því fugls rǫdd. Þetta er enn qveðit um Guðrúno: (Guðrún sat over dead Sigurðr. She did not weep like other women, yet she was ready to burst with grief. Both women and men came to comfort her; but it was not easy. People said that Guðrún had eaten from Fáfnir’s heart and so understood the speech of birds. This is also said about Guðrún:). The reference to Guðrún eating from the dragon Fáfnir‘s heart is described in the prose version of the story, Vǫlsunga saga. There it is said that Sigurðr gave some of the dragon’s heart to Guðrún, “and thereafter she was much grimmer than before, and wiser.” See R. G. Finch, ed. and trans., The Saga of the Volsungs (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 47-48. 318 All quotes and numbering from Guðrúnarkviða I and other poems of the Poetic Edda are from the online edition of Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmalern, ed. Gustav Neckel, 5th rev. ed. Hans Kuhn (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1962). Translations are my own.

198

móðugr as “fierce” when applied to a giant or man, and Finnur Jónsson suggests a kind of irascible courageousness.319 When applied to Guðrún (she being the only attested woman to whom the word refers), the former instead suggests “gloomy” or “moody,” while the latter gives

(in Danish) “sorgful” (sorrowful) and “kummerfuld” (miserable). Translators of the Poetic Edda into English have also usually gendered Guðrún’s móðugr state of mind with a more emotional semantic palette: Orchard gives “heart-full” and “fervent”, Larrington “impassioned,” Terry

“burdened by grief,” Bellows “sad,” Thorpe describes her as having an “affliction,” and

Hollander sidesteps it altogether.320 Although the context of the word does not always make its precise meaning clear, it often appears in situations where the person who is móðugr is consumed by a fierce yet grim sense of purpose. Put another way, those who are móðugr are often driven by emotion to a path that will avenge the betrayed, but result in a pyrrhic victory.

They are fierce because their desire for revenge is fueled by emotions of loss; and they are grim because they know their actions will likely result in self-destruction.

In the Eddic poem Hymiskviða (“Hymir’s Poem”), for example, móðugr is twice used as an epithet for the giant Hymir, who, besides being strong and powerful, also has a reputation for vengefulness and for being a fierce protector of his wealth. The adjective appears in two other poems that are part of Guðrún’s Eddic biography. In Guðrúnarhvǫt (“The Whetting of

319 Richard Cleasby and Guðbrandd Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1874), s.v. “móðugr;” Finnur Jonsson and Sveinbjorn Egilsson, eds., Lexicon Poeticum: Antiquae linguae septentrionalis Ordbok over det Norsk-Islendske Skjaldesprog, 2nd ed., (København: S. L. Møllers Bogtrykkeri, 1931), s.v. “móðugr.” 320 Andy Orchard, trans., The Poetic Edda: A Viking Book of Lore (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 179; Carolyne Larrington, trans., The Poetic Edda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 177; Patricia Terry, trans., Poems of the Elder Edda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1990 rev. ed.), 173; Henry Adams Bellows, trans., The Poetic Edda (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923), 413; Benjamin Thorpe and I. A. Blackwell, trans., The Elder Eddas of Sæmund Sigfusson and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson (London: Norrœna Society, 1906), 206; Lee M. Hollander, trans., The Poetic Edda, 2nd ed., rev. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 247. Taken in a broader context, moðugr has an even wider range of meanings, including “angry,” “brave,”, “covetous,” and “pained”: see Klaus von See et al, eds., Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Bd. 6: Heldenlieder (Brot af Sigurðarkviðo, Guðrúnarkviða, Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Helreið Brynhildar, Dráp Niflunga, Guðrúnarkviða II, Guðrúnarkviða III, Oddrúnargrátr, Strophenbruchstücke aus der Völsunga saga) (Heidelberg: C. Winter 2009), 227. 199

Guðrún”), the adjective appears three times. The poem covers events near the end of Guðrún’s story, when she has been married twice more and borne more children. When her daughter has been falsely accused of infidelity and is killed, Guðrún incites her sons to avenge her. In the word’s first appearance, móðgir refers to the young men just after Guðrún has persuaded them to their course: hlóðuz móðgir á mara bógo (they leapt – móðgir – on horseback) (st. 7). After they have departed, Guðrún sits and recounts the grievances of her life that have led her…at telia, tárughlýra, / móðug spioll á margan veg: (to tell, with tears on her cheeks, / móðugr lamentations in every way). Finally, the word is used twice in Atlakviða (“Atli’s Poem”). The first instance is in a compound in st. 13. Gunnar and his brother Hǫgni have decided to journey to Atli’s hall, knowing he has set a trap to steal their wealth and likely kill them. As the brothers ride off, they and their troop are described as harðmóðgir, a severe, grim mood. In st. 36, following Atli’s murder of her brothers, Guðrún reveals her vengeance to her husband as she feeds him their sons: melta knáttu, móðugr, manna valbráðir... (“know that you, móðugr, are eating human flesh…”).

In Guðrún’s case, and at this point in her story, I believe she is a móðugr protagonist par excellence, regardless of gender: she is fierce and self-destructive. Her emotions are a balance of grief and rage at the betrayals through which grief was visited upon her, and she is feeling both emotions so intensely that she is unable to address either one singly, in order to alleviate the pressure. Afraid for her life, the men and women of Guðrún’s household continue to try to help her relieve the intensity of her emotions. Two women share their experiences of loss, each of which is objectively worse than Guðrún’s (st. 3-4, 6-10), but she is unable to weep. After each story, the narrator tells us:

St. 5, 11 St. 5, 11 Þeygi Guðrún gráta mátti; Nevertheless, Guðrún could not weep; she was so móðugr at the death of the young 200

svá var hon móðug at mǫg dauðan man, and hard-hearted at the prince’s death. oc harðhuguð um hrer fylkis.

Her sister Gullrǫnd, however, takes another tack, forcing Guðrún to confront Sigurðr’s corpse:

13. 13. Svipti hon blæio af Sigurði She swept the burial-covering from Sigurðr oc vatt vengi fyr vífs kniám: and threw it on the ground before the wife’s "Líttu á liúfan, legðu munn við grǫn, knees: sem þú hálsaðir heilan stilli." “Look at the beloved one, put your mouth to his moustache, as you would embrace a living prince.” 14. 14. Á leit Guðrún eino sinni; Guðrún looked at him once; sá hon dǫglings scǫr dreyra runna, she saw the prince’s hair running with blood, fránar siónir fylkis liðnar, the leader’s gleaming eyes closed, hugborg iofurs hiorvi scorna. the lord’s chest scored by a sword. 15. 15. Þá hné Guðrún hǫll við bólstri; Then Guðrún knelt upon a cushion; haddr losnaði, hlýr roðnaði, loosened her hair, blooded her cheeks, enn regns dropi rann niðr um kné. and drops like rain ran down about her knees. 16. 16. Þá grét Guðrún, Giúca dóttir, Then Guðrún wept, daughter of Gjúki, svá at tár flugo tresc í gognom, so that tears flew into her hair(?),321 oc gullo við gæss í túni, and cried out with the geese in the yard, mœrir fuglar, er mær átti. the magnificent birds which the maiden owned. Seeing Sigurðr’s corpse, and being urged by her sister to touch and kiss it as she would if he were alive, relieves the logjam of intense emotions that prevented Guðrún from mourning in the socially prescribed way. The módugr intensity of her feelings no longer overwhelms her.

321 For tresc, Cleasby-Vigfusson suggests “veil,” “cushion,” “pillow.” “Hair” or “tresses,” however, is more likely on the grounds of both etymology and context: tresc may be cognate with Old French tresce (French tresse, English tress); and in St. 15, Guðrún clearly loosens her hair about herself, so it could scarcely avoid being wetted by a good weeping. Finally, it has been pointed out to me by Ian McDougall that “tresses” is also justified by the parallelism with st. 14, in which the blood flowing down through Sigurðr's hair is mirrored by the tears that flow through the Guðrún’s hair. For a complete summary of the commentary on tresc, see Klaus von See et al, eds., Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Bd. 6, 246-247. 201

Drawing once again upon Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, we can say that when Guðrún confronts the corpse – bloody, scored by wounds, eyes hidden, and presented by her sister in an abrupt manner, with a grotesque command to touch it romantically– she recognizes the finality of his loss and in abjecting him, she restores some of the integrity of her identity. She continues to feel his lack as part of her self, but she also begins the process of transitioning from bereaved wife to mourner, weeping the “healing tears” that Thomas D. Hill has noted are essential to the mourning process;322 without them Guðrún would have died, as we shall see in the case of

Brynhildr below.

Guðrún’s lament for Sigurðr comprises five strophes (st. 18-22). The first compares Sigurðr to her brothers: he was as superior to them as a leek above the grass and the brightest of gems on a necklace (st. 18). The second tells how, as his wife, Guðrún thought herself beyond all of

Óðinn’s women, but now feels as small as a willow leaf (st. 19). The sense of both emotional and material diminishment that Guðrún articulates is similar to that of the speaking-subject of

“The Wife’s Lament.” Her self-with-Sigurðr, defined by her love for him as well as by the higher status she enjoyed as his wife, has been stripped from her against her will. She is powerless, without agency, and still móðugr. Like the “Wife”-speaker, she finds recourse in words. In st. 20 and 21, Guðrún identifies the source of her loss, the brothers who have acted without her consent and against her interests, and attempts to use her words as weapons.

20. 20. Sacna ec í sessi oc í sæingo I miss, in his seat and in bed, míns málvinar, valda megir Giúca; my talking-friend, Gjúki’s kin are the cause; valda megir Giúca míno bǫlvi Gjúki’s kin caused my curse oc systr sinnar sárom gráti. and their sister’s anguished weeping. 21. 21. Svá ér um lýða landi eyðit, So may you both waste the people’s land

322 Thomas D. Hill, “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta: Guðrún’s Healing Tear, in Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Carolyne Larrington and Paul Acker (New York: Routledge, 2013), 110. 202

sem ér um unnoð eiða svarða; as you swore your oaths; mana þú, Gunnarr, gullz um nióta, you, Gunnarr, will not use the gold, þeir muno þér baugar at bana verða, those rings will be your bane, er þú Sigurði svarðir eiða. because of the oaths you swore to Sigurðr.

Tenderly describing her longing for her husband, her “talking-friend” (málvinr), Guðrún lays the blame at her family’s feet. In the last half of 20b, she says, valda megir Giúca (“Gjúki’s kin are the cause”), and then repeats those exact words in the beginning of the next line in a clever rhetorical trick that clearly indicates she has pivoted from lament and and directed her attention to its cause, her family. To the repeated phrase in 20c, Guðrún adds an object, míno bǫlvi (“my curse”), and in the next line, her anguished weeping (sárom gráti). Bǫl as a noun (dat. bǫlvi) is usually defined as a misfortune or affliction, but is related to the verb bǫlva “to curse.”

Understood as a pun, 20c may be read as “Gjúki’s kin caused my curse” with bǫlvi intended to signify her misfortune (she feels cursed) as well as to signal that her next words in st. 21 are intended as a curse.

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir has observed that in Eddic poetry, women’s curses are often a direct result of men’s oath-breaking.323 Whetting, which Brynhildr has used to catastrophic effect, is another. By casting her words predicting the unhappiness of her brothers as a curse,

Guðrún accomplishes two things. She exercises the little agency she has to effect through words that create a shift in the subject-positions of her brothers that will force them to share her own experience of misery, similar to the way the speaker of “The Wife’s Lament,” another victim of broken oaths, cursed her former lover. Cursing also allows Guðrún to give vent to the móðugr pressure of her emotions, the anger caused by her grief. Although she does not fully exorcise

323 Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, “‘Gerðit hon…sem konor aðar’: Women and Subversion in Eddic Heroic Poetry,” in Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Carolyne Larrington and Paul Acker (New York: Routledge, 2013): 127.

203

either emotion in this poem, and finds many more reasons to grieve as her anger leads her to far greater acts of vengeance in the remainder of her narrative, Guðrún is nevertheless able to carry on for the time being, having successfully found ways to grieve and relieve her móðugr mind through her speech-acts of lamentation and cursing.

Brynhildr, on the other hand, has a far different outcome. In the Eddic poems in which she appears, the aggrieved warrior also relies on words to deal with her grief and anger. She whets the Gjúkling brothers to get vengeance on Sigurðr and Guðrún, and she curses and accurately prophecies the horrible fates of those who have wronged her (e.g., “Sigurðarkviða in skamma,”

“A Short Poem of Sigurðr”), but none of her speech-acts are laments, the only mode of speech that relieves grief. And so for Brynhildr, her emotions become deadly to her, as we see in the remaining stanzas of “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta.”

Immediately after cursing her brothers, Guðrún identifies Brynhildr, not quite fairly, as the cause of all that has happened (st. 22). Brynhildr curses Guðrún’s sister Gullrǫnd for “causing

[Guðrún] to weep and giving her the power of speech” (st. 23). She reveals much here about the power of women’s speech in the context of bereavement and vengeance. By weeping, Guðrún avoided death, and thereby made Brynhildr’s vengeance incomplete. Furthermore, helping

Guðrún to grieve enabled her to speak her grief, and to further help herself recover by cursing those who have wronged her, including Brynhildr, who sees herself as the wronged party. When

Guðrún and her sister accuse Brynhildr of being the cause of all that has happened, she corrects them, placing blame on her brother Atli, whose greed led her to this circumstance.

The final stanza shows us in vivid terms the danger Guðrún avoided by externalizing her grief in words rather than only speech-acts of vengeance.

204

27. 27. Stóð hon und stoð, strengði hon elvi; She stood by the pillar, she called on all her brann Brynhildi, Buðla dóttur, strength; eldr ór augom, eitri fnæsti, from Brynhildr, daughter of Budli, er hon sár um leit á Sigurði. fire burned from the eyes, poison she snorted, when she looked at the wound upon Sigurðr. Gazing upon Sigurðr’s body, a catalyst for emotion, Brynhildr does the opposite of Guðrún, keeping her emotions within her rather than expressing them. As a result, she turns monstrous, even draconic. From the prose epilogue, we learn that Guðrún afterwards wandered away into the wilderness, eventually continuing her life in Denmark. Brynhildr on the other hand, having relieved none of her emotions, does not wish to outlive Sigurðr, essentially putting her where

Guðrún was at the beginning of the poem. Brynhildr has thirteen of her male and female slaves executed, then kills herself with a sword.

“Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta” demonstrates in a short space the importance of words to women’s recovery from trauma at the hands of others. On the one hand, speech as lament can prevent the buildup of emotions that can lead to self-harm. On the other hand, speech as curse (or incitement) can provide the kind of solace the speaker of “The Wife’s Lament” attempted to find, by allowing a speaking-subject to inflict pain on those who have hurt them. Brynhildr dies because she availed herself only of cursing and whetting, which were thwarted in the end by

Guðrún’s survival through lament. At the end of her own tragic, long life, Guðrún too gives up lament, using her words only for vengeance, the result of which is the death of all her family, and eventually her own death by suicide.

No Joy: Three Failed Laments

In this final section, I turn to three figures of Welsh and Irish poetry who find in their verse neither solace nor release from their alienation. Their poems demonstrate the impossibility of shaping a tolerable identity when the present is unbearable and desire for the past is

205

overwhelming. As Heledd, a Welsh aristocrat, endures a worst-case scenario for a noblewoman in heroic society, she attempts to articulate her loss, but is repeatedly drawn back to memories of the recent, happy past, preventing her from accepting her present and thinking of the future.

Memories of the past also afflict the Welsh leper of Abercuawg. For him, the cycles of the natural world and the pain of his illness serve as constant reminders of his social and spiritual isolation, making consolation or reconciliation with God an impossibility. Finally, the Irish old woman of Beare is caught between the joyous memories of her pre-Christian youth and the isolation of asceticism in her Christian old age. Her efforts to find comfort in the promise of

Christian salvation, whose intangible promises are no match for the bodily joys of her remembered past, are unsuccessful. None of these speaking-subjects gain any psychological ground over the course of their utterances. Instead, as we shall see, they reinforce their alienation by articulating its causes in language that serves to heighten, rather than relieve, their emotions.

Canu Heledd (“The Song of Heledd”)

The hundred or so englynion (i.e., stanzas) that make up the cycle of Welsh poems known as

Canu Heledd are assumed to be the surviving elements of a lost prosimetric narrative theory first articulated by Ifor Williams:

“The [saga] englynion, in my opinion, are the verse elements in a cycle of stories, tales, sagas, told in pre-Norman times in north-east Wales, in the eastern part of Powys bordering on England, opposite to, and perhaps including portions of Shropshire and Herefordshire. The prose setting has disappeared: the verse has survived in twelfth-century and fourteenth century manuscripts, a few stanzas even in eighteenth-century copies of earlier manuscripts now lost.”324

324 Ifor Williams, The Poems of Llywarch Hên (London: H. Milford, 1932), 7. The theory is broadly accepted today; the only outlier is Patrick K. Ford, who is concerned that commentators have too willingly speculated on narrative elements serving to flesh out their background stories. Ford instead suggests that these poems may have been

206

The stanzas, called by scholars today the englynion chwedlonol or “saga englynion,” have been dated to the mid to late ninth century,325 while the speaking-subject of this and the two other surviving Welsh cycles derive from sixth- or seventh-century history. A brief discussion of the setting of Canu Heledd will help to contextualize the speaker.

Canu Heledd: Contents, Background, and Narrator

From the surviving poetry, it is possible to infer a sketch of the narrative background of Canu

Heledd. Heledd,326 sister of Cynddylan, the lord of Powys, is one of a few survivors of a

Mercian attack upon their territory. Her brothers and sisters have all been slain, and the land and its people have been devastated. Tempting though it is to assume that Canu Heledd’s story has a historical basis, none has been established – Heledd herself is not historically attested, although the historicity of Heledd’s brother, Cynddylan son of Cyndrwyn, is not doubted. 327

Nevertheless, the saga, composed two centuries after Cynddylan’s time, draws a believable picture of life on the eastern border of Wales, where incursions from the Mercians would have been a familiar story to a ninth-century audience.328

The cycle may be divided into two halves. The first half (st. 1-65) contains seven poems and two incidental stanzas (1, 17). The poems all seem to occur immediately after the fall of

Cynddylan, and can be read as occurring in chronological order, though the possibility that the seven poems have been copied in no particular order should be kept in mind. The second part of

introduced by questions in the Irish fashion. See Ford’s Poetry of Llywarch Hen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 48-55. 325 Jenny Rowland, ed. and trans., Early Welsh Saga Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 389; a detailed discussion of the orthographical and linguistic basis for the dating can be found 367-389. 326 See Williams’s note on Heledd’s name in Canu Llywarch Hen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1953), 227-228, no. 78a; and Rowland’s in Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 601-602, no. 78a. 327 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 2 328 A detailed overview of the historicity of Canu Heledd can be found in Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 120- 141. 207

the cycle comprises the remaining stanzas (66-113), a miscellany of short poems or single englynion, many of them obviously later interpolations, and some of which may be remnants of versions of the saga different from the cohesive poems of the first half. These poems appear to occur later in the narrative, when Heledd wanders about the countryside in search of material and social support, remembering as she goes the past happiness of her life at the court of

Pengwern.329 Because of their brevity and lack of apparent cohesion, I concentrate my discussion on the englynion of the first half of the cycle.

That Heledd is the narrator of all or even most of the poems in the cycle is unprovable, though they are well-suited to her voice. The speakers of the poems of the second half refer in a number of places to brothers and sisters, Cynddylan among them; and in st. 78-79, Heledd refers to herself by name. The poems of the first half, though more cohesive in theme, are less certainly attributed. Nevertheless, as Jenny Rowland points out, although other speakers might fit the poetry well, such as a surviving “aged retainer,” nothing in the poetry eliminates or even makes problematic reading Heledd as the narrator.330

Further support for Heledd as the speaking-subject of the cycle is furnished, albeit indirectly, by two other sources. Heledd is shown to have been a figure of legend by her inclusion in the brief triadic groupings of traditional lore of history, legend, and myth called the Trioedd Ynys

Prydain (“Triads of the Island of Britain”). Heledd appears twice in these: once as one of the three “licensed guests” and “wandering” ones at Arthur’s court (triad no. 65, paraphrased in no.

77), and once as one of the “tri ngiryavl” of Britain – that is, one of the three “violent” or

329 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 141. 330 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 162-163

208

“marvelous” ones, or as John Koch translates, one of the “three driven mad by grief” (no. 76);331 fitting attributions for the speaker of any poem in Canu Heledd. Further confirming her status as a well-known figure of story are an englyn attributed to Heledd in the twelfth- or thirteenth- century Englynion y Clyweit, a collection of proverbs placed in the mouths of Welsh saints and legendary figures;332 and her inclusion in the largely unhistorical genealogy, Bonedd yr Arwyr

(“Genealogy of the Heroes”), as one of twenty-one children of Cyndrwyn.333 Although Heledd is nowhere attested as an historical figure, she and her story were clearly well-known from at least the ninth century onward. The view that Heledd is the primary speaking-subject of the cycle is thus well supported, if provisional.

Canu Heledd, then, is the sole representative in early Welsh literature of a woman’s voice.

By making a woman’s experience the central concern of the cycle, its saga-author provides a rare glimpse into the non-male experience of heroic society. Kenneth Jackson has suggested that early englynion were often a vehicle for exploring less “courtly” topics;334 certainly the saga- author of Canu Heledd has constructed out of Heledd’s experience a three-dimensionally rendered figure of great pathos unusual in a courtly context.

The wild shift in Heledd’s subject-position – from sister of a ruling lord to fugitive – is the starting point of the cycle. In her poems, Heledd gains little psychological ground; each of the seven poems presents to some degree a woman confronting the great changes that have been wrought upon her subject-position, but in none of them does she find consolation. Instead, the

331 Rachel Bromwich, ed. and trans., Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain, 4. ed. (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014; 4th ed.), 181-182, 206-8; John T. Koch, ed., Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006), s.v. “Heledd ferch Cyndrwyn.” 332 Marged Haycock, Blodeugerdd Barddas o ganu crefyddol cynnar (Aberystwyth: Barddas, 1994), no. 31, englyn 28. 333 P. C. Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966), 85 (1). 334 Kenneth Jackson, “Incremental Repetition in the Early Welsh Englyn,” Speculum 16:3 (1941): 319-20. 209

poems explore, from various perspectives, the range of fears perhaps endemic among those dependent upon others for their well-being. Although all seven poems are worthy of discussion,

I confine my analysis to the two that most directly bear upon Heledd’s selfhood, “Marwnad

Cynddylan” (Cynddylan’s Elegy) and “Stafell Gynddylan” (The Hall of Cynddylan).

Heledd’s Alienation

The cycle begins with the ending of Cynddylan’s land, Powys:

1.335 1. Sefwch allann vorynnyon a syllwch Come out, maidens, and look at gyndylan werydre. Cynddylan’s land. llys benngwern neut tande. The court of Pengwern is a raging fire. gwae ieueinc a eidun brotre. Woe to the young who desire a mantle.

The englyn sets up the rest of the cycle, signalling a dramatic confrontation between past identities and the new subject-positions being written by the events unfolding before them. The image of the mantle in 1d encompasses a range of meanings, doubling as a practical warning – from this point forward, even having a mantle for warmth is in doubt – as well as a metonymy for the loss of any expectation of protection, whether physical or psychological. The englyn’s exhortative tone also serves as a rhetorical command to the audience to focus on the pathos of the vulnerable women and youth, who were left behind by the parties that went to war and, of course, were defeated.

“Marwnad Cynddylan”: A Subverted Elegy

Following immediately upon the first englyn is “Marwnad Cynddylan,” an elegy for Heledd’s brother Cynddylan (st. 2-16). The marwnad is a courtly genre, and accordingly this elegy,

335 All quotes and translations from Jenny Rowland, ed., trans, Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 429-447, 483-496. I follow Rowland’s numbering of the englynion, which is continuous through the cycle. 210

presumably spoken by Heledd, keeps largely to the practice of extolling masculine courtly ideals.

Heledd speaks to Cynddylan in direct address, praising in the past tense his nobility and wisdom, and his defense of the land and people (st. 3-6). He has the heart of a hunting dog (st. 7), a wild hawk (st. 8), a boar (st. 9), and is a lion in battle like the heroes of old (st. 10). Throughout the marwnad, the poet employs an important rhetorical device common to the englynion called a cymeriad.336 Cymeriadau (pl.) come in many variations, but the general principal is that they link stanzas together through repetition. In the case of “Marwnad Cynddylan,” each stanza of the elegy except the first begins with “Cynddylan,” concatenating his name down through the poem.

The stanzas are further linked together by a great deal of syntactical parallelism and by incremental repetition of animal images and references to the lands of Powys. All is quite typical of the courtly marwnad until the last three stanzas, when Heledd switches to the present tense, re-enacting a scene or reliving a moment that must have occurred just before Cynddylan’s fateful battle:

14. 14. Kyndylan kymwyat wyt. Cynddylan, you are an harasser (of enemies). armeithyd na bydy[d] lwyt. You intend that you will not be grey-haired. am drebwll twll dy ysgwyt. Around Trebwyll your shield is shattered.

15. 15. Kynndylan kae di y riw. Cynddylan, block the slope yn y daw lloegyrwys hediw. where the Mercians come today. amgeled am vn ny diw. Anxiety for one man does not avail.

16. 16. Kyndylan kae di y nenn. Cynddylan, block the place yn y daw lloegyrwys drwy dren. where the Mercians come through Tren. ny elwir coet o vn prenn. A single tree is not called a forest.

336 For a detailed discussion of the variations of cymeriad in the Welsh englynion, as well as an overview of the popular englyn forms and metres, see Kenneth Jackson, “Incremental Repetition in the Early Welsh Englyn,” Speculum 16:3 (1941): 304-321. For a comprehensive overview of the features of the saga englynion, see Chapter 7: Metrics, Authorship, Language, Dating of Rowland’s Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 305-389. 211

Where the previous stanzas focused on the remembered exterior or observable qualities of the dead prince, Heledd’s re-enactment of this scene before the battle moves away from courtly formality and instead lays bare the tragic nature of the relationship between a prince and his people. The poet offers us the chance to imagine Cynddylan, his name still echoing down the stanzas, being confronted by his sister, in whom is embodied the larger community Cynddylan must protect. In the previous stanzas, eulogizing his recent deeds, he is drawn in martial terms.

In st. 14-16, those deeds are yet to come, so when Heledd (and thus his people) call Cynddylan a kymwyat (“harasser”) in 14a, they are both commanding him and challenging him to live up to his duty. In st. 15 and 16, twice more they command Cynddylan to fulfill the heroic contract, using the rhetorical insistence of another cymeriad in the a-line, in which the first two lines are repeated with slight variation. The third lines of those stanzas, however, strongly contrast with each other. 15c expresses the hard-line heroic view that there is no point being anxious for the warrior fighting hopeless odds; he must fulfill his duty. But 16c acknowledges that futility – one man alone can neither survive nor save them. The last image – un prenn “one tree” – echoes the marwnad’s first line:

2. 2. Vn prenn ygwydvit a gouit arnaw A single tree in a forest in hardship – o dieinc ys odit. if it escapes it is a rare thing. ac a uynno duw derffit Let that which God wills come to pass.

The bookended image of the tree signals the end of the poem, and also emphasizes the image’s importance to the poem’s concern with, if not the unfairness of the heroic ethos, at least its unsustainability.

Indeed, the function of the whetting scene of the last three stanzas is to force into the open the fraught nature of the relationship between the lord and his people, and in particular between him and his poets and female relatives, who hold up a verbal mirror to their patrons and protectors to

212

exhort them to do their duty. The poet, speaking through Heledd, indicates the bitterness and regret that must sometimes attend that duty. It also shows the complicity of Heledd (and through her, the community) in the fate she now finds herself in. As the regrets of Heledd move into the foreground at the end (15c and 16c), the uncomplicated praise of Cynddylan is problematized and subverted, displacing the hero from the focus to make way for Heledd’s emotions, which are at the centre of the next poem.

“Stafell Gynddylan” (“The Hall of Cynddylan”)

St. 18-33 comprise the best known of the poems of Canu Heledd. That it is so well known is a result of its intense pathos, as well as its representation of a woman’s perspective on great loss in heroic society. The success of the poem lies not just in the sympathy Heledd’s situation inspires, but in the way her thoughts and feelings are rendered. The poem is set at night in the burned-out ruin of Cynddylan’s hall. Heledd sits alone in the dark among the ruins, attempting to make sense of what has happened to her and her community – she must reassess her identity and attempt to reform her subjectivity under completely new conditions: kinless, homeless, lordless, without support, an exile. Unfortunately, Heledd’s lament never goes anywhere. If, as we have seen in “The Wanderer” or “The Wife’s Lament,” for example, a function of lament is to put traumatic experiences into words as a way of better understanding an alienating shift in subject-position, then Heledd’s poem is a failure. Rather than bringing her catharsis or a transition out of mourning, Heledd’s utterance leaves her in exactly the same place she begins – overwhelmed by shock and grief, unable to confront, much less accept, her new reality. To achieve this effect, and to develop a feeling of pathos in his audience, the poet exploits the cymeriad and other forms of verbal repetition, the hallmarks of the saga englynion.

213

The first englyn introduces the setting and major themes of the poem, as well as the dominant cymeriad:

18. 18. Stauell gyndylan ys tywyll heno The hall of Cynddylan is dark tonight, heb dan heb wely. without a fire, without a bed. wylaf wers. tawaf wedy. I will weep for awhile; afterwards I will fall silent

In 18a, the poet establishes Heledd’s setting, the burned-out hall of Cynddylan’s court at

Pengwern. The image is employed as a cymeriad in the first line of all sixteen stanzas, so each englyn returns Heledd and us to the haunting image. The importance of the hall as a setting lies in its social function as the centre of political and social activity, quite similar to that seen in

“The Wanderer”; on any other night, it would be peopled and active. But heno, “tonight,” the night of its destruction, the hall is empty of anyone save Heledd. Although some variation occurs in the a-lines, the cymeriad always employs“Stauell gyndyaln” (The hall of Cynddylan) as the first element. The second element is often darkness as in the first stanza (st. 18-20, 25-26,

32), but in several places, it is used to highlight the lost community:

Stauell gyndylan ys digarat heno The hall of Cynddylan is abandoned tonight (st. 23) Stauell gyndylan nyt esmwyth heno The hall of Cynddylan is without comfort tonight (st. 24) Stauell gyndylan ys peithiawc heno The hall of Cynddylan is desolate tonight (st. 28) Stauell gyndylan ys oergrei heno The hall of Cynddylan is cold and harsh tonight (st. 29) Stauell gyndylan ys araf heno The hall of Cynddylan is silent tonight (st. 30)

18b introduces another piece of the pattern: “heb dan heb wely” (without a fire, without a bed), like the a-lines, brings attention to the hall’s emptiness, but it also fills the emptiness with specific memories of what, until that night, had been there: people, physical and emotional warmth, wealth, security, and reminders of Heledd’s status as an aristocrat. Each successive b- line continues thus, referring always to what the hall lacks, and which Heledd, sitting in the 214

darkness, perceives to be missing. Fire is the most frequently used image, occurring as an element in more than a third of the b-lines, while the rest address the lack of warriors, song, company, all the elements of social happiness and security that Heledd had until this night. The contrast of the past and present is emphasized by the syntactical pattern that links almost all of the b-lines: each line employs either heb (without) or gwedy (after) plus an object:

“The hall of Cynddylan is [x] tonight…”

heb dan heb wedy without a fire, without a bed (st. 18) heb dan heb gannwyll without a fire, without a candle (st. 19) heb dan heb oleuat without a fire, without a light (st. 20) heb dan heb gerdeu without a fire, without songs (st. 25) heb dan heb deulu without a fire, without a household troop (st. 26) heb doet heb dan without roofs, without a fire (st. 27)

The heb-constructions focus most on basic comforts of society: warmth, a place to sleep, a candle and light to see by, songs to enjoy together, troops for protection and comradery. The gwedy-constructions instead emphasize the dependence of all these things upon the presence of

Cynddylan and his men:

“The hall of Cynddylan is [x] tonight…”

gwedy gwen gyweithyd after having had a fine company (21b) gwedy yr neb pieuat after he who owned it (23b) gwedy ketwyr [b]odawc after having had staunch warriors (28b) gwedy y parch am buei after the respect which I had heb wyr heb wraged ae katwei without the warriors, without the women who kept it (29bc) gwedy colli y hynaf after losing its lord (30bc) gwedy dyua o loegyrwys after the killing of by Mercian warriors of kyndylan ac eluan Powys Cynddylan and Elfan337 of Powys (31bc) o blant kyndrwyn[yn] after the children of Cyndrwyn: kynon a gwiawn a gwyn Cynan and Gwion and Gwyn (32bc)

337 Elfan is a brother of Cynddylan and Heledd’s. 215

While the heb-phrases lament lack, the gwedy-phrases identify the cause of that lack, namely, the absence of the prince. As a woman, Heledd’s fortunate subject-position depended entirely upon her brother and his success. Now that he is gone, the underpinnings of her identity have been removed and the subject-position through which she forged her identity has become a thing of the past. This, as much as the death of her family and friends, is reflected in her words. In the first two lines of each englyn, Heledd is confronted with the recently lost past intruding upon the empty present, the emotional difficulty of which prevents her from imagining her future. That is, in the immediate aftermath of the devastation of Pengwern, Heledd inhabits a liminal space in which she must attempt to construct a new identity out of the changes that have been made to her subject-position, but the way she is thinking, driven by the darkness and emptiness about her, makes it impossible for her to begin. The poem reveals how difficult this is for Heledd to achieve in the last line of each englyn.

The c-lines show the most syntactical and semantic variation in “Stafell Gynddylan.” Two of the sixteen c-lines parallel the syntax and imagery of the b-line pattern (st. 24, 29), while four others simply continue the sense of b-line statements (28, 31-33). But the ten remaining lines reflect the agitated movement of Heledd’s thoughts as she attempts to comprehend all the implications of Cynddylan’s death. As I noted above, nowhere in the poem does Heledd call

Cynddylan her brother; instead, he is mentioned in terms of his position as her lord and protector.

The poet makes clear in the c-lines that Heledd is keenly aware of her dependence upon him and other kinsmen. Sometimes this is expressed in descriptions of her sadness:

e[t]lit am daw amdanat Sorrow comes to me because of you (20c) dygystud deurud dagreu Tears wear away the cheeks (25c) hidyl [vyn neigyr] men yt gynnu My tears are abundant where it falls (26c)

Other instances contrast the time before and after Cynddylan’s death more strongly than in the b- lines: 216

hyt tra uu ny bu dollglwyt While he was alive there was not a broached gate (22c) marw vy glyw. buw mu hunun My lord is dead; I myself alive (27c)

And in the rest, Heledd expresses only incomprehension at her situation and asks unanswered questions:

wylaf wers. tawaf wedy I will sleep awhile; afterwards I will fall silent (st. 18) namyn duw pwy am dyry pwyll Except for God, who will give me sanity? (st. 19) gwae ny wna da ae dyuyd Woe to him who does not do the good which comes to him (st. 21) o wi a angheu byrr ym gat Oh death, why does it leave me behind? (st. 23) y mawr drugarawc duw paa wnaf Great merciful God, what shall I do? (st. 30)

Taken together, these final lines emphasize Heledd’s complete dependence upon the actions of others for her well-being. She sees herself as powerless, and her words are not helping her. She does not “solve” her problem through consolation, as do the speakers of “The Wanderer” and

“Sonatorrek,” nor does she find solace in using her words as weapons, as do Guðrún and the speaker of “The Wife’s Lament.” Nor does what can be reconstructed of the narrative suggest that Heledd finds catharsis and relief through her utterance. Instead, the intent of the poet seems to be to show the shock induced by traumatic experience.

As I noted above, the speaking-subjects of other poems of consolation (or near consolation, such as “The Wife’s Lament,” “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta”) could be said to have an arc: the speaking-subject begins his or her speech in an undesirable subject-position, explains their situation, expresses their feelings about that situation, and then, either in the poem or through speaking the poem, finds their way to a shift of perspective that allows them to alter the conditions of their subjectivity. The status of “The Wanderer”-speaker as a worldly exile with no hope of comfort is transformed when he adopts a Christian perspective, and comes to see himself as an exile from heaven, to which home he will surely find his way. Egill 217

Skallagrímsson, suicidal over the death of his son, which he feels is the death of his legacy, uses his lament to figuratively rebuild his family, and thus his identity. For each speaker, the poem is the bridge from an undesirable subject-position to a better one.

“Stafell Gynddylan” goes nowhere, a moebius strip of linked, circular englynion that return

Heledd to the same subject-position in which she started the poem. As outlined above, every a- line begins with the image of Cynddylan’s burnt hall, which triggers in Heledd remembrance and sadness of what has been lost in line b. But rather than giving rise to solutions, the final line is only a vehicle for her hopelessness, which derives from the emotions arising in the a- and b-lines as a result of her repeated realization that the social foundations of her identity are gone. The pattern is repeated englyn after englyn, renewed by the cymeriad of line a, refueled by the loss in line b, and petering out in line c without solution. The cycle continues until the final englyn, in which Heledd gives up her attempt at lament with a summative statement in the final stanza:

33. 33. Stauell gyndylan am erwan. pob awr. The hall of Cynddylan, it pierces me – gwedy mawr ymgyuyrdan. every hour – a weleis ar dy benntan. after the great conversing I saw on your hearth side.

This englyn brings together all the major themes of Heledd’s alienation. The poet invokes the hall of Cynddylan a final time, but does not include the usual descriptive element to indicate its current state or a specific temporal element, such as heno.338 Instead the hall is said to pierce

Heledd pob awr (every hour, constantly). The words are emphasized metrically, set apart as a gair cyrch (i.e., the syllables immediately following the caesura) as well as by being excluded from the rhyme scheme (in bold). Read aloud, there would be a discernable pause before the gair cyrch. Setting the temporal clause apart, the poet draws our attention to the fact that, after

338 St. 27 is the only other stanza that does so. 218

innumerable repetitions of the same theme, the traumatic emptiness of the hall has become a state of mind to Heledd, from which exit is impossible. And so, Heledd ends the poem with a gwedy-construction employing an image – the hearth – that recalls the entirety of her community gathered together beside the warmth and security of the hearth, a microcosm of what will never be again.

“Claf Abercuawg” (The Leper of Abercuawg)

“Claf Abercuawg” is a poem of thirty-two englynion that is found just before the poems of

Canu Llywarch Hên, another of the Welsh saga cycles preserved with Canu Heledd.339 The poem’s speaking-subject is unnamed and not identifiable with any figure from history or the other saga englynion. One manuscript witness, the White Book of Rhydderch, includes a title:

Englynion Mabclaf ap Llywarch (the englynion of Llywarch’s Son,) but this appears to derive from the poem’s proximity to the Llywarch material and a misunderstanding of “mabclaf” for

“son” instead of the correct “little leper” or “little sick one.”340 The poem is thus likely intended to stand alone, or is perhaps a surviving element of a lost cycle.

As with the other Welsh and Irish poems I have considered in this chapter, commentary on this poem is sparse. For the most part, critical interest in the poem has been limited to discussing its quality and whether or not it should be classed as a penitential poem. With regard to the quality of the poem, its earliest critic, Ifor Williams, made note of the seemingly disproportionate number of lines given to gnomic statements and nature descriptions. For Williams, these sententious statements were mere “filler lines” (llinellau llanw).341 The consensus today,

339 NLW 4973a is exception. See Jenny Rowland, ed. and trans., Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), 190, n. 6. 340 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 190, n. 6. For more on “mabclaf” see also 628, n. 32a and Ifor Williams, ed. Canu Llywarch Hên (Caerdydd: Prifysgol Cymru, 1953), 173-174. 341 Ifor Williams, Canu Llywarch Hên, xliii-xliv.

219

however, is that the gnomic and nature elements play an integral role in the depiction of the speaker’s state and overall intent of the poem, a view arrived at through comparative analysis of this poem with similarly multimodal texts like “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.”342

Comparative work with the Old English elegies has also been important to the discussion of

“Claf Abercuawg’s” genre. On the one hand are those who classify the poem as a penitential lyric, an opinion arrived at based on its rhetorical similarities to the more clearly penitential Old

English elegies.343 In this view the gnomic and nature elements are present in the poem merely to support a perceived penitential narrative, that of a wretched, exiled person bemoaning his existence and in the end finding some kind of reconciliation with God. Others have rejected any application of genre to “Claf Abercuawg,” arguing that, although clear structural and motivic affinities to the Old English elegies exist, the poem lacks their clear religious didacticism and unambiguous narrative of consolation, which creates another mood altogether, one perhaps uniquely Welsh.344

I fall in the latter camp: although the poem may have penitential elements, I believe its chief goal is to render in verse a figure of alienation who is both sympathetic and repellent, a person to be contemplated. A close examination of how the poet renders his speaking-subject will show how ingeniously the gnomic and nature elements that Ifor Williams found superfluous can be used to show alienation and despair. I will also show how “penitential” is an inadequate term to encompass the utterance of a subject who desires many things in addition to God. Before turning

342 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 190-191. 343 P. L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970), 19-22, 81; Herbert Pilch, “The Elegiac Genre in Old English and Early Welsh Poetry,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 29 (1964): 209- 224; Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 190-228. 344 Patrick K. Ford, The Poetry of Llywarch Hen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 53-55; Sarah Lynn Higley, Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 46-50. 220

to the poem itself, a discussion of the word “claf” is necessary to better understand the subject- position of the speaker.

The Alienation of the “Claf”

Ifor Williams first suggested that the speaker of “Claf Abercuawg” is a leper, basing his assertion upon his interpretation of the word “mabklaf,” which occurs in st. 31 of the poem.345

The speaking-subject also refers to himself as a “claf” in the sixth stanza, which as a noun often means simply a “sick one,” but can often mean “leper” as well. Rowland notes that “clafwr” always means “leper,” that “claf” is present in the compound clafdy “leprosarium, infirmary, hospital,” and that the Irish cognate “clam” is also usually understood to mean “leper” as a noun, and as an adjective, “leprous, mangy.”346 That the speaker is a leper also seems borne out in the small bits of personal revelation we are given. From the start of the poem we are made aware of the speaker’s illness: “Goreiste ar vrynn a eruyn uym bryt / a heuyt nym kychwyn” (“My mind begs to sit idle on a hill, but it does not start me going” – 1ab), “ny allaf darymret” (“I am not able to wander about – 3b). Although restless, he is not able to rouse himself. He is gripped by fever and disease: “teryd glaf wyf hediw” (“I am very ill today” – 2c), “crei vym bryt rac gofit heint” (“raw my mind because of the affliction of disease” – 11c), “crei vym bryt cryt am dewis”

(“raw my mind; fever has gripped me” – 20c); losing weight: “neur laesswys vyg kylchwy” (“my clothing is loose” – 8b), “cleuyt am cur” (“disease wastes me” – 21c); and unable to sleep:

“dylywn pwyth hun y heneint” (“I deserve the reward of sleep in old age” – 12c).

Admittedly, these are rather generic descriptions of illness, though all are in keeping with leprosy.347 But lines 17bc and 18bc offer a more specific symptom: “pan vryssyant ketwyr y gat,

345 Ifor Williams, Canu Llywarch Hên, 173. 346 Jenny Rowlands, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 192. 347 Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 21-49. 221

/ mi nyt af anaf nym gat” (“when warriors hasten to battle, I do not go; a blemish does not allow me”); “pan vrys ketwyr gatle, / mi nyt af anaf am de” (“when warriors hasten to the battlefield, I do not go; a blemish burns me”). Rowland notes that the word “anaf” can be used for a “wound, defect, sore or disfigurement which is permanent and incurable.”348 In this context, it seems reasonable to suggest that the speaker’s “blemish” is a sign of leprosy. Saul Nathaniel Brody remarks that those who suffer from some forms of leprosy will develop lesions on the skin which appear in patches of a distinctly different pigment than the surrounding skin. They are dry to the touch and on the surface completely without sensation to the sufferer, but extremely painful beneath the skin.349 Such an anaf would have been visible to others, as suggested in 17c and 18c.

A visible blemish would also have been instrumental in the speaker’s diagnosis as a leper and subsequent isolation from the community. Though scanty, the physical descriptions offered by the speaker are consistent with leprosy.

Medieval medical writers tell us that lepers were thought to be highly contagious and a serious threat to society. The impulse to isolate the leper for the good of the community goes back a long way, as Leviticus attests:

Now whosoever shall be defiled with the leprosy, and is separated by the judgment of the priest, shall have his clothes hanging loose, his head bare, his mouth covered with a cloth, and he shall cry out that he is defiled and unclean. All the time that he is a leper and unclean he shall dwell alone without the camp.350 This was still the general practice in the Middle Ages. Thus communities usually sent lepers away to live in hospitals or leprosariums, or, as was more commonly done in the early period, hermitage-like huts.351 Wales appears to have followed this pattern. The leper’s isolation from a

348 Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 192. 349 Saul Nathanial Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 28. 350 Leviticus 13: 44-46 351 Saul Nathanial Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 52.

222

Welsh community often included the loss of all rights, including the loss of property, the loss of galanas (i.e., restitution) paid to a leper if his kinsman was murdered, and galanas collected or owed for the murder of a leper.352 Any inheritance rights for a son born after the father was declared leprous were also lost.353 Furthermore, no leper could serve as a surety for another man;354 and should a wife leave a leprous husband, she was entitled to reclaim all the wealth she had brought to the marriage.355 A leper quickly became a non-entity with little or no recourse in early Welsh law. As Brody puts it:

Few misfortunes in medieval life were feared as much as such a diagnosis [of leprosy]. It was a prediction of disfigurement and death, and what is perhaps more terrifying, it separated a man from society because of the infection he carried outwardly and the moral corruption that lay within him.”356 This loss of one’s place in society is unmistakeably expressed in statements scattered through what little of “Claf Abercuawg” remains that is not a gnomic statement or nature description. In the first englyn we are told that the speaker’s homestead is desolate (“diffeith vyn tydyn” – 1c), and later (32a) it is suggested that he is at or near a derwdy, an oaken house or oratory. Both details are in keeping with a leper’s exile to a hermitage, and emphasize his lack of possessions or material wealth. The speaker’s comment that the cattle-track is bare (“benedyr byw” – 2a357) also supports his state of poverty. In the third englyn we learn that the speaker does not keep a host (“millet ny chatwaf” – 3a), perhaps implying by mentioning it at all that, were it not for his condition, he would not only keep a host, but lead it as well. This is possible, given that the most explicit biographical statement made in the poem is “Oed mackwy mabklaf oed goewin gynran /

352 Dafydd Jenkins, ed. and trans., The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales (Llandysul, Dyfed: Gomer Press, 1986), 150. 353 Dafydd Jenkins, The Law of Hywel Dda, 150. 354 Dafydd Jenkins, The Law of Hywel Dda, 76. 355 Dafydd Jenkins, The Law of Hywel Dda, 46. 356 Saul Nathanial Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 59. 357 A difficult line to translate. See P. L. Henry, The Early English and Celtic Lyric, 75 and Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 617-618, n. 2a. The line may also simply refer to the season. 223

yn llys vrenhin” (“the leper was a youth, he was a daring warrior in the court of a king” – 31ab).

Another moment of longing for the warrior life occurs in 17bc and 18bc, mentioned above, where he acknowledges the blemish (anaf) that has prevented him from living the life he anticipated for himself.

Also expressed is the loss of loved ones, and again, loss of the life the speaker knew: “ys atuant gan vym bryt / ae kigleu nas clyw heuyt” (“my mind is sad that one who heard them [the birds] does not hear them as well” – 7c), “a garet ymabolaeth / carwn bei kaffwn etwaeth”

(“what was loved in boyhood / I would love if I obtained it again” – 15bc), “etlit a gereis neut mwy” (“grief for that which I love is greater” – 8c), and “gwiw callon rac hiraeth” (“Withered the heart for longing” – 14c).

With these statements, the poet draws a clear picture of a person completely cut off from earthly comforts, both physical and emotional. Lepers were not, however, isolated only for fear of their illness, but also out of an abiding belief that anyone who had become a leper did so through immoral behaviour. As Brody again states,

The [medieval] medical writers are generally agreed that lepers threaten society not only through infection but also through their corrupt and evil behavior. Nearly always they specify – and thereby warn – that lepers burn with desire for sexual intercourse. To be sure, most writers describe leprosy itself as a venereal disease.358 In addition to their strong sexual appetites, lepers were also thought to be treacherous and devious-minded, and wholly in estrangement from God, and therefore from salvation.359

Leprosy was a sinner’s disease; thus a leper was, for all intents and purposes to its community, treated as dead, and probably damned.

358 Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 52. 359 Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 51, 104. 224

The spiritual status is the main concern of the poem’s final stanzas. At this point, however, I wish to turn to the poem itself in order to show how the poet brings his themes together – leprosy, isolation, the natural world, and alienation from both humanity and God – in order to construct his speaking-subject.

Constructing the “Claf”

1. 1. Goreiste ar vrynn a eruyn uym bryt. My mind begs to sit idle on a hill, a heuyt nym kychwyn. but neither does it start me going. byrr vyn teith diffeith vyn tydyn. Short my journey, desolate my dwelling.

2. 2. Llem awel llwm benedyr byw. Sharp the wind, bare the cattle-track, pan orwisc coet teglyw when the garment of the forest is the fair haf. teryd glaf wyf hediw. color of summer. I am feverishly ill today.

3. 3. Nyt wyf anhyet. millet ny chatwaf I am not agile, I do not keep a host, ny allaf darymret. I am not able to wander about. tra vo da gan goc canet. While it pleases the cuckoo, let it sing.

That the leper is out of sync with his surroundings is made clear gradually; the first englyn provides us with our first inkling of his alienation. The speaking-subject desires to sit upon a nearby hill, but illness prevents him. He is effectively trapped in his desolate dwelling. In the second englyn, the speaker describes his environment, but again turns inward; while the world is going about its summer business, the leper is ill and unable to be part of it. The third englyn continues the inward brooding – unwell, the speaker dwells again on his lost mobility, which prevents him from participating in the world about him.

3c introduces the cuckoo, whose song dominates the next twelve englynion. With its mournful cry – the call of the cuckoo is rendered “cw cw” in Welsh, which as a pun means

225

“where? where?” – the cuckoo is the leper’s only connection to the world about him. He savours the company, urging the bird on in the next two stanzas:

4. 4. Coc lauar a gang an dyd. The loud cuckoo sings with daybreak, kyfreu eichyawc yn dolyd. cuawc ready songs in the meadows of Cuawg. gwell corrawc no chebyd. Better to be one too generous than a miser.

5. 5. Yn aber cuawc yt ganant gogeu. In Abercuawg cuckoos sing ar gangheu blodeuawc. on flowering branches. coc lauar canet yrawc. Loud cuckoo, let it sing forever more.

5a introduces the first cymeriad geiriol of the poem, which is repeated over the next two englynion. In 5c, the speaker again urges the cuckoo to keep singing. In the next stanza, however, the sound becomes oppressive, and the speaker begins to think about the past:

6. 6. Yn aber cuawc yt ganant gogeu. In Abercuawg cuckoos sing ar gangheu blodeuawc. on flowering branches. gwae glaf ae clyw yn vodawc. Woe to the sick one who hears them constantly.

7. 7. Yn aber cuawc cogeu a ganant. In Abercuawg cuckoos are singing. ys atuant gan vym bryt. My mind is sad ae kigleu nas clyw heuyt. that one who heard them does not hear them as well.

8. 8. Neus endeweis i go car eidorwc brenn. I have listened to a cuckoo on an ivy-covered neur laesswys vyg kylchwy. tree. etlit a gereis neut mwy. My clothing is loose. Grief for that which I love is greater.

9. 9. Yn y vann odywch llonn dar. On the branch from high the stirring oak yd endeweis i leis adar. I listened to the cries of the birds. coc uann cof gan bawp a gar. Loud cuckoo, everyone remembers what he loves.

10. 10. Kethlyd kathyl uodawc hiraethawc y llef. Singer of ceaseless song, its longing cry, teith odef. tuth hebawc. 226

coc vreuer yn aber cuawc. intending a journey, with hawk-like movements is the loud cuckoo of Abercuawg.

The cuckoo calls continue, providing a background of sadness that becomes more raucous, driving at the leper. The mournful sound causes the speaker to long for the company of others from his past.

Englyn 11 introduces the next cymeriad and another shift in the leper’s mind, now from the past to the present, as the birds continues to call and the world cools with the night.

11. 11. Gordyar adar gwlyb neint. Clamorous the birds, wet the streams/valleys llewyvhyt lloer oer deweint. the moon shines, cold is midnight. crei vym bryt rac gofit heint. Raw my mind because of the affliction of disease.

12. 12. Gwynn gwarthaf neint deweint. hir [Noisy are the birds; wet the] valleys; keinmygir pob kywreint. midnight is long, dylywn pwyth hun y heneint. Each curiosity is honored, I deserve a reward of sleep in old age.

13. 13. Gordyar adar gwlyb gro. Clamorous the birds, wet the shingle. deil cwydit divryt divro. A leaf falls, dispirited the exile; ny wadaf wyf claf heno. I do not deny I am ill tonight.

14. 14. Gordyar adar gwlyb traeth. Clamorous the birds, wet the beach, eglur nwyvre ehalaeth Clear the sky, broad the wave. tonn. gwiw callon rac hiraeth. Withered the heart for longing.

15. 15. Gordyar adar gwlyb traeth. Clamorous the birds, wet the beach, eglur tonn tuth ehalaeth clear the wave of broad movement; a garet ymabolaeth what was loved in boyhood carwn bei kaffwn etwaeth. I would love if I obtained it again.

16. 16. Gordyar adar ar edrywy ard. Clamorous the birds on high Edrywy, bann llef cwn yn diffeith. loud the cry of dogs in the wilderness. Gordyar adar eilweith. Clamorous the birds again.

227

The birds continue to call, and it is a cool, wet night. The leper’s illness, though, puts him at odds with his environment, burning against the cool wet. In pain, he is unable to sleep, though the world around him does (12c). Ill and heartsick, the world – birds, leaves, waves – continues on relentlessly as he is trapped physically by illness and emotionally by the memories the constant cries of the birds call up (13-15).

In st. 17 and 18, springtime arrives (or its memory). Fair things are growing, which reminds the leper that in the world from which he is exiled, it is time for young men to go to battle:

17. 17 Kynnteuin kein pob amat Spring—beautiful is each growing thing pan vryssyant ketwyr y gat. —when warriors hasten to battle. mi nyt af anaf nym gat I do not go; a blemish does not allow me.

18. 18. Kynteuin kein ar ystre. Spring—fair the border pan vrys ketwyr y gatle. —when warriors hasten to the battlefield. mi nyt af anaf am de. I do not go; a disability burns me.

Because of his illness, he cannot go to battle, which he indicates is as natural for young men to do in spring as it is for things to grow; he, however, is no longer part of the natural order of things. His disordered nature and his isolation from the world and his past are the subject of the next run of stanzas. In st. 21, he invokes two gnomes – “Amlwc golwc gwylyadur” (“Clear is the gaze of the watcher”) and “gwnelit syberwyt segur” (“The idle one performs generosity”) – that contrast with his current state. Leprosy has likely destroyed his sight, or perhaps prevents him from closing his eyelids, giving him a goggling visage that cannot see clearly at all;360 while his illness prevents him from being able to put his forced idleness to good purpose: “crei vym bryt. cleuyt am cur” (“raw my mind; disease wastes me”).

360 See Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 622 n. 21a for a discussion of this difficult passage; see also Saul Nathaniel Brody, The Disease of the Soul, 30. 228

The poet continues to use gnomic statements to emphasize how the speaking-subject exists outside the order they describe.

22. 22. Alaf yn eil meil am ved. Cattle in the shed, mead in the bowl. nyt eidun detwyd dyhed. The blessed one does not desire adversity. amaerwy atnabot amyned. The bond of understanding is patience.

23. 23. Alaf yn eil meil am lat. Cattle in the shed, ale in the bowl. llithredawr llyry llonn cawat. Slippery the course, agitated the shower, a dwfyn ryt berwyt bryt brat. and deep the ford. The mind boils up treachery.

24. 24. Berwit brat anuat ober. It boils up treachery, a wicked deed. bydaut dolur pan burer. There will be pain when it is atoned for. gwerthu [yr bycholt llawer]. Selling a great thing for a small quantity.

25. 25. Pre ator pre ennwir [A cauldron will be prepared for the] wicked. pan uarno douyd dyd hir. when God judges on the long day tywyll vyd geu. goleu gwir. the false will be dark, the true, bright.

Englyn 22 describes good order in both the community, employing symbols of wealth and wellbeing (22a, 23a), and in the individual, who should not wish to disrupt that good order with

(22bc). But as I noted above, the leper is often associated with disease of both body and soul.

The image of the boiling mind in 23c and 24a recalls other similar descriptions of a burning mind associated with his disease (7b, 11c, 20c, 21c, 27c), but here it is clearly a sign of moral disease as well. Disruption of the social order through treachery is the speaker’s crime, it appears, which has resulted in his leprosy, the outward manifestation of his internally disordered state, the result of which is damnation (25).

Englyn 26 returns once more to the gnomic language of the ordered world –

26. 26. Kerygyl yn dirchiuat kyrchynyat kewic. Cups are raised, the warrior is well-ordered, llawen gwyr odywch llat. men are cheerful over drink.

229

crin calaf alaf yn eilyat. Withered the stalk; cattle are in the shed.

– but the leper is again drawn out of his memory by the noise of the present world, which reminds him of his estrangement:

27. 27. Kigleu don drom y tholo. I have heard a heavy-sounding wave vann y rwng graean a gro loud between course sand and shingle. krei vym bryt rac lletvryt heno. My mind is raw from sorrow tonight.

In one last gnomic englyn, the leper comes to understand that he does in fact have a role in the ordered universe:

28. 28. Osglawc blaen derw. chwerw Branching the tip of the oak, chweith onn. bitter the taste of the ash, chwec evwr chwerthinat tonn. sweet the cowparsnip, laughing the wave. ny chel grud kystud callon. The cheek does not hide affliction of the heart.

An oak tree grows and expands, the ash is bitter, the cow parsnip sweet, and the wave sparkles and rolls; that is, everything acts according to its nature. The cheek, betraying the leprous red flush sometimes reported by medieval medical writers, identifies the speaker as a leper – each thing according to its nature. The leper knows his nature and cannot fight it – he is diryeit:

29. 29. Ymwng ucheneit. a dyuet arnaf Frequent is the sigh which betrays me Yn ol vyg gordyfneit according to my wont. ny at duw da y diryeit God does not allow good for the diryeit.

30. 30. Da y direit ny atter. Good to the diryeit is not allowed, namyn tristit a phryder only sadness and care. nyt atwna du war a wnel God does not undo that which he does.

230

The speaker is diryeit, a word meaning “wicked,” “wretched,” “terrible;”361 certainly, he is estranged from God. His spiritual condition is as hopeless as his physical condition.

The speaker looks back to better days in the penultimate englyn, briefly invoking a more merciful God:

31.362 31. Oed mackwy mabklaf. oed goewin The leper was a youth, he was a daring gynran warrior yn llys vrenhin. in the court of the king. Poet gwyl duw wrth edein. May God be kind to the exile.

But he fatalistically accepts his estranged subject-position:

32. 32. Or a wneler yn derwdy Despite what is done in a penitentiary, ys diryeit yr ae derlly. he who reads it is diryeit: cas dyn yman cas duw vry. hated by men here, hated by God above.

The work the speaker might do in a penitentiary (or oratory) is presumably penance, but he believes it will not avail him. To be a leper is to be diryeit, to have committed a crime against

God and society, and to be separated from both. Supported by the poem’s spiritual, social, and material expressions of isolation, as well as its vocabulary of illness, the speaking-subject’s alienation – from society, from God – is clear.

Conclusion: “Claf Abercuawg”

As I noted earlier, critics have long debated whether “Claf Abercuawg” is a penitential poem, a question that speaks to the degree and nature of the speaking-subject’s alienation. Much of the evidence interpreted as being in favour of categorizing the poem as penitential rests on the inclusion of God in the final four englynion, which I have shown actually reinforces and elevates

361 H. Meurig Evans and W. O. Thomas, eds., Y Geiriadur Mawr: The Complete Welsh-English English-Welsh Dictionary, 22 arg. (Swansea: C. Davies; Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1997), s.v. “diriaid.” 362 In Rowland’s edition, stanzas 31 and 32 are reversed. I have restored the manuscript order for reasons explained below. 231

the speaker’s alienation rather than alleviating it; and on comparative readings with such Old

English elegies as “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.” This poem shares with those elegies some of the themes and stylistic characteristics noted above, such as gnomic and nature material, but “Claf Abercuawg” does not share their spiritual consolation. “The Wanderer” in particular is similar to “Claf Abercuawg” in its recognition of the inflexibility of fate, yet by the end its narrator knows that, although deprived of hearth and lord, a home will always be prepared for him in heaven. In contrast, by the end of his utterance, the leper of Abercuawg is just as certain that his status as a diryeit is unremitting – there is no hope of salvation for a leper. In the poem’s penultimate stanza, the speaking-subject does make a brief wish for God’s mercy (31c), but it is quickly crushed in the final englyn with the pronouncement that the diryeit is hated both here on earth and by God in heaven.363 Thus the kind of spiritual didacticism that might be considered the primary intent of “The Wanderer” is entirely absent from “Claf Abercuawg.”

The composer of “Claf Abercuawg” expresses the isolation of the speaker on all the levels unique to a leper’s situation – few other subjects in medieval literature are isolated in quite the same way: he is condemned to exile from his family and community; he is condemned to death; and he is condemned as inherently immoral, and therefore irredeemable in the eyes of God. But he is not dead. Instead, this leper lives in a world that seems to mock or even ignore his existence. He is dead to God, and therefore he is estranged from God’s creation. This final degree of isolation is expressed through the nature poetry and gnomic statements that permeate

363 In fact, Henry Pilch and Jenny Rowland reverse stanzas 31 and 32, making the final line of the poem the somewhat hopeful “Poet gwyl duw wrth edein” (“May God be kind to the exile”). Rowland justifies the switch on the grounds that, in this arrangement stanzas 29-31 form a cyrch-gymeriad (that is, the repetition of a word or syllable at the end of one englyn and the beginning of the next englyn). This is true, but placing the seemingly penitential englyn 31 at the end allows Rowland to create a narrative more in keeping with the Old English elegies. I would suggest instead that the final stanza is correct as it stands in the manuscripts, and that it is possible that the breaking of the cyrch-gymeriad is intentional, a deliberate hopeful interruption of an anticipated downward spiral, possibly meant to catch a listener off guard or bring up short an attentive listener who was expecting resolution. See Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry, 452, 627; P. L. Henry, Early English and Celtic Lyric, 78. 232

“Claf Abercuawg.” Hardly “filler lines” (llinellau llanw), they are essential to expressing the speaker’s social and spiritual isolation.

“The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare”

The “Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” as it is editorially known, is regarded as one of the most sophisticated and beautiful pieces of medieval Irish verse – “the greatest of Irish poems,” as two editors have called it364 – an opinion that is borne out by the frequency with which it has been edited, translated, anthologized, recorded, animated, and set to music.365 And like many of the richly constructed poems discussed in this thesis, the “Lament” and its speaker can be read in a number of ways. Some of the difficulty of interpreting the poem arises from textual concerns.

The “Lament” as it appears in editions today is derived from five sixteenth- and seventeenth- century manuscripts,366 although its language suggests a date of composition around 900.367

Corruption of the text, confusion over the arrangement of its thirty-five (or so) quatrains, and questions of interpolation have made the task of producing a definitive edition of the “Lament” difficult, with the result that literary commentary on the poem and its speaker has been limited,

364 David Greene and Frank O’Connor, eds. and trans., A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry A.D. 600-1200 (London, 1967), 7. 365 Editions and translations are referred to below. Frank O’Connor recorded his own translation of the poem to tape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library Woodberry Poetry Room, 1961, audiotape reel); Kuno Meyer’s translation in Ancient Irish Poetry (London: Constable, 1913), 90-93 was read by Gretta Sexton Owens for the vinyl album James N. Healy’s Poetry of Cork and Kerry (Cork: Mercier Press, date unknown, audio disc: analog 33 1/3, 30 cm.). This recording has been animated by Jim Clark (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65CWjdVcBmg. Another unknown recording of the poem, translated by Brendan Kennelly, Love of Ireland: Poems from the Irish (Cork: Mercier Press, 1989), has also been animated by Jim Clark (2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARgV1TO0VYU&t=35s. Musical treatments of the poem include Nancy Telfer, Portraits for Soprano and Piano (Toronto: Canadian Music Centre, 1983); Nicole LeFanu, The Old Woman of Beare, for Soprano and Thirteen Players (Borough Green, Kent: Novello & Co., Ltd., 1984); Michael Alcorn, The Old Woman of Beare (Dublin: The Contemporary Music Centre, 1994). 366 For a comparative discussion of the manuscripts and their presentation of the “Lament,” see Donncha Ó hAodha, ed. and trans., “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989): 308. 367 Donncha Ó hAodha, ed. and trans., “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 310.

233

and is descriptive rather than analytic. Kuno Meyer, for example, says only that the poem is “the lament of an old heitara who contrasts the privations and suffering of her old age with the pleasures of her youth, when she had been the delight of kings”; and Myles Dillon describes the poem as simply the utterance of “an old woman [who] remembers the pleasure of youth and love and scorns old age.”368

Other scholars have examined the legendary background of the speaker of the “Lament,” the

Caillech or old woman, as she is usually known; but these studies tend to ignore the Caillech as she is presented in the “Lament” itself: Kuno Meyer, Eleanor Hull, A. H. Krappe, and Gearóid Ó

Crualaoich have all investigated the folklore tradition of the Caillech, but failed to bring their findings to bear upon the poem itself.369 Others have glimpsed a historical background to the

“Lament,” and used it to illuminate some broader concerns of Munster legendary history: Seán Ó

Coileáin, for example, read a mytho-political dimension in the poem, seeing the Caillech as the displaced sovereignty goddess of a once powerful people who were much reduced in influence at the time of its composition;370 while Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has pointed to the Caillech’s presence earlier and northwards to include the Boyne valley and the sovereignty of Tara.371

368 Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., “Stories and Songs from the Irish MSS,” Otia Merseiana 1 (1899): 119. 369 Kuno Meyer, ed. and trans., The Vision of Mac Conglinne: A Middle-Irish Wonder Tale (London: Nutt, 1892), 131- 34; Eleanor Hull, “Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara of or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare,” Folklore 38:3 (1927): 225-254; Hull quotes from her verse rendering of the poem in her Poem-book of the Gael (Chicago: Browne & Howell Company; London: Chatto & Windus, 1913), 147-150; A. H. Krappe, “La cailleach Bheara: notes de mythologie gaélique,” Études celtiques 1 (1936): 292-302; Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, “Continuity and Adaptation in Legends of Cailleach Bhéarra,” Béaloideas 56 (1988): 153-178; and his “Non-Sovereignty Queen Aspects of the Otherworld Figure in Irish Hag Legends: The Case of Cailleach Bhéarra,” in Béaloideas 62/63 (1994-1995): 147-162. 370 James Carney, “The So-Called ‘Lament of Créidhe,’” 236, 239; see also Katherine Simms, “The Poet as Chieftain’s Widow: Bardic Elegies,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989): 400-411. 371 Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, “The Eponym of Cnogba,” Éigse 23 (1989): 27-38.

234

Proinsias Mac Cana, meanwhile, read the poem as a contest between pagan and Christian belief, with the latter coming out on top;372 while B. K. Martin established a learned continental and Christian background for the “Lament,” which led him to conclude that the central impulse behind its composition lay in the homiletic de contemptu mundi tradition, conveyed through native poetic practice.373 John Carey has understood the poem more broadly as a learned and

“fascinating dialectic” contrasting the pre-Christian concept of the Otherworld with Christian thought on the resurrection.374 And most recently, Katja Ritari has proposed that the figure of the Caillech served as a convenient and familiar vehicle for a meditation on old age.375 The variety of perspectives brought to bear upon the “Lament” attests to its sophistication and multivalent background. But although the “Lament” has been regularly and fruitfully mined for insights into other areas of early Irish studies, the poem – and its speaker – tend to get lost in the shuffle.

The basic plot of the poem is straightforward: an old woman remembers a past in which she happily lived at the centre of her community as a consort of kings and, according to the brief prose introduction, the mother and foster-mother of many children. Now an old woman, she lives in isolation, with none of the pleasures of her youth, and only the hope of Christian salvation to look forward to. Much as we saw in the Old English “Wanderer,” the speaker tries to reinterpret her situation through a Christian lens by casting her present unhappy subject- position as a tolerable step toward permanent happiness in heaven. The Caillech’s attempt to console herself, however, fails, and she remains alienated.

372 Proinsias Mac Cana, Celtic mythology (New York: Hamlyn, 1970), 94-95. 373 B. K. Martin, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare: A Critical Evaluation,” Medium Ævum 38.3 (1969): 254- 255. 374 John Carey, “Transmutations of Immortality in ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,’” Celtica 23: 30-37. 375 Katja Ritari, “Images of Aging in the early Irish poem Caillech Bérri,” Studia Celtica Fennica 3 (2006): 57-70. 235

The Caillech’s inability to reach a Christian consolation is owed in large part to the high degree of disparity between the speaker’s past and present – the contrast the poet creates between the social, emotional, and physical deprivation of the old woman’s present with her joyous, relationship-rich past is so striking that it is not difficult to imagine any attempt to reimagine her present as a positive subject-position must fail when juxtaposed with the joys of her past subject- position. Further complicating consolation is the fact that the Caillech is a richly overdetermined figure; she is not only an old woman lamenting her mortality, but, as a prose passage that prefaces the poem in its most original manuscript witnesses:376

Sentane Bérre, Digdi a ainm, di Chorco Dubne dí .i. di Uaib maic Íair C[h]onchinn. Is díb dano Brigit ingen Iustáin. Is diib dono Líadain ben Chuirithir. Is díb dono Úallach ingen Muinegháin. Fo-rácaib Fínán Cam doib ní biad cin c[h]aillig n-áin díb. Is de do-boí Caillech Bérre forre: coíca dalta dí a mBérri. Secht n-aís n-aíted a ndechaid co déged cech fer éc críne úade, comtar túatha 7 chenéla a hui 7 a íarmy, 7 c[h]ét mblíadna dí fo c[h]ailliu íarna ṡénad do Chuimíniu for a cend. Do-sn-ánic-si áes 7 lobrae íarom. Is ant is-rubard- sii. The old woman of Beare, whose name was Digde, was of the Corcu Duibne, that is to say of the Ui Maic Íair Chonchinn. Brigit daughter of Iustán belonged to them also, and Líadain wife of Cuirithir, and Uallach daughter of Muimnechán. Fínán Cam has bequeathed to them that they shall never be without some wonderful caillech among them. This is why she was called the Caillech of Beare: she had fifty foster-children in Beare. She passed into seven periods of youth, so that every husband used to pass from her to death of old age, so that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were peoples and races. And for a hundred years she wore the veil, after Cuimíne had blessed it and placed it on her head. Then age and infirmity came to her, and she said [her “Lament”]:377 Drawing upon this account of the Caillech’s life up to the moment she speaks the “Lament,” we can say that her present alienation derives from two specific shifts in her subjectivity. The first,

376 Two of the MSS (N and b) provide short, straightforward introductions to the poem: b says only “Caillech bhéirre cecinit,” “the Caillech of Beare said;” N states “Sentuidne verre cecinit iarna senod don crine,” which Murphy translates as “The Old Woman of Beare said this when senility aged her” (Early Irish Poetry, 34-35). MSS B and h provide no introduction to the poem. See Donncha Ó hAodha, ed. and trans., “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 309. 377 From Murphy, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare” 83-84; an abbreviated version of this colophon is also found in the Book of Lecan, (see Vernon Hull, “The Old Woman or Nun of Beare,” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 19: 174-176). 236

as I noted above, is her transition from youth to old age, which has profoundly affected not just her body, but her agency and position within society. The second is the Caillech’s transition from supernatural figure to mortal Christian. From the prose introduction, we know the Caillech as a sovereignty goddess, an entity, cyclical as the tides, who embodied the land and lived as an ever-young consort of kings and mother of generations, her husbands and children passing into old age and death. When she took the veil, she became subject to the human condition, doomed not only to grow old and die, but also to be estranged from the cycles of nature. The only regeneration she can hope for is the intangible promise of life to come through Christian salvation. Thus the Caillech’s attempt to console herself through signification in the Christian symbolic order is made challenging in several ways: in the great preferability of her past subject- position to her present on levels ranging from the mundane to the cosmic; in the knowability of the past as compared to the abstract, intangible notion of a future salvation; and by the fact that

Christianity itself is responsible for the Caillech’s drastically altered subjectivity.

1.378 1. Aithbe damsa bés mara; Ebb-tide to me as it is to the sea; sentu fom-dera croan; old age causes me to be sallow; toirsi oca ce do-gnéo, although I may grieve thereat, sona do-táet a loan. it comes joyfully to its food.

The poet introduces two central themes in the first quatrain, likening the ebbing of the sea to the onset of old age upon the speaking-subject in 1ab. The poet positions the ebb-tide and old age as the grammatical subjects, while the Caillech is their object. For her, the ebb-tide is not something generated by the sea, nor does old age occur as a process within her body; rather both forces afflict her body from without. The poet’s use of the emphatic form damsa in 1a (“to me”)

378 Quotations from the Irish and translations are from Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” in Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney, ed. Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin (Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989): 308-331. Where other readings may be preferred, I have silently emended the translation. 237

reinforces this distinction, as does the verb fom-dera (third-person singular of fofera “to cause”, the m being an infixed pronoun, thus “causes me”) in 1b: the speaker is acted upon, rather than actor.

In the sea, then, the old woman recognizes an object whose situation she regards as parallel to her own; but it is only a false metonym – for while the sea’s tide will return in a flood, the speaker’s youth is lost to her. The failed analogy is all the more painful because, before she became Christian and mortal, the metonymy was true. This failed analogy embodies the speaker’s alienation – she can never recover what she has lost, neither youth nor her cyclical existence. The image of the tide, with its ebbing and the flood she will never again experience, can also be heard in the rocking rhythm of the poem’s metre. The picture of the old woman we are given from the outset, then, is of a speaking-subject being diminished by the forces around her and reminded constantly of what she has lost. Agency lies with others: although she may grieve ineffectually at old age and its power over her (1c), it happily rushes forward to consume her (1d). Her words thus have no power, and her consolation fails before it even begins.

Unaware of how her semiotic energies are undermining her speech-act of signification, she nevertheless persists.

In the second stanza, the old woman names herself:

2. 2. Is mé Caillech Bérre Buí, I am the Caillech of Beare, from Dursey; do-meilinn léne mbithnuí; I used to wear a smock that was always new. indium táthum dom shémi Today I am become so thin that ná mellain cid athléni. I would not wear out ever a cast-off smock.

238

The speaker establishes her identity: the Caillech Bérre Buí, the old woman379 of Beare, of the island of Dursey,380 using a title rather than a personal name: “caillech” has a number of meanings – “old woman,” “married woman” “housekeeper,” “hag,” “nun” – that speak to the various subject-positions she has inhabited in her time as wife, mother, woman of property, and old woman in a religious house. In each case, none speaks to a personal identity, but rather an identity authored by others, just as the ebb-tide of old age has written her present subjectivity.

The name also associates her identity with the geography (peninsula, coast, sea, islands) around her, perhaps an echo of her former mythic relationship to the natural world, while also serving as an indication of how she has moved from the centre of her community to its margins.

In the same quatrain, the poet also introduces another theme of the “Lament,” the contrast between the contentment and joy of her past, and the isolation and privation of her present.

Whereas before she was provided for (new garments), now she would wear out old cast-offs if she had not diminished (ebbed) physically. She continues to contrast the past and present in the next several stanzas, moving beyond materiality to include social concerns in her critique:

3. 3. It moíni It is riches charthar lib, nidat doíni; you love, and not people; ind inbaid i mmarsarmar when we were alive, batar doíni carsamar. it was people we loved.

4. 4. Batar inmaini doíni Beloved were the people ata maige mad-ríadam; whose land we happily traverse;

379 The term “cailleach” has been the subject of some discussion. It has a broad range of meanings, primarily “veiled one” (derived from Irish caille, borrowed from Latin pallium), as well as those noted above. The meaning appears to have shifted over time. In a study of the term, Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha has concluded that all meanings proceed from “veiled (that is, married secular) woman.” Taking that as a basis, “Old Woman” is apt (especially in light of the prose preface’s use of sentane "old person”), while the other meanings reflect the other identities the figure inhabits throughout the poem – sometimes bride, sometimes consort, sometimes religious. See Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, “Caillech and Other Terms for Veiled Women in Medieval Irish Texts,” Éigse 28 (1994-95): 71-96. 380 It is entirely possible that Buí is meant as the Old Woman’s personal name. Thought most translators favour it as a geographical location, this seems to be a matter of preference rather than conviction. The geographical interpretation suits my reading of the poem well, but must, like much in this poem, remain provisional. 239

ba maith no meilmis leo, well did we fare among them, ba bec no moítis íaram. and it was little they boasted afterwards.

5. 5. Indíu trá caín-timgarat, Today indeed they are good at claiming ocus ní mór nond-oídet; and they are not lavish in granting the claim; cíasu bec do-n-idnaiget, although they bestow little, is mór a mét no-moídet. great is the extent to which they boast of it.

The Caillech paints a happy past where the key to contentment lay in those social practices that encouraged an attitude of mutuality lacking in her present. Today there is empty boasting, says the old woman. In her day, they valued people, and honoured those virtues that support aristocratic communities: generosity and verbal modesty. The society she describes deemphasizes individuality in favour of dividuality, an anthropological term that recognizes a person as a composite, multiply-authored entity.381 People who engage in the mutual giving and receiving of wealth and modest behaviour that promote harmony and vigour are tied together, are dividuated among one another, engaged in a process of mutual determination. Once the Caillech was “writer” and “written” within a healthy community. Now written as the old woman of

Beare, she attempts to write herself a new identity through her utterance.

The dividuality of the Caillech’s past subjectivity, as well as her urge to speak out as a way of consoling herself against its loss, recalls once more the path to signification charted by Julia

Kristeva. In Kristeva’s narrative, before an individual enters into language (i.e., the symbolic order) and becomes a subject, he or she is a proto-subject or distinctiveness produced by the drives and processes of the body. These processes, or pulsions, produce an ebbing and flowing

381 Chris Fowler, The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), 7- 9.

240

of energies within the body that is regulated by family and social structures. The space where this process of “almost becoming” occurs is called by Kristeva the “semiotic chora.”382

Although the proto-subject has not yet encountered the symbolic order (i.e., difference), the semiotic chora it inhabits is nevertheless subject to a regulating process, effectuated by a mediator whom Kristeva calls the mother.383 It is the mother to whom semiotic functions and drives connect and orient the body. The mother, also known as the maternal space, is regarded by the proto-subject of the semiotic chora as an extension of itself, although difference is, if not learned there, it is encountered: the child takes substance from the mother, but, when sated, it spits out the breast, gaining its first impressions of “I” vs. “other.” The instinctual act of rejecting the maternal body prepares the proto-subject, the distinctiveness to which the semiotic chora has given rise, for the next stage of the process of signification: introduction of difference.384

In her pre-Christian state, the Caillech resembles several aspects of the proto-subject. The mutual inscribing of selfhood that characterizes her relationships in the past, and the dividualized identity she clearly prizes, recall both the ebb and flow of the semiotic chora, and also the maternal space, in which difference is muted by the feeling that the other is merely an extension of the self. The ebb and flow of the sea’s tides, whose cycle the Caillech shared in her pre-

Christian state, likewise recalls the motility of the semiotic chora’s proto-subject’s pulsions.

The introduction of difference and the entry into the symbolic order (language) occur in what

Kristeva calls the thetic break, the act that brings about the separation of proto-subject and

382 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 25. 383 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 27. 384 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 47-48.

241

maternal space, thus instigating the realization of difference.385 The result of the thetic break is, as Corey J. Marvin put it in his Kristevan reading of Middle English literature, “the pervasive – and dramatic – recognition of an entire brimming constellation of discrete identities (‘things’ of the world) clearly separated from another and capable of attaining to positions in an open combinatorial system.”386 In order to cope with this now fragmented perception, the subject enters into language. Now fully a subject, “the events [the thetic break] are inextricable and simultaneous. The semiotic motility characteristic of the chora emerges as a symbolic order, where it is given expression as well as subjected to the boundedness of separation and constraint.”387 The subject defines everything by difference now, and thus “all enunciation, whether of word or sentence, is thetic”;388 in other words, all meaning now lies in difference.

For the Caillech, the thetic break, the loss of her relational, metonymic existence, occurs when she realizes age has deprived her of her dividual existence. The old woman must now work through that loss to come to some kind of terms with the reality of the Christian symbolic order into which she has entered; that is, she is now a subject-in-process, using language to find accord between her semiotic drives, which desire a return to the maternal, and the dictates of the

Christian symbolic. We have already seen how the Caillech’s first utterance was an attempt to forge a metonymic relationship with the natural world, an attempt to recreate the maternal (qt. 1).

Although the effort was unsuccessful, the images of the sea’s ebb and flood, and repetition of certain words reveal the influence of the old woman’s semiotic drives, which are still oriented toward the maternal rather than the Christian symbolic. This leads her to articulate the differences between her past and present over qt. 2-5, idealizing the maternal space of the former

385 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43. 386 Corey J. Marvin, Word Outward: Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4. 387 Corey J. Marvin, Word Outward, 4. 388 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43. 242

over the isolated, individual character of the latter. The disruptive influence of the semiotic persists throughout the rest of the poem, as the Caillech continues to try to forge a new subjectivity through the Christian symbolic.

St. 6 more explicitly connects the fraught theme of ebb and flow to a social context:

6. 6. Carpait lúaith Swift chariots ocus eich do-beirtis búaid, and steeds that took the prize, ro boí, denus, tuile díb: for a time there was a flood of them: bennacht ar ríg roda-úaid. a blessing on a king who gave them.

The theme of plenty – races (presumably at festive gatherings), a generous king – is expressed as a tuile, what Ó hAodha translates as “abundance,” but is better understood a “flowing in of the sea” or “flood-tide.”389 The flood of abundant social activity, the king (a maternal figure who may indicate God) who provided it, and the community that was able to sustain such a flood of communal enjoyment contrast strongly with the old woman’s present world, characterized by an ebbing of social contact.

The positioning of the speaker in these st. 3-6 is also important. In 3ab, she addresses “you” directly, making her implicit “I” separate; she does not see herself as part of present society. In

3cd, where she praises the dividuality of the past, the Caillech refers to herself as a shared “we,” emphasizing the mutuality of her former subject-position. In the next stanzas, she continues to distinguish her plural past self from the people of the present by referring to them in the third person, distinct from herself.

St. 7 marks a shift from contrasting past and present to the old woman’s keen awareness of her present state:

7. 7.

389 Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, s.v. tuile. dil.ie/42319. Accessed 2 July, 2017. 243

Tocair mo chorp co n-aichri Bitterly does my body seek to go dochum adba díar aichni; to a dwelling where it is known; tan bas mithig la Mac nDé when the Son of God deems it time, do-té do breith a aithni. let him come to carry off his deposit.

The old woman focuses on her body, which seems to turn its back on the past, seeking of its own accord to go where it will be known in heaven.390 In 7cd, the poet introduces another Christian element, her aithni, the deposit that is the old woman’s soul.391 Yet the Caillech remains reluctant to embrace the Christian narrative of death and salvation. This is apparent in her assignation of independent desires to her aged body, and in the way she describes her soul as something to be carried off rather than a part of her selfhood or agency. The desire for death her body has developed should be viewed through the Christian lens of salvation as a joyous development, but her diction suggests otherwise, as is indicated in the way that aithni (“deposit”) both rhymes and alliterates only with aichri (“bitterly” – 1a) and aichni (“to which it is known,” meaning death), as well as the poem’s first and recurring word, aithbe (“ebb-tide”). The semiotic is already disrupting her nascent attempts to embrace the Christian symbolic order.

Nevertheless, the poet’s introduction of Christian discourse into the “Lament” opens up the speaker’s thoughts to the future; Christianity introduced the old woman to linear time, and so both death and salvation are inextricably bound up with it. There is a future, and it must be defined within a Christian framework. But before she attempts to reconstitute her subjectivity within that framework, the Caillech is drawn back to the ways her body embodies her alienation.

8. 8. Ot é cnámacha cáela They are all bony and thin, ó do-éctar mo láma – when my arms are seen – ba hinmainiu, tan, gnítis: in fondest fashion they acted, once:

390 1 Corinthians 13: 12. 391 Ó hAodha follows Gerard Murphy (Early Irish Lyrics), in taking aithni as referring to “the deposit of grace entrusted to the believer by God, to be kept safe during life and returned to God again at death,” a usage probably derived from 2 Timothy 1: 12. See Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 321, n. 7d. For another similar occurrence of aithni, see “God Be with Me” in Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics, 22-27, st. 17. 244

bítis im ríga ána. they used to be around glorious kings.

9. 9. Ó do-éctar mo láma, When my arms are seen, ot é cnámacha cáela, all bony and thin, nidat fíu turchbáil, taccu, they are not, I declare, súas tarna maccu cáema. worth raising up over handsome boys.

10. 10. It fáilti na hingena The girls are joyful ó thic dóib co Beltaine; when they approach Maytime: is deithbiriu damsa brón: grief is more fitting for me: sech am tróg, am sentaine. I am not only miserable, I am an old woman.

11. 11. Ni feraim cobra milis; I speak no honeyed words; ni marbtar muilt im banais; no wethers are killed at my wedding; is bec, is líath mo thrilis, my hair is scanty and grey, ní líach drochcaille tarais. to have a mean veil over it is no cause for regret.

12. 12. Ní holc lim I am not sorry ce beth caille finn form chin; that there is a white veil on my head; boí mór meither cech datha many coverings of every colour were on my form chin ic ól daglatha. head when I drank good ale.

The old woman moves from lamenting the loss of her past socially dividuated self to the loss of another dividuality, this one located in the body. Describing her physical qualities as they might be seen by a third party (again emphasizing her alienation from her aged body), she judges them as an observer. Her bony arms and thin, white hair are not her, they are merely what she as a partible dividual has to offer to others. Afflicted by age, those aspects of her physical self that were once a means to ensuring and enhancing her dividual identity are no longer of any use.

That dividual flood has gone the way of aithbe, ebb-tide, leaving her isolated in yet another way.

The girls at Maytime (st. 10), the time of fertility and renewal, may partake of bodily dividuality, their sexual agency being the means to marriage (11ab); but she, her sexual agency gone, may

245

only feel grief and lament. Having worn veils as a wife in the past,392 perhaps she finds comfort in the white veil she wears now – if, as has been suggested above, the veil here indicates the old woman is now a religious, it may be that as a nun she feels that she has the potential to develop a similar dividual relationship with God in the present as she did with her spouses in the past.

Christianity would provide for her a return of some sort to the dividuated subjectivity she once enjoyed, a return to the maternal.

In the next run of stanzas (13-20), the Caillech continues her comparative exploration of how old age has altered her subject-position. In st. 13-14, she again compares her aged body to nature:

13. 13. Nim-geib format fri nach sen I envy no one old, inge nammá fri Femen; excepting only Feimen; meisse, ro melt forbuid sin, while I have worn out an old garment, buide beus barr Femin. Feimen’s crop is still gold

14. 14. Lia na Ríg i Femun, The Stone of the Kings in Feimen, Cathair Rónáin i mBregun: Rónán’s Dwelling in Bregon; cían ó ro-síachtsat sína it is long since storms have reached a llecne, na senchrína. their cheeks, that are old and weathered.

The possibility of reclaiming the maternal space is problematized as the Caillech’s considers how she is unable to metonymize the natural world: the field of Feimen will always produce a new golden covering, while she will receive no new clothing. The stone of kings may age as she does, but it is eternal. The royal site and inauguration stone,393 also evoke memories of her mythic-political function as consort of kings and embodiment of the land, again emphasizing the

392 The veiling of women in early Ireland was not limited to religious women or penitent spouses, but also took place at marriage. Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, “Caillech and Other Terms for Veiled Women,” 74-75. 393 The reference to Rónán in b may also refer to the Caillech’s role as ancestress and consort of kings: as Ó hAodha notes in his edition (323), F. J. Byrne identifies Rónan as “probably Rónán Mór, mentioned in the genealogies of the Múscraige Treithirne, a branch of the Múscraige of Bregon to the west of Cashel, who probably lived in the early eighth century: his great-grandson, Donn Dige, was named from the Hag of Beare.” See F. J Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings (London: Batsford, 1973): 168. 246

contrast of her past and present. The noise of the sea, loudest in winter, draws her attention, highlighting her isolation:

15. 15. Is labar tonn mara máir, The wave of the great sea is noisy, ros-gab in gaim comgabáil; winter has begun to raise it; fer muid, mac moga, indium neither functionary nor slave’s son ni frescim do chéilidiu.394 do I expect on a visit today.

16. 16. Is éol dam a ndo-gniat, I know what they are doing: rait ocus do-rraat; they row to and fro; curchasa Átha Alma, the reeds of Áth Alma, is fúar in adba i faat. cold is the dwelling in which they sleep.

In 15ab, the Caillech does for a moment make a connection with the sea; winter as old age has led the old woman to speech, just as the winter winds stir up the sea into noisy articulations of its own. This image of stirrings within and eruptions out of the sea create a sense of stirrings or instabilities within the old woman as she continues her utterance.

Isolated because old, the speaker expects no visitors (15cd). St. 16 has proved problematic to interpret, and there is a possibility it has been interpolated. Ó hAodha, following Carney, suggests 16ab refers to the present generation, and is perhaps uncomplimentary.395 16cd, then, would refer to the old woman’s contemporaries, now cold and sleeping (i.e., dead) as the reeds of the ford of Alma. This suits the tone of the “Lament” generally, and again underscores the speaker’s present lack of company and activity.

In the next several stanzas, the poet begins to move the Caillech towards reconciling her past and her present. Renewing (once more) attention to the distance between her present and past lives,

394 B. K. Martin, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 260, n. 18, notes that “Céile in the sense of ‘lover’ may be latent in the phrase do chéilidiu’, rendering the translation ‘neither functionary nor slave’s son do I expect for loving’. 395 Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 324, n. 16. See James Carney, ed. and trans., Medieval Irish Lyrics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 34-35. 247

in st. 17 the old woman draws a connection between her loss of beauty and the using up of the sexual charge (cétluth, literally “lust, wantonness”) that accompanied her youth; doing so, she begins to recover some agency in her process of aging:

17. 17. Is mó láu It is many a day nát muir n-oíted ima-ráu; since I sailed on the sea of youth; testa mór mblíadnae dom chruth, many years of my beauty are departed, dáig fo-rromled mo chétluth. because my wantonness has been spent.

18. 18. Is mó dé It is a long time damsa indíu, ce bé-de; for me today, however it be; gaibthium étach cid fri gréin, clothing upholds me even when the sun shines, do-fil áes dam, at-gén féin. old age is upon me, I myself recognize it.

To this point, the Caillech has largely described her selfhood and her aged body as separate. But needing clothes to ward off the cold, even when the sun shines, the old woman cannot avoid recognizing that her selfhood is embodied in the body that feels alien to her. Though she continues to describe age as an affliction (do fil áes dam – “old age is upon me”), she also says at-gén féin, which may be translated as either “I myself recognize it” and “I recognize myself,” both readings indicating the speaking-subject is beginning to accept old age as something that cannot be entirely rejected from herself. She continues:

19. 19. Sam oíted i rrabamar Summer of youth in which we were, do-melt cona fhogamur; I have spent with its autumn; gaim aís báides cech duine, winter of age which overwhelms everyone, domm-ánic a fhochmuine. its first days have come to me.

The Caillech’s continued process of assimilation to her current subject-position is evident in how she accounts for the time between summer and spring, that is, the life that she lived after her youth (autumn) before there was winter. Winter she no longer views as her particular condition, but as a stage that comes to all (19c). This stanza is not a stark contrasting of past and present as 248

before, but the observation of a process of youth to maturity to old age – part of the human condition – that she is beginning to connect to her selfhood. She continues to reflect on this process in the next stanza:

20. 20. Ro milt m’oíted ar thuus, I wasted my youth to begin with, is buide lem ro-ngleus; I am glad that I so decided; cid bec mo léim dar duae, though my leap over the wall had been small, níba nuae in brat beus. the cloak still would not be new.

20cd is understood as an idiom for something like “even had I not been so venturesome I would still be old,”396 and continues the sense that the old woman is taking stock not just of youth and old age, but of the worth of the process that brought her from one to the other. She then connects the aged cloak (i.e., her body – which would be worn out regardless of her choices) to both the cycles of the natural world and the Christian promise of rebirth in st. 21, looking to reconcile her anxiety over age and death through the faith that set her on the mortal path.

21. 21. Is álainn in brat úaine Beautiful is the cloak ro scar mo Rí tar Drummain; which my King has spread over Drumain; is sáer in Fer rod-lúaidi, the One who has traversed it is a craftsman, do-rat loí fair íar lummain. He has put a cloak of wool on it after a cloak of coarse cloth.

The speaker envisions the cloak of growth covering the hill of Drumain, another reminder of the natural world from which she is estranged. But unlike the regeneration of the field of Femein or of the tides, which she depicts as occurring as a matter of course, here she gives credit for

Drumain’s new “cloak” to God, signalling her hope that through her Christian faith, she will likewise enjoy a regeneration of her own. That Christianity is the framework through which she hopes to achieve new life, and the framework through which she is reconsidering her unhappy

396 Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 325, n. 20cd. 249

subject-position, is further indicated by the Biblical inspiration for the cloak metaphor, as Ó hAodha observes:

…the metaphorical use of brat (‘cloak’) here may owe its origin partly to certain scriptural references...e.g. ‘he has stretched out the heavens like a cloth,’ Is. 40:22. Also, Hebrews 1:10-12: ‘Lord, thou hast laid the foundations of the earth at its beginning, and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They will perish, but thou wilt remain; they will all be like a cloak that grows threadbare, and thou wilt lay them aside, like a garment, and exchange them for new; but thou art he who never changes, thy years will not come to an end.’397 Ó hAodha goes on to note that while the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews stresses “the transitory aspect even of the world of nature (as compared with God ‘who never changes’), the speaker of the present poem, on the other hand, continually alludes to the permanence of the natural world as contrasted with the life of man.”398 This would suggest that the old woman is relying on Christianity to provide a new tuile, a flood-tide in a life after death.

The Caillech’s hope in the Christian symbolic is dampened in another unfavourable comparison of past and present:

22. 22. Aminecán morúar dam Woe is me, indeed – cech dercoin is erchraide – – every acorn is doomed to decay – íar feis fri condlib sorchaib to be in the darkness of an oratory after bith i ndorchaib derrthaige. feasting by bright candles.

23. 23. Rom-boí denus la ríga I have had my time with kings, ic ól meda is fína; drinking mead and wine; indíu ibim medcuisce today I drink whey and water itir sentanaib crína. among shrivelled old women.

Having inched forward toward the hope Christianity offers her, the old woman expresses honestly how inadequate she finds the penitential life compared to the company and pleasure of the feasts of her youth. On the other hand, she does continue to acknowledge the inevitability of

397 Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 325-326, n. 21. 398 Donncha Ó hAodha, “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare,” 326. 250

aging and death, linking her own subjectivity metonymically to that of the acorn, the first linear, mortal thing of nature with which she has done so.

In st. 24, the Caillech briefly rallies, attempting to break her desire for the past completely by reimagining her simple religious life into an experience as rich as the feasting in her young, dividuated days:

24. 24. Robat mo chuirn coidin midc, May cups of whey be my drinking-horns, ropo toil Dé cecham-theirp; may whatever hinders me be God’s will; ocot guide-si, a Dé bí, praying to you, O living God, do-rata cró clí fri feirg. may the wound deal a spear against anger.

She wishes, at least, that she may be able to see dining with shrivelled women and raising cups of whey as something she can desire as much as the time she spent with kings at feasts. She also hopes that Christ’s sacrifice (the wound) can slay her anger at where her Christian life has led her.

The Caillech persists in trying to understand her aging through a Christian lens in the next two stanzas:

25. 25. At-chíu form brat brodrad n-aís; I see on my cloak the stains of age; ro gab mo chíall mo thogaís; my reason has begun to deceive me; líath a finn ásas trim thuinn, grey is the hair which grows through my skin, is samlaid crotball senchroinn. the bark of an ancient tree is like this.

26. 26. Rucad úaim-se mo shúil des My right eye has been taken from me dá reic ar thír mbíthdíles; to be sold for a land that will be forever mine; ocus rucad int shúil chlé the left eye has been taken also, do fhormach a fhoirdílse. to make my claim to that land more secure.

In st. 25, the speaker again connects herself to a mortal aspect of the natural world, this time an ancient tree, which represents the far end of the life of an acorn (22b), again acknowledging the transition from past to present, a process she increasingly allows to inform her identity. In st. 26,

251

she finds some value in aging: losing her sight has secured her a position in heaven, the land that will be forever hers (26b).

In st. 28-30, the poet returns the Caillech to her contemplation of the tides and her relationship to them.

28.399 28. Tonn tuili The flood-wave ocus ind í aithbi áin: and that of swift ebb: a tabair tonn tuili dait what the flood-wave brings you beirid tonn aithbi as do láim. the ebb-wave carries out of your hand. 29. 29. Tonn tuili The flood-wave ocus ind aile aithbi: and the other, ebb: dom-áncatarsa uili all have come to me so that conda éolach a n-aichni. I know how to recognize them.

Evocative images at the outset, flood and ebb are now fraught with meaning. The flood we know encapsulates the inrush of youth, the building up of social ties, sexuality, of all the joys available only to her dividuated self of the maternal space. The ebb-tide, on the other hand, brings about the erasure of relationships and agency, leading to the emergence of the isolated individual, who has been looking to forge new relationships through the Christian symbolic order. Having thoroughly articulated her contrasting flood- and ebb-selves, the Caillech is now able to recognize each. Yet although she defines the flood and ebb as being antithetical to one another, indicating she understands that her past and present selves are also forever separated by linear time, the semiotic interferes once again to show her desire to return to the maternal cyclical existence of the past. This is evident in 28ab and 29ab, where the flood-wave (tonn tuili) and ebb (aithbi) are repeated in sequence, the a-line alliteration on “t” flowing easily and naturally into the vowel-alliteration of the b-line, whose first three syllables rush swiftly to the strong

399 I omit st. 27 as an obvious interpolation that is quite out of place in the poem. 252

fourth syllable, subconsciously evoking the tidal cycle. The old woman knows flood and ebb are separate forever for her, yet she still desires to recreate the maternal rhythms.

This rhythm of flood and ebb is interrupted in the next quatrain, when the repeated phrase “tonn tuili” is brought up short by an abrupt switch in 30b-d from long vowels to short, staccato syllables:

30. 30. Tonn tuili, The flood-wave, nicos-toir socht mo chuili; the silence of my larder will not reach it; cid mór mo dám fo-déine, although my own company may have been fo-cres lám forru uili. many a hand was laid on them all.

The cobblestone stutter of short vowels breaks the cyclical rhythm of the maternal, as the old woman acknowledges that flood is gone for her forever, evoking the image of her empty cellar, her lack of provisions and guests to serve, all of whom are now dead. This reminder of her bleak present causes the Caillech to again look to the Christian symbolic to forge relationships for a new, Christian dividuated subjectivity:

31. 31. Ma rro-feissed Mac Muire If the Son of Mary had known that he co mbeth fo chlí mo chuile: would be under the roof-tree of my larder: cinco ndernus gart chena, although I have practised liberality in no other ni ébart ‘nac’ fri duine. way, I never said ‘No’ to anyone.

The language is difficult here, but the sense seems to be that, if Jesus were under her roof, as guests once were, the old woman would revive some of the past by providing generously for her guest, perhaps even sexually. In doing so she would recreate her flood-tide, recreating a maternal space within the Christian present that recalls the physical joys of her past.

253

Yet Jesus does not manifest physically; he and his promise of salvation are abstract concepts that ultimately prove less desirable than the Caillech’s maternal past. The anger she feels at her radically altered subject-position, which she hoped Christ would slay in st. 24, persists:

32. 32. Tróg n-uile, It is wholly miserable, daírib dúilib, do duine, compared to base creatures, for man, ná déccas a n-aithbesi that this ebb was nor seen feb ro-déccas a tuile. as the flood had been seen.

In st. 33, the Caillech attempts once more to console herself by interpreting her experience through a Christian lens:

33. 33. Mo thuile, My flood, is maith con-roíter m’aithne; it has guarded well that which was deposited ro-sháer Ísu Mac Muire with me conám toirsech co aithbe. Jesus, Son of Mary, has redeemed it so that I am not sad upon up to ebb.

By casting her earlier life as the means of preserving God’s grace within her, so that it may be taken by Jesus at death, the Caillech tries to give purpose to her ebbing, but the final stanzas make it clear that Christian signification is not sufficient to console her against the loss of the maternal flood.

The remaining stanzas cycle back to where we began:

34. 34. Céin-mair ailén mara máir, Happy the island of the great sea: dos-n-ic tuile íarna tráig; flood comes to it after ebb; is mé, ni fresco dom-í as for me, I do not expect for myself tuile tar éisi aithbi. a flood after ebb.

35. 35. Is súaill mennatán indium Today there is scarcely a place ara tabrainnse aithgne; I would recognize; a n-í ro boí for tuile what was in flood atá uile for aithbe. is all ebbing.

254

The old woman again contrasts herself with the cyclical natural world, and knows she cannot share in it. There is an acceptance of her reality, but also bewilderment: everything that once was in flood is now completely unrecognizable to her. That confusion and misrecognition suggest thar her efforts to become a full subject must remain unfinished. As the ebb-tide rushes out one last time, the old woman remains an unsettled identity, a subject never fully signified.

Conclusion

At the outset, the Caillech presents herself as an entity authored entirely by or dividuated among others. The joys of her past and the miseries of her present are all the product of forces outside herself. Undermining this view of herself is the fact that as an individual she does possess an agency – that of feeling emotions and expressing them. The loss of joy-giving outside forces (represented by the flood, which is social, sexual, and material) at the instigation (in her view) of joy-depriving outside forces (the ebb) thus accomplishes two things: the process of dis- dividuation (1) reveals the individual self who, alone and nameless, (2) seeks to somehow redefine herself under the conditions of the Christian present. This is not wholly successful: although the old woman becomes aware of her agency as a self-authoring individual, the comforts of Christianity are insufficient to prevent her from being drawn back, away from the brink of full acceptance, by memories of the flood of her previous existence and the semiotic drives that desire a return to that maternal space.

Chapter Conclusion: No Joy

The seven poems discussed in this chapter demonstrate two broad strategies of constructing alienated speaking-subjects. In the poems of Créd, Líadan, the Wife, and Guðrún, we saw how poets exploited the tricky triangulation of eros to create disturbing distances between the speaker and their beloveds, thereby estranging the speaking-subject from her ideal subjectivity and

255

heightening her emotional distress. For Créd and Líadan, the intensity of their sorrow over their lost (or never attained, in Líadan’s case) identities as lovers prevented them from performing successful laments; lament was not equal to the task of alleviating their literary, tragic and erotic grief. Similarly, in “The Wife’s Lament” and “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta,” neither speaker was able to use her words to console herself in the restorative manner we saw with “The Wanderer” and “Sonatorrek.” Rather, each speaker enacted cursing speech-acts of a kind of vengeful consolation, which provided a resigned satisfaction that, at the least, she can inflict the same pain upon those who injured her.

The second strategy of alienation is more clearly centred on the failure of lamenting or consoling speech-acts. In the poems of consolation discussed in Chapter 2, the speakers were able to construct happier subject-positions for themselves by reinterpreting the conditions in which they were signified. Those speakers were also constructed to show moderation and deep knowledge of the tools of consolation available to them in their own poetic and religious traditions. The speaking-subjects of Canu Heledd, “Claf Abercuawg,” and “The Lament of the

Old Woman of Beare” demonstrate little such knowledge; or if they have it, it is overwhelmed by the extremity of their desire for the happier past that contrasts so favourably with their unhappy present, from which they can find no joy.

256

Conclusion

The intent of this project has been to explore, discuss, and bring to light the creativity and skill with which medieval North Atlantic poets brought the speaking-subjects of their poetry to life. The first chapter examined how Irish poets constructed monastic subjectivities reflecting a range of religious subject-positions, from the monk struggling to keep his mind on the straight and narrow path of devotion, to the idealized voices of holy hermits and saints, whose perfect accord with God's ordered world is reflected in subjectivities that experience the world as an extension of the self. The second chapter turned to Old Norse, Irish, and Old English poems of consolation, examining how poets designed their speaking-subjects as models of therapeutic self- construction. These speakers demonstrated the power of perspective in how one's subject- position can be transformed from alienated to consoled by adopting more postive frameworks through which to signify the self. The third and final chapter addressed the prolific ways in which poets figured alienation, whether through the paradoxically self-desiring mode of eros, or through great shifts in subject-position brought about by the passage of time, misfortune, or evil deeds.

Despite (or because of) the unifying themes of each chapter – accord, consolation, and alienation – the variation among the speaker’s situations and the inventiveness with which their composers has constructed them is striking. My hope is that this work has demonstrated the benefit not only of giving due attention to the lyric speaking-subject, but also of the importance of how we organize those speakers. For example, organizing the poems around the relationship between the semiotic and symbolic order in the process of signification has led me to consider the ways in which that relationship is embodied in both the subjective experience of the speaker and in their speech. Thus the laments of figures such as Heledd and the speaker of “The Wife’s

257

Lament,” which have often been linked on account of their gender, have been revealed to have less in common than, for example, Heledd and the leper of Abercuawg. Likewise, where the monastic poems of Béccán might be more comfortably grouped with the other Irish monastic verse of Chapter 1, emphasizing the former’s consolating function brings it into contact with texts as apparently unrelated as “Sonatorrek” and “The Wanderer;” doing so has revealed their common strategy of adapting the framework of the symbolic order in order to make the speaker’s subject-position more tolerable. This suggests that lyric speakers could be fruitfully organized around other criteria, such as class or gender, or perhaps aspects of psychology or social context.

Opening up the lines of critical inquiry into the speaking-subjects of North Atlantic lyrics suggests further avenues of exploration outside the scope of this project. Beyond the potentials of reconfiguring comparative schema, there are a number of discrete themes I have discussed throughout the dissertation that bear further exploration. For example, the role of Original Sin in poetic representations of alienation and accord, both within and beyond Irish tradition, offers a rich vein of raw material to be considered. Also of interest would be a comparative analysis of poems of consolation and vernacular prayer: do they share similar strategies of employing culturally resonant material to bring about spiritual enlightenment? what similarities are there between the guiding voice of consolation and the communal “I” of prayer? Yet another area that would benefit from further work is the function of the alienated speaking-subject in the communities that produced them: were these figures intended to inspire pity for the marginalized? to instill fear of unchristian thoughts and acts and thus encourage an audience to embrace the status quo? Or were they simply intended, as dramas and melodramas today, to entertain and provide catharsis?

Finally, there is also that great body of North Atlantic courtly verse in the first person, which I set aside at the outset. Throughout the dissertation, I have tried to avoid divorcing the text from 258

its historical context, as Jonathan Culler’s somewhat essentialist notions of lyric might urge; I have also tried to avoid allowing historical context, so often plagued with uncertainties, to be an overdetermining factor in my analysis. Nevertheless, the poet is bound to history. Having freed the lyric material, so to speak, now would be a good time to marry an account of the poet in history to my readings, and to extend those readings to include the (usually) better documented contexts of court poets, whose poetic personas are no less works of artifice than their lyric counterparts. Ultimately, as with many comparative works, this project has opened more doors than it has closed.

259

Bibliography

Alcorn, Michael. The Old Woman of Beare. Dublin: The Contemporary Music Centre, 1994. Alfred, William. “The Drama of The Wanderer.” In The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield. Edited by Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1982: 31-44. Anderson, Alan Orr and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, eds., trans. Adomnan’s Life of Columba. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961. Anderson, Carolyn. “No Fixed Point: Gender and Blood Feuds in Njal’s Saga.” Philological Quarterly 81 (2002): 421–40. Bambas, Rudolf C. “Another View of the Old English Wife’s Lament.” In Journal of English and Germanic Philology 62: 1963: 303-309. Bartrum, P. C. Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966. Battles, Paul. “Toward a Theory of Old English Poetic Genres: Epic, Elegy, Wisdom Poetry, and the ‘Traditional Opening.’” Studies in Philology 111:1 (2014): 1-33. Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Edited by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Bellows, Henry Adams, trans. The Poetic Edda. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923. Bergin, Osborn and R. I. Best, trans. “Tochmarc Étaíne.” Ériu 12 (1938): 137-196. Bergin, Osborn, R. I. Best, Kuno Meyer, J. G. O’Keefe, eds. and trans. Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts. 5 Vols. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co.; Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1907-1913. Best, Richard Irvine and Osborn Bergin, eds. Lebor na hUidre: the Book of the Dun Cow Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Dublin, 1929. Binchy, D. A. “Varia. III.” Ériu 20 (1966): 229-237. Bintley, Michael J. “Life-cycles of Men and Trees in Sonatorrek.” Opticon1826 6 (Spring 2009): 1-3. Bitel, Lisa M. Isles of the Saints: Monastic Settlement and Christian Community in Early Ireland. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Bisagni, Jacapo. “The Language and Date of the Amrae Coluimb Chille.” In Kelten am Rhein: Akten des dreizehnten Internationalen Keltologiekongresses. 23. bis 27. Juli 2007 in Bonn. Zweiter Teil: Philologie. Sprachen und Literaturen. Edited by Stefan Zimmer. Mainz am Rhein: Zabern, 2009: 1-11. Bjarni Einarsson, ed. Egils saga. London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 2003.

260

Bjork, Robert E. “Sundor æt Rune: The Voluntary Exile of The Wanderer,” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 119-121. Blake, Norman F. “The Dating of Old English Poetry.” In An English Miscellany: Presented to W. S. Mackie. Edited by Brian S. Lee. London: Oxford University Press, 1977: 14-27. Bloch, Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Bolton, W. F. ed. An Old English Anthology. Evanston: Northwestern Universtiy Press, 1966. Bouman, A. C. Patterns in Old English and Old Icelandic Literature. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1962. Bonjour, Adrian. “Beowulf and the Beasts of Battle.” PMLA 72 (1957): 562-573. Bourke, Angela et al, eds. and trans. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Vol. IV: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions. Cork: Cork University Press in assoc. with Field Day, 2002. Brandser, Kristin. “The Wife’s Lament: A Riddle of Her Own,” Ennaratio 4 (1997): 128-142. Bradley, S. A. J., trans. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: J. M. Dent, 1995. Bray, Dorothy Ann. “Suckling at the Breast of Christ: a Spiritual Lesson in an Irish Hagiographical Motif.” Peritia 14 (2000): 282-296. ------. “A Woman’s Loss and Lamentation: Heledd’s Song and The Wife’s Lament.” Neophilologus 79 (1995): 147-154. Breuer, Rolf. “Vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit: zur Structur des altenglischen ‘Wanderer.”’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 75 (1974): 552-67 Brody, Saul Nathaniel. The Disease of the Soul: Leprosy in Medieval Liteurature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Bromwich, Rachel, ed., and trans. Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain. 4. ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Robert M. “Glastonbury and the Early History of the Exeter Book.” In Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context. Edited by Joyce Tally Lionarons. Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ------. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Byrne, F. J. Irish Kings and High-Kings. London: Batsford, 1973.

261

Carey, John. King of Mysteries: Early Irish Religious Writings. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998. ------. “The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition.” In The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Tradition. Edited by Jonathan Wooding. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000: 113- 119. Originally published Éigse 19 (1) (1982): 36-43. ------. “The Rhetoric of ‘Echtrae Chonlai.’” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 30 (1995): 41– 65. ------. “Transmutations of Immortality in ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare.’” Celtica 23 (1999): 30-37. Carney, James. “The Earliest Bran Material.” In Latin Scripts and Letters A.D. 400-900. Festschrift Presented to Ludwig Bieler on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Edited by John J. O’Meara and Bernd Naumann. Leiden: Brill, 1976: 174-193. ------, ed. and trans. Medieval Irish Lyrics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. ------, ed. and trans. The Poems of Blathmac Son of Cú Brettan: Together with the Irish Gospel of St. Thomas and a Poem on Virgin Mary. Dublin: Irish Texts Society, 1964. ------. “The So-Called ‘Lament of Créidhe.’” Éigse 13 (1969/1970): 227-242. ------. Studies in Irish Literature and History. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1955. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Orig. publ. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Cassian, John. The Institutes. New York: Newman Press, 2000. Cavell, Megan. Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Champion, Margrét Gunnarsdóttir. “From Plaint to Praise: Language as Cure in ‘The Wanderer.’” Studia Neophilologus 69 (1998): 187-202. Charles-Edwards, T. M. Early Christian Ireland. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004. ------. “The Social Background to Irish Peregrinatio.” Celtica 11 (1976): 43-59. Clancy, Thomas Owen and Gilbert Márkus, eds. and trans. Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995. Clancy, Thomas Owen. “Saint and fool: the image and function of Cummíne Fota and Comgán Mac Da Cherda in early Irish literature.” Doctoral Dissertation. University of Edinburgh, 1991. Retrieved from https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/7381 Clark Hall, J. R. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Repr. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2004.

262

Cleasby, Richard and Guðbrandd Vigfusson. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1874. Clunies Ross, Margaret. “The Art of Poetry and the Figure of the Poet in Egils Saga.” In Sagas of Icelanders. Edited by John Tucker. New York: Garland, 1989: 126–44. Colgrave, Bertram, ed., trans. Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956; 2007 digital reprint. Conner, Patrick W. Anglo-Saxon Exeter: A Tenth-Century Cultural History. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1993. Conway, G. E. “Urbs Beata Jerusalem Dicta Pacis Visio.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia. 2 ed. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Virtual Reference Library (accessed June 3, 2017). http://go.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=utoronto_mai n&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCX3407711373&asid=43480f81233d003fb649d227d193138b. Cook, Robert et al, eds. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. Reykjavík: Leifur Ericksson Publishing, 1997. Couenhoven, Jesse. “Augustine.” In T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin. Edited by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016: 181-198. Cross, James E. “‘Ubi sunt Passages in Old English: Sources and Relationships.’” Vetenskaps‐ societen i Lund Årsbok: 25–44. Davis, Thomas M. “Another View of the Wife’s Lament.” Papers on Language and Literature 1 (1965): 291-305. De Lacy, Paul. “Thematic and Structural Affinities: The Wanderer and Ecclesiastes.” Neophilologus 82:1 (1998): 125-137. de Looze, Laurence. “Poet, Poem and Poetic Process in Egils Saga Skalla-Grímssonar.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 104 (1989): 123-142. de Rougement, Denis. Love in the Western World. Revised and augmented edition. Translated by Montgomery Belgion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983; orig. 1956. Desmond, Marilyn. “The Voice of the Exile: Feminist Literary History and the Anonymous Anglo-Saxon Elegy.” Critical Inquiry 16:3 (1990), 572-590. de Vries, Jan. “Der Mythos von Baldrs Tod.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 70 (1955): 41-60. Dictionary of Old English: A to H, online edition. Edited by Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette dePaolo Healey et al. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, 2016. Di Sciacca, Claudia. Finding the Right Words: Isidore's ‘Synonyma’ in Anglo‐Saxon England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Doane, A. N. “Heathen Form and Christian Function in The Wife’s Lament.” Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966): 77-91. 263

Dooley, Ann. “Date and Purpose of Acallam na Senórach.” Éigse (2003): 97-126. Dooley, Ann, and Harry Roe, trans. The Tales of the Elders of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dover, Kenneth, ed. Plato: Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Dronke, Ursula, ed. and trans. The Poetic Edda, Vol. II: Mythological Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Drout, Michael C. “Possible Instructional Effects of the Exeter Book ‘Wisdom Poems’: A Benedictine Reform Context.” In Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in the Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence. Edited by Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, Maria Amalia D’Aronco. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007: 447-466. Dunning, T. P., and Alan J. Bliss, eds. The Wanderer. London: Methuen, 1969. Elín Ingibjörg Eyjólfsdóttir, “The Bórama: The Poetry and the Hagiography in the Book of Leinster” PhD dissertation. University of Glasgow, 2012. Retrieved from http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3717/1/2012EyjolfsdottirPhD.pdf Evans, H. Meurig, and W. O. Thomas, eds. Y Geiriadur Mawr: The Complete Welsh-English English-Welsh Dictionary. 22 arg. Swansea: C. Davies; Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1997. Finlay, Alison. “Elegy and Old Age in Egil’s saga.” In Egil, the Viking Poet: New Approaches to Egils Saga. Edited by Laurence de Looze, Jón Karl Helgason, Russell Poole, and Torfi H. Tulinius. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015: 111-130. Finnur Jónsson and Sveinbjorn Egilsson, eds. Lexicon Poeticum: Antiquae linguae septentrionalis Ordbok over det Norsk-Islendske Skjaldesprog. 2nd ed. København: S. L. Møllers Bogtrykkeri, 1931. Flower, Robin. Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum. London: Printed for the trustees of the British Museum, 1926-1953. ------. “The Irish High Crosses.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954): 87-97. ------. The Irish Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947. ------. “‘The Two Eyes of Ireland’: Religion and Literature in Ireland in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries.” In The Church in Ireland: A.D. 432-1932: the Report of the Church of Ireland Conference Held in Dublin 11th-14th October, 1932. Edited by William Bell and N. D. Emerson. Dublin: Church of Ireland Printing and Publishing Company, 1932: 66- 75. Ford, Patrick K. “Blackbirds, Cuckoos, and Infixed Pronouns: Another Context for Early Irish Nature Poetry.” In Celtic Connections: Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of Celtic Studies. Volume I: Language, Literature, History, Culture. Edited by Ronald Black, William Gillies and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999. 264

------, trans. The Celtic Poets: Songs and Tales from Early Ireland and Wales. Belmont, Mass.: Ford & Bailie, 1999. ------. Poetry of Llywarch Hen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Fowler, Chris. The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Frank, Roberta. “Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet.” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 75:1 (1993): 11-36. Gameson, Richard. “The Origin of the Exeter Book of Old English Poetry.” Anglo-Saxon England 25 (1996): 135-185. Gneuss, Helmut. Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. Grandsen, Antonia. “Traditionalism and Continuity during the Last Century of Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40:2 (1989): 159-207. Greene, David, and Frank O’Connor, eds. and trans. A Golden Treasury of Irish Poetry AD 600- 1200. London: Macmillan, 1967. Greenfield, Stanley B. “The Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’ in Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Speculum 30:2 (1955): 200-206. ------. “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices in the Wanderer and The Seafarer.” Journal for English and Germanic Philology 68:2 (1969): 212-220. ------. “The Old English Elegies.” In Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature. Edited by E. G. Stanley. London: Nelson, 1966): 142-175. ------. “The Wanderer: A Reconsideration of Theme and Structure.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 50 (1951): 15-20. Griffith, M. S. “Convention and Originality in the Old English ‘Beasts of Battle’ Typescene.” Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1993): 179-199. Han, Byung-Chul, ed. The Agony of Eros. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Harris, Joseph. “Elegy in Old English and Old Norse. A Problem in Literary History.” In The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research. Edited by Martin Green. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 46-56. ------. “Erfikvæði, Myth, Ritual, Elegy.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004. Edited by Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, Catharina Raudvere. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006: 267-271.

265

------. “‘Goðsögn sem hjálp til að lifa af’ í Sonatorreki.” In Heiðin minni: Greinar um fornar bókmenntir. Edited by Haraldur Bessason and Baldur Hafstað. Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1999: 47-70. ------. “Homo necans borealis: Fatherhood and Sacrifice in Sonatorrek.” Myth in Early Northwest Europe 3 (2007): 153-174. ------. “‘Myth to Live By’ in Sonatorrek.” In Laments for the Lost: Medieval Mourning and Elegy. Edited by Jane Tolmie and Jane Toswell. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010: 149-171. ------. “A Nativist Approach to Beowulf: The Case of Germanic Elegy.” In Companion to Old English Poetry. Edited by Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994: 45-62. ------. “A Note on eorðscræf/eorðsele and Current Interpretations of The Wife‘s Lament.” English Studies 58:3 (1977): 204-208. ------. Review of Dunning and Bliss, eds. The Wanderer.. Notes and Queries 17:3 (1970): 113- 116. ------. “Sacriﬁce and Guilt in Sonatorrek.” In Studien zum Altgermanischen: Festschrift für Heinrich Beck. Edited by Heiko Uecker. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1994: 173- 196. Haycock, Marged. Blodeugerdd Barddas o ganu crefyddol cynnar. Aberystwyth: Barddas, 1994 Hayes-Healey, Stephanie. "'Irish pilgrimage': A Romantic Misconception." In Princes, Prelates and Poets in Medieval Ireland: Essays in Honour of Katharine Simms. Edited by Seán Duffy. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013: 241-260. Healy, James N. James N. Healy’s Poetry of Cork and Kerry. Cork: Mercier Press, Date unknown. Audio disc: analog 33 1/3, 30 cm. Heller, Rolf. Die literarische Darstellung der Frau in den Isländersagas. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1958. Henriques, Julian et al, eds. Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London: Methuen, 1984. Henry, P. L. The Early English and Celtic Lyric. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1970. Herbert, Máire. “Becoming an Exile: Colum Cille in Middle-Irish Poetry.” In Heroic Poets and Poetic Heroes in Celtic Tradition: A Festschrift for Patrick K. Ford. Edited by Joseph Falaky Nagy and Leslie Ellen Jones (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005): 131-140. ------. Iona, Kells and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. ------. “The Preface to the Amra Choluim Chille.” In Sagas, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney. Edited by Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach, Kim McKone. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989: 67-75.

266

Herren, Michael. “The Authorship, Date of Composition and Provenance of the So-Called Lorica Gildae.” Ériu 24 (1973): 35-51 ------. Hisperica Famina, Vol II: Related Poems. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Herren, Michael and Shirley Ann Brown. Christ in Celtic Christianity: Britain and Ireland from the Fifth to the Tenth Century. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. Heslop, K. S. “‘Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide’: Sonatorrek and the Myth of Skaldic Lyric.” In Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society: the 11th International Saga Conference, 2-7 July 2000, University of Sydney. Edited by Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross (Sydney: Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Sydney, 2000): 152-164. Heyworth, Melanie. “Nostalgic Evocation and Social Privilege in the Old English Elegies,” Studia Neophilologica 76 (2004): 3-11. Higley, Sarah Lynn. Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Hill, Thomas D. “Guðrúnarkviða in fyrsta: Guðrún’s Healing Tears.” In Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend. Edited by Carolyne Larrington and Paul Acker. New York: Routledge, 2013: 107-116. Hollander, Lee M., trans. The Poetic Edda. 2nd ed., rev. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962, 247. Hood, A. B. E., ed. and trans. St. Patrick: His Writing and Muirchu’s Life. London: Phillimore, 1978. Hughes, Kathleen. The Church in Early Irish Society. London: Methuen, 1966. Hull, Eleanor. “Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara of or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare.” Folklore 38:3 (1927): 225-254. ------, ed. and trans. Poem-book of the Gael: Translations from Irish Gaelic Poetry into English Prose and Verse. Chicago: Browne & Howell Company; London: Chatto & Windus, 1913. Hull, Vernon, ed. and trans. “The Old Woman or Nun of Beare.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 19: 174-176. ------. “Two Anecdotes Concerning St. Moling.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 18 (1930): 90-99. Hume, Kathryn. “The ‘Ruin Motif’ in Old English Poetry.” Anglia 94 (1976): 339-360. Jackson, Kenneth H. “Incremental Repetition in the Early Welsh Englyn.” Speculum 16:3 (1941): 304-321. ------. Studies in Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

267

Jenkins, Dafydd, ed. and trans. The Law of Hywel Dda: Law Texts from Medieval Wales. Llandysul, Dyfed: Gomer Press, 1986. Jeauneau, Édouard, ed. Jean Scot: Homélie sur le Prologue de Jean: Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes. Sources chrétiennes, No. 151. Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 1969. Jochens, Jenny. Women in Old Norse Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir. “‘Gerðit hon…sem konor aðar’: Women and Subversion in Eddic Heroic Poetry.” In Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend. Edited by Carolyne Larrington and Paul Acker. New York: Routledge, 2013: 117-135. ------. Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Johnson, Elva. “Exiles from the Edge? The Irish Contexts of Peregrinatio.” In The Irish in Early Medieval Europe. Edited by Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016: 38-52. Johnson, William C. “The Wife’s Lament as Death-Song.” In The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research. Edited by Martin Green. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983: 69-81. Joynt, Maud, ed. “Tromdámh Guaire.” Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series, Vol. 2. Dublin: [Dublin Institute for Advanced Study,] 1931. Kelly, Fergus. A Guide to Early Irish Law. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1988. ------, ed. and trans. “A Poem in Praise of Columb Cille.” Ériu 24 (1973): 1-34. ------, ed. and trans. “Tiughraind Bhécáin.” Ériu 26 (1975): 66-98. Klausner, David N. “The Topos of the Beasts of Battle in Early Welsh Poetry.” In The Centre and its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Edited by Robert A. Taylor, James F. Burke, Patricia J. Eberle, Ian Lancashire, Brian S. Merrilees. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1993: 247-263. Klinck, Anne L., ed. and trans. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Knott, Eleanor. An Introduction to Irish Syllabic Poetry of the Period 1200-1600. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1966. Koch, John T., ed. Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006. Krapp, G. P., and E. V. Dobbie, eds. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-1942. Krappe, A. H. “La cailleach Bheara: notes de mythologie gaélique.” Études celtiques 1 (1936): 292-302.

268

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984; abridged version of La revolution du langue poétique. Éditions du Seuil, 1974. ------. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lake, Stephen. “Usage of the Writings of John Cassian in Some Early British and Irish Writings.” Journal of Australian Early Medieval Association 7 (2011): 95-121. Langeslag, Paul Sander. “Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature.” Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 2012. Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 177. Lassen, Annette. Odin på kristent pergament. En texthistorisk studie. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2011. ------. “Textual Figures of Óðinn.” In Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. An International Conference in Lund, Sweden, June 3-7, 2004. Edited by Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, Catharina Raudvere. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2006: 280-284. Lawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. 2nd edition. London: Longman, 1989. LeFanu, Nicole. The Old Woman of Beare, for Soprano and Thirteen Players. Borough Green, Kent: Novello & Co., Ltd., 1984. Lench, Elinor. “The Wife’s Lament: A Poem of the Living Dead.” Comitatus 1 (1970): 3-23. Lerner, Elizabeth. “Virgins and Mothers: Feminine Ideals and Female Roles in the Early Irish Church.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 14 (1994): 162-174. Leslie, Roy F., ed. The Wanderer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966. Repr. Liverpool University Press, 1985. Liuzza, R. M. “The Tower of Babel: The Wanderer and the Ruins of History.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 36:1 (2003): 1-35. Lockett, Leslie. Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Lucas, Angela M. “The Narrator of ‘The Wife’s Lament’ Reconsidered,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 70:2 (1969): 282-297. Lumiansky, R. M. “The Dramatic Structure of the Old English Wanderer.” Neophilologus 34 (1957): 104-12. Mac Cana, Proinsias. “Aspects of the Theme of the King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études celtiques 7:1 (1955-56): 76-114.

269

------. “Aspects of the Theme of the King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études celtiques 7:2 (1955-56): 356-413. ------. “Aspects of the Theme of the King and Goddess in Irish Literature,” Études celtiques 8:1 (1957-58): 59-65. ------. Celtic Mythology. London: Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1970. ------. The Learned Tales of Medieval Ireland. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1980. ------. “The Sinless Otherworld of Immram Brain,” Ériu 27 (1976): 95-115. Mac Eoin, Geróid. “Invocation of the Forces of Nature in the Loricae.” Studia Hibernica 2 (1962): 212-217. Mac Mathúna, Séamus, ed. Immram Brain. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985. Magoun, Jr., F. P. “The Theme of the Beasts of Battle in Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 56:2 (1955): 81-90. Mandel, Jerome. Alternative Readings in Old English Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Martin, B. K. “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare: A Critical Evaluation.” Medium Ævum 38.3 (1969): 245-261. Marvin, Corey J. Word Outward: Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language. New York: Routledge, 2001. McCone, Kim, ed., trans. Echtrae Chonnlai and the Beginnings of Vernacular Narrative Writing in Ireland: A Critical Edition with Introduction, Notes, Bibliography and Vocabulary. Maynooth: National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2000. ------. Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature. Maynooth: National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2000 McFarland, Ian A. “Original Sin.” In T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin. Edited by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016: 303-318. McNamara, Martin. “Sources and Affiliations of the Catechesis Celtica (MS Vat. Reg. lat. 49).” Sacris Erudiri 34: 185-237 Mees, Bernard. Celtic Curses. Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2009. Melia, Daniel F. “A Poetic Klein Bottle.” In Celtic Language, Celtic Culture: A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp. Edited by A. Matonis and D. Melia. Belmount, MA: Ford & Bailie, 1990: 187-196. Meyer, Kuno, ed. “Eine Altirische Homilie” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 4:1 (1903): 241- 243. ------, trans. Ancient Irish Poetry. London: Constable and Company, 1913; paperback reprint 1994.

270

------, ed. and trans. “Anecdotes of St. Moling.” Révue celtique 14 (1893): 188-194 ------, ed. and trans. Bruchstücke der älteren Lyrik Irelands. Part 1. Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1919. ------, ed. and trans. “Comad Manchón Léith,” Ériu 1 (1904), 38-42. ------, ed. and trans. “The Hermit’s Song.” Ériu 2 (1905): 55-57. ------, ed. and trans. King and Hermit: A Colloquy between King Guaire of Aidne and His Brother Marbán. London: David Nutt, 1901. ------, ed. and trans. Liadain and Cuirithir: An Irish Love-story of the Ninth Century. London: D. Nutt, 1902. ------, ed. “Mitteilungen aus irischen Handschriften.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 5 (1905): 495-405. ------, ed. and trans. “A Religious Poem.” Ériu 3 (1907): 13-15. ------, ed. and trans. “Stories and Songs from the Irish MSS.” Otia Merseiana I (1899): 119- 128. ------, ed. and trans. The Vision of Mac Conglinne: A Middle-Irish Wonder Tale. London: Nutt, 1892. Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Latina. Paris, 1844-1864. Miller, William Ian. Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. ------. “Choosing the Avenger: Some Aspects of the Bloodfeud in Medieval Iceland and England.” Law and History Review 1 (1983): 159–204. Muir, Bernard, ed. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter MS 3501. 2 vols. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, rev. 2nd ed. 2000; orig. pub. 1994. Mundal, Else. “The Position of Women in Old Norse Society and the Basis for Their Power.” NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 1 (1994): 3–11. Murphy, Gerard. Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998 (Orig. publ. 1956, Oxford University Press). ------. Early Irish Metrics. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1961; repr. 1973. Neckel, Gustav, ed. Edda: Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmalern. 5th rev. ed. Edited by Hans Kuhn. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1962. Ní Dhonnchadh, Máirín. “Caillech and Other Terms for Veiled Women in Medieval Irish Texts.” Éigse 28 (1994-95): 71-96. Niles, John D. “The Problem of the Ending of The Wife’s Lament.” Speculum 78:4 (Oct. 2003): 1107-1150. 271

Nordal, Sigurður. “Átrúnaður Egil Skallagrímssonar.” Skirnir 98 (1924): 145-165. ------, ed. Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar. ÍF 2. Reykjavík: Íslenzka fornritafélag, 1933. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Revised edition. Translated by Philip S. Watson Philadephia: The Westminster Press, 1953. Ó hAodha, Donncha, ed. and trans. Bethu Brigte. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1978. ------, ed. and trans. “The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare.” In Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney. Edited by Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989: 308- 331. ------, ed. and trans. “The Poetic Version of the Voyage of Snédgus and Mac Ríagla.” In Dan do Oide: Essays in Memory of Conn R. Ó Cléirigh. Edited by A. Ahlqvist and V. Capková. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997: 419-29. O’Brien, M. A., ed. Corpus genealogiarum hiberniae. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. “Heroic Values and Christian Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. Edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 107-125. Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás. “The eponym of Cnogba.” Éigse 23 (1989): 27-38. Ó Coileáin, Seán. “The Making of Tromdámh Guaire.” Ériu 28 (1977): 32-70. ------. “The Structure of a Literary Cycle.” Ériu 25 (1974): 88–125. O’Connor, Frank. The Nun of Beare. Cambridge: MA: Harvard College Library Woodberry Poetry Room, 1961. Audiotape reel. Ó Corráin, Donnchadh, ed. Clavis litterarum hibernensium: Medieval Irish Books and Texts (c.400-c.1600). Turnhout Belgium: Brepols, 2017. ------. “Early Irish Hermit Poetry?” In Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney. Edited by Donnchadh Ó Corráin, Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989: 251-267. ------. Ireland before the Normans. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972. ------. The Irish Church: Its Reform and the English Invasion. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2017. Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid. “Continuity and Adaptation in Legends of Cailleach Bhéarra.” Béaloideas 56 (1988): 153-178. ------. “Non-Sovereignty Queen Aspects of the Otherworld Figure in Irish Hag Legends: The Case of Cailleach Bhéarra.” Béaloideas 62/63 (1994-1995): 147-162.

272

O’Dwyer, Peter. Céli Dé: Spiritual Reform in Ireland 750-900. 2nd edition, revised. Dublin: Editions Tailliura, 1981. O’Grady, Standish Hayes, ed. and trans. Silva Gadelica (I-XXXI): A Collection of Tales in Irish with Extracts Illustrating Persons and Places. 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1892. O’Keeffe, J. G. “Colman Mac Duach and Guaire,” Ériu 1 (1904): 43-48 Ó hÓgáin, Daithi. Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopedia of the Irish Folk Tradition. London: Ryan Publishing, 1990. Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Olsen, Magnus. “Om Balder-digtning og Balder-kultus.” Arkiv för nordisk filologi 40 (1924): 148-175. Orchard, Andy. “The Hisperica Famina as Literature.” Journal of Medieval Latin 10 (2000): 1- 45. ------. “Not What It Was: The World of Old English Elegy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Elegy. Edited by Karen Weisman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: 101-117. ------, trans. The Poetic Edda: A Viking Book of Lore. London: Penguin, 2011. ------. “Re-Reading The Wanderer: The Value of Cross-References.” In Via crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross, eds. James E. Hall, Thomas N. Hall, Thomas D. Hill. Morgantown, WV: University of West Virginia, 2002: 1-26. Ó Ríain, Pádraig. A Dictionary of Irish Saints. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011. ------. “A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man. Éigse 14:3 (1972): 179-206. Partridge, Angela. “Wild Men and Wailing Women.” Éigse 18:1 (1980-1981): 27-37. Pasternack, Carol Braun. “Anonymous Polyphony and The Wanderer’s Textuality.” In The Textuality of Old English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995: 33-59; revised and reprinted from Anglo-Saxon England 20 (1991): 99-122. Pilch, Herbert. “The Elegiac Genre in Old English and Early Welsh Poetry.” Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie 29 (1964): 209-224. Plummer, Charles. Vitae sanctorum Hiberniae, partim hactenus ineditae. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910 Poole, Russell. “‘Non enim possum plorare nec lamenta fundere’: Sonatorrek in a Tenth- Century Context.” In Laments for the Lost: Medieval Mourning and Elegy. Edited by Jane Tolmie and Jane Toswell. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010: 173-200. Pope, John C. “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.” In Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor of Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 1965), reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Olld English Poetry (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968): 533-70. 273

Quin, E. G. “The Early Irish Poem Ísucán.” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (Summer) (1981): 39-52. Rees, B. R., trans. The Letters of Pelagius and his Followers. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1988. Reid, Jennifer. “The Lorica of Laidcenn: the Biblical Connections.” The Journal of Medieval Latin 12 (2002): 141-153. ------. “Celtic Curses (Review).” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111:2 (2011): 224-226. Richman, Gerald. “Speaker and Speech Boundaries in The Wanderer.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 81 (1982): 469-79. Rissanen, Matti. “The Theme of ‘Exile’ in ‘The Wife’s Lament.’” Neophilologus Mitteilungen 70:1 (1969): 90-104. Ritari, Katja. “Images of Aging in the early Irish poem Caillech Bérri.” Studia Celtica Fennica 3 (2006): 57-70. Rittenmueller, Jean, ed. Liber Questionum in Evangeliis. CCSL 108F. Scriptores Celtigenae 5 Turnhout: Brepols, 2003. Rowland, Jenny. Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990. Schücking, Levin L. “Das angelsächsische Gedicht von der Klage der Frau.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 48 (1906): 436-449. Selmer, Carl, ed. Navagatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis: From Early Latin Manuscripts. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959; reprint, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1989. Sharma, Manish. “Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer.” Neophilologus 96 (2012): 611-629. Sharpe, Richard. “Claf Abercauwg and the Voice of Llywatch Hen.” Studia Celtica 43 (2009): 95-121. Simms, Katharine. “The Poet as Chieftain’s Widow: Bardic Elegies.” Sages, Saints and Storytellers: Celtic Studies in Honour of Professor James Carney. Edited by Liam Breatnach, Kim McCone, and Donnchadh Ó Corráin. Maynooth: An Sagart, 1989: 400- 411. Smyth, Marina. “The Word of God and Early Medieval Irish Cosmology.” In Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland. Edited by Jacqueline Borsje, Ann Dooley, Séamus Mac Mathúna, and Gregory Toner. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 2014: 112-143. Snorri Sturluson. Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning. 2nd ed. Edited by Anthony Faulkes. London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 2005.

274

------. Edda: Skáldskapurmál. 1: Introduction, Text and Notes. London: Viking Society for Northern Research and University College London, 1998. Spolsky, Ellen. “The Semantic Structure of the Wanderer,” Journal of Literary Semantics 3 (1974): 101-19. Stanley, E. G. “Old English Poetic Diction and the Interpretation of The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Penitent's Prayer.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie 73 (1955): 413-66. Stevens, Martin. “The Narrator of The Wife’s Lament.” Neophilologus Mitteilungen 69 (1968): 72-90. Stokes, Whitley, ed. and trans. “Acallamh na senórach.” In Irische Texte mit Wörterbuch. 4 Vols. Edited by Ernst Windisch and Whitley Stokes. Leipzig, 1900: Vol. 1, ix-xiv, 1- 438. ------, ed. and trans. The Birth and Life of St. Moling, Edited from a Manuscript in the Royal Library, Brussels with a Translation and Glossary. London: “Privately printed,” 1907. ------, ed. and trans. “The Bodleian Amra Choluimb Chille.” Revue Celtique 20 (1899): 31–55, 132–183, 248–289, 400–437. ------, ed. and trans. Goidelica: Old and Early-Middle-Irish Glosses, Prose, and Verse. 2nd ed. London: Trübner and Co., 1872. ------, ed. and trans. The Martyrology of Oengus the Culdee: Félire Óengusso Céli Dé. London: Harrison and Sons, 1905. ------, ed. and trans. The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. Irish Manuscript Series. Vol. 1, Part 1: On the Calendar of Oengus. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1880. ------, ed. and trans. “The Voyage of the Huí Corra.” Revue celtique 14 (1893): 22-69. ------. ed. and trans. “The Voyage of Snedgus and Mac Riagla.” Revue celtique 9 (1888): 14- 25. Stokes, Whitley and John Strachan, eds. Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus: A Collection of Old-Irish Glosses, Scholia Prose, and Verse. Vol. II. Non-Biblical Glosses and Scholia; Old Irish Prose; Names of Persons and Places; Inscriptions; Verse; Indexes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903. Strachan, John. “An Old-Irish Homily.” Ériu 3 (1907): 1-10. ------. Old-Irish Paradigms and Selections from the Old-Irish Glosses. 3rd rev. ed. by Osborn Bergin. Dublin: Pub. for Royal Irish Academy by Hodges, Figgis & Co.; London: Williams & Norris, 1929. Strachey, Strachey, ed. and trans. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Vintage, 2001 Straus, Barrie Ruth. “Women’s Words as Weapons: Speech as Action in “The Wife’s Lament.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23:2 (1981): 269-285. 275

Telfer, Nancy. Portraits for Soprano and Piano. Toronto: Canadian Music Centre, 1983. Terry, Patricia, trans. Poems of the Elder Edda. Rev. ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1990. Thornbury, Emily V. Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. Codex Exoniensis: A Collection of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: William Pickering for the Society of Antiquaries of London, 1842. Thorpe, Benjamin and I. A. Blackwell, trans. The Elder Eddas of Sæmund Sigfusson and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson. London: Norrœna Society, 1906. Tolmie, Jane. “Goading, Ritual Discord and the Deflection of Blame.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4 (2003): 287–301. Toner, Gregory. “Authority, Verse and the Transmission of Senchas,” Ériu 55 (2005), 59-84. Tripp, Raymond P. “The Narrator as Revenant: A Reconsideration of Three Old English Elegies.” Papers on Language and Literature 8 (1972): 339-36 Tulinius, Torfi. “Le statut théologique d’Egill Skalla-Grímsson.” In Hugur: Mélanges d’histoire, de littérature et de mythologie offerts à Regis Boyer pour son 65e anniversaire. Edited by Claude Lecouteux and Olivier Gouchet. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 1997: 279-288. Turville-Petre, E. O. G., ed. and trans. Scaldic Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976 van Gennep, Arnold. Rites of Passage. London: Routledge, 1960; repr. 2004. von See, Klaus. “Sonatorrek und Hávamál.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 99, Bd. H. 1 (Mar. 1970): 26-33. ------, Beatrice La Farge, Eve Picard, Katja Schulz, Matthias Teichert, eds. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda. Heidelberg: C. Winter 1997-. Walker-Pelkey, Faye. “Frige hwæt ic hatte: ‘The Wife’s Lament’ as Riddle.” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992): 246-266. Wehlau, Ruth. “Landscapes of Despair in The Wanderer, Beowulf’s Story of Hrethel, and Sonatorrek.” Parergon 15:2 (1998): 1-17. ------. Riddle of Creation: Metaphorical Structures in Old English Poetry. Studies in the Humanities 24. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Wentersdorf, Karl P. “The Situation of the Narrator in the Old English Wife’s Lament.” Speculum 56 (1981): 492-516. Williams, Ifor, ed. Canu Llywarch Hen. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1953. ------, ed. The Poems of Llywarch Hên. London: H. Milford, 1932.

276

Wilmart, André, ed. Analecta reginensia: extraits des manuscrits latins de la reine Christine conservés au Vatican. Studie Testi 59. Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, 1933.

277