Style in Old English Poetry: The Test of the Auxiliary
... Youmans 2010), such research on Old English is comparatively under-represented. There are important studies in some areas of Old English poetic syntax (e.g., Mitchell 1975, Donoghue 1987, Minkova and Stockwell 1992, Blockley 2001. ...
... Considering the more linguistic end of this scholarship, there is considerable research in the area of historical English poetic syntax, and Old English poetic syntax in particular (e.g., Mitchell 1975, Donoghue 1987, Minkova and Stockwell 1992, Blockley 2001). However, little of this research aims at providing large-scale accounts of syntactic patterns that would aid in relating word order variation in poetry to that found in prose. ...
In a short paragraph of his ‘Die Metrik des Beowulf’ (1885), Eduard Sievers proposed emendation of preterite plural bǣron to infinitival beran at l. 1889b. This emendation has much to commend it, but it has not been accepted by the majority of editors of the poem. This article adduces new palaeographical, metrical and stylistic evidence in support of Sievers’s proposal, and it also argues that the preterite plural forms bǣron and mǣton at Andreas 1221b and Beowulf 1633b should likewise be emended to infinitival beran and metan.
This essay draws on codicological, metrical, and stylistic evidence to argue that three sequences of poetic texts in the Old English Exeter Book were understood by the compiler and early readers as linked poetic sequences rather than individual poems. The sequences are the Christ poems and Guthlac; the Old English Physiologus (the Panther, Whale, and Partridge); and the Riddles (including Wulf and Eadwacer, the Wife’s Lament, the Husband’s Message, and the Ruin). The essay concludes by indicating how early medieval English ideas about poetry could be plugged back into the intellectual history of poetics that skips from Aristotle to George Puttenham.
The maxim Wyrd oft nere // unfægne eorl, / onne his ellen deah "Fate often spares an undoomed man when his courage avails" (Beowulf 572b-573) has been likened to "Fortune favors the brave," with little attention to the word unfægne, which is often translated "undoomed". This comparison between proverbs emphasizes personal agency and suggests a contrast between the proverb in 572b-573 and the maxim G3 a wyrd swa hio scel "Goes always fate as it must" (Beowulf 455b), which depicts an inexorable wyrd. This paper presents the history of this view and argues that linguistic analysis and further attention to Germanic cognates of (un)f3ge reveal a proverb that harmonizes with 455b. (Un)fæge and its cognates have meanings related to being brave or cowardly, blessed or accursed, and doomed or undoomed. A similar Old Norse proverb also speaks to the significance of the status of unfæge men. Furthermore, the pronominal position of unfægne is argued to represent a characterizing property of the man. The word unfægne is essential to the meaning of this proverb as it indicates not the simple absence of being doomed but the presence of a more complex quality. This interpretive point is significant in that it provides more information about the portrayal of wyrd in Beowulf by clarifying a well-known proverb in the text; it also has implications for future translations of these verses.
Conventional linguistic and metrical perspectives claim that secondary elements of Old English compound names are only stressed if they are disyllabic or inflected. This essay argues that this conclusion derives directly from the use of Eduard Sievers's metrical formalism and that other formalisms may suggest that this counterintuitive result is, in fact, incorrect. Using Geoffrey Russom's innovative word-foot metrical formalism and examining evidence from secondary alliteration patterns, this essay offers evidence that monosyllabic secondary elements were given secondary stress. Furthermore, evidence from the spacing of compound names in the Beowulf manuscript supports such a conclusion. Taken together, the evidence from scansion, alliteration patterns, and the manuscript suggest that both Sieversian formalism and the linguistic claims that it gave rise to should be replaced.
Albert Stanburrough Cook was the single most powerful American Anglo-Saxonist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but contemporary medievalists have forgotten him and contemporary historians of literature misapprehend his work. A thorough and judicious analysis of Cook's research, particularly on Cynewulf, shows how his philology was not too “narrow” or removed from political dispute (as asserted by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature), but instead entangled in the politics and cultural concerns of the day. Careful examination of Cook's work and its influence shows that although shifts of ideology, intellectual fashion and method can obviously and significantly affect an individual scholar's visibility, the accumulation of important facts and improvements in method can long outlive an individual's fame.
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