What does it mean to tell stories without narratives? Do the formal effects of poetry - at perhaps as basic a level as lineation - alter the content of the poem? What about the formal effects of media - literally, the means by which a poem or story is transmitted? Does the technology used to record and transmit a thought have an impact on the thought itself, in production or reception? Can the very same thoughts be expressed and understood via cuneiform tablets, papyrus scrolls, printed paper codices (bound books), and even web pages? Or does something else change as the material of communication changes? This lecture considers the Anglo Saxon poetry found in early Medieval manuscripts - only four of which are known to exist - and asks us to consider the categories we typically apply to poetry, such as Epic, Lyric, and Elegiac, in the historical and material contexts of the Anglo Saxon world. Do these categories still apply?

1. Are we reading poetry
yet?
Old English Verse, Media, and Poetic Form

2. Table of Contents
Song & Poetry
Media & Authorship
Manuscripts, Copies, and the Idea of Authoritative
Sources
Text & Translation
Old English Verse
Genre & Form
Riddles, Gnomic, and Historical Poems
Subjectivity, Modernity, & the (Literary) Historian
Elegy, the Elegiac, and the Self in Old English poetry

3. Song & Poetry
“What we now know as poetry . . . began as song, though the
tunes and the music have been lost beyond recall” (ix).

4. Song & Poetry
William Bascom: “Myths are prose narratives . . .
” (9).
Does a myth have to be prose?
Does a myth have to be narrative?
Genre: Drama, Prose and Verse
Mode: Didactic, Narrative and Lyric
Form: Meter, Rhyme, Alliteration, Structure

5. Song & Poetry
“What we now know as poetry . . . began as song,
though the tunes and the music have been lost
beyond recall” (ix).
“Lyric”
Poetry sung to the lyre
A modern conception (Virginia Jackson)
Anglo-Saxon Warrior-Poet
Braveheart
Apostrophe (Jonathan Culler)
First-person speaker (“I”)
Fictional or absent addressee (“you”)
Lyric “thou” and the “overheard” (John Stuart Mill)

6. Song & Poetry
“. . . the tunes and the music have been lost beyond
recall” (ix).
What separates a poem from a song?
How are these Old English poems different from
Beowulf?
Can myth be sung? Can it be sung without story?
Can it be hummed?
“Lyric” vs “Narrative”
What is the difference between a song and a story?
Ballads: Story-Songs
“Rocky Raccoon”
“Candle in the Wind”

7. Media & Authorship
From Gilgamesh to Beowulf: Tablets, Manuscript[s], and
Author[s]

8. Media as Method
What do cuneiform tablets and YouTube have in
common?
History of the Book
Cultural Bibliography vs. Descriptive Bibliography
Media Studies

9. Media: Old English
Manuscripts
Only four major Old English poetic manuscripts:
Junius Manuscript: aka “the Caedmon
manuscript”
Exeter Book: anthology
Vercelli Book: found in Vercelli, Italy
Nowell Codex: aka “the Beowulf manuscript”

10. Media: Old English
Manuscripts
Beowulf manuscript
Damaged in fire
Editorial insertions
Authority?
Exeter Book
131 original leaves (?)
First 8 leaves are lost
10th Century
Largest extant
collection of OE
literature
Spills, cuts, and burns
interfere with legibility
of text

11. Authorship: Old English
Poets
Only four known Old English Poets
Caedmon (mid 7th century)
Bede (c. 672-735)
Alfred the Great (849-899)
Cynewulf (c. 770-840)
Other references
William of Malmesbury: Aldhelm, Bishop of
Sherborne

12. Authorship: Old English
Poets
Caedmon: First Old English
Poet
Bede: Historia
Ecclesiastica
An illiterate shepherd
Given poetic inspiration
in a dream
Christian poet who sets
the stage for Bede
“Caedmon’s Hymn”: only
surviving poem
Nine lines
Three versions
Nineteen manuscripts
Bede: The Smartest Man in
Europe
Scriptural commentary
Historia ecclesiastica gentis
Anglorum
The Ecclesiastical History of
the English People
“Bede’s Death Song”
five lines
two versions

13. Authorship: Old English
Poets
Alfred the Great
King of the Anglo-
Saxons
King of Wessex, 871-
899
Self-promoted
Warrior-poet
“the Great”
Translations and
Metrical Prefaces
Gregory: Pastoral
Care
Promoting literacy
among the
English nobility
Boethius: Consolation
of Philosophy
Cynewulf
Little known; early c9th
Vercelli Manuscript
Elene
Authorial presence
Dream of the Rood?
References the
same cross
discussed in “Elene”
Cross suffers with
Christ
Dreamer = Poet?
Old man’s
lamentation
Exeter Book

14. Media & Authorship:
The Epics of Gilgamesh and
Beowulf
Gilgamesh
Media
Stone tablets
Cuneiform
Many copies
Authorship
Many multiforms
Many authors
No “authoritative”
version
Beowulf
Media
Manuscript
Old English
Single surviving copy
Uh-oh . . .
Authorship
Multiforms:
The Fight at Finnsburh
Scribal Authoring?
Clear indications of different
world-view between speaker
and story

15. Media & Authorship:
“Caedmon’s Hymn”
“Bede’s story . . . indicates that it was normal at
an Anglo-Saxon drinking-party for a harp to be
passed round so that everyone could sing” (x).
Caedmon: First Old English Poet
Bede: Historica Ecclesiastica
“Caedmon’s Hymn”: only surviving poem
Nine lines
Three versions
Nineteen manuscripts
Can we be sure about Caedmon?

16. Text & Translation
Old English Verse Form

17. Translation: Old English
Verse
The Alliterative Long Line
Two half-lines
the on-verse (a-verse) and the off-verse (b-verse)
Each verse = two feet
each verse must contain at least one stressed
syllable
the first foot is stronger than the second
On-verse: two strong-stressed positions
(alliterating)
Off-verse: only the strong-stressed syllable of the
first foot is allowed to alliterate

18. Text & Translation:
Old English Verse
Strong-Stress Meter & Alliterative Verse
Variation [Epithet]
Oral-Formulaic Theory
Caesura
Simile & Metaphor

19. Genre & Form
The Generic & Media Contexts of “Other Old English Poems”

20. Genre & Form:
Heroic or Historical Poems
“The Battle of Malden”
Medium: Only Manuscript destroyed in 1731
Incomplete anyway: beginning and end missing
“Deor”
Form: Stanza & Refrain (p. 138)
Medium: Exeter Book
Genre: Heroic Lyric?
What is the difference between story and song?

21. Genre & Form:
Exeter Book Riddles
Medium: Exeter Book
90 in Exeter
Latin and Old English originals
Form: Riddle
Formal markers: “What am I?” etc
Double entendre vs. Third-person descriptive

22. Genre & Form:
Gnomic or Wisdom Poems
Genre:
Didactic & Moralistic
Rhetorical Play
Form:
Turn on the slipperiness of language
Maxims: Ambiguity
Charms: Substitution
What do Maxims, Charms, and Riddles have in
common?

23. Subjectivity, Modernity, and
the Literary Historian
The “Elegy” and English Lyric from Old to Modern

24. Elegiac “Form”
Elegy defined by “elegiac speaker”
Know the [literary] historian: “elegy” a Victorian
designation
Contemporary with invention of “lyric” and J.S. Mill
Not “formal”
Classical “elegy”: metrical form
Modern “elegy”: poem of lamentation (mode)
“Genre” can be defined by
Mode/Voice
Form
Medium: Exeter Book
Source for all four of our “elegies”

25. Elegiac “Form”
Old English “elegies”:
An isolated or exiled speaker who laments a loss
Longing for earlier days of joy with loved ones
Bad weather reflecting the wintry storms of mental life
Fluctuating mental states (memory, dream,
hallucination)
The use of reason to try to understand life’s
misfortunes
Recognition that life is . . . “transient, fleeting”
Use of occasional proverbial wisdom to generalize
one’s lot
Searching for consolation, sometimes finding it in
religious belief
(143)

26. Elegiac: “The Wanderer”
“By shifting from first-person lament to third-
person description or reflection, he both
generalizes his own condition and establishes
some distance between the suffering man and
the reflective man . . . he must use his mind to
cure his mind” (145).
1st person/3rd person

27. Elegiac: “The Seafarer”
First Half:
The Ocean
Second Half:
Radical tonal shift
Ezra Pound’s translation omits
Elegiac: “The Wife’s
Lament”
Is the speaker male or female?

28. Elegiac:
“Wulf and Eadwacer”
If he comes home here to my people, it will seem
A strange gift. Will they take him into the tribe
And let him thrive or think him a threat?
It’s different with us.
(1-4)

29. Elegiac: “Wulf and
Eadwacer”
Medium: Exeter Book
Only surviving copy
Not mentioned anywhere else
Title is a modern editorial convention
Genre: Notoriously difficult to classify
Riddle
Elegy
Ballad
Form: Stanza and Refrain?
Not a convention of Old English
Borrowing?

30. Elegiac:
“Wulf and
Eadwacer”
If he comes home here to my people, it will seem
A strange gift. Will they take him into the tribe
And let him thrive or think him a threat?
It’s different with us.
Wulf is on an island; I am on another.
Fast is that island, surrounded by fens.
There are bloodthirsty men on that island.
If they find him, will they take him into the tribe
And let him thrive or think him a threat?
It’s different with us.
I’ve endured my Wulf’s wide wanderings
While I sat weeping in rainy weather–
When the bold warrior wrapped me in his arms –
That was a joy to me and also a loathing.
Wulf, my Wulf, my old longings,
My hopes and fears, have made me ill;
Your seldom coming and my worried heart
Have made me sick, not lack of food.
Do you hear, Eadwacer, guardian of goods?
Wulf will bear our sad whelp to the wood.
It’s easy to rip an unsewn stitch
Or tear the thread of an untold tale—
The song of us two together.

31. Elegiac: “Wulf and
Eadwacer”
Medium:
What does the absence of a confirming text change about our
understanding of textual “authority”? If Beowulf is more like The
Aeneid than like Gilgamesh because of its existence as a single text,
can the same be said of this poem?
How does the addition of the title inform our reading of the poem?
Genre:
How does our classification of the poem change our understanding of
it?
What mode of address does the poem take? Is it didactic (instructive,
universalizing), narrative (explanatory, sequencing), or lyric
(meditative, individualizing)?
Form:
What work does the refrain do in the first two stanzas? How does it
build expectation? How does its absence from the third stanza
onward disrupt this?
How do the pronouns create, intensify, or clarify ambiguity in the
poem? Who is “us”? Who are “they”?

32. Mixed Genres
Riddles with elegiac or heroic motifs
Deor: Heroic or Lyric? Charm? Elegy?
Wulf & Eadwacer
The Dream of the Rood

33. “Deor”
Let me tell this story about myself:
I was a singer and shaper for the Heodenings,
Dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
(34-36)

34. Mixed Genres: “Deor”
Medium: Exeter Book
“In the Exeter Book, [‘Deor’] follows a series of homiletic or
religious poems and precedes ‘The Wife’s Lament,’ ‘Wulf and
Eadwacer,’ and the first group of riddles. ‘Deor’ is a poem that
bridges the homiletic and the enigmatic. Both the form of the
poem and its murky historical details are much debated” (139).
What does the position of the poem in the larger text tell us about
the way its author, scribe, or compiler understands it? How does it
shape the way the audience understands it?
Form: Stanza & Refrain
Uncommon in OE historical poetry
Each stanza details a particular suffering
The refrain universalizes this to common experience

35. Mixed Genres:
“Deor” Weland the smith made a trial of exile.
The strong-minded man suffered hardship
All winter long—his only companions
Were cold and sorrow. He longed to escape
The bonds of Nithhad who slit his
hamstrings,
Tied him down with severed sinews,
Making a slave of this better man.
That passed over—so can this.
To Beadohild her brother’s death
Was not so sad as her own suffering
When the princess saw she was pregnant.
She tried not to think how it all happened.
That passed over—so can this.
Many have heard of the cares of Maethhild—
She and Geat shared a bottomless love.
Her sad passion deprived her of sleep.
That passed over—so can this.
Theodric ruled for thirty winters
The city of the Maerings—that’s known to
many.
That passed over—so can this.
That grim king ruled the land of the Goths.
Many a man sat bound in sorrow,
Twisted in the turns of expected woe,
Hoping a foe might free his kingdom.
That passed over—so can this.
A man sits alone in the clutch of sorrow,
Separated from joy, thinking to himself
That his share of suffering is endless.
The man knows that all through middle-
earth,
Wise God goes, handing out fortunes,
Giving grace to many—power, prosperity,
Wisdom, wealth—but to some a share of
woe.
Let me tell this story about myself:
I was singer and shaper for the
Heodenings,
Dear to my lord. My name was Deor.
For many years I was harper in the hall,
Honored by the king, until Heorrenda now,
A song-skilled shaper, has taken my place,
Reaping the rewards, the titled lands,
That the guardian of men once gave me.

36. Mixed Genres: “Deor”
Form: Stanza & Refrain
Each stanza details a particular suffering
First stanza: Weland
Second stanza: Beadohild
Third through fifth stanzas: better-known or lesser-
known?
“Many have heard . . .” (14)
“—that’s known to many” (19)
“We all know . . .” (21)
How does the succession of stanzas build the reader’s
understanding of sorrow’s particularity?
Penultimate stanza: universal, “A man” (27)
Absent refrain – can you universalize the universal?
Final stanza: Deor
Poet-as-speaker: Hero?
“Deor”: “brave, bold” or “grievous, ferocious” (140)
How does the movement between particular and
universal problematize our understanding of both
categories?

37. Mixed Genres & Subjectivity:
“The Dream of the Rood”
Medium: Vercelli Book
found in Italy
One of the earliest Old English Christian poems
Author: Cynewulf (?)
Form: Alliterative Verse
Genre: Christological Dream-Vision
Cross suffers with Christ
Paradox: must stay strong to fulfill the will of God, but will
of God is to become instrument of Christ’s death
Dream-Vision:
Kubla-Khan?
The Wrath of Khan
Star Trek (2009)