Following the Formula in Beowulf, Örvar-Odds saga, and Tolkien

260 Pages·2020·3.424 MB·English

by  Michael Fox

Following the
Formula in Beowulf,
Örvar-Odds saga,
and Tolkien
Michael Fox
Following the Formula in Beowulf, Örvar-Odds
saga, and Tolkien
“Fox describes a method of reading and composition that reaches back into
the origins of European storytelling, a method that worked for Beowulf and for
J. R. R. Tolkien. Fox takes his reader from the smallest phrase, through nested
motifs, scenes, and plots, to the formulaic patterns of myths themselves. Norse
sagas, ancient Germanic languages, early medieval Latin—all play recurring
roles in a gripping analysis built on the very formula that underlies The Hobbit.
Highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand ancient storytelling
techniques.”
—Stephen Harris, Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
“This learned and engaging book unlocks the intricate artistry of Beowulf,
demonstrating subtle and meaningful repetitions and variations at the level of dic-
tion, half-line, fitt, digression, and theme. Fox also unearths fascinating new con-
nections with Germanic alliterative verse, biblical tradition, heroic legend, Norse
saga, and folktale. This is a book that all Beowulf scholars will want to read.”
— Francis Leneghan, Associate Professor of Old English, University of Oxford,
UK, and author of The Dynastic Drama of Beowulf (2020)
Michael Fox
Following the
Formula in Beowulf,
Örvar-Odds saga,
and Tolkien
Michael Fox
Western University
London, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-48133-9 ISBN 978-3-030-48134-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48134-6
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P
reface
On May 1, 2015, I was invited to talk at the Old English Colloquium
at the University of Toronto. I am grateful for the opportunity because
it was the first time I patched several of the ideas in this book’s chapters
together and attached to them the title “Following the Formula.” Roy
Liuzza asked immediately afterward about using the word “formula” and
how I was planning to define it. Almost five years later, having written
the book that was first conceived in that talk, I confess that, as then, I
cannot answer the question.
Even though formula has been attached to Old English studies since
the first half of the nineteenth century, the mix of descriptive and pejo-
rative uses of the term that were in use then has hardly changed. The
term was adopted by oral-formulaic studies in the first half of the twenti-
eth century, and formula was again praised and adopted and vilified and
scorned. For a time, the author of Beowulf seemed dead. The develop-
ment of theories of formula that did not rest on clear, visible repetition,
the recognition of variation, and thinking about formula at different lev-
els of the compositional process, from the deep structure of the half-line
to overarching mythic structures, helped to revive the author, even in
the absence of any consensus about what formula might mean. Today,
the use of the word in the context of Beowulf carries with it still, at the
very least, a connotation of orality and, for most readers, drags behind
it an unwieldy and almost debilitating train of scholarship. The question
of oral versus literate or the identification of a possible transitional stage
between the two has not been at the forefront of Beowulf studies since
v
vi PREFACE
the 1990s, and the word formula is used by many critics now to denote
simply a repeated phrase, half-line, or line, sometimes without any expla-
nation of how repetition becomes formula. If something repeats, it is a
formula.
Without repetition of some kind, of course, formula is impossible to
recognize. To attempt to define formula, therefore, I start with repe-
tition. The difficulty with such a definition is similar to attempting to
identify etymemes: one person’s repetition, be it metrical repetition, syn-
tactic repetition, lexical repetition, or semantic repetition, is another per-
son’s brand new passage. At the level of story-pattern, one might think
of the comparison of Beowulf and Grettis saga: one person’s clear genetic
relationship is another person’s coincidence. Still, when repetitions of a
similar type and quality begin to cluster, as we have seen from the earli-
est arguments for common authorship of Old English poems, those clus-
ters must mean something. The argument of this book, therefore, is that
Beowulf can be considered the result of a formula. That formula is in fact
very complicated, for it begins with a formula for a story-pattern, and
that formula has various smaller levels of formula embedded within it.
The story-pattern contains type-scenes or themes and motifs, the themes
and motifs are often tied in form and content to digressions and epi-
sodes, and themes and motifs and digressions and episodes are almost
always expressed in structural formulas of patterned repetition such as
envelope patterns and ring structures. The whole, of course, is expressed
in Old English verse, that “rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast
or insane prose,” as Joseph Ritson apparently called it (D’Israeli 1841,
53; Magennis 2011, 42), the formulaic nature of which is, if not entirely
understood, widely accepted. If my argument has merit, then the recog-
nition of formula suggests also a method of reading the poem, and that
is largely how the book is structured.
The first chapter of the book, though limited in scope by the con-
straints of its place in the argument, traces the history of thinking about
formula in Old English. The sketch will demonstrate the movement
from formula as repetition to formula as method of composition and the
way formula has edged in recent years back toward repetition. I make no
attempt to arbitrate between theories of how formula works, for I find
in every identification and expression of formula a useful way of think-
ing about the poem (that is, if a pattern seems significant to a reader or
group of readers, the pattern is worth considering). The story of formula
has mainly been written in the context of oral-formulaic theory, and the
PREFACE vii
chapter reflects that, though the question of Beowulf’s status within the
oral-formulaic tradition is not directly part of my study. Where issues of
formula have co-existed with oral-formulaic theory (in studies of struc-
ture, theme, and story-pattern), I include those studies in the review.
What becomes obvious is that repetition and formula are central, if only
implicitly, in every reading of the poem.
The half-line formula is the most commonly recognized formulaic
unit in the poem, and I trace weox under wolcnum (8a) to demonstrate
what can be learned about Old English composition and about the poem
from a single half-line. The half-line is significant in its smaller units (in
its lexical constituents and its phrase under wolcnum), both within the
poem and outside it. The half-line is widely considered a formula or at
least part of a system, and it has been suggested to participate in a theme
that appears also in Genesis A. Repetition within the poem links it to sev-
eral other half-lines ending in under/to wolcnum, and one example would
seem to link to yet another theme in several Old English poems. The
repetition, formulaic or otherwise, clusters around other kinds of repeti-
tion that suggest a relationship between poems while also adding depth
to the scenes in which it appears. Finally, the half-line connects outside
the tradition to Old Saxon half-lines, an interaction that has rarely been
explored.
The first numbered fitt of the poem demonstrates a great deal about
the poet’s method of composition. The fitt expands on the themes of the
proem, introduces the poet’s method of embedding digressions and epi-
sodes, demonstrates how structural features can signal textual divisions
and thematic significance, and illustrates the poet’s approach to inter-
weaving narrative strands, a method that is tied to the handling of time.
In short, the fitt and its concentrated sequence of references to the Old
Testament book of Genesis allow us to see much of the poet’s method
in the space of a few lines. Reading the poem at the level of the fitt con-
nects to the half-line weox under wolcnum and looks ahead to the more
sustained digressions and episodes, even while hinting at story-patterns
related to the poem as a whole.
One of the most celebrated passages in the poem is the
Sigemund-Heremod digression. The digression plays a vital role in the
poem, binding the two ages of Beowulf’s life together, but understand-
ing the nuance of that role requires knowledge of a great deal of back-
ground material, for the passage is highly allusive and offers a version
viii PREFACE
of a well-known story that is otherwise unattested. The passage involves
itself with many of the themes of the poem—it has been seen as the
poem in miniature—and it even offers a suggestion about a significant
date in the poem’s development.
At the level of whole narratives, Beowulf has most often and most pro-
ductively been compared and contrasted with Grettis saga. However, if
the broad narrative structures of the two stories are in any way related,
that is, if behind the poem and the saga is a kernel of traditional story
that develops into the life stories of Beowulf and Grettir, then that
kernel, which may be a folktale resembling the basic outline of what
is now known as ATU 301, “The Three Kidnapped Princesses,” must
also lie at the heart of Örvar-Odds saga. I would argue that the career
of Örvar-Oddr has been overlooked as a Beowulf analogue, but perhaps
more importantly, the saga has been overlooked as a possible model for
the slow metamorphosis and accretion of features that must have hap-
pened in the poem and Grettis saga. The process has never been artic-
ulated for Beowulf, but must have been analogous to the shaping of the
Odyssey, which has recently been persuasively reconstructed by M. L.
West (2014).
Finally, the compositional processes that I am calling Beowulf’s for-
mula remain productive. One of the poem’s best-known readers, J. R. R.
Tolkien, intimately familiar with the poem and with hypotheses of a pos-
sible folktale behind it, uses his knowledge in two different ways. In his
recently published Sellic Spell, Tolkien extracts and realizes one element
of the formula, the basic story-pattern behind the poem. In The Hobbit,
Tolkien works through the Beowulf formula, selecting and innovating, to
come up with a prose narrative that participates in the same tradition as
the poem and its Old Norse-Icelandic analogues. Again, the correspond-
ences are notable, but the value of such an analysis lies more in the rec-
ognition of what is possible as the formula is deployed.
Larry D. Benson said many years ago that “to prove that an Old
English poem is formulaic is only to prove that it is an Old English
poem” (1966, 336). With Beowulf, however, the notion of formula takes
on much more meaning. Formula rests in the half-line as a compositional
unit, but those half-lines are the building blocks of every other struc-
ture in the poem, reaching out in many different directions, even into
the spaces behind the poem, into the history and myth all around it,
and into stories not yet told. I hope the following chapters demonstrate
PREFACE ix
the broad applicability of the term formula to the compositional process
while at the same time modeling different ways to read the poem, from
consideration of a single half-line to the way story-patterns change and
can be changed over time.
London, Canada Michael Fox
references
Benson, Larry D. 1966. The Literary Character of Anglo-Saxon Formulaic
Poetry. PMLA 81: 334–341.
D’Israeli, Isaac. 1841. Amenities of Literature, vol. 1. London: Edward Moxon.
Magennis, Hugh. 2011. Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse.
Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
West, M. L. 2014. The Making of the Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
a
cknowledgments
This book would not exist without the efforts of many. I would not be
in this line of work without Nicholas Watson, Kirsten Wolf, Michael
Lapidge, Stephen R. Reimer, Jane Toswell, Brock Eayrs, and Kathleen
Fraser. I might not have survived the early years without Marteinn Helgi
Sigurðsson and Manish Sharma. This book might never have been com-
pleted without the iron will of Tim Freeborn and the patience and kind-
ness of Allie Troyanos and Rachel Jacobe.
I offer this book to the three people who have taught me the most
about Beowulf and, if inadvertently, also much about other things.
The first warmed winter mornings here in London with Hrólfs saga
kraka and Beowulf—I think of snow seen through windows, people
chucking bones, a bottle of Stoli—and looked out for me as long as she
could.
The second read the Junius manuscript and Beowulf with me over two
full years on the eastern edge of the prairie—I think of fall stubble burn-
ing in the Red River Valley, the hidden world of devils, what it means to
go to war—and sent me on my way.
The third showed me I had come to the right place—I think of rest-
less genius, the only good version of “Hallelujah,” respect for those who
have gone before—and remained there, in the distance, a comfort and a
shield.
This book is for what we have lost, the bones underfoot, the dust in
the air.
xi